Saar Wilf is an ex-Israeli entrepreneur. Since 2016, he’s been developing a new form of reasoning, meant to transcend normal human bias.
His method - called Rootclaim - uses Bayesian reasoning, a branch of math that explains the right way to weigh evidence. This isn’t exactly new. Everyone supports Bayesian reasoning. The statisticians support it, I support it, Nate Silver wrote a whole book supporting it.
But the joke goes that you do Bayesian reasoning by doing normal reasoning while muttering “Bayes, Bayes, Bayes” under your breath. Nobody - not the statisticians, not Nate Silver, certainly not me - tries to do full Bayesian reasoning on fuzzy real-world problems. They’d be too hard to model. You’d make some philosophical mistake converting the situation into numbers, then end up much worse off than if you’d tried normal human intuition.
Rootclaim spent years working on this problem, until he was satisfied his method could avoid these kinds of pitfalls. Then they started posting analyses of different open problems to their site, rootclaim.com. Here are three:
For example, does Putin have cancer? We start with the prior for Russian men ages 60-69 having cancer (14.32%, according to health data). We adjust for Putin’s healthy lifestyle (-30% cancer risk) and lack of family history (-5%). Putin hasn’t vanished from the world stage for long periods of time, which seems about 4x more likely to be true if he didn’t have cancer than if he did. About half of cancer patients lose their hair, and Putin hasn’t, so we’ll divide by two. On the other hand, Putin’s face has gotten more swollen recently, which happens about six times more often to cancer patients than to others, so we’ll multiply by six. And so on and so forth, until we end up with the final calculation: 86% chance Putin doesn’t have cancer, too bad.
This is an unusual way to do things, but Saar claimed some early victories. For example, in a celebrity Israeli murder case, Saar used Rootclaim to determine that the main suspect was likely innocent, and a local mental patient had committed the crime; later, new DNA evidence seemed to back him up.
One other important fact about Saar: he is very rich. In 2008, he sold his fraud detection startup to PayPal for $169 million. Since then he’s founded more companies, made more good investments, and won hundreds of thousands of dollars in professional poker.
So, in the grand tradition of very rich people who think they have invented new forms of reasoning everywhere, Saar issued a monetary challenge. If you disagree with any of his Rootclaim analyses - you think Putin does have cancer, or whatever - he and the Rootclaim team will bet you $100,000 that they’re right. If the answer will come out eventually (eg wait to see when Putin dies), you can wait and see. Otherwise, he’ll accept all comers in video debates in front of a mutually-agreeable panel of judges.
Since then, Saar and his $100,000 offer have been a fixture of Internet debates everywhere. When I argued that Vitamin D didn’t help fight COVID (Saar thinks it does), people urged me to bet against Saar, and we had a good discussion before finally failing to agree on terms. When anti-vaccine multimillionaire Steve Kirsch made a similar offer, Saar took him up on it, although they’ve been bogged down in judge selection for the past year.
Rootclaim also found in favor of the lab leak hypothesis of COVID. When Saar talked about this on an old ACX comment thread, fellow commenter tgof137 (Peter Miller) agreed to take him up on his $100K bet.
At the time, I had no idea who Peter was. I kind of still don’t. He’s not Internet famous. He describes himself as a “physics student, programmer, and mountaineer” who “obsessively researches random topics”. After a family member got into lab leak a few years ago, he started investigating. Although he started somewhere between neutral and positive towards the hypothesis, he ended up “90%+” convinced it was false. He also ended up annoyed: contrarian bloggers were raking in Substack cash by promoting lab leak, but there seemed to be no incentive to defend zoonosis.
[Rest of the article here]
A problem with the debate format is mistakes that may be picked up if submissions were filed in advance can get missed. For example, the claim serial passage would show N501Y mutations that are not seen in SARS-CoV-2 was incorrect. It would in BALB/c mice but not hACE2 mice which is what WIV had.
In terms of getting to the truth of the matter since the debate several new papers have undermined the core arguments relied on from Worobey et al and Pekar et al. for Huanan Seafood Market origin:
Spatial statistics experts Stoyan and Chiu (2024) find the statistical argument by Worobey et. al. that Huanan Seafood Market was the early epicenter is flawed. https://academic.oup.com/jrsssa/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/jrsssa/qnad139/7557954
Lv et. al. (2024) found new intermediate genomes so the multiple spillover theory is unlikely (it was anyway given lineage A and B are only two mutations apart). Single point of emergence is more likely with lineage A coming first. The market cases were all lineage B so not the primary cases. Their findings are consistent with Caraballo-Ortiz (2022), Bloom (2021). t.co/50kFV9zSb6
Jesse Bloom (2023) published a new analysis showing that genetic material from some animal CoVs is fairly abundant in samples collected during the wildlife-stall sampling of the Huanan Market on Jan-12-2020. However, SARS-CoV-2 is not one of these CoVs. t.co/rorquFs1wm
Michael Weissman (2024) shows a model with ascertainment collider stratification bias fits early Covid case location data much better than the model that all cases ultimately stemmed from the market. George Gao, Chinese CDC head at the time, acknowledged this to the BBC last year - they focused too much on and around the market and may have missed cases on the other side of the city).
https://academic.oup.com/jrsssa/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/jrsssa/qnae021/7632556
The anonymous expert who identified coding errors in Pekar et. al. leading to an erratum last year has found another significant error. Single spillover looks more likely. t.co/GAPihZu51P
Ultimately was performing in vivo experiments in transgenic (human ACE2 expressing) mice and civets in 2018 and 2019 in SARS-like CoVs. The results are unknown and they won't share their records.
missing subject, who was performing? I guess WIV?