"Rootclaim" then bet $100,000 on being able to back that claim in a independant structured 18 hour long debate of their own devising .. and lost the $100,000.
The Rootclaim assessment was worthless.
See: https://protagonist-science.medium.com/lableak-truther-loses...
Or watch the entire 18 hour debate in which that claim was shredded.
Given your user profile about: it's easy to see why you might give weight to Saar Wilf's Rootclaim project .. championing this particular result while ignoring its full history seems professionally questionable.
I don't have time to watch the 3hr debate or read all of that article (which makes some misrepresentative statements, and like your response, is rather venomous in tone), but here is the response from rootclaim about the debate outcome: https://blog.rootclaim.com/covid-origins-debate-response-to-...
I also know from experience that scientists, and people in general, are often not well trained in the kind of probabilistic reasoning that is required for combining and weighing up multiple sources of evidence.
It was 18 hours.
Three blocks of six hours.
Plus preparation time by both parties and the multiple judges who were chosen to have the kind of expertise to weigh up arguments.
Both parties were invested in making a case, and each put up $100,000 in escrow to add weight to the debate.
The case that you put forward lost.
It was debated by the person that put it forward.
He lost.
What confuses me however, is his dismissal of two pieces of evidence in table 2 which he says should be ignored "following the presumption that HSM is the first SSE", and yet earlier, in footnote 24, he states "We are very specifically not conditioning on that place being HSM" (talking about the first SSE location). Can anyone enlighten me about this seeming contradiction?