[delbarital]

Rootclaim, an Israeli startup, claims Covid-19 SARS-CoV-2 was developed in a Chinese lab and was released was released by accident. They are offering to bet $100,000 on the accuracy of our analysis. Here you can find information about the challenge: https://www.rootclaim.com/rootclaim_challenge

Personally, I think their logic is doesn't work and I would like to see someone credible challenges them.

[BEEdwards]

You can't prove a negative though.

The burden of proof is on them.

[whammywon]

I wonder if that's why they're making the bet.

[wsdookadr]

It could be a direct application of Cunningham's law: "The best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question; it's to post the wrong answer."

In other words, a curiosity that begs to be proven wrong. We have a saying over here.. "A fool throws a pebble in a pond, and ten wise men can't recover it".

[dathinab]

Yes, it's a common approach to trick people into believing things:

1. Open a public "bet" or similar

2. Make it so that you can always wiggle yourself out of the bet (on nitpicking and legalese)

3. If someone challenges you wiggle yourself out hope that person sues you and then use nitpicking and legalese to win the court case about that proof of you being wrong not being applicable for the bet

4. Then claim that the court agreed with you that you have right with your bet (which isn't what the court case was about but people don't know and sometime don't (want to) understand).

There had been some case of this pattern in Germany wrt. to (I think) vaccines and autism. If I remember correctly (I might not) their trick was to require a single scientific paper formulated in a way so that if you paper has other papers it refers to it's no longer eligible for that bet and in turn to win the bet you would have to do multiple large case studies from scratch in cram them into one massive paper covering multiple topics and the joint conclusion. I.e. it's not very feasible.

[khyryk]

To be pedantic, you can't actually prove anything, positive or negative, outside of the realm of logic and mathematics.

[akyu]

>You can't prove a negative though.

You definitely can prove a negative.

[chillacy]

For some limited definitions of prove maybe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot