rootclaim appears to be yet another group of people who, having stumbled upon the idea of the Bayes rule as a good enough alternative to critical thinking, decided to try their luck in becoming a Serious and Important Arbiter of Truth in a Post-Mainstream-Journalism World.
This includes a randiesque challenge that they’ll take a $100K bet that you can’t prove them wrong on a select group of topics they’ve done deep dives on, like if the 2020 election was stolen (91% nay) or if covid was man-made and leaked from a lab (89% yay).
Also their methodology yields results like 95% certainty on Usain Bolt never having used PEDs, so it’s not entirely surprising that the first person to take their challenge appears to have wiped the floor with them.
Don’t worry though, they have taken the results of the debate to heart and according to their postmortem blogpost they learned many important lessons, like how they need to (checks notes) gameplan against the rules of the debate better? What a way to spend 100K… Maybe once you’ve reached a conclusion using the Sacred Method changing your mind becomes difficult.
I’ve included the novel-length judges opinions in the links below, where a cursory look indicates they are notably less charitable towards rootclaim’s views than their postmortem indicates, pointing at stuff like logical inconsistencies and the inclusion of data that on closer look appear basically irrelevant to the thing they are trying to model probabilities for.
There’s also like 18 hours of video of the debate if anyone wants to really get into it, but I’ll tap out here.
quantian’s short writeup on the birdsite, will post screens in comments
pdf of judge’s opinion that isn’t quite book length, 27 pages, judge is a microbiologist and immunologist PhD
pdf of other judge’s opinion that’s 87 pages, judge is an applied mathematician PhD with a background in mathematical virology – despite the length this is better organized and generally way more readable, if you can spare the time.
rootclaim’s post mortem blogpost, includes more links to debate material and judge’s opinions.
edit: added additional details to the pdf descriptions.
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
If Randi wants paranormal he should see me in bed. Ain’t nothing normal about that
[nsfw and very old]
A man sneaks into a brothel and asks to speak to the madam. He tells her his fantasy, to be whipped by a girl in a clown suit while he is sodomized by an orangutan dressed like a pirate.
The madam looks at him with disgust. “Sir, in all my years of service, I’ve never heard a more disgusting or perverse request. I will get you what you want, but you’ll have to wait three days for me to arrange it, and it will cost you plenty.”
After the man leaves, the madam calls upstairs. “Yeah, we got another Number 7 booked for Thursday.”
I told people on Lemmy about my gender identity and how people of my gender do family relationships and sex, and they told me I was a troll who was making fun of trans people, and that the way I have sex (which I have done many times) is physically impossible.
But is there a pirate suit involved??
No, but there are bugs involved
Did you say bugs?
https://youtu.be/17ocaZb-bGg
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.
Is it still a scam if the only applicants are scammers?
There are plenty of non scammers who would have liked to apply, like me with my smartphone, and we weren’t allowed. Randi was pulling a magic trick. He used the power of stage magic and scams to convince people real magic doesn’t exist.
@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.