Want to Debate the World’s Top Misinformation Superspreaders? Here’s How
By STEVE KIRSCH
Gosh. All of a sudden I’m in demand from pro-vaxxers who want to debate me! I’m happy to accept. Here are my proposed rules so that we can have a meaningful live debate.
I’m happy to take on all qualified people who want to challenge our beliefs and believe that they can challenge our beliefs.
In order to make the interaction productive for both sides and for the audience, I am proposing these ground rules. However, I’m also open to accepting any other similarly well thought out ground rules as well (or modifications to these rules).
- How to apply: Apply here and select the “debate me” option. In the Notes section, provide a URL with the required information (as noted in the points below). Also, to let all my followers know, also post here.
- Be respectful: No insults. If the moderator feels that someone insulted another person, the person doing the insult will be ejected from the debate room by the moderator.
- Tell us who is on your team: You must pre-specify the names of the people on your team. You can have up to 5 people. The names must be real names. Show us that the combined h-index (Google Scholar or any other reliable source) of your team sums to 20 or more. We will guarantee the same on our side. This sets a base level of academic credibility to the debate. You can do this with a single person or use the combined score of all 5 people.
- Team sizes: The size of our team will be set based on the number of questions you ask, but no more than 1 person per question. So if you ask 5 questions, we get 5 people. If you want to ask us just 3 questions, we’ll only need 3 people. You may have up to 5 people on your team. We will tell you the names of the people on our team within 10 days of a successful submission. We can’t tell you this in advance because it depends on the questions you ask and the dates you gave us.
- Pick the questions you will answer: You choose the 3 of the 5 issue(s) you want us to ask you from any of the issues in this slide deck. You should present serious brief answers to all 5 questions you choose in writing when you apply. The two fixed questions we have that you are required to answer are:
- Provide your best estimate of the number of Americans that the COVID vaccine has actually killed? Show as many ways as you want for how you calculated this number and the 95% confidence bands.
- How do you explain with actual evidence the fact that there are 45X as many deaths reports for the first two years in VAERS compared to all the death reports from the flu vaccine since 1990?
- Tell us the questions you want us to answer: You should specify the 5 questions you want us to answer.
- Let us know when you can do it: You should specify 4 dates when you can do the debate where you have 2 hours. The times should be within 9am to 9pm PST. We will pick from one of the dates you supply
- Tell us who you want to moderate it: You should supply a neutral moderator who has an h-index of 5 or more. The moderator will not ask or answer any questions but is there just to mute people or otherwise keep the peace. The h-index is simply just a screening tool to ensure scientific integrity.
- Two hour time limit: Each side gets a total of 60 minutes of total speaking time for asking/answering all questions. All time speaking is counted against the side doing the speaking, whether they are asking a question or answering a question. The moderator will have a chess clock to track the times. This prevents a side from running down the clock.
- Alternate who gets to ask questions: The questioning party will flip after each question (alternate who gets to ask the next question). A coin flip determines who gets to ask the first question.
- Question order: The order of the questions will be up to the side asking the question.
- Maximum time per question: A maximum of 15 minutes of elapsed time is available for each question.
- Moderator duties: The moderator will flip to the other side to ask the next question after the first to occur of: 1) 15 minutes total time spent on the question or 2) both sides are done speaking and want to move on (this allows more time to be spent on other questions). Note that if equal time is spent on each question, it would be 12 minutes maximum per question, so there is incentive for both sides to close a question early to allow for more time for other questions.
- Yielding the floor: The floor flips to the other party when either 1) the speaking party has indicated to the moderator that they are done speaking 2) 5 minutes, whichever one comes first.
- Modifications: These rules are negotiable and I’m happy to make reasonable changes for any team who qualifies. Submit any proposed rule changes with your application
- Zoom, recorded: Debate will be on Zoom and recorded by the moderator and by both sides.
- Distribution rights: All sides will have rights to publish the debate video and excerpts
In short, the rules are symmetrical, but the challenger has five advantages to show that we are being more than fair about this:
- They pick the moderator (who can eject people)
- They pick the questions they want to answer (they get to pick 3 of the 5 questions; the other two are set)
- They pick the questions they want to ask us (5 out of 5)
- They set the dates
- They always get 5 people on their team. We get only as many questions they want to ask us on their team.
So this can hardly be construed as “unfair.” There are no advantages for our side.
So if you are a troll and claim this is an “unfair” challenge, you need to spell out exactly what is unfair because it is highly skewed to favor the challengers.
I look forward to seeing the applications!
I debated ChatGPT
Here’s what happened when I debated ChatGPT on COVID deaths.
She admitted that she had no paper comparing the gold standard tissue sample stains with the opinion of experts.
Thus, we have no evidence that any of these experts assessments are correct.
That’s comforting.
Whoops!
Summary
I’ve presented a fair framework to debate.
I can’t wait to see the applications.
