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Comment by defrost | Hacker News Reader

Which means what?

"Rootclaim" then bet $100,000 on being able to back that claim in a independant structured 18 hour long debate of their own devising .. and lost the $100,000.

The Rootclaim assessment was worthless.

See: https://protagonist-science.medium.com/lableak-truther-loses...

Or watch the entire 18 hour debate in which that claim was shredded.

Given your user profile about: it's easy to see why you might give weight to Saar Wilf's Rootclaim project .. championing this particular result while ignoring its full history seems professionally questionable.

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Which means this; it gives further weight to the lab leak theory, and shows the reasoning behind it.

I don't have time to watch the 3hr debate or read all of that article (which makes some misrepresentative statements, and like your response, is rather venomous in tone), but here is the response from rootclaim about the debate outcome: https://blog.rootclaim.com/covid-origins-debate-response-to-...

I also know from experience that scientists, and people in general, are often not well trained in the kind of probabilistic reasoning that is required for combining and weighing up multiple sources of evidence.

> I don't have time to watch the 3hr debate

It was 18 hours.

Three blocks of six hours.

Plus preparation time by both parties and the multiple judges who were chosen to have the kind of expertise to weigh up arguments.

Both parties were invested in making a case, and each put up $100,000 in escrow to add weight to the debate.

The case that you put forward lost.

It was debated by the person that put it forward.

He lost.

I had a look at Eric Stansifer's write-up of his decision, but I didn't read all of it (83 pages!). He does seem to have a good understanding of Bayesian decision making and hypothesis testing.

What confuses me however, is his dismissal of two pieces of evidence in table 2 which he says should be ignored "following the presumption that HSM is the first SSE", and yet earlier, in footnote 24, he states "We are very specifically NOT conditioning on that place being HSM" (talking about the first SSE location). Can anyone enlighten me about this seeming contradiction?

Another point: while both judges are qualified scientists, their expertise is in microbiology/virology not epidemiology, but it is the epidemiological aspect of the situation that is the most contentious part of the analysis, and AFAIK the part that swung the decision in favour of zoonotic origins for both judges. Without prior assumptions they both agree that the DNA evidence favours the lab leak theory.

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