SAS

Thursday

The Spectator

Steven Pinker: The inside story of my Covid ‘bio bet’

Betting men Sir: The bet between Martin Rees and me that Matt Ridley recounts pits two kinds of scruples of disinterested rationality against each other (‘Wuhan wager’, 7 December). One is the scientific ethos that calls for factoring in all relevant information in updating one’s degree of credence in a hypothesis. The other is the logic of the epistemological tool of betting, which demands an agreed-upon fixed criterion and deadline for resolving the bet. My degree of credence has been influenced by Matt and Alina Chan for the lab leak hypothesis, but also by counter-arguments from Peter Miller for the zoonotic theory. When Martin and I joined the bet, neither

Thursday

William Moore

SAS betrayal, the battle for Odesa & in defence of film flops

48 min listen

This week: SAS SOS The enemy that most concerns Britain’s elite military unit isn’t the IRA, the Taliban or Isis, but a phalanx of lawyers armed with the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), writes Paul Wood in The Spectator. Many SAS soldiers now believe that if they kill a terrorist during an operation, they’ll spend decades being hounded through the courts. Paul speaks to former SAS soldiers who say that stories of men being ‘dragged back to be screamed at in interview rooms’ are ‘flying around the canteens now’. Soldiers feel like ‘the good guys have become the bad guys – and the bad guys are now the good guys’.