HTT Nuño Sempere’s January forecasting newsletter. And be sure to check out his marvelous Metaforecast service!
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So: Metacululs and RootClaim give very different probabilities that COVID-19 originated in a lab (see earlier post summarizing Monk):
- Metaculus: 15% for Hubei lab origins (either accidental or deliberate) - median never went above 30% during the last year.
- RootClaim: 76% accidental release, and 2% deliberate, based on a (simplified?) Bayesian analysis.
Metaculus has ~3K forecasts on that question over the last year+, and over 260 comments, most well-informed. They’ve done well in COVID-19 forecasts vs. experts. (And famously one of their top forecasters nailed the pandemic in late January 2020, as Sempere reminds us.)
Rootclaim, as far as I can tell, begins with some crowdsourcing to formulate hypotheses, get initial probabilities, gather sources, and maybe to help set likelihoods. Then they do a Bayesian update. At one point they used full Bayesian networks. It seems this one treats each evidence-group as independent.
Both are heavily rationalist and Bayesian-friendly, and had access to each other’s forecasts. So the divergence is quite interesting - I wish I had time to dig into it some more.