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.
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
Sort 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.
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?
The 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.
“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
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)
birdsite stuff:
There’s fuck around and find out, and then there’s fuck around, find out, and learn nothing.
Very 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!
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.
