4 ms·

As an actual pharmacologist I find it fascinating how the general public has suddenly taken such a poorly informed interest in drug discovery. For the HN audie

As an actual pharmacologist I find it fascinating how the general public has suddenly taken such a poorly informed interest in drug discovery. For the HN audience it would be like people taking an almost tribal approach to go-lang vs rust, debating it on national television, without any of them knowing what a loop is.

helen___keller 6y ago
My mother-in-law is an architect by training but she was convinced (by youtube) that she ought to have some HCQ so she had family members ship us some. She's even suggested out of the blue that she should start taking it as a preventative for no particular except that she read amazon workers have been contracting covid and we get a lot of amazon packages. When we told her that's not a good idea she felt compelled to defend HCQ against the mainstream media slander, as if that were the problem here.
- gameswithgo 6y ago
  The cries if mainstream media are so weird, because what even is mainstream any more? I wish such a thing still existed really. Yet one gets accused of being naively trusting of this extinct thing any time one is rational.
  - glitcher 6y ago
    I don't think mainstream media is anywhere near extinct, but instead it's evolving and growing. I would argue that all the people who jumped on the HCQ bandwagon without sufficient evidence were also victims of mainstream media! The real epidemic is the deficit of critical thinking among those who primarily look for media content to fit what they want to hear, and then close themselves off to any other input, evidence, or scrutiny.
- s1artibartfast 6y ago
  I think the MSM weighing in and taking a position was exactly the problem. The question of HCQ efficacy would have been solved much faster without it being politicized.. The actual story of HCQ is pretty boring. It was a plausible treatment with a mixed bag of weak evidence for and against efficacy. It is not particularly dangerous. Trump oversold and lied about the benefits. The MSM lied about the data against and the risks. In such an environment, it's not surprising people take sides and dig in.
hocuspocus 6y ago
Is it fascinating, or concerning and scary? Tell me if I'm wrong, but low quality papers get published all the time, in all domains. But nobody cares about Rust vs Go in the current crisis. Then the media take results at face value because they're constantly looking for breaking news, they give a platform to people with strong opinions rather than nuanced ones (good scientists probably don't have time for that anyway). It seems only logical that the general population has a misguided and emotional interest in the topic, especially when it has disrupted the life of so many.
- _Wintermute 6y ago
  I don't blame people for taking an interest, it's the tribalism of it that I find so weird and fascinating, I'd be concerned if in the future, drug-discovery efforts for things other than coronavirus get so political and emotional to people. Yes, low quality papers indicating that existing drug X may be effective in disease Y get published all the time, probably several a day. Fortunately most of these are left to pad academic's CVs and don't really influence the pharmaceutical industry.
  - FrancisOfAssisi 6y ago
    _Wintermute says>"Yes, low quality papers indicating that existing drug X may be effective in disease Y get published all the time, probably several a day. Fortunately most of these are left to pad academic's CVs and don't really influence the pharmaceutical industry."< And some of them are correct.
pjc50 6y ago
Anything can be picked up and weaponised by the culture war process. At this point it's almost automatic. The clickbait machinery doesn't help either: the selling point of HCQ was its unapproved status, it was the "one weird trick doctors don't want you to know".
- zests 6y ago
  It's simpler. HCQ was mentioned by he-who-shall-not-be-named. Many in the United States will have an opinion no matter what the evidence looks like. Culture wars effecting your viral drug treatments? It's gone too far. Become a culture war conscientious objector.
rich_sasha 6y ago
As, well, "Hackers", we are probably used to being able to synthesize information we need ourselves. New API? Read the quickstart, patch together the documentation, you're good. A complex societal problem? I'll find the data on it, and form a better insight in 20 minutes than a journalist describing the story, who clearly doesn't understand fractions. New programming language? Give me a week, it's either like C, Haskell or Lisp. Many of us also regularly read scientific papers, pick up new tools or frankly whole new academic fields, just as parts of our daily lives. All of this, on the one hand, gives us expertise in coming up with our own, often better informed views about the world, on the other probably makes us overconfident about our information synthesis abilities in fields other than the wider CS. sed '/we/I/' etc.
mannykannot 6y ago
That is an interesting point, and I think there are at least two factors in this tribalism. Firstly, there is a faction of the population (or maybe most of us, at some time or other) who choose what they believe on the basis of whether it would lead to outcomes they would prefer, rather than on evidence for or against the proposition. Then there is another faction who assume that if you do not agree with them, then you must have bad motives. The sort of tribalism we are seeing here (and elsewhere) arises in the intersection of these tendencies, and people who take the first position over this matter are 'primed' to also take the second: they want the virus defeated, so if you are skeptical of this treatment, you must want the pandemic to continue, right? And people who realize that the evidence is not good may suspect those who insist that the treatment is effective of having ulterior motives.
PragmaticPulp 6y ago
People took interest because the idea was seductive. COVID anxiety dominated the news cycle and made everyone feel hopeless. HCQ arrived on the scene as a purported miracle solution. Everyone wanted to believe it was the antidote to the COVID problems. > For the HN audience it would be like people taking an almost tribal approach to go-lang vs rust, debating it on national television, without any of them knowing what a loop is. In the business world, this happens far too often. Usually a non-technical manager reads hyperbolic internet chatter about how Rust is the only way to write secure code or that Node.js will boost productivity by allowing your front-end devs to write back-end code, then they assume their understanding is superior to that of the actual programmers. Once the non-technical people start having strong opinions on technical decisions that disagree with the experts, it’s not a good sign for the company. Likewise, once the president started advocating for medications that weren’t supported by evidence, it was obvious that this administration had no idea what they were doing with their response.
GuB-42 6y ago
Illustrated here: https://www.commitstrip.com/en/2020/05/26/experts/?setLocale=1 https://www.commitstrip.com/en/2020/05/26/experts/?setLocale...
FrancisOfAssisi 6y ago
How does an "actual pharmacologist" differ from a "pharmacologist"?
me_me_me 6y ago
> debating it on national television, without any of them knowing what a loop is. That's a great analogy, a perfect to pickup my mood for a Friday :D

helen___keller 6y ago

My mother-in-law is an architect by training but she was convinced (by youtube) that she ought to have some HCQ so she had family members ship us some. She's even suggested out of the blue that she should start taking it as a preventative for no particular except that she read amazon workers have been contracting covid and we get a lot of amazon packages. When we told her that's not a good idea she felt compelled to defend HCQ against the mainstream media slander, as if that were the problem here.

gameswithgo 6y ago
The cries if mainstream media are so weird, because what even is mainstream any more? I wish such a thing still existed really. Yet one gets accused of being naively trusting of this extinct thing any time one is rational.
- glitcher 6y ago
  I don't think mainstream media is anywhere near extinct, but instead it's evolving and growing. I would argue that all the people who jumped on the HCQ bandwagon without sufficient evidence were also victims of mainstream media! The real epidemic is the deficit of critical thinking among those who primarily look for media content to fit what they want to hear, and then close themselves off to any other input, evidence, or scrutiny.
s1artibartfast 6y ago
I think the MSM weighing in and taking a position was exactly the problem. The question of HCQ efficacy would have been solved much faster without it being politicized.. The actual story of HCQ is pretty boring. It was a plausible treatment with a mixed bag of weak evidence for and against efficacy. It is not particularly dangerous. Trump oversold and lied about the benefits. The MSM lied about the data against and the risks. In such an environment, it's not surprising people take sides and dig in.

hocuspocus 6y ago

Is it fascinating, or concerning and scary? Tell me if I'm wrong, but low quality papers get published all the time, in all domains. But nobody cares about Rust vs Go in the current crisis. Then the media take results at face value because they're constantly looking for breaking news, they give a platform to people with strong opinions rather than nuanced ones (good scientists probably don't have time for that anyway). It seems only logical that the general population has a misguided and emotional interest in the topic, especially when it has disrupted the life of so many.

_Wintermute 6y ago
I don't blame people for taking an interest, it's the tribalism of it that I find so weird and fascinating, I'd be concerned if in the future, drug-discovery efforts for things other than coronavirus get so political and emotional to people. Yes, low quality papers indicating that existing drug X may be effective in disease Y get published all the time, probably several a day. Fortunately most of these are left to pad academic's CVs and don't really influence the pharmaceutical industry.
- FrancisOfAssisi 6y ago
  _Wintermute says>"Yes, low quality papers indicating that existing drug X may be effective in disease Y get published all the time, probably several a day. Fortunately most of these are left to pad academic's CVs and don't really influence the pharmaceutical industry."< And some of them are correct.

pjc50 6y ago

Anything can be picked up and weaponised by the culture war process. At this point it's almost automatic. The clickbait machinery doesn't help either: the selling point of HCQ was its unapproved status, it was the "one weird trick doctors don't want you to know".

zests 6y ago
It's simpler. HCQ was mentioned by he-who-shall-not-be-named. Many in the United States will have an opinion no matter what the evidence looks like. Culture wars effecting your viral drug treatments? It's gone too far. Become a culture war conscientious objector.

rich_sasha 6y ago

As, well, "Hackers", we are probably used to being able to synthesize information we need ourselves. New API? Read the quickstart, patch together the documentation, you're good. A complex societal problem? I'll find the data on it, and form a better insight in 20 minutes than a journalist describing the story, who clearly doesn't understand fractions. New programming language? Give me a week, it's either like C, Haskell or Lisp. Many of us also regularly read scientific papers, pick up new tools or frankly whole new academic fields, just as parts of our daily lives. All of this, on the one hand, gives us expertise in coming up with our own, often better informed views about the world, on the other probably makes us overconfident about our information synthesis abilities in fields other than the wider CS. sed '/we/I/' etc.

mannykannot 6y ago

That is an interesting point, and I think there are at least two factors in this tribalism. Firstly, there is a faction of the population (or maybe most of us, at some time or other) who choose what they believe on the basis of whether it would lead to outcomes they would prefer, rather than on evidence for or against the proposition. Then there is another faction who assume that if you do not agree with them, then you must have bad motives. The sort of tribalism we are seeing here (and elsewhere) arises in the intersection of these tendencies, and people who take the first position over this matter are 'primed' to also take the second: they want the virus defeated, so if you are skeptical of this treatment, you must want the pandemic to continue, right? And people who realize that the evidence is not good may suspect those who insist that the treatment is effective of having ulterior motives.

PragmaticPulp 6y ago

People took interest because the idea was seductive. COVID anxiety dominated the news cycle and made everyone feel hopeless. HCQ arrived on the scene as a purported miracle solution. Everyone wanted to believe it was the antidote to the COVID problems. > For the HN audience it would be like people taking an almost tribal approach to go-lang vs rust, debating it on national television, without any of them knowing what a loop is. In the business world, this happens far too often. Usually a non-technical manager reads hyperbolic internet chatter about how Rust is the only way to write secure code or that Node.js will boost productivity by allowing your front-end devs to write back-end code, then they assume their understanding is superior to that of the actual programmers. Once the non-technical people start having strong opinions on technical decisions that disagree with the experts, it’s not a good sign for the company. Likewise, once the president started advocating for medications that weren’t supported by evidence, it was obvious that this administration had no idea what they were doing with their response.

GuB-42 6y ago

Illustrated here: https://www.commitstrip.com/en/2020/05/26/experts/?setLocale=1 https://www.commitstrip.com/en/2020/05/26/experts/?setLocale...

FrancisOfAssisi 6y ago

How does an "actual pharmacologist" differ from a "pharmacologist"?

me_me_me 6y ago

> debating it on national television, without any of them knowing what a loop is. That's a great analogy, a perfect to pickup my mood for a Friday :D