6 ms·
One of the fun (and a little scary) things about HN is seeing what google trails led people to find the articool in question. In this case, it was almost certai
by scottlocklin 6y ago
One of the fun (and a little scary) things about HN is seeing what google trails led people to find the articool in question. In this case, it was almost certainly dexamethasone, which was used in the treatment of this poor lady's tumor, and which was recently revealed, rather unsurprisingly, to be a marginally effective treatment for severe Covid19. I say it's a little scary because it's the sort of thing that one could probably model, and considering the payoff, I'm sure someone has at least tried. In fact, I pitched an idea to DARPA about 12 years ago...
Anyway cool story.
- motoboi 6y agoI could not completely understand what you said. But found it interesting anyway. Care to explain?
- scoopertrooper 6y agoThat's a relief, I thought I was the one having a stroke for a minute there.
- pavel_lishin 6y agoWhy is it scary? And what's the payoff?
- scottlocklin 6y agoA potentially very effective propaganda tool.
- polytely 6y agoYou mean like planting an article into the results for a certain search query, then manufacturing a (news)event that causes someone to want to research that particular subject?
- booleandilemma 6y agoArticle submitter here :) I just want to clarify that I did not find this ResearchGate article by googling for dexamethasone. I hadn't heard of that until now! I found a link to this article on the front page of a certain news site, and thought the fine people of HN would enjoy it.
- scottlocklin 6y agoWell then, my post should be a great illustrator of both the birthday paradox and both its application to the original article about the poor lady with the brain tumor, and an alternative explanation for this unusual event. Brains are great at finding patterns. Sometimes brains find patterns even when there aren't any! Thank you very kindly for the corrective post!
- Flenser 6y agoYou might still be correct. How did it get to the front page of the other news site?
- scottlocklin 6y agoNo, I mean understanding in great detail how ideas propagate through social networks of human beings, with the idea in mind of sending your own ideas propagating through for useful effects. The SBIR I bid on was explicitly for doing this to countries the US had acquired in foreign wars. My excuse ... I had a lady friend serving in Mosul. Now a days I look at that as a fairly terrible thing to work on which could only make the world worse if it had succeeded. This example (which OP helpfully told me I was mistaken about) would have been one of a sort of "forced hand" as in stage magic. I doubt as anyone could have foreseen that specific paper being googled up, but one can easily foresee things relating to that drug being more exposed in a group like ours than they were ... 4 years ago or something. Add a lot of little things up like that, and you can really push things in a desired direction in a group of people. Enough groups of people, and you are influencing an entire society in pretty radical ways. Lots of modern propaganda works this way in large and small ways. If you've been alive for a while, you'll see that we've had some pretty significant changes for the last couple of decades. My "contribution" would have been providing a model to test scenarios. They actually funded a considerably less speculative project than mine: more or less Poisson regression applied to this problem.