Rootclaim Blog, February 18, 2024
And the winner of Rootclaim’s COVID-19 origins debate and the $100,000 prize is… Unfortunately, not us :). We would like to explain this result, but first, we would like to congratulate our opponent and Rootclaim’s first challenger, Peter Miller. Miller showcased an impressive understanding of the details during the debate, which was hard to match. […]
We therefore never provided extremely low conditional probabilities under zoonosis, and as a result didn’t have any extreme factors in our analysis. Unfortunately, the result of our steelmanning was that when our hypothesis’ explanation was favored, the effect on the final likelihood was much smaller than when Miller’s was. When the judges did not have the tools to conclude between the sides, their result was some average of the two, which of course, given the extreme, strawmanned numbers offered by Peter, favored zoonosis.