Ground Truth Challenge results: Update!
Remember those two challenges last week, that we marked as inconclusive [https://www.betterskeptics.com/
We haven't gone down in flames, yet!
It's been truly exciting to watch contributions come in. Nine participants submitted 52 entries, of which 40 were rejected for not meeting the rules and the remaining 12 were sent for review to our referees.
There were some teething problems (maybe a few accidental bot tweets...) and more of these are likely to happen. This is a quick and dirty project, and we expect to learn from iteration. And for anyone who are displeased with the rules or concept: we embrace the spirit of open source. Please send us an end-to-end suggestion of how you'd solve the related problems (aka. Pull Request) or fork the project and go crazy! This is why we started this whole thing!
To better illustrate the process, we created a diagram illustrating the flow of submissions and the two rounds involved. (For more details, go here).
Shout out to David Fuller at Rebel Wisdom, who today published a video about the challenge:
The storm over vaccines and the drug Ivermectin, with allegations of misinformation and social media censorship has recently been centred on Bret Weinstein and the Dark Horse podcast. A new experimental, project has been launched to fact check the claims: https://t.co/0BGXw2kNZx
— Rebel Wisdom (@WisdomRebel) July 17, 2021
We're very grateful for David's interest in this project! David was involved in discussions with us leading up to the it and introduced us to one of our referees.
new and fascinating project just launched to fact check some of the claims made about vaccines & IVM on the Dark Horse podcast. I've been an unofficial 'observer' of the project - I think it's a great start in the right direction - check it out and get involved https://t.co/oPiLWbpVfJ
— David Fuller (@fullydavid) July 17, 2021
Meanwhile Alexandros also published a more detailed thread about the origins of Better Skeptics, touching on sources of the funding, the inspiration for the idea and the name.
"Fans" on either side are accusing @BetterSkeptics. It's how you know it's working.
— Alexandros Marinos (@alexandrosM) July 17, 2021
The story:
- Me & @iseravi1 are DarkHorse viewers
- I took apart the Quillette attack myself
- We still want the best counters
So I'm self-funding this challenge with some of my $TSLA gains.🧵 https://t.co/opnHDRiRWc
Maybe the most rewarding has been to see the challenge gain traction and clearly hitting a note with others out there.
Interesting project from husband & wife team Alex Marinos (@alexandrosM) and Eva Tallaksen (@Iseravi1) — a $10,000 challenge to get better fact checking of 4 controversial pandemic-related episodes of @BretWeinstein’s #DarkHorsePodcast. 🧵https://t.co/mImu6mVPwP
— Keiko (@keikoinboston) July 18, 2021
We had no idea what to expect coming into this, and still don't. But if we can come out of this week with a better idea of falsifiable claims on COVID-19 then I think we are all the better off for it.