4 ms·

That Didier Raoult appears to have a history of image manipulation is not an ad hominem, and is apparently true. His 2006 offense was sufficiently bad as to be

That Didier Raoult appears to have a history of image manipulation is not an ad hominem, and is apparently true. His 2006 offense was sufficiently bad as to be banned from publication for a time in a leading journal in his field. That is also not an ad hominem. You also completely fail to engage with the first 2/3 of the text, which has any number of impersonal methodological critiques which are not addressed through a literature search.

jojo2000 7y ago
You point the exact problem here. As a scientist the first test is intuition. The second test is having people getting better with treatment. The third test is conducting a full, deep study with the utmost scientific rigor. So now there is a dilemna. People die in front of you. You try something. It seems to work. It uses a widely-used set of molecules (Hydroxychloroquine + azythromycine (+Zinc in some protocols). Will you try it, or will you make a double-blind study with half the people at risk of dying ? History of aviation. People just couldn't believe that it was possible. http://www.wright-brothers.org/History_Wing/Aviations_Attic/They_Wouldnt_Believe/They_Wouldnt_Believe_the_Wrights_Had_Flown.htm http://www.wright-brothers.org/History_Wing/Aviations_Attic/... "Not wishing to be miserly with his information, Root sent an eye-witness account of what the Wrights were doing to the Scientific American, with a letter telling the editor he was free to use it. But the editor was not to be taken in and made no effort to investigate what Root had dropped into his lap. Though the Scientific American printed in 1905 many articles about flying, nearly all were about devices that maybe ought to be tried." I don't fail in anything, I just don't need to engage in endless debates about methodology. Half of the studies in psychology fail to replicate. There are problems everywhere in science, because geniuses are still rare and now ostracized because they produce new researched and are judged by lords of the old order. If you scratch hard, you can always find something. Some people criticize, others just act. The people who create are always going to be the targets of the people who spend their time criticizing. Now it's time to act. Not pull over waiting for some authority to decide for yourself. The list of publications is here to show that this available treatment doesn't come from a magical hat.
- hprotagonist 7y ago
  you’re good at grandstanding, but you have yet to meaningfully engage with the numerous methodological critiques of Raoult’s work which, if unaddressed, make his result unethical and inappropriate for use as approval to act. There have been blinded trials of chloroquine; they have their issues too, but didn’t show an effect. the side effects of chloroquine are nontrivial, at least one person has died in an attempt at self-medication by ingesting a substance that had a similar looking word in it, and pre-existing patients who do need the drug are being deprived of it as hucksters run rampant. Keeping an even keel in a crisis and knowing when to make informed decisions on limited data and when not to are skills we develop and must have the strength to use as practicing scientists. Especially when it feels tempting not to.
  - grayed-down 7y ago
    Give me a break...twice. The guy who ingested fish tank cleaner was a tried and true moron. And when you have a crisis of this extent you do what you have to do and relax the, ah, formalisms a little.
    - exmadscientist 7y ago
      "Relaxing the formalisms" is great! "Tolerating scientific fraud" is not. This doctor has previously come very close to scientific fraud. That means that for us to trust him again, his work needs to be impeccable. It isn't. This potential treatment is promising enough that it is worthy of study, and in lieu of better solutions, administering to patients. These are drugs that have a known safety record for human use. But if you stop and think this is any form of "cure", you are deceiving yourself and endangering lives. It's pretty clear that chloroquine/azithromycin probably doesn't make COVID-19 any worse (in general). But it's not clear yet that it's actually a good treatment, and if we stop the search now, that is to our own detriment.
    - hprotagonist 7y ago
      - the couple who ingested fish tank cleaner were, first and foremost, people. - when you have a crisis like this, doing what you have to do involves doing things as clearly as possible to extract the most information you can from limited data and report it honestly and completely. That is not what's happened here.
brokenkebab 7y ago
Yes, but the author makes more efforts describing him as just bad person then as lousy scientist which is certainly ad hominem.

jojo2000 7y ago

You point the exact problem here. As a scientist the first test is intuition. The second test is having people getting better with treatment. The third test is conducting a full, deep study with the utmost scientific rigor. So now there is a dilemna. People die in front of you. You try something. It seems to work. It uses a widely-used set of molecules (Hydroxychloroquine + azythromycine (+Zinc in some protocols). Will you try it, or will you make a double-blind study with half the people at risk of dying ? History of aviation. People just couldn't believe that it was possible. http://www.wright-brothers.org/History_Wing/Aviations_Attic/They_Wouldnt_Believe/They_Wouldnt_Believe_the_Wrights_Had_Flown.htm http://www.wright-brothers.org/History_Wing/Aviations_Attic/... "Not wishing to be miserly with his information, Root sent an eye-witness account of what the Wrights were doing to the Scientific American, with a letter telling the editor he was free to use it. But the editor was not to be taken in and made no effort to investigate what Root had dropped into his lap. Though the Scientific American printed in 1905 many articles about flying, nearly all were about devices that maybe ought to be tried." I don't fail in anything, I just don't need to engage in endless debates about methodology. Half of the studies in psychology fail to replicate. There are problems everywhere in science, because geniuses are still rare and now ostracized because they produce new researched and are judged by lords of the old order. If you scratch hard, you can always find something. Some people criticize, others just act. The people who create are always going to be the targets of the people who spend their time criticizing. Now it's time to act. Not pull over waiting for some authority to decide for yourself. The list of publications is here to show that this available treatment doesn't come from a magical hat.

hprotagonist 7y ago
you’re good at grandstanding, but you have yet to meaningfully engage with the numerous methodological critiques of Raoult’s work which, if unaddressed, make his result unethical and inappropriate for use as approval to act. There have been blinded trials of chloroquine; they have their issues too, but didn’t show an effect. the side effects of chloroquine are nontrivial, at least one person has died in an attempt at self-medication by ingesting a substance that had a similar looking word in it, and pre-existing patients who do need the drug are being deprived of it as hucksters run rampant. Keeping an even keel in a crisis and knowing when to make informed decisions on limited data and when not to are skills we develop and must have the strength to use as practicing scientists. Especially when it feels tempting not to.
- grayed-down 7y ago
  Give me a break...twice. The guy who ingested fish tank cleaner was a tried and true moron. And when you have a crisis of this extent you do what you have to do and relax the, ah, formalisms a little.
  - exmadscientist 7y ago
    "Relaxing the formalisms" is great! "Tolerating scientific fraud" is not. This doctor has previously come very close to scientific fraud. That means that for us to trust him again, his work needs to be impeccable. It isn't. This potential treatment is promising enough that it is worthy of study, and in lieu of better solutions, administering to patients. These are drugs that have a known safety record for human use. But if you stop and think this is any form of "cure", you are deceiving yourself and endangering lives. It's pretty clear that chloroquine/azithromycin probably doesn't make COVID-19 any worse (in general). But it's not clear yet that it's actually a good treatment, and if we stop the search now, that is to our own detriment.
  - hprotagonist 7y ago
    - the couple who ingested fish tank cleaner were, first and foremost, people. - when you have a crisis like this, doing what you have to do involves doing things as clearly as possible to extract the most information you can from limited data and report it honestly and completely. That is not what's happened here.

brokenkebab 7y ago

Yes, but the author makes more efforts describing him as just bad person then as lousy scientist which is certainly ad hominem.