Prove the Earth is round, win a million dollars

Imagine that a rich man declares that the Earth is flat. He challenges anyone to prove him wrong, even offers a million dollars if anyone can.

But there are caveats. You need to bet a million dollars of your own money and hold a debate. Judges will decide the outcome of the debate.

You ask the man for more details. He proposes two judges, both of them are Flat Earthers.

You say that’s not fair, so the man proposes an alternative — there will be 6 judges, some will be Flat Earthers and some Round Earthers. It might be split 50/50 but you don’t know, exactly. The winner is whoever convinces the majority of the panel.

The rich Flat Earther says he has lots of evidence that he intends to bring to the debate. His key argument is a poll showing that 10% of Americans think that the Earth is flat.

Sounds absurd, right? Well… similar plans were just made to have this kind of debate about covid vaccines.

The Flat Earther in this case is Steve Kirsch

He’s a wealthy tech entrepreneur who believes that covid vaccines have killed more people than they have saved.

He thinks that the vaccines have killed hundreds of thousands of people in America and saved few lives. He thinks that governments are covering up millions of deaths around the world. These are the same governments that halted all vaccinations with AstraZeneca as soon as they saw a potential risk of blood clotting, with only a 1 in a million risk of death. But, for some reason, they’re not very concerned about vastly more Pfizer deaths.

Steve is being challenged by Saar Wilf, an Israeli business man and poker player who makes debate challenges of his own.

Resolving this dispute on the facts shouldn’t be difficult. There’s no sign of mass casualties from covid vaccines, they can’t possibly have caused the hundreds of thousands of deaths that Kirsch thinks happened.

Resolving this debate by a panel of judges is another question, entirely.

Steve started the dialogue by proposing Bret Weinstein and Chris Martenson as the judges. Both fit into the “crazy as a Flat Earther” category, when it comes to covid.

A second round of discussion said that there will be 6 judges, who will be neutral on the issue (i.e. half will be as crazy as Flat Earthers). The new set of judges isn’t clear, but it sounds like a 3rd person will pick them. That 3rd person might be John Ioannidis, who doesn’t seem entirely crazy but did publish some really bad research at the beginning of the pandemic, concluding the virus was much less deadly than it actually is. He also predicted that covid would kill only 10,000 people in America.

So, the entire debate now revolves around only two questions:

“How crazy is John Ioannidis and which judges will he pick?”

Beyond that, it’ll probably be a lot of noise, and a lot of evidence from weird sources.

Steve ignores things like CDC death counts and instead focuses on things like an online poll that he conducted. In his poll, 2.6% of households reported having someone die from the COVID virus. 2% of households reported someone that died from the covid vaccine.

Since we’ve seen about a million covid deaths in America, Steve concluded there were 774,000 vaccine deaths.

This has since been outdone by someone else’s online poll where 28% of people answered yes to “Do you personally know anyone whose death you think may have been caused by side effects of COVID-19 vaccines?”

Why was the number so high?

Here’s one guess. In the same poll, 26% of people said they had not received a covid vaccine. The poll doesn’t list crosstabs, but I would guess, it’s the same people answering that they didn’t get vaccinated that are also saying they think the vaccines killed someone they know.

They do give crosstabs for age. It’s mostly young people that “know someone that died from a covid vaccine”:

Also, the number of people that didn’t get vaccinated in each age group almost exactly matches the number of people that think someone they know died from the vaccine:

I think there’s an easy way to explain all these polls: a whole bunch of people are hysterically afraid of vaccines, to the point that they didn’t get them and also think that they’re killing people around them.

The poll also shows that some people are just plain stupid. 4% of millenials answered that they were “not sure” if they had received a covid vaccine.

Any number lower than 4% on a poll can generally be ignored.

People give a lot of weird answers to polls

YouGov polled 1,000 people on various conspiracy theories.

6% of those people agreed the Earth is flat and 8% weren’t sure.

The poll has options for how strongly you agree. I’m not sure what those mean. Maybe if you “strongly agree” the Earth is flat, it’s completely flat? If you “somewhat agree”, are you uncertain, or do you think the Earth is only mostly flat?

10% of Americans also answered that the moon landing never happened, and 14% of them weren’t sure.

The rates vary by age, gender, and race.

Men are more likely to deny the moon landing, women are more likely to say they don’t know.

Young people are less likely to believe in the moon landing, with 17% saying it didn’t happen and 20% unsure.

Few people over the age of 55 disbelieve, perhaps because they saw it happen on TV when they were younger. But 4% still think it was fake and 9% aren’t sure. I’m not sure if those ones grew up without a TV or came to doubt it later.

Black people are less likely than whites to believe in the moon landing, and they’re much more likely to say they don’t know if it happened, with a full 30% answering that way.

They were perhaps inspired by the old Gil Scott Heron poem, “Whitey may or may not be on the moon”.

People were even more likely to believe other theories.

45% believe in ghosts, 18% aren’t sure.

42% believe in psychic powers, 18% aren’t sure.

20% believe in chemtrails, 26% aren’t sure.

23% believe aliens built the pyramids, 24% aren’t sure.

28% of people in one poll think they know someone that died from a covid vaccine. It’s become a folk belief at about the same level as chemtrails and ancient aliens.

Some people lie on polls, but I’m not even sure that the polls are wrong. They may well be a believed truth. Maybe your grandmother died for some reason. It happened a year after the covid vaccines were given out, but lots of people on Twitter and Substack told you that the vaccines are dangerous. Tucker Carlson got on TV telling you the same thing, Joe Rogan repeated it in his podcasts. You concluded that the vaccine must have killed your grandmother.

I think it must be terrifying living as an anti-vaxxer — constantly thinking that everyone is out to get you.

I mean, living through the pandemic was a bit stressful for me. I spent 2020 vaguely worried that covid might damage my lungs and sometimes wore a mask to avoid it.

But these other people, while professing their lack of fear of covid, seem terrified of the vaccines, the government, Bill Gates, George Soros, and just about everything else:

Can prizes and debates settle any of these questions?

Saar Wilf also offers his own prize money for other topics. You can win $100,000 for betting against any of these questions:

These are sort of interesting. If Saar Wilf is a good faith actor, I could maybe win one of these.

I haven’t thought at all about the first two questions. I’m in agreement with Wilf that the 2020 US presidential election wasn’t stolen. I haven’t thought enough about Vitamin D and covid to bet either way, but it sounds like Wilf failed to agree on the terms of debate when someone else challenged this.

The last question, the lab leak theory, I think I could debate against. I’m not 100% certain where covid came from, but I’m pretty sure it’s not a lab leak. Wilf thinks that it’s 89% likely that Covid was developed during gain of function research. I’d put the odds at 90% or higher in the other direction.

So I could sign up for that debate. The problem is, again, who would judge the question. There’s no objective way to settle it. I wouldn’t risk $100,000 to bet on convincing unknown judges.

To really settle the debate, you’d either need to find the documents at the Wuhan lab proving that they created covid, or you’d need to find a wild virus that’s close enough to be the most likely source.

In the case of SARS, scientists quickly found the host animal (civets) but it took 13 years to find a bat virus as the original source.

In the case of Covid, China killed all the animals at the Wuhan market without testing, so I’m not sure if we will ever find the host animal. I do think searching for more bat viruses will find viruses that are closer and closer to covid, over time. The closest ones we have now are 96–97% similar to covid.

So how would I make a lab leak bet?

I would bet that no one will ever prove the lab leak theory.

You need a time limit, you can’t wait forever. I would bet:

“In 5 years time, the scientific consensus will not be that SARS-CoV-2 was created by gain of function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”

We could define consensus in a variety of ways.

I mean something comparable to, say, the level of scientific consensus that global warming is real and mostly caused by human CO2 emissions.

It could be something like surveying if 90% or more of virologists believe the lab leak theory.

It could be done by nominating current zoonotic origin proponents and saying they won’t endorse the lab leak theory. I might suggest scientists like Michael Worobey, Bob Garry, and Kristian Anderson. Two of those people changed their minds from lab leak to zoonotic origin, in 2020, so that should show that they are capable of changing their minds. Worobey also signed a letter endorsing the discussion of the lab leak as a valid question, even though he strongly advocates for a zoonotic origin.

I would bet that the lab leak discussion will remain about the same as it is today. Most virologists will still lean towards a zoonotic origin. They will continue to slowly find somewhat related bat viruses in China and SE Asia.

The lab leak theory may live on in the public imagination. People will still make podcasts about it, they’ll write articles and books about the Wuhan lab for as long as it’s profitable.

The theory might be endorsed by more government reports (like the House GOP minority report which already endorsed the lab leak theory). It may even become the theory favored by a majority of the US government, if the GOP wins the next election.

But I would bet that the lab leak theory will still remain fringe among scientists. There will not be any clear proof of a gain of function research program at the WIV creating the virus. No one will find proof in the RNA sequence that covid is not natural. If any of the WIV databases become public, there will be no virus that’s closer to SARS-CoV-2 than the RATG-13 virus that they already declared.

I could also bet that we’ll continue to find natural viruses that are similar to covid. But finding the exact precursor to Covid might not happen, or it might take a long time. It might have to be a long term bet, since it took 13 years to find the origin of SARS, and we still don’t know the source of Ebola after decades of searching.

I proposed my 5 year bet to Saar Wilf. He refused it. He agrees that scientists still won’t believe the lab leak, in 5 years time. But he personally believes in the lab leak, and apparently he thinks he could convince some judges. I guess it all depends who the judges are.

I feel like there has to be a better way to resolve some questions than a judged debate. Some things have an objective answer.

James Randi’s Million Dollar Prize

The million dollar prize approach did work, once.

Skeptic James Randi offered a million dollars if anyone could prove to him they had paranormal powers.

But there were a lot of differences between Randi’s prize and the ones that Kirsch and Wilf are offering.

Anyone could enter Randi’s contest for free, they didn’t have to bet a million dollars of their own money.

Lots of people did enter. They tried to use psychic powers to locate hidden objects, to identify cards in a sealed envelope, to find hidden water flowing under the ground. And they all failed.

There’s a big difference with today’s debates. All the tests for Randi’s prize were empirical. Anyone could tell at a glance who had won.

In today’s clown world, the psychics would offer the prize instead of Randi. They’d ask Randi to put up 1 million dollars to have a debate about telepathy, rather than a demonstration of psychic powers. Or, perhaps, they wouldn’t let him talk, they’d just use their powers to read his mind, decide he was lying, and declare themselves the winners.

That’s about where we’re at, with the anti-vax movement.

I know. People are stupid.

Is there any way to actually make people smarter?

People believe a lot of stupid things. Sometimes I wonder if there’s a better way to convince them.

I write these blog posts because I’m curious, and I find it somewhat entertaining. I’ve occasionally had people tell me I changed their minds on an issue. But I’ve received a lot more responses from angry people that didn’t change their minds. Some people won’t be convinced by any number of charts and graphs.

I think we could actually prove some things by demonstration, not by written argument.

A Youtube star named Uncle Rob made a nice demonstration that masks block droplets:

Of course, that’s just a man lighting things on fire, for fun. It doesn’t prove whether a mask blocks enough droplets to stop a covid infection.

But you could prove similar results in a covid challenge trial.

One of Steve’s challenges is “do masks work?”.

He’ll bet a million dollars that masks do not work.

And, I’m pretty sure that masks do work.

I wouldn’t challenge Steve to that debate, no matter how rich I was, because he’d just pick judges that agree with him.

But I think you could make an objective test to prove it, one way or another.

We’d really need to be clear about what we mean. The latest Cochrane review just came out. Headlines say it “proved that masks don’t work”. So, let me clarify.

I think that if you’re sick, and you wear a mask, you’re less likely to transmit covid to other people. I’m highly certain that’s true with an N-95 mask. I’m less certain with surgical or cloth masks, but I suspect those are still a bit better than nothing if you’re coughing.

I also think that if you’re not sick, wearing an N-95 mask is likely to protect you from catching covid around other people that are.

The 95 in N-95 means that the mask is rated to filter out 95% of particles in a particular size range. The particles that transmit covid are in that size range. So, why wouldn’t it help?

I’m, again, less certain on how well cloth or surgical masks work. Surgical masks filter out some particles, but generally fewer. On average it seems to be 84% of the particles, but it seems to really depend on the exact mask. Cloth masks are even worse. A randomized trial in a hospital found that healthcare workers were about twice as likely to get sick if they wore a cloth mask as compared to a surgical mask.

I have personally worn an N-95 mask in a room with a covid infected person and not gotten sick. That doesn’t prove much, maybe I’m just immune to covid. Maybe the vaccine I took worked. Maybe it takes a long time to catch covid. Maybe you have to get very close to a sick person.

You’d need an experiment with more than 1 person to prove it.

So, I’d be willing to bet on something like that. I would design a challenge trial. Maybe you have one covid infected person share a room with some uninfected people. Half wear N-95 masks, half do not. I predict that more of the people without masks will get sick. Preferably, you get enough volunteers to make it statistically significant.

You could also take 2 covid infected people, each shares a separate room with some uninfected people. 1 of the infected people wears an N-95 mask, the other one does not. I predict that less people will get sick in the room where the infected person wears a mask.

I wouldn’t bet a million dollars on that outcome, because I don’t have a million dollars. And I’m also not 100% sure of the outcome.

But I’m pretty sure of the outcome. I would bet $10,000. Maybe more, depending on the experimental design.

More importantly, I’d film the experiment and put it on Youtube. Unlike a complicated debate that many people can’t follow, stupid people could actually watch the video and learn something. Seeing is believing.

That doesn’t set all the parameters of how well masks work. I have no idea if giving a bunch of children cloth masks and putting them in classes with each other for 8 hours does anything to slow down covid transmission.

If my experiment proved that masks work to prevent covid for 20 minutes, that wouldn’t prove that masks work for an hour.

The CDC picked some arbitrary number and said it took 15 minutes of covid exposure to be at danger. One Iowa school decided to move children around the classroom every 14 minutes so that no child would have 15 minutes of exposure to the virus, which again proves that most people are stupid.

People did a lot of crazy things during the pandemic. Some wore plastic face shields instead of masks. Contact tracing during one outbreak showed that those failed, while masks worked.

We made rules where everyone on a plane has to wear a mask, but then everyone takes their masks off simultaneously to eat. I have no idea if that works to stop covid transmission.

I do know that I used to frequently get sick after I got on a plane, before the pandemic started. I’ve been on a number of flights, during the pandemic, wore a mask, and never got sick.

Either: my mask worked, other people’s masks worked, or there were just less viruses going around during the pandemic, for some other reason.

We do know that viral transmission went down during the beginning of the pandemic. At least some of the restrictions worked:

In any case, you could design a challenge trial to test exactly how well masks work on planes, and film it in a way that’s convincing to people.

If no one takes me up on this bet about masks, we can conclude that it’s proven: masks do work to prevent the spread of covid.

There’s a catch to the James Randi prize.

Randi’s prize doesn’t really prove that no one is psychic. If you had psychic powers, you could use them to make a lot more than 1 million dollars.

I suppose it depends what the psychic power is, exactly.

If you could see the future, that’s easy. You could make all the money you want on the stock market.

If you could read people’s minds, that’s easy, too. You could get their passwords and steal anything from them. Or you could win at Poker or Blackjack.

Telekinesis? A bit less obvious, but I’m sure you can still make plenty of money that way, maybe you can open locks, make the valuable objects walk to you, and so on.

I’m not quite sure how you make a million dollars if your only power is spoon bending.

James Randi showed that most psychics are lying.

But they also prove that, themselves, by not making money with their powers, other than by grifting.

There’s also a catch to Steve’s prize

If Steve really had proof that Pfizer killed a million people, he wouldn’t use it to bet against strangers on the internet. He’d use it to sue Pfizer.

That’s also proof that Steve is lying.

Many drug makers had to pay billion dollar settlements for making false claims or failing to disclose safety data.

If Pfizer really killed a million people, that would be the easiest class action lawsuit in history.

We know that the government will halt vaccinations for a small safety risk, like the one in a million risk of death from the AstraZeneca vaccine.

So, that would be another way to make the Pfizer debate objective.

I would bet that Pfizer’s vaccine won’t get pulled off the market for this safety issue.

That also needs a timeline to resolve. I’d propose giving the bet a year. Surely by then everyone will notice the millions of dead bodies and conclude that Steve is telling the truth.

I would also bet all the money I have that the Earth is round, or that the covid vaccines have saved more people than they’ve killed. But only if I trusted the judges.