July 18, 2021

Ground Truth Challenge: Day 1

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.

ParticipantsSubmissionsRejectedSent for review
July 179524012

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:

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.

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.

Maybe the most rewarding has been to see the challenge gain traction and clearly hitting a note with others out there.

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.