6 ms·

Isn't this an example of some rigid and ineffective thinking patterns? Article publishes sound arguments, doesn't talk down to the audience, admits problems wi

• jacquesm 5y ago
  I've been following with some amazement the number of conspiracy peddlers on HN for the last 18 months or so and one case of conversion isn't going to make me overly happy. It is a bit like the story about the lie getting halfway around the world before the truth puts their shoes on, in the extreme long term the truth will come out, meanwhile, the damage is done. This guy until yesterday wanted his mother to take some ivermectin, 'just in case'. I want my mother to take her doctors advice, not mine. edit: just one exhibit: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=mewpmewp2 https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=mewpmewp2
  • roenxi 5y ago
    You could try spreading the truth instead of bullying people? I do care about my mothers health you know. And if a doctor isn't convinced by a large number of studies I want them to explain why not rather than call me a conspiracy peddler. The way someone gets ivermectin is to walk a doctor through the evidence they've seen and then ask them to prescribe it.
    • jacquesm 5y ago
      If you care about your mothers' health then you shouldn't engage in quackery. > The way someone gets ivermectin is to walk a doctor through the evidence they've seen and then ask them to prescribe it. That is factually incorrect, no doctor in their right mind will allow the patients to effectively prescribe their own controversial and in some cases downright dangerous medicine.
      • ddingus 5y ago
        Is that not what the ADS we see on TV are helping patients to do? I am being dead serious here. Confused. And to be clear, it should not work that way at all. I think it does work that way a lot more than many of us would care to admit. Happy to be shown I am wrong.
        • jacquesm 5y ago
          That's one reason TV advertising for medication is strongly regulated in plenty of places.
          • ddingus 5y ago
            So far, I believe it is allowed in the US, Saudi Arabia, and a few other places. The rest of the world considers it as illegal it is harmful / unethical.
      • jonnycoder 5y ago
        Enlighten us on how it is "dangerous" medicine. Sources please.
    • rscho 5y ago
      I am a doc. I am also a medical researcher, but you (and most other people here) _have_ to realize that the vast majority of practicing MDs are _not_ scientists, and understand almost nothing when reading medical studies. And that's fine, because it's not their job. The profession is bound by guidelines and expert opinion. Experts do research, formulate guidelines, and guidelines get applied by practitioners. And no, that absolutely does not mean you know better than the average doc because you've read 10 studies. That's telling a highly specialized labourer that you know the job better because you've read 0.0001% of the theory.
      • deadpannini 5y ago
        The dissonance here is intense. On the one hand, "practicing MDs ... understand almost nothing when reading medical studies", but also I don't "know better than the average doc [just] because [I've] read 10 studies." Is the idea that doctors deserve deference because they are conditioned to submit to guidelines formulated by experts? There is a lack of consensus on many long-standing, common medical questions, much less novel diseases. When I ask my GP about prostate screening, for example, he lays out the current state of research as best he can, but delegates the decision to me. Why is the COVID situation different, given that experts are still fighting through a figurative fog of war?
        • nickspacek 5y ago
          Great point. Perhaps the idea is that neither you nor the avg doc can conclude much from reading 10 studies. Therefore, defer to the experts? As to why the COVID situation is different, presumably because prostate cancer screening affects only you (and perhaps your family in the case of a true/false positive/negative diagnosis), and COVID represents a threat to everyone around you, and everyone around them, etc.
          • deadpannini 5y ago
            I wasn't clear. Most of the time, as with prostrate screenings, one of the following is true: - There is no expert consensus (on treatments, etiology, etc.). - Consensus exists, but the level of consensus is overstated. - There is broad consensus, but with relatively low confidence. A generalized public health threat like a pandemic doesn't change the epistemological calculus, nor the sociology of knowledge.
    • kaba0 5y ago
      But why do you even assume that it works? The doctor might not be able to disprove it because disproving is fundamentally hard and may not even be possible. But the direction that makes sense is that we prove if something does work/has an effect. The zero hypothesis is the long standing default, that a random thing will not cure this illness. The alternative hypothesis is that it does cure it and then we can analyze the results based on the results of a fair trial.
  • nzmsv 5y ago
    As an engineer, sometimes I say "ship it!" to code that doesn't make me happy but works and solves a real problem. Edit: I meant this to go with debating techniques, not cures. There are people for whom no amount of saying "why can't you just listen to Dr. Fauci" is going to work. We can say they are bad people, but that doesn't work very well for getting them to agree either. You are right to call out above that there were other anti-Ivermectin arguments before and roenxi might not have had the background to understand them. That's exactly the point: here we have an argument that he can understand, and it's effective. This is good science journalism. The kind that doesn't work (too much moralizing or too confusing for the general audience) is bad journalism.
    • jacquesm 5y ago
      I hope that that only goes for things that you can oversee the risks of and that you would refrain from giving medical advice to your relatives assuming that you are not a doctor. "move fast and break stuff" is the wrong attitude for medicine and aerospace. But a solution is better than no solution, and of all the countermeasures that we had available in March 2020 we only used a fraction. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AqRHH6e-y6I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AqRHH6e-y6I note the date on that video. As to your edit: no, here we have an argument that he thinks he understands, that's not the same thing. The argument as presented is at best a hypothesis, it isn't proof of anything, just one more theory that may or may not end up being the right one explaining the sometimes observed effect, assuming it really was observed in the first place. This is precisely what makes this discussion so tiring: people will be swayed one way or the other based on arguments that they have no way of understanding unless they were trained in that particular field. Unfortunately, there are plenty of politicians that fall into the same trap, leading to terrible examples of wishful thinking, outright quackery and conspiracy amplification. The harm that this is causing is substantial. So even if this article swayed one person I'm pretty sure you'll be able to find people who get the opposite out of it, because hey 'x' has now joined the establishment, must have sold out.
      • ddingus 5y ago
        "Sold out" is a real problem. More people than we want to admit see corruption coupled with big media as a enemy, not a thing to be trusted. Many ordinary people flat out do not know when to trust, so they don't. They then seek others and continue to have conversations, and they find others lacking trust resonates and that opens the door for a lot of BS normally and easily seen. Just an example of the difficulty we now face: Hiding YouTube dislikes will, among other effects, serve to help big corporate media compete against new media. Hiding the dislikes also breeds more mistrust. This is unavoidable no matter how reasoned the move is. Public trust in corporate media is really low, and the younger a potential user of that media is the worse those metrics are. Had that same media held more closely to journalism, rather than access journalism, which is essentially a sales job, the trust problems we struggle with today would not have grown into the chronic problem it all is today. You identified politicians committing similar abuse of the public trust. Look at Russiagate. Basically, it flat out did not happen the way many believed it did. Back when that started, many and myself included went to the original documents, saw speculation and in some cases saw it helpfully color coded, and turned on the news only to see all that elevated to fact. That scared me frankly. What can one conclude? I do not see how judging others helps right now. Not saying anyone did here, but I am saying that is happening a lot and when it happens the door for good info to find it's way home gets closed. Advocates render their efforts far less potent. Secondly, the lack of trust really can't be assigned to people. We have a lot of "they are stupid" type discussion, judgement and rationalization going on and very little of that is helpful. ie: 70 million people voted for... The people who had a far better position of authority and trust denigrated that themselves, and for dollars and ratings. All that is a real mess! How can authorities, who have abused public trust be counted on to fact check and improve on misinformation without amplifying the already chronic trust problems they created? In a more basic sense, how can we improve on public trust at all? I am not sure how that is done quickly. Longer term, we need media that makes informing people a priority. And doing that likely means a move away from the current AD and access based media we have now. Given how things are right now, the more important thing is to avoid judgement of others and encourage more and better information exchange. We will not know what reaches people, until it does. Once it does, we need those people to continue seeking better information so we see more people making better choices more of the time.
• croon 5y ago
  This is a blogger who took time out of their day to do this. Why do you have to be catered to to be convinced? The blogger didn't produce any new data, it was already there, you chose to ignore it, or rather, picked something else to be convinced by. It's not bullying or "talking down to" to simply ignore bullshit, it's effective use of your time.
  • reissbaker 5y ago
    The blogger didn't produce any new data. I was never an ivermectin proponent — although I thought the "horse dewormer" rhetoric was self-defeating, because it's obviously and well-known to be also a human dewormer (amongst other parasites), and the "horse" part just seemed to be played up to make ivermectin supporters look stupid — but this article is indeed the first one I've seen to make the parasite-COVID-comorbidity argument. It's not, in fact, the first time that argument has been made... But it seems like the first time that link was made was within the last month, as the blog post links to the following Twitter thread from a medical researcher: https://twitter.com/AviBittMD/status/1456376484180922368 https://twitter.com/AviBittMD/status/1456376484180922368 It's not ridiculous to me that this blog post would be someone's first encounter with that argument, considering how recent the link is. I have a little bit of experience with reading lots of research papers about COVID safety measures, and coming to the opposite conclusion of medical experts: in early 2020 I read lots of papers on masks, and tried to convince most of my family to mask up even when the CDC said that masks didn't work. I happened to be right, and to my parents, I now look like a smart and forward-thinking, science-driven person. But that's only because I was right! I could see someone doing the same with the ivermectin studies, and while it appears that they were wrong, I don't think it deserves dismissal or derision — especially when it comes from someone willing to change their mind and admit they were wrong when presented with compelling evidence to the contrary.
    • hef19898 5y ago
      Considering how many people are actually using hose doses instead of those intended for humans, I guess that characterization isn't too wrong.
• raxxorrax 5y ago
  "Listen to science!" is ironically a profoundly unscientific statement.
  • danans 5y ago
    Nobody claims it to be a scientific statement. It's just a best practice in many circumstances.
    • azinman2 5y ago
      What’s a better practice is to explain the rationale per situation, what is known and what is not known. The right turned science into a culture war flashpoint, which meant the left blindly preaches “believe in science” as if it’s about faith. This is all very disingenuous and not at all what science is actually about. It’s very unfortunate that Covid started under trump because being anti-science was part of his marketing message to his base, many because of the risk to certain jobs with caring about climate change (aka the great “hoax”) and the association of science/medicine and abortion. Unfortunately explaining the rationale in a way that people can comprehend and not tune out is very very difficult, and far more time consuming than whatever 2 syllables Trump could come up with as a retort.
      • danans 5y ago
        > The right turned science into a culture war flashpoint, which meant the left blindly preaches “believe in science” as if it’s about faith. These two perspectives are not equivalent opposites though. "Believe in science" is not a religious statement. It is a shorthand for "trust in the scientific institutions that have proven their track record via decades of public health progress, and not in anti-scientific rhetoric with a culture war agenda". That concept wasn't even controversial on most of the political right until their recent nationalist turn.
        • azinman2 5y ago
          Knowledge and understanding of the world is constantly growing. There are endless examples of how scientists and other intellectuals have a current paradigm of how something must work, only to be disproven in the future (usually by someone who gets castigated until held up years later). So to say 'believe in science' is actually dogma. It makes me cringe when I see it as a political banner, or along side signs like 'in this house we believe in....' It would be more accurate to say 'the scientific method works', but it really only works in the long run. At any point in time our understanding is incomplete and erroneous. The facts are out there, whether you believe it or not, and eventually the scientific method will catch up. Of course if you're not a trained scientist, then it's hard to appreciate how the scientific method works, and that even when we're very sure of something, true scientists will always hedge their statements. This will be misinterpreted by those who are outside this world as there being more gray than actually exists, and those with an agenda will drive a truck right through it.