Will Peter Miller win the "Rootclaim Challenge" debate with Saar Wilf on the origins of COVID-19?

Source: Will Peter Miller win the “Rootclaim Challenge” debate with Saar Wilf on the origins of COVID-19?
Publisher: Manifold
Archived: July 8, 2026

Will Peter Miller win the “Rootclaim Challenge” debate with Saar Wilf on the origins of COVID-19?

201

Ṁ1.7kṀ180k

resolved Feb 18

Resolved

YES

1H

6H

1D

1W

1M

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Important: in the case of a draw (both judges undecided, or a split decision), this market resolves N/A, not NO.

Rootclaim is an organisation, founded by Saar Wilf, that performs analysis and makes truth claims on various, possibly controversial matters. One current such claim is that COVID-19 originated in a lab leak, with high probability.

Rootclaim has a standing offer called the Rootclaim challange, in which someone who disagrees with their analysis may challenge them to a debate judged by professional judges, with each party having $100,000 at stake.

No such debate has yet taken place. (Edit: It has now!)

AstralCodexTen commentor Peter Miller (who goes by the handle BSP9000) is currently considering taking them up on the offer, on the topic of whether COVID-19 originate in a lab leak. Peter Miller will argue that COVID-19 did not originate in a lab leak, and RootClaim will argue that it did. Peter and Saar Wilf are currently attempting to find judges.

Conditional on such a debate going ahead, will Peter Miller win?

This market will resolve YES if a debate largely matching the spirit of the Rootclaim challange, with approximately $100,000 at stake, goes ahead this year, and Peter Miller is judged to be the winner. Reduced stakes will not count, other than as needed to pay for the costs of the judges and other costs relating to the debate itself, which is stipulated as part of the challange.

If Saar Wilf is judged to be the winner, this market will resolve NO.

If the debate does not go ahead or if there is not a clear winner, it resolves N/A.

Edit Oct 22: in light of the rules of the debate prescribing different degrees of victory, as discussed by Peter Miller here, It seems neccesary to clarify what counts as “winning”. Peter Miller writes:

The winner will receive $100,000 for a unanimous decision. If one judge is undecided, the payout will be $50,000. There’s also a possibility that neither side wins anything, if both judges are undecided or it’s a split decision with one judge voting natural and the other voting for gain of function.**

Assuming the above is accurate, I’ll count a participant that receives either a $100,000 payout or a $50,000 payout as the winner. That is, a participant declared the winner unanimously by both judges, or by one judge with the other undecided, is the winner for the purposes of this market.

Update Dec 30th: the debate has taken place and we now await the judges’ results.

Edit Jan 22nd: here is Peter’s latest comment with links to videos and documents from the debate, included here in full for convenience (since it will get buried in the comment thread otherwise):

I’ve posted all the videos and all the slides. Now we’re just waiting on the judges to announce.

The original rules said they’d just write something, but Saar and I recently asked judges to make some videos as well, for something more authoritative.

We’re still figuring out the timing… maybe another week, give or take?

Get your bets in now before it’s too late.

For anyone tuning in late, the videos are here:

https://www.youtube.com/@tgof137/videos

And the written documents were posted in a few different threads:

https://manifold.markets/chrisjbillington/will-bsp9000-win-the-rootclaim-chal#MnyfXgxSlBcibruUuPix

https://manifold.markets/chrisjbillington/will-bsp9000-win-the-rootclaim-chal#yTVcg82DSpZN5z0PCzrq

https://manifold.markets/chrisjbillington/will-bsp9000-win-the-rootclaim-chal#6qAoFKOBTNX19qkVQwC4

https://manifold.markets/chrisjbillington/will-bsp9000-win-the-rootclaim-chal#u7RkSIgHHxAswJeev8Vc

https://manifold.markets/chrisjbillington/will-bsp9000-win-the-rootclaim-chal#QXjaWtX6e9928lpVcUEX

This question is managed and resolved by Manifold.

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bought Ṁ10,000 YES from 99.7% to 99.9% 2y

@PeterMillerc030 Congrats on the 100k! Loved the video series, one of the few gems out there w.r.t in-depth research

@NicoDelon

Gain of function research?

(it’s just a joke)

@TonyVandongen Why not go all in? Potential of over a 20:1 return in only a few days.

@zcoli As Warren Buffett says, if you liked it at 5% odds, you should love it at 4%!

@PeterMillerc030 I’m genuinely interested because there’s so rarely any criticism of quality of arguments made internally by lab leak supporters. Your job would’ve been harder if there was more reflection and editing. Presumably people making token bets on this with their free money think Yuri did a bad job, but can’t say so?

@zcoli

It’s possible that my job would have been harder, had a larger slice of the lab leak community been involved in preparing the arguments. But it’s also possible that a larger group would have just prepared inconsistent arguments, given how various lab leak theories contradict each other.

If Rootclaim loses, the lab leak community might say that Saar/Yuri just did not argue the best lab leak theory.

The community could also try to release some new evidence or “smoking gun” in the next few days to overshadow the debate announcement.

The most likely outcome, though, is they’ll just ignore the debate, pretend it didn’t happen, and keep complaining that no one will debate them. That seems to be the strategy so far, for the biggest lab leak accounts.

@PeterMillerc030 True, except for some like @GillesDemaneuf who know better yet also know they need influential allies, so declare that Rootclaim’s contention that hospitals aren’t well suited for superspreading “is an excellent thread with some great analysis.”

@PeterMillerc030 Seriously, I think the debate that would move opinion on this most significantly is booking someone such as yourself on the Daily Show now that Stewart is back. He dared everyone to openly discuss it and now he has a platform to host the discussion.

@zcoli

Stewart’s old show would have been good for this, I think The Daily Show is way too short format, I don’t know how to get this down to 5 minutes of good sound bites.

I think I’d enjoy talking to Sam Harris, if he’d have me on. Not sure how to arrange that, though.

(though his show is audio only and I’d have to think how well I can present this without slides)

sold Ṁ46 YES

Figured it was worth selling a bit to see what people think the judges will conclude if they choose to give their estimated likelihoods following the debate.

Here’s how the market will resolve depending on the median price over the 24-hour period prior to judges’ likelihoods (likelihood of “lab leak of engineered virus”) being public and confirmed by @PeterMillerc030 and/or Rootclaim.

To simplify: Look at the picture below and see what “Judges’ likelihood” corresponds to your beliefs and find the corresponding market likelihood. If the current price is less, then you should buy “YES” — place a limit order for “NO” to cover you if the price gets too high or check back in often enough to pay attention to the 24-hour median.

bought Ṁ25 YES

@zcoli Trading at 45% now with a “fair” value above 60% per the price of this market. But low liquidity so can’t bet too much safely if you think judges will decide “51% lab leak”.

If the structure of the market is too complicated or just not enough liquidity to be worth spending time on, I’m interested in what people think the likelihoods will be and why. Since I’m judging that question I won’t give a guess, though.

A version of the market where draw doesnt resolves to NA but resolves to NO

@IsaacKing happy to buy more of your position if you’re looking to sell

@Joshua The delay is the reason I’m certain this will resolve Yes, but I actually became very confident two weeks ago when I saw Saar basically concede they expected to lose in debate three part three in this slide where he talks about what would happen if they kept doing more debates:

“Unlike Peter, we did not do a thorough review of studies and data” 💀

@Joshua Imagine what would happen if anyone arguing for likelihood of zoonosis cited in their top 4 bits of new evidence something they read in the Daily Mail about someone’s unverified, but totally verifiable, claim of a not very plausible November 2019 onset COVID-19 diagnosis.

@Joshua

If one side researches extensively and finds lots of evidence, that means that there must be an equal amount of evidence supporting the other side that just hasn’t been found yet.

Therefore, the side that researched less probably won. That’s just how probability works.

@Joshua That’s gotta go in some sort of hall of fame for debate arguments. It’s so beautiful

• Let’s imagine what will happen if we spend more time on this.

• We’ll find more evidence…

@NateWatson Rootclaim fundamentally does not exhibit any understanding that (1) low likelihood of changing your mind means it’s likely not worth looking for more evidence, but (2) if someone gifts you new evidence at zero cost on your part, you should happily accept it and update your beliefs accordingly.

Instead, from the very beginning the behavior at Rootclaim is seeing new evidence in terms of the cost of adding a new epicycle to their theory to explain how it’s uninformative. I don’t blame them, since this is how Rootclaim’s muses who occasionally publish on this topic in the scientific literature also behave. Rumors and motivated reading between the lines premised on what’s worth reporting in tabloids or worse is data that demands further investigation. Whenever there’s actually new, relevant data (e.g. retrospective serology in Wuhan or a new related genome) it’s rare that it will even be mentioned by lab leak folks. If there is some need to acknowledge it, it will be in terms of how it’s negligible.

predictedYES

@zcoli One thing of importance is that there is data that is relevant, known to exist, and is unpublished. I’ve seen “zoonati” call for its publication. I’ve seen lab leak proponents call for more fishing expeditions into lab notebooks in North Carolina.

The frustrating part is that it’s totally rational for data to remain unpublished when the data China does publish is ignored when it doesn’t point to lab leak or misrepresented to support some bank shot theory of lab leak. Look at the various reports drawn from interim snapshots of the COVID-19 case database in China. Is this used to inform the picture of the early pandemic? Not really, the primary international impact was that the Washington Post had a conspiracy theorist ghost write a major OpEd based on motivated misrepresentation of the data

This means that we are less likely than we otherwise would be to get additional data.

@zcoli What is the data China has published which has been misrepresented? Which WaPo OpEd are you referring to? Seems to me that the Chinese have been reluctant to reveal information even before lab leak was serious consideration (Chinese academic publications on Covid-19 have required Ministry of Education approval since April 7 2020). It is also hard to take the Chinese position seriously when they have had state media assert that Covid originated in Italy, Australia, and the US. But perhaps I have been too primed to assume they are acting in bad faith. So which data has been misrepresented?

@PeterMillerc030 That’s not what we agreed on. I agreed Gilles’ interpretation of one of the study is wrong.

But the broader point of an incomplete retrospective search, as laid out by Gilles, still holds and is confirmed by multiple sources like early WHO reports, early China CDC report and early peer reviewed papers from China.

An incomplete retrospective search is evidence for a lab leak.

@Akzzz123 IIRC we agreed that there is one study that goes as high as 227 December cases? But Gilles was clearly in error when he “proved” there were 257 cases in December and 9 in November.

@brp I’ll take your nonsense from state media in China and raise you one White House leaking a stupidly detailed lab leak fantasy to the press so that it would be asked at a press conference mid-April 2020 and all of the conspiracy theory bait pushed out by the State Department at the last minute. This garbage flows both ways on this and it’s hardly the only issue where US/China rhetoric has a loose connection with reality (despite being related to a real issue). The Wuhan Military Games is a particularly good example with propaganda from China saying it meant that SARS-CoV-2 was imported and propaganda from abroad saying that it meant that SARS-CoV-2 was covered up in October 2019. The truth is that everyone’s just making things up. But only one side of the debate points to the stuff made up in a geopolitical battle over our heads as evidence to support their case.

@Akzzz123 How did finding 7 in Gilles’ report make you feel?

@Akzzz123

Gilles is a prolific writer. Rootclaim’s strategy was to say, “Gilles wrote a 200 page report on early cases, which we did not read, but we think might contain useful information”. Saar requested the judges read it.

In our conversation, you said that Gilles’ report proved the existence of ~90 hidden cases, and 9 in November. I disproved that and you agreed that Gilles is wrong on that point.

Now you are saying that Gilles’ report still has some other important information in it. If you’d like to spell out what else you think is important, I might choose to look into those additional claims.

@PeterMillerc030 This whole thing of appealing to anecdotal maybe-case X is kinda absurd. There are closer to 100 than to 10 unascertained and/or unreported infections for every COVID-19 case reported (the fraction of reported cases that are symptomatic COVID-19 cases being so high makes that clear enough). The question is what’s the specific evidence of a case early enough and with associated epidemiological or genomic data to provide evidence that shifts conclusions. Along those lines, what’s been uncovered by investigations from the crowd and media mainly supports Huanan market origins and somewhat earlier infection with lineage B than lineage A. Probably the best example is being able to add a black triangle for the earliest likely COVID-19 case at the same place as a red square indicating isolation of lineage B SARS-CoV-2.

I have a question for @PeterMillerc030 maybe I can reach him here.

Peter, do you think that WIV was “unlucky” that a natural spillover event happened to occur very close to it (within about the same 0.5% of China’s population) and very close in time to (a) the lifting of the GoF funding moratorium (b) the opening of WIV as China’s first BSL-4 facility and (c) the DEFUSE proposal which proposed to create exactly the kind of virus that covid-19 was?

Like, if Daszak could launch a lawsuit against God for getting extraordinarily bad luck that the virus he was studying managed to get right back to his doorstep of its own accord, would he win?

Or do you think this is a broken analysis and there really wasn’t any luck involved?

@Roko Conditional on zoonosis being true you might also think Daszak et al were extremely lucky, like the worst possible drunk driver who just out of moral luck didn’t hurt anybody. What the origin debate can obfuscate is that, even if Covid didn’t come from a lab, these people were inexcusably reckless.

@Roko I think they covered this in the debate. Peter’s argument was that there are quite a few virology labs in China that could plausibly have been the source of a pandemic, so we shouldn’t be too surprised to see one of them near the source of Covid.

@Roko Have we cycled back to WIV being suspicious because of BSL-4 already? Folks need to make up their minds if it’s level 2, 3, or 4 that should call WIV into question. Also, make up their mind about which lab they’re talking about.

@IsaacKing The only SARS2-like virus known to be grown in a lab before the SARS2 outbreak, and probably the only one that was ever grown in a lab, wasn’t grown in Wuhan. That alone puts a couple cities above Wuhan on how eerie a coincidence it would be.

@IsaacKing

> Peter’s argument was that there are quite a few virology labs in China that could plausibly have been the source of a pandemic

Does he have a list?

@zcoli

> The only SARS2-like virus known to be grown in a lab before the SARS2 outbreak, and probably the only one that was ever grown in a lab, wasn’t grown in Wuhan.

Who grew it and where?

@IsaacKing watching debates is very inefficient. I’m not a fan of this format, I think it should be written down, then many eyes can quickly scan all arguments.

@IsaacKing That’s a terribly flawed argument given DEFUSE.

@Roko you can look at the slides which are linked to by comments which are linked in the description

@IsaacKing I think @zcoli is talking about ZC45, which was found in Nanjing. I tried making some counterfactual theories for other cities in the first debate:

If you go back to 2020, there were actually theories about ZC45 being the virus which was used to create Covid – Li Meng Yan was the main person promoting those theories. I’d say with nearly 100% certainty that we would have had some lab leak theory in 2020, regardless of which city the virus started in. I’m less certain that lab leak would have successfully grown into the cultural phenomenon it is today, had it been a different city, because Wuhan does allow for better theories than many of the other cities.

The theories Li Meng Yan made have very little resemblance to lab leak theories today, like she called covid a bioweapon and the engineering details she suggested have nothing in common with the theories today. Here’s an old interview with her:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFlqXPl_hZQ

She was also funded by Miles Guo and Steve Bannon. I noticed your post on Twitter, @Roko, about zoonotic origin being a psyop/propaganda campaign. But it’s really quite the opposite – lab leak was promoted by the US government from the very beginning. Some of the key information that has driven the conversation (i.e. the “3 sick researchers at the WIV”) was fabricated by someone in Trump’s state department (David Asher) and then spread by the journalist (Michael Gordon) who first said that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction.

I talked about this at the debate, but if you’d prefer a written version, here’s an older blog post:
https://medium.com/p/8e0d13a0c1b5

I didn’t first disbelieve lab leak because of who’s pushing it, though. I first looked into it by looking at case data and genetic features of the virus and stuff like that. I only later noticed that many of the people promoting the theory are bad actors.

@PeterMillerc030

So were Daszak/WIV just exceptionally unlucky that the virus came to them rather than any one of dozens of other cities somewhere in China?

predictedYES

@Roko for your more specific question, “why Wuhan?”

So, I listed 3 cities that worked with Ecohealth Alliance. You could blame Daszak if it showed up in any of those locations. But maybe it wouldn’t look as good because the other 2 didn’t have their names on the defuse grant, or whatever.

The odds a natural virus would show up in Wuhan, vs somewhere else in China might be as low as 1.5% (that was a lower bound that Rootclaim and I agreed on) but could be higher (5-10%?) for a number of reasons I outlined in the debate (i.e. Wuhan is a hub of the wildlife trade, it had looser restrictions on wet markets than bigger cities like Beijing and Shanghai, wildlife trade and consumption are different between northern and southern China, SARS1 was found on Hubei farms and may even have originated in Hubei, Guangdong shut down civet farming after SARS1 while Hubei did not, etc)

The coincidence that a lab leak in Wuhan would show up first at Huanan market is on the order of a 1 in 10,000 thing.

So, just based on those 2 location coincidences (city plus first cluster in that city), you’d already be leaning heavily towards natural origin.

From there, we just get a hundred different lab leak arguments for why they think the market data is fake or unimportant, to try to keep the lab leak theory alive.

I.e. every pro-lab leak “bayesian analysis” I’ve read treats the “virus found in Wuhan” as highly suspicious but just gives 100% odds to “lab leak showing up at Huanan”, rather than the much lower actual odds for that event.

I listed 3 cities that worked with Ecohealth Alliance

Which are?

@Roko You need to go look up the other SARS2 conspiracy theories to find out… probably the most famous/infamous one centers on ZC45/ZXC21.

@PeterMillerc030 It’s a restriction endonuclease Bible Code theory… so it has quite a bit to do with the latest and possibly silliest shiny thing that lab leak folks have decided is a smoking gun.

@zcoli Rootclaim did not endorse that restriction sites theory, at least, though maybe they would if they had another lab leak debate since that’s made a resurgence.

predictedYES

@PeterMillerc030 they’d better pay someone to throw the fight if they’re going to go to that well.

The latest restriction site stuff was implicitly part of Rootclaim’s case, because the latest restriction site stuff isn’t disputed by sources Rootclaim’s case relied on as credible. If a source supposedly is aiming to sort out the origins of the pandemic and whines about Worobey 2022 and all that without ever criticizing the fraud on BsmBI/BsaI, that’s not a very credible source!

At some level, Rootclaim relied on others to do the work for them – we all have to do this – so relying on people who run away from contradictory data is problematic.

@PeterMillerc030 How many labs were interested in inserting furin cleavage site at the S1/S2 in novel sarslike viruses in 2019?

predictedYES

@Roko I guess for every city you could have a starting P(lab leak) vs P(zoonosis), for a novel virus showing up there. The ratio might actually be higher for a place like Beijing (more labs, further north from the relevant bats, better wet market restrictions) than in Wuhan.

Another thing worth pointing out is that if all you know is “novel sarbecovirus with a furin cleavage site found in Wuhan”, your ratio between the two theories might be pretty good – Kristian Andersen initially said his odds were a bit above 50% for lab leak based on that information, and I think it was reasonable for everyone to wonder if it was a lab leak in 2020.

But if you start to incorporate case data and growth rate and phylogeny all pointing at the market, then unknown virus backbone, atypical furin cleavage site, etc, then you end up with pretty low odds for a lab leak.

Unfortunately it’s hard to fit that all into a few tweets, and it doesn’t go viral the way that “Scientists committed genocide and Fauci bribed them to cover it up” does.

@PeterMillerc030

> case data and growth rate and phylogeny all pointing at the market

If the data pointing at the market is solid AND there’s a significant space & time argument in favor of a lab-created virus, then one has to consider ways that a lab leak into the general population might have been dressed up or messed with to make it look like it started in the wet market.

The other cities are not as compelling for various reasons, such as not being mentioned in DEFUSE, not planning to do coronavirus GoF research, etc.

Maybe Daszak was mean to a Raccoon Dog in a previous life, and a natural spillover right on the doorstep of his primary lab in China is their Karmic revenge lol

@Roko Also, there’s always an outside chance that the virus went FROM WIV to the market because some lab tech decided to sell infected mice from serial passage of the virus at the wet market as a side hustle.

That would explain the awkward combination of evidence pointing to the market and evidence pointing to the lab, and it would also explain how the virus escaped.

@Roko

The first instinct of DEFUSE authors tells they knew how prophetic their proposal was.

@Roko You could also hypothesize that it’s a US bioweapon launched at the Huanan market to be maximally confusing. That’s why we had event 201 and crimson contagion exercises. Ron Unz has some entertaining articles on that idea.

It’s kind of like religion where you can throw out the evidence and go with faith, but that doesn’t tell you which faith to go with.

The natural origin theory has the answer down to the building, the most likely shop, and has a good guess for the date.

The lab leak theory says it leaked sometime between August and December, and doesn’t even know which lab it leaked from (various theories blame 2 WIV campuses, the wuhan CDC, or WIBP)

There are a lot of reasons to doubt the idea that China just faked all the evidence. We could get into that but the conversation would get long and your time would be better spent watching the debate or reading the slides.

predictedYES

@benshindel First off, the debate was Rootclaim’s idea for truth-seeking, not mine.

Second, I tend to think that if a dude with 100 million dollars can’t put up a convincing argument against one random blogger with no debate experience then maybe the lab leak arguments just aren’t that convincing.

But, of course, it’s premature to conclude that, given that the result has not been announced.

bought Ṁ1,000 YES from 94% to 96% 2y

@PeterMillerc030

Well, there’s a list of known biosecurity incidents and some of them are pretty crazy. Labs mailing out live Anthrax by accident. One known case of a covid lab leak in Taiwan.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecurity_incidents

The problem with trying to assess what happened in Wuhan in detail is that it is complicated and adversarial agents are operating, compromising the integrity and provenance of the data.

I think if you have dirty data and clean data, just look at the clean data, and the clean data implies a very substantial update to it being a lab leak, enough that we should already be starting a legal process against Ecohealth, Daszak and all his collaborators and subpoenaing everything. Of course this is very unlikely to happen because these people are powerful.

@IsaacKing Last I checked wikipedia, the reference in the COVID lab leak entry to these multiple labs didn’t find facts supporting it. It would be useful if that were updated, if there is a reference which lists the labs which in that hypothetical could be blamed.

@Ernie I don’t know enough of the technical details to really be comfortable editing the Wikipedia pages on it; my interaction with the lab leak theory has been almost entirely on the meta level, trying to figure out what groups of people are more likely to be correct. But if you or someone else wants to give me a breakdown of what needs fixing on Wikipedia complete with references, I’m happy to do so.

predictedYES

@Roko Literally all of the lab leaks you mentioned were discussed during either the written or verbal portions of the debate.

The fact that lab accidents happen is one of the many reasons why I didn’t personally decide against the lab leak theory until 2022.

Both sides of the debate made some estimates of lab leak rate in their probabilistic calculations. Though you could crank the rate up to 100% in mine and zoonosis would still be more likely. And that also raises logical problems, like if their lab safety is really that bad, and they’re making 200+ viruses in the full version of the defuse grant, you’re going to get a lot more than just 1 lab accident.

I don’t think I can explain all of this very well in the comments section or a series of tweets. I have produced a lot of long form content both at the debate and on my blog. If you have time to engage with that, then you’re welcome to.

If not, then that’s fine. But I think if that’s the case you should probably go around saying that you are uncertain about covid origins, rather than alleging scientists covered up genocide when you have not actually researched the other side of the issue. There are lots of issues that I’m just agnostic on, because I haven’t studied them enough.

I think it might also help to think through what the extent of the conspiracy is. I.e. it might be easy for a few people in China to hide a secret, but an international cabal is implausible. Many people in DRASTIC don’t even think that Daszak knows the answer, his early public statements don’t make any sense under the assumption he knows it’s a lab leak, and he’s simply not a powerful person.

That also got discussed briefly in weeks 2 and 3.

@IsaacKing I asked Saar to bet a fixed percentage of his net worth against the same fixed percentage of mine, but sadly he wouldn’t take that bet.

@PeterMillerc030 You are right that Daszak is not a powerful person. But he seems to be shielded by the most powerful entity in the world - The US Department of Defense.

A bill to cut all DoD funding to EcoHealth Alliance that was passed by both the House and Senate was watered down undemocratically and secretively.

I’m sure you believe it’s just a coincidence that Daszak essentially predicted the pandemic. I’m sure you also believe the US DoD continues to fund this guy, despite him having a history of wantonly flouting all rules, to ‘prevent future pandemics’.

The obvious answer is that elements within the USG are covering their asses to hide their culpability for this pandemic.

@Akzzz123 So you think the whole US senate is working to maintain funding for EcoHealth alliance? Or just the Armed Services committee?

I had to check who’s on that:

Let’s see, so is Elizabeth Warren in on the lab leak plot? Tammy Duckworth?

How about Tom Cotton? In spring 2020 he called Covid a Chinese bioweapon. Why would he say that, if it was made with US funded research in China? Did he only learn later?

Who knows the truth about the lab leak, in your version of the theory?

@PeterMillerc030 Not willing to bet big on a question he’s well over 99% confident in while ridiculing people who don’t put their money where their mouths are was relevant to evaluating the likelihood of debate outcomes.

@zcoli I wish Rootclaim could see how much it supports the value of their method that, despite their biases, putting evidence and logic to the test put many of the arguments honed over almost 4 years under more scrutiny in a formal way than had ever been done. The approach is very valuable if Rootclaim will admit that the value is best illustrated by how Rootclaim learned of its own biases, how the instinctive response was to scramble for more data to reinforce misconceptions, and how this would’ve worked in other forums but did not work in this one.

@Akzzz123 and @Roko Maybe you two could put together a rebuttal to Peter’s arguments in the Rootclaim debate, and host a new debate with new judges and a new bet? Scott Alexander was apparently open to being such a judge, and preferred it to be in writing, which aligns with Roko’s preferences.

@IsaacKing There’s a scientific debate on SARS-CoV-2 origins already happening. There’s almost zero barrier to publishing preprints and people are free to do it if they have facts or logic that they think are missing from the debate in favor of one hypothesis or another.

predictedYES

Okay so I watched all the debates and I thought they were great, but honestly I still don’t have a strong opinion on if it was a lab leak or not. I’m sure Peter won the debate, but I’m also sure that Rootclaim was not very good at debating.

I also don’t know that much about the judges and so although my belief that they judged in Peter’s favor does update me towards Zoonosis, it doesn’t do so as much as if I knew who the judges were beforehand and had a prior respect for their judgement.

I read that one person they considered having as a judge for this was Zvi Mowshowitz, and I think that Zvi would have been a great judge! Very curious what he thinks about Covid Origins these days.

I also can’t find a probability estimate from him on lab leaks since he said 55% in 2021. So, if y’all want to do more short-term betting on Covid Origins I made a market that resolves on Zvi’s opinion if he gives one:

bought Ṁ75 YES from 92% to 93% 2y

@Joshua wow, yeah! Can we throw in money/mana somewhere to have him evaluate the args in a public doc or video of some kind? very worthy cause

@Ernie I’m hoping he just gives a number in his usual course of blogging, because apparently he was too expensive for Rootclaim:

I first tried to get Scott Alexander and Zvi Mowshowitz to sign up as the 2 judges, but that didn’t work out. Scott accepted but he wanted the debate done in written form with the authors anonymized, and Wilf wasn’t okay with that. Zvi also accepted but his judging fee was too high for Wilf.

Presumably that’s because he’d need to have spent dozens of hours to be an official judge though.

@Joshua Zvi’s hourly rate is $500 and judges say they spent about 150 hours on this.

Time to start a GoFundMe.

FWIW, Zvi did actually agree to do it for 20k, under the assumption it would be about 40 hours of work between debates and reading/writing.

I told Saar we should just increase the bet to 120k and pay each judge that much, but he wanted to pay less. I forget, I think 2k was his max at the time but we eventually settled on something higher.

Getting Scott to judge was harder because he wanted a written debate (i would have much preferred that, honestly) and he wanted it to be anonymized to eliminate bias (he didn’t know at the time what side each of us was on and thought he could keep it that way, though obviously that would have broken down). I think he was worried he’d favor Saar based on having some prior interactions. But Scott also mentioned that he was 60/40 (leaning natural origin), so maybe the biases would have canceled out.

Anyways, that fell through and we tried various other searches and picked Eric and Will. I think they were great and worked really hard on this.

@PeterMillerc030 An alternative would be that, say, 3x hourly would be taken out of escrow for some multiple of however many hours one chose to talk. This would also set a price on choosing to wait to publish a result at 1x hourly. The cost of that could be split or not. Judge’s would be happier to look indecisive for weeks if they were paid for the period of silence.

@zcoli I don’t know, maybe someone can submit a FOIA request for the outcome of the debate?

predictedYES

I was thinking I might try to edit this all down into a 2 hour version, since many people are still intimidated by watching 17 hours. Does anyone want to get involved with working on this?

The plan would be to:

1. Add an intro with some short clips of famous people talking about covid origins, to show how controversial and divided an issue this is, plus keep some interest (the current video starts with “affirmations of neutrality”, which are boring and lose a lot of viewers).

2. Expand Will’s video feed and remove the clock, because the time gets distracting and unnecessary in an edited version.

3. Then, cut down the rest of the debates into a much shorter version.

I’ve made some progress on the first 2 steps. The 3rd one seems harder both because it’s a lot more editing and because it’s hard for me to decide what to cull and keep. Would it still contain most of the important information in 2 hours?

If anyone’s interested, I could either send files and let you edit any of the 9 videos. Or, you could also just send recommended timestamps for what you find important or irrelevant, and I’ll make the cuts based on those suggestions.

The offer is open to people on either side of this issue, though maybe if you’re pro lab leak I’d rather let you edit one of Saar/Yuri’s videos and if you’re pro zoonosis you should edit one of mine, that way we get the best versions of both.

DM me if you’re interested, otherwise I’ll see what I can get done on my own.

I’m confused by the movement in prices. Did Rootclaim’s argument today that hospitals don’t meet the requirements for being a superspreading location, but Huanan market does, not convince anyone? Sure @GillesDemaneuf who applauded their argument will buy NO at this price, at least?

Gilles’ analysis is regularly cited by the Washington Post! If no one’s putting even their fake money where their mouth is, what does that say about the credibility of some sources on this subject?

@zcoli I mean, regardless of the actual truth about COVID this market’s outcome seems very certain to me now just based on the delayed announcement outside of Peter’s control.

I don’t see how that makes sense in any scenario where Rootclaim won. They would want to announce their win ASAP if that had been the outcome. They haven’t, so it wasn’t.

@Joshua It was obvious it wasn’t a win or even a split decision when Rootclaim’s first move was to criticize their own process that they previously claimed they could teach people in a handful of patronizing riddles on their site. I’m sure so many hours was more than sufficient and I wonder how the judges feel about having their capacity for logic criticized like that.

predictedYES

@zcoli I pointed out at the 3rd debate that Rootclaim’s rapid growth argument doesn’t fit the data at all:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTK1hWOzwns#t=15s

It seems the judges had some other concerns with it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTK1hWOzwns#t=1h2m10s

But another question that we discussed in the written debate was: if the market spreads covid so well that covid can only start there, does it do the same for other viruses? Do viruses from the nearby train station get drawn to the market? What about the flu? Does that start at Huanan market every year?

And then I was going through the recent papers on other viruses collected at the market and noticed: H3N2 flu was found only in a single stall.

So the theory would then be that the Huanan market is perfect for spreading covid, but not flu, and only the west side of the market can spread viruses well but not the east side.

At some point, you just have to admit that you’re making things up to avoid dealing with the actual evidence.

I am sympathetic to Rootclaim’s general point that you need to consider uncertainty of evidence before assigning the odds to it. But I think quantifying uncertainty is challenging, the case data is actually a lot clearer than most people think, and there’s probably even more uncertainty on the other side of the debate (i.e. it’s hard to put odds on what evolution can and can’t do). There’s also a big question about which things are true until proven or false until proven, and it’s easy to introduce bias by making those assumptions.