So I would’ve agreed with you even a month ago, but then I was informed of the Rootclaim debate over the origins of Covid19 with $100,000 at stake. And oh boy, did that debate (and Daniel Filan’s helpful coverage!) change my mind on the likelihood of the lab-leak hypothesis. Franky, this is the minimum standard we should’ve held as to the inquiry of such an important topic as a society. Regardless, it change my mind from about 70% likelihood of a lab-leak to about 1-5%. Manifold seems to agree, given the change from ~50% probability of lab-leak winning to 6%.
EDIT: To clarify, this comment was a recommendation, not an argument. Second, I didn’t watch the whole debate. Instead, I watched the opening arguements, snippets of later parts of the debate, and read through Daniel’s thread which made sense given the content I had watched. I apologize for not making that clear. Mea culpa. Third, the debate covers the Defuse proposal. [1]
I still recommend looking at parts of the debate (they’re handily timestamped!) which consists of written, and verbal segments. Or you can wait until the condensed 2-hour version is released. Either way, the breadth of evidence considered, and the amount of detail analysed, was very high. To make things easier, I’ll describe the format of the debate and what each round was about. There were three rounds focusing on different aspects of Covid19′s origins. Each round was compsed of 3 parts: opening statements by both sides (about 90 mins) and a third part conisting of series of shorter debate segments the judges asking questions. 10 days before each round, slides were shared, with written questions from the judges, replies to judges and to each other’s 2 days before each round [1].
Round 1: Opening arguments from Peter (pro zoonotic origin) and Saar/Rootclaim (lab-leak), plus the debate segment with judges asking questions.
Round 2: Opening arguments from Yuri Deigin (siding with Rootclaim) and Peter. They focus on the genetic evidence for lab-leak and gain of function research, including the whole DEFUSE proposal.
Round 3: Peter vs Saaf again. Peter mostly summarizing his arguement here, and gives probabilities for a bunch of different things.[2] Saaf gives his final rebuttals, claiming every slide in Peter’s presentation has something wrong with it. Then the final debate segment.
There will be a shorter, edited version of the debate that I think will be released sometime in Febuary.
[1] Link to a market whose description contains links to all of the written documents.
- ^
The arguements against it were (IIRC) that the proposal didn’t happen at the WIV, the known virus in WIV, or those proposed in DEFUSE, weren’t actually that close genetically to what we got, likely suspects in lab-leak theories weren’t acting suspiciously before Covid blew up, Covid was first known to spread in the Wuhan market which closely resembled zoontic viruses spreading in wet-markets in other cities, the market was 10 milles across the river from the WIV were relevant labs were, there were multiple lineages which better match zoonosis compared to single lab-leak etc.
- ^
He gives total odds against a lab leak as 1 in 5^10^25, but I think he commited errors here. He made the conjuction fallacy and I don’t think he gave likelihood ratios, which is what we care about. Plus, I feel like he left out evidence favouring the lab-leak theory in this probabilistic calculation. Funnily enough, the judges noted that and said he had made the same criticism against some of Rootclaim’s probabilistic analyses.
Sub-Section 2.9 should have been an entire section. ARC used GPT-4 to simulate an agent in the wild. They gave GPT-4 a REPL, the ability to use chain of thought and delegate to copies of itself, a small amount of money and an account with access to a LLM api. It couldn’t self replicate.