Steve Kirsch
Article
Steve Kirsch is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 6 times across 6 issues between December 29, 2022 and December 17, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “commissioned by Steve Kirsch, an eccentric anti-vaccine billionaire”; “Prominent anti-vaccine personality Steve Kirsch offered $500k bets”; “Steve Kirsch did not in fact back out of his bet with Saar Wilf”. It most often appears alongside New York Times, Substack, COVID.
Metadata
- Category: People
- Mention count: 6
- Issue count: 6
- First seen: December 29, 2022
- Last seen: December 17, 2024
Appears In
- Sorry, I Still Think I Am Right About The Media Very Rarely Lying
- Links For February 2023
- Open Thread 263
- Practically-A-Book Review: Rootclaim $100,000 Lab Leak Debate
- Failure To Replicate Anti-Vaccine Poll
- Links For December 2024
Related Pages
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- New York Times (4 shared issues)
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- Substack (4 shared issues)
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- COVID (3 shared issues)
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- Kirsch (3 shared issues)
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- Rootclaim (3 shared issues)
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- Trump (3 shared issues)
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- Daniel Filan (2 shared issues)
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- FDA (2 shared issues)
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- Iraq (2 shared issues)
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- Less Wrong (2 shared issues)
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- Manifold Market (2 shared issues)
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- NPR (2 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
I was able to find the poll they cited. It’s here, and it says exactly what they claim it says. It was commissioned by Steve Kirsch, an eccentric anti-vaccine billionaire - but he used a real polling company not under his control, so I’m not sure how his own views would affect the results.
Inline links: It’s here, commissioned by
Still, The Daily Skeptic isn’t making anything up. Kirsch’s poll really says that! Their only mistake was believing the poll, instead of doing sanity checks against every other source of information about deaths.
Prominent anti-vaccine personality Steve Kirsch offered $500k bets (a) on the result of a public debate on whether vaccines save lives or not. Rootclaim (a), a hardcore Bayesian analysis organization, put significant efforts into doing their homework, and accepted the bet (a). Then Kirsh dishonourably chickened out (a). A transcript of the negotiations can be found here (a).
25: People sometimes talk about the value of bets as a mechanism for settling disputes. I think this works well either when the dispute is about a future prediction that will be obvious when it happens, or when both people are really careful and honest and trust each other a lot. More creative uses - like bets on how debates on hot-topic issues will go - work less well. Nuno Sempere’s forecasting newsletter on the attempted Kirsch-Wilf bet:
Inline links: Nuno Sempere’s forecasting newsletter
UPDATE: The bet is back on! Kirsch has put in $1MM, Wilf has put in $500K, there’s room for another $500K on the pro-vaccine side (I don’t know if the debate will still go forward without it), and the terms are here.
Inline links: here
2: Correction from last week’s links: Steve Kirsch did not in fact back out of his bet with Saar Wilf; although they briefly reached an impasse, they’ve solved it and plan to go forward with the debate. I’m not sure if this is a good truth-finding method, but I’m intrigued by it and will probably cover it when it happens.
Inline links: go forward with the debate
For example, does Putin have cancer? We start with the prior for Russian men ages 60-69 having cancer (14.32%, according to health data). We adjust for Putin’s healthy lifestyle (-30% cancer risk) and lack of family history (-5%). Putin hasn’t vanished from the world stage for long periods of time, which seems about 4x more likely to be true if he didn’t have cancer than if he did. About half of cancer patients lose their hair, and Putin hasn’t, so we’ll divide by two. On the other hand, Putin’s face has gotten more swollen recently, which happens about six times more often to cancer patients than to others, so we’ll multiply by six. And so on and so forth, until we end up with the final calculation: 86% chance Putin doesn’t have cancer, too bad. This is an unusual way to do things, but Saar claimed some early victories. For example, in a celebrity Israeli murder case, Saar used Rootclaim to determine that the main suspect was likely innocent, and a local mental patient had committed the crime; later, new DNA evidence seemed to back him up. One other important fact about Saar: he is very rich. In 2008, he sold his fraud detection startup to PayPal for $169 million. Since then he’s founded more companies, made more good investments, and won hundreds of thousands of dollars in professional poker. So, in the grand tradition of very rich people who think they have invented new forms of reasoning, Saar issued a monetary challenge. If you disagree with any of his Rootclaim analyses - you think Putin does have cancer, or whatever - he and the Rootclaim team will bet you $100,000 that they’re right. If the answer will come out eventually (eg wait to see when Putin dies), you can wait and see. Otherwise, he’ll accept all comers in video debates in front of a mutually-agreeable panel of judges. Since then, Saar and his $100,000 offer have been a fixture of Internet debates everywhere. When I argued that Vitamin D didn’t help fight COVID, people urged me to bet against Saar, and we had a good discussion before finally failing to agree on terms. When anti-vaccine multimillionaire Steve Kirsch made a similar offer, Saar took him up on it, although they’ve been bogged down in judge selection for the past year. Rootclaim also found in favor of the lab leak hypothesis of COVID. When Saar talked about this on an old ACX comment thread, fellow commenter tgof137 (Peter Miller) agreed to take him up on his $100K bet. At the time, I had no idea who Peter was. I kind of still don’t. He’s not Internet famous. He describes himself as a “physics student, programmer, and mountaineer” who “obsessively researches random topics”. After a family member got into lab leak a few years ago, he started investigating. Although he started somewhere between neutral and positive towards the hypothesis, he ended up “90%+” convinced it was false. He also ended up annoyed: contrarian bloggers were raking in Substack cash by promoting lab leak, but there seemed to be no incentive to defend zoonosis. Unlike Saar, Peter was not especially rich. $100K represented a big fraction of his net worth. But (he wrote me in an email): It was a moderately large financial risk for me ... I [expected] a smart and unbiased person would vote for zoonosis with, say, 80% odds after seeing all the evidence. If both judges voting for lab origin is uncorrelated, that's 20% squared, and it was pretty low odds of a catastrophic financial risk for me. I wasn't highly worried about losing the debate because I was wrong about the science. I put in enough effort to know I'm probably correct there. My biggest fear was that I'd choke at the debate for some reason, that I'd be too anxious and particularly that I'd be unable to sleep the night beforehand. I have zero prior debate experience to rely upon. If this seems like a weirdly blase attitude towards risk, Peter told blogger Philipp Markolin that he “is a mountain climber where sometimes there is a 5% chance to die, and the stakes are just not that high for a debate.” Unlike the eternally bogged-down Saar-Kirsch debate, here things moved quickly. The two contestants put out a call for judges on the ACX subreddit, and agreed on: Will van Treuren, a pharmaceutical entrepreneur with a PhD from Stanford and a background in bacteriology and immunology.
Inline links: does Putin have cancer, celebrity Israeli murder case, argued that Vitamin D didn’t help fight COVID, took him up on it, on an old ACX comment thread, told blogger Philipp Markolin, put out a call for judges
The other part of the argument was that saying “I will debate all comers for an $X bet” is annoying, and we shouldn’t encourage that kind of thing. Certainly this technique has been used by bad actors - for example, the Holocaust denial group Institute For Historical Review offered a $50,000 prize to anyone who could prove the Holocaust happened (it was eventually won by an Auschwitz survivor whose “proof” was that he saw his family led to the gas chambers; IHR failed to accept this; the survivor sued and won). Likewise, anti-vaccine multimillionaire Steve Kirsch has offered to bet $500,000 on the results of a debate about vaccines not working9 (Saar took him up on it and they’re continuing to hammer out the specifics). I assume the concern is that (if the court system hadn’t stepped in), the Institute for Historical Review could have kept denying any evidence they were given, then kept taunting people with “We’ve offered $50,000 for proof that the Holocaust happened, nobody has ever won our money, so the proof must not exist”. Or Kirsch could keep saying “Nobody will bet me $500,000 on vaccines, guess they’re scared and think they don’t have evidence” (when in fact it’s just that most people don’t have the time, courage, and risk tolerance to do this, especially when there’s no guarantee the right person will win the debate). In order to deny these people this weapon (the argument goes) we need to make it common knowledge that this strategy isn’t legitimate. And taking people up on their offer, having a great debate that leaves everybody more enlightened and serves as a model for rational discourse, then having the right side win in the end - seems like the opposite of delegitimizing this strategy. I guess I classify this with all the other examples in Less Utilitarian Than Thou. Cool Machiavellian plot you have there, but maybe the fact that you’re losing 16%-66% should make you question whether you’re really as smart as you think you are, and whether your plan to suppress all discussion for the greater good is really the mastermind-level strategy you hoped it would be. It’s good to assert the true fact that these kinds of challenges are often dumb/rigged/useless, and that “nobody has yet responded to my challenge” isn’t a valid argument that someone’s necessarily right. But I stop short of trying to set some kind of social norm that nobody may respond to anyone else’s challenges, even if they think that person is being honest and has organized the challenge well (as Saar was and did). That almost seems like itself legitimizing the whole thing, in the sense of accepting that if someone loses a challenge then it means something important. I would rather place the illegitimacy where it belongs (a challenge really doesn’t prove anything, separate from the arguments made in it) and let people do what they want. I want to see more debates like this. I learned more watching the 15 hours of Rootclaim debate than I think I would have researching on my own for 15 hours. But a lot of things had to come together to make this work. Most of all, this debate worked out because the judges were two very smart scientists with relevant expertise. To get such good judges, lots of things had to fall into place. First, the debate itself had to be expensive enough that neither side begrudged paying the extra $5,000 per judge to hire the best people. And second, the debate had to be about a topic where lots of intelligent people haven’t yet made up their minds. If the debate was about flat earth, I would despair of finding good judges. Either the judges would already be convinced the Earth was round (which the flat Earth side would understandably refuse to accept). Or they would be 50-50, which would mean they were extremely weird people whose reasoning couldn’t be trusted. Flat Earth is an extreme example, but even a debate about COVID vaccines would be pushing it here. (since writing this, I learned Peter had made this same argument and analogy in a blog post on Kirsch; sorry for the unintentional plagiarism) I think I would genuinely update on the conclusion of any other Rootclaim debate with the same caliber of participants as this one, but not necessarily on whatever Steve Kirsch or the Institute of Historical Review comes up with, nor the next person to hit on the strategy of “I’ll pay you $100,000 if you prove me wrong!”10 The Aftermath: Conclusion This was one of my favorite topics to write about this year, for a few reasons. First, on the object level, I learned a lot about the origins of COVID, which is a great story. I feel like I know much more now about this disease that came out of nowhere and ruined all of our lives for a few years. It’s a weird rabbit hole, which I’m not yet entirely out of. I have a weird urge to visit Wuhan as a tourist, see the Wuhan Institute of Virology, stroll through the Huanan Central Seafood Market (unfortunately closed), maybe eat a raccoon-dog. Second, some of the lessons of this debate are actionable. I’ve written before about how we should learn the lessons of lab leak even if it turns out to be false this time; that hasn’t changed. But this was a good reminder to also learn the lessons of zoonosis, for the same reason. We need more attention on closing wet markets and tracking weird Chinese wildlife. The DEFUSE proposal wanted to immunize bats - is this still a worthwhile idea? The virologists got a bad rap for wanting to gain-of-function exactly the pathogen that caused the century’s worst pandemic, but in a way that speaks well of them - they clearly knew what to be worried about. Has anyone mumbled an apology and asked them if they have any other useful predictions? Third, John Nerst has written about erisology, the study of disagreements. This was surely one of history’s greatest erisological studies. Two very smart people spent fifteen hours hashing out every argument and counterargument in good faith, then quantified all of their beliefs in a way that lets us figure out exactly where they differed and by how much. This isn’t entirely a victory - as a newly minted member of team zoonosis, I still can’t trace exactly why Saar is so sure I’m wrong. But if the COVID origin story fascinates me as this peek deep into a pestiferous underworld of sinister laboratories and reeking wet markets, something about this debate felt like analogous peek into the creepy subconscious swamps where disagreements begin. Fourth, for the first time it made me see the coronavirus as one of God’s biggest and funniest jokes. Think about it. Either a zoonotic virus crossed over to humans fifteen miles from the biggest coronavirus laboratory in the Eastern Hemisphere. Or a lab leak virus first rose to public attention right near a raccoon-dog stall in a wet market. Either way is one of the century’s biggest coincidences, designed by some cosmic joker who wanted to keep the debate acrimonious for years to come. But fifth, if the coronavirus’ story is a comedy, all of this - Rootclaim, the debate, the $100K - is a tragedy. Saar got $100 million, decided to devote a big part of his life to improving human reasoning, and came up with a really elegant system. He was so confident in his system, and in the power of open discussion, that he risked his money and reputation on an accept-all-comers debate offer . Then some rando who nobody had ever heard of accepted the challenge, turned out to be some kind of weird debate savant, and won, turning what should have been Rootclaim’s moment of triumph into a bitter defeat. Totally new kind of human suffering, worthy of Shakespeare. I look forward to the movie, especially seeing who plays the dashing young blogger who helped the participants meet. Other Resources Daniel Filan’s running Twitter commentary of the debate
Inline links: 9, Less Utilitarian Than Thou, in a blog post on Kirsch, 10, erisology, Daniel Filan’s running Twitter commentary of the debate
Some people have since claimed that Kirsch’s debate offer isn’t honest - see https://twitter.com/SkepticJonGuy/status/1665071649555906561 and https://twitter.com/SwaledaleMutton/status/1721170306788630713.
Steve Kirsch is an inventor and businessman most famous for developing the optical mouse. More recently, he’s become an anti-COVID-vaccine activist. He has many different arguments on his Substack, of which one especially caught my eye:
Inline links: his Substack
8.5% of people said a household member had died from the vaccine. All other statistics were normal and confirmed that this was a fair sample of the population. In particular, about 75% were vaccinated (suggesting that they weren’t just polling hardcore anti-vaxxers). Since then, Kirsch has collected several other polls - some by him, some by others - saying the same. For example, here’s Rasmussen (another reputable polling company) from last January: I’ve truncated the table to keep it readable, but I kept the breakdown by party - these aren’t just anti-vax Republicans lying to support their party narrative. Even 19% of Democrats say they know someone killed by the vaccine! I know people here like to argue about whether to debate people or deplatform them, but surely someone else finds this interesting. Here’s 24% of the US - so probably a little short of 100 million people - saying they’ve seen something which consensus science says shouldn’t be possible? Aren’t you at least a little curious what’s going on? Also, isn’t Steve Kirsch being a little too smug about this? So I asked about this on the 2022 and 2024 ACX surveys. Both gave similar results, but I’m going to focus on the 2024 survey, since I did the most followup on it. Here “family” was defined on the question page as including “brother, sister, mother, father, child, aunt, uncle, grandparent, grandchild, niece, or nephew”. This is broader than Pollfish’s “member of your household” but narrower than Rasmussen’s “person you know”. Kirsch and I got similar results for knowing someone who died of COVID - 6.5% vs. 7.5%. But we got very different results for knowing someone who died from the vaccine: Kirsch’s 8.5% vs. my 0.6%. Why? As people love to point out, my survey is a nonrepresentative sample. But as I point out, it’s important to keep track of when that should vs. shouldn’t matter. No matter how weird my readers are, they’re not biologically invincible - they should have side effects at similar rates to anyone else. One possibility is that my readers are very pro-vaccine compared to the general population, so they interpret ambiguous cases in a more pro-vaccine way. I didn’t have a question about vaccine-related views, but it’s no secret that vaccine opponents are more often right-wing, so I looked at questions about politics. Conservatives in general were only slightly more likely (1%) to report vaccine deaths compared to liberals (0.4%). But I had a question where people ranked their support for Donald Trump. Trump supporters had much higher vaccine injury rates (7.5%) than moderates (1.3%) or opponents (0.3%). I couldn’t find much of an effect by gender, education level, or any of the other traditional demographic categories. This doesn’t quite explain the difference between my survey and the others, since my moderates had 1.3% side effect rate, and the Rasmussen moderates had 22%. But it does suggest that there’s room for political beliefs to alter perception of relatives’ vaccine deaths. II. All of this would be much clearer if we could get in there and ask the people who said their relatives died from vaccines what they meant. Most ACX Survey respondents gave me permission to email them. So I emailed the people who answered “yes” to that question and asked for their story. Some details: 5,981 people took the survey
Inline links: last January, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!BDeP!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fe6939f50-4dca-48ce-ae9b-eb7d872d587f_1071x136.png, https://x.com/stkirsch/status/1788003066547200351, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Emtd!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fbe05b487-80af-4c93-af22-8abf99fa2f13_799x682.png, as
Steve Kirsch is an inventor and businessman most famous for developing the optical mouse. More recently, he’s become an anti-COVID-vaccine activist. He has many different arguments on his Substack, of which one especially caught my eye: He got Pollfish, a reputable pollster, to ask questions about people’s COVID experiences, including whether they thought any family members had died from COVID or from COVID vaccines. Results here:
4: Rootclaim’s $1 million debate bet with Steve Kirsch over the costs vs. benefits of the COVID vaccine is officially happening.
Inline links: is officially happening