Rationalist org bets random substack poster $100K that he can't disprove their covid lab leak hypothesis, you'll never guess what happens next
Rationalist org bets random substack poster $100K that he can't disprove their covid lab leak hypothesis, you'll never guess what happens next
rootclaim appears to be yet another group of people who, having stumbled upon the idea of the Bayes rule as a good enough alternative to critical thinking, decided to try their luck in becoming a Serious and Important Arbiter of Truth in a Post-Mainstream-Journalism World.
This includes a randiesque challenge that they'll take a $100K bet that you can't prove them wrong on a select group of topics they've done deep dives on, like if the 2020 election was stolen (91% nay) or if covid was man-made and leaked from a lab (89% yay).
Also their methodology yields results like 95% certainty on Usain Bolt never having used PEDs, so it's not entirely surprising that the first person to take their challenge appears to have wiped the floor with them.
Don't worry though, they have taken the results of the debate to heart and according to their postmortem blogpost they learned many important lessons, like how they need to (checks notes) gameplan against the rules of the debate better? What a way to spend 100K... Maybe once you've reached a conclusion using the Sacred Method changing your mind becomes difficult.
I've included the novel-length judges opinions in the links below, where a cursory look indicates they are notably less charitable towards rootclaim's views than their postmortem indicates, pointing at stuff like logical inconsistencies and the inclusion of data that on closer look appear basically irrelevant to the thing they are trying to model probabilities for.
There's also like 18 hours of video of the debate if anyone wants to really get into it, but I'll tap out here.
quantian's short writeup on the birdsite, will post screens in comments
pdf of judge's opinion that isn't quite book length, 27 pages, judge is a microbiologist and immunologist PhD
pdf of other judge's opinion that's 87 pages, judge is an applied mathematician PhD with a background in mathematical virology -- despite the length this is better organized and generally way more readable, if you can spare the time.
rootclaim's post mortem blogpost, includes more links to debate material and judge's opinions.
edit: added additional details to the pdf descriptions.
birdsite stuff:
26There’s fuck around and find out, and then there’s fuck around, find out, and learn nothing.
26"Without resorting to sore losing, I'm going to be a sore loser. Nyah!"
17Very ironic that they refuse to use the Bayesian framework while insisting that their judges did not use it correctly. To reuse an old joke: I updated my posteriors; now, up yours!
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Reading through the judges' reports I can only conclude that Rootclaim is so Extremely Online that they burned their money because:
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Judge 1 says they, just, uh, decided some past disease outbreaks were lab leaks and never looked to see if that's actually scientifically debated or just weird Rat Accepted Truths.
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Judge 2 says that he doesn't know what they were doing, but it wasn't Bayesian reasoning, which wasn't appropriate for the topic anyway.
20RC response: okay yeah but the other guys were better at memorizing!
("Better at memorizing" is why live debate with subject-nonexpert judges is not accepted as a method of approaching truth, except at the Steven Crowder and Ben Shapiro School of Public Sciencing, soon to be at a University of Austin campus near you. But if you put up the cash, maybe you should whip out the flash cards first.)
17Looking through the reddit thread, the whole 'Peter Miller has great recall' thing feels off, like it's less an excuse for shoddy preparation and more a genuine grievance that he kept his superior memory
genesskills purposefully hidden so they couldn't sent someone who had rolled equal or better brain stats to the debate.This is in response to PM himself showing up in the thread to say rootclaim actually had his presentation 24 days in advance because the debate was delayed once:
This is true. I think the point is more that, even having seen all your own and your opponents information, a debater with greater recall / working memory can potentially "win" even if their argument is weaker.
Like, of course they lost, mere facts are nothing when the opponent has the IQ advantage, this is how the AI demons get us.
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Judge 1 says they, just, uh, decided some past disease outbreaks were lab leaks and never looked to see if that’s actually scientifically debated or just weird Rat Accepted Truths.
Yes but see, an anthrax environment containment breach almost five decades ago at a sprawling soviet weapons facility with biosecurity protocols that consisted of a wink and a handshake totally strengthens our claim that in 2019 some chinese intern accidentally shot up a gm bat virus and wandered off. Bayesian inference is unintuitive like that, you plebs wouldn't understand.
12Well you have to admit, finding a non-white object that is not a swan really does strengthen the claim that all swans are white.
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The Randi prize was a scam by the way. They wanted evidence of "supernatural powers", but they wouldn't accept my smartphone as not being natural, despite the fact that it is clearly manmade in a factory. They only accepted supernatural powers that didn't exist.
19Is it still a scam if the only applicants are scammers?
5@corbin @sneerclub AIUI scammers are more easily scammed than average folks precisely because they think they know all about scams and nobody can fool them. It leads to complacency.
9There are plenty of non scammers who would have liked to apply, like me with my smartphone, and we weren't allowed. Randi was pulling a magic trick. He used the power of stage magic and scams to convince people real magic doesn't exist.
2
clearly manmade in a factory
Man is part of nature. Anything that man makes -- in a "factory" that itself is also entirely manmade -- is therefore entirely natural. Nothing supernatural about it.
1
Wait they had Peter's arguments and sources before the debate? And they're blaming the format? Having your challenger's material before the debate, while they don't have yours is basically a guaranteed win. You have his material, take it with you to the debate and just prepare answers in advance so you don't lose $100K! Who gave these idiots a $100K?
18The sole funder is the founder, Saar Wilf. The whole thing seems like a vanity project for him and friends he hired to give their opinion on random controversial topics.
14God knows I'm not good at web design, but the look of that page is really really cheap.
EDIT their first claim is that Syrian opposition forces, not the Syrian government, were the perpetrators of the chemical attacks in Ghouta:
https://www.rootclaim.com/analysis/Who-carried-out-the-chemical-attack-in-Ghouta-on-August-21-2013
This is a really controversial claim, heavily pushed by supporters of Assad and Putin. No-one seems to have been interested in claiming the 100K this time so they're happy to be calling this "resolved".
14Under "Significant developments since publication" for their lab leak hypothesis, they don't mention this debate at all. A track record that fails to track the record, nice.
Right underneath that they mention that at least they're right about their 99.9% confident hypothesis that the MMR vaccine doesn't cause autism. I hope it's not uncharitable to say that they don't get any points for that.
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"It wAs aCtuALLy a lAB LEaK" is such a right-wing shibboleth that it's extra delicious that some wingers[1] put their money where their mouths and were comprehensively disproven. Kudos to the Lesswronger who went through all this, even though a 100K payout made it rATioNaL
[1] I don't have any evidence that Rootclaim are right-wingers but my priors tell me they are
17Kind of a tangent: to me it seems that there’s a penchant for right wing accusations to be projections of right wing wrongdoing onto other parties. My go to examples would be fake news (should be self explanatory) and corruption (e.g. Soros bucks).
What would the lab leak correspond to? Off the top of my head I might go with the opioid epidemic, if only so that I don’t speak a US originated virus lab leak into existence.
8"Soros bucks" is particularly marvellous. Literally all these guys fund thinktanks that promote their important billionaire views. Thiel, funding this stuff is basically his hobby. Is Soros just much more effective than all of them?
14
oh hey! Remember the Initiative Q thing that spammed your social media a few years ago?
yeah, that was Saar Wilf's too
(that article is the single most-read thing I've ever written btw, with >250k views)
14Sort of an aside, but let's soap box about why the Lab Leak theory is a thing:
What I don't get about lableak enthusiasts is why they insist that it's not just a lab leak, but also a lab leak of an other than natural virus. Hell, if you wanted to try and fit the facts but still explain the spooky coincidence, envision a just-so scenario where someone caught (proto) covid while collecting samples in a cave, went back to work at the lab, infected everyone while buying groceries at the market.
Nobody makes up a story like that! It's always a credibility-straining cover-up paired with claims about an engineered virus that don't fit the facts. That makes me think they don't care about the facts at all, and instead just really want to be able to blame something-anything-besides their own countrys' ineffectual responses to the virus for the death and mayhem.
Lab leak is a slight of hand, but don't be fooled; how patient zero happened isn't relevant for the purposes of evaluating how a certain very popular right wing someone managed to fall down flat the one time he was actually called upon to act as a leader.
13The video and slides can be found here, I watched a bit of it as it happened and it was pretty clear that rootclaim got destroyed.
Anyone actually trying to be "bayesian" should have updated their opinion by multiple orders of magnitude as soon as it was fully confirmed that the wet market was the first superspreader event. Like, at what point does occams razor not kick in here?
11Basic Bayesian reasoning. Assuming the near-certain and certainly not at all racist (except in the good way of course) prior that any insititution from Chiyeena should be considered a malevolent and incompetent actor, P(LL) turns out very high.
Now one might object that there have been multiple outbreaks of various coronaviruses in the last handful of decades, quite a few of which became or had the potential to become pandemics, and as far as any credible evidence is concerned, all of them were zoonotic in origin. Thus we should, absent strong evidence to the contrary, assume zoonotic origin of SARS-CoV-2 as the default null hypothesis. However, this postulate is debunked by the fact that it doesn't explain how the commies are evil and out to get us.
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From their updated website:
In fact, this is exactly what happened in the first Rootclaim challenge, where mistakes we made in structuring the debate led the judges to vote for the less likely hypothesis.
Peak rationalism
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