A debate sequel, with someone other than Peter Miller (but retaining and reevaluating all the evidence he got from various sources) would be nice. I can easily imagine Miller doing better work on other research topics that don’t involve any possibility of cover ups or adversarial epistemics related to falsifiability, which seem to be personal issues for him in the case of lab leak at least.
Maybe with 200k on the line to incentivize Saar to return, or to set up a team this time around? With the next round of challengers bearing in mind that Saar might be willing to stomach a net loss of many thousands of dollars in order to promote his show and methodology?
If $100k was not enough to incentivize Saar & his team to factcheck Peter’s simplest claims like “Connor said his cat died of COVID-19”, where it takes me literally 15 seconds* to find it in Google and verify that Connor said the exact opposite of that (where an elementary school child could have factchecked this as well as I did), I don’t think $200k is going to help Saar either. And I don’t know how one would expect the debate format to work for any genuinely hard question if it takes approaching a million dollars to get anyone to do sub-newspaper-level factchecking of Peter’s claims. (If you can’t even check quotes, like ‘did this dude say in the Daily Mail what Peter said he said?’ how on earth are you going to do well at all of these other things like mahjong parlors in wet markets that no longer exist or novel viral evolution or CCP censorship & propaganda operations or subtle software bugs in genomics software written by non-programmers...?) The problem is not the dollar amount.
* and I do mean “literally” literally. It should take anyone less than half a minute to check the cat claim, and if it takes more, you should analyze what’s wrong with you or your setup. If you doubt me, look at my directions, which are the first query anyone should make—and if that’s not an obvious query, read my search case-studies until it is—then get a stopwatch, open up google.com in a tab if you have neglected to set up a keyboard shortcut, and see how long it takes you to factcheck it as I describe.
A debate sequel, with someone other than Peter Miller (but retaining and reevaluating all the evidence he got from various sources) would be nice. I can easily imagine Miller doing better work on other research topics that don’t involve any possibility of cover ups or adversarial epistemics related to falsifiability, which seem to be personal issues for him in the case of lab leak at least.
Maybe with 200k on the line to incentivize Saar to return, or to set up a team this time around? With the next round of challengers bearing in mind that Saar might be willing to stomach a net loss of many thousands of dollars in order to promote his show and methodology?
If $100k was not enough to incentivize Saar & his team to factcheck Peter’s simplest claims like “Connor said his cat died of COVID-19”, where it takes me literally 15 seconds* to find it in Google and verify that Connor said the exact opposite of that (where an elementary school child could have factchecked this as well as I did), I don’t think $200k is going to help Saar either. And I don’t know how one would expect the debate format to work for any genuinely hard question if it takes approaching a million dollars to get anyone to do sub-newspaper-level factchecking of Peter’s claims. (If you can’t even check quotes, like ‘did this dude say in the Daily Mail what Peter said he said?’ how on earth are you going to do well at all of these other things like mahjong parlors in wet markets that no longer exist or novel viral evolution or CCP censorship & propaganda operations or subtle software bugs in genomics software written by non-programmers...?) The problem is not the dollar amount.
* and I do mean “literally” literally. It should take anyone less than half a minute to check the cat claim, and if it takes more, you should analyze what’s wrong with you or your setup. If you doubt me, look at my directions, which are the first query anyone should make—and if that’s not an obvious query, read my search case-studies until it is—then get a stopwatch, open up google.com in a tab if you have neglected to set up a keyboard shortcut, and see how long it takes you to factcheck it as I describe.