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.
ssc reddit thread
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.
"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
Kind 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.
"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?
The specific guilty element here is sacrificial war with China, which they know to be a phantasm. Just America First foreign policy in general.
“Every accusation is a confession” is a much better phrasing, thank you