birdsite stuff:
this post was submitted on 28 Feb 2024
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Hurling ordure at the TREACLES, especially those closely related to LessWrong.
AI-Industrial-Complex grift is fine as long as it sufficiently relates to the AI doom from the TREACLES. (Though TechTakes may be more suitable.)
This is sneer club, not debate club. Unless it's amusing debate.
[Especially don't debate the race scientists, if any sneak in - we ban and delete them as unsuitable for the server.]
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There’s fuck around and find out, and then there’s fuck around, find out, and learn nothing.
"Without resorting to sore losing, I'm going to be a sore loser. Nyah!"
Very ironic that they refuse to use the Bayesian framework while insisting that their judges did not use it correctly. To reuse an old joke: I updated my posteriors; now, up yours!
The Randi prize was a scam by the way. They wanted evidence of "supernatural powers", but they wouldn't accept my smartphone as not being natural, despite the fact that it is clearly manmade in a factory. They only accepted supernatural powers that didn't exist.
Proof of paranormal phenomena and it's just a video of a chimp poking an anthill with a stick and eating the ants
Is it still a scam if the only applicants are scammers?
@corbin @sneerclub AIUI scammers are more easily scammed than average folks precisely because they think they know all about scams and nobody can fool them. It leads to complacency.
clearly manmade in a factory
Man is part of nature. Anything that man makes -- in a "factory" that itself is also entirely manmade -- is therefore entirely natural. Nothing supernatural about it.
Wait they had Peter's arguments and sources before the debate? And they're blaming the format? Having your challenger's material before the debate, while they don't have yours is basically a guaranteed win. You have his material, take it with you to the debate and just prepare answers in advance so you don't lose $100K! Who gave these idiots a $100K?
The sole funder is the founder, Saar Wilf. The whole thing seems like a vanity project for him and friends he hired to give their opinion on random controversial topics.
God knows I'm not good at web design, but the look of that page is really really cheap.
EDIT their first claim is that Syrian opposition forces, not the Syrian government, were the perpetrators of the chemical attacks in Ghouta:
https://www.rootclaim.com/analysis/Who-carried-out-the-chemical-attack-in-Ghouta-on-August-21-2013
This is a really controversial claim, heavily pushed by supporters of Assad and Putin. No-one seems to have been interested in claiming the 100K this time so they're happy to be calling this "resolved".
Rootclaim’s conclusion contradicted all Western intelligence agencies, but years later was shown to be correct. This demonstrates that superior inference methodologies are far more important than privileged access to information.
big yikes. big big yikes.
years later was shown to be correct
Take a guess at what prompted this statement.
Did one side of the conflict confess? Did major expert organization change their minds? Did new, conclusive evidence arise that was unseen for years?
Lol no. The "confirmation" is that a bunch of random people did their own analysis of existing evidence and decided that it was the rebels based on a vague estimate of rocket trajectories. I have no idea who these people are, although I think the lead author is this guy currently stanning for Russia's war on ukraine?
Wasnt this also claimed by the greyzone types before it was clear just how pro-putin the types were? I also recall a lot of weird opinions re the white hats around that time.
Under "Significant developments since publication" for their lab leak hypothesis, they don't mention this debate at all. A track record that fails to track the record, nice.
Right underneath that they mention that at least they're right about their 99.9% confident hypothesis that the MMR vaccine doesn't cause autism. I hope it's not uncharitable to say that they don't get any points for that.
"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?
oh hey! Remember the Initiative Q thing that spammed your social media a few years ago?
yeah, that was Saar Wilf's too
(that article is the single most-read thing I've ever written btw, with >250k views)
Sort of an aside, but let's soap box about why the Lab Leak theory is a thing:
What I don't get about lableak enthusiasts is why they insist that it's not just a lab leak, but also a lab leak of an other than natural virus. Hell, if you wanted to try and fit the facts but still explain the spooky coincidence, envision a just-so scenario where someone caught (proto) covid while collecting samples in a cave, went back to work at the lab, infected everyone while buying groceries at the market.
Nobody makes up a story like that! It's always a credibility-straining cover-up paired with claims about an engineered virus that don't fit the facts. That makes me think they don't care about the facts at all, and instead just really want to be able to blame something-anything-besides their own countrys' ineffectual responses to the virus for the death and mayhem.
Lab leak is a slight of hand, but don't be fooled; how patient zero happened isn't relevant for the purposes of evaluating how a certain very popular right wing someone managed to fall down flat the one time he was actually called upon to act as a leader.
The video and slides can be found here, I watched a bit of it as it happened and it was pretty clear that rootclaim got destroyed.
Anyone actually trying to be "bayesian" should have updated their opinion by multiple orders of magnitude as soon as it was fully confirmed that the wet market was the first superspreader event. Like, at what point does occams razor not kick in here?
Basic Bayesian reasoning. Assuming the near-certain and certainly not at all racist (except in the good way of course) prior that any insititution from Chiyeena should be considered a malevolent and incompetent actor, P(LL) turns out very high.
Now one might object that there have been multiple outbreaks of various coronaviruses in the last handful of decades, quite a few of which became or had the potential to become pandemics, and as far as any credible evidence is concerned, all of them were zoonotic in origin. Thus we should, absent strong evidence to the contrary, assume zoonotic origin of SARS-CoV-2 as the default null hypothesis. However, this postulate is debunked by the fact that it doesn't explain how the commies are evil and out to get us.
From their updated website:
In fact, this is exactly what happened in the first Rootclaim challenge, where mistakes we made in structuring the debate led the judges to vote for the less likely hypothesis.
Peak rationalism
What is this utter pile of dog excrement calling itself "rationalist org?" Of course it can be proven without difficulty that COVID was not caused by a lab leak, we know that for certain, there isn't even a reason to think otherwise. And we can prove that the 2020 was not stolen and that it, in fact, was one of the most secure and unhacked elections ever held in our country.
You'd have to a stupid asshole to think otherwise, so why even bother with this group of know-nothings? I know a pile of dogshit when I see it, and I know enough to go around and not step into it.