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.

  • Deborah@hachyderm.io
    0·
    10 months ago

    Reading through the judges’ reports I can only conclude that Rootclaim is so Extremely Online that they burned their money because:

    1. 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.

    2. 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.

    • Deborah@hachyderm.io
      0·
      10 months ago

      RC 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.)

      • Architeuthis@awful.systemsOPEnglish
        0·
        10 months ago

        Looking 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 genes skills 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.

        • AcausalRobotGod@awful.systemsEnglish
          0·
          10 months ago

          Like, of course they lost, mere facts are nothing when the opponent has the IQ advantage, this is how the AI demons get us.

          nicholson nodding dot gif

        • self@awful.systemsMEnglish
          0·
          10 months ago

          I’m kind of surprised they haven’t accused Pete of being acausal while they’re at it

    • Architeuthis@awful.systemsOPEnglish
      0·
      10 months ago

      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.

      • korydg@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        10 months ago

        Well you have to admit, finding a non-white object that is not a swan really does strengthen the claim that all swans are white.