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> many serious anti-Ivermectin arguments in the past I haven't seen any of these. I just run into irrational and offensive people like you that accuse me of wa

by gardnr 5y ago

> many serious anti-Ivermectin arguments in the past I haven't seen any of these. I just run into irrational and offensive people like you that accuse me of wanting to drink bleach when I bring up the topic of Ivermectin. This article removed all doubt for me. I needed to see the thought process while pouring over the studies. You shouldn't make so many assumptions about people based on your political bias. Some people want to understand. That doesn't make them foolish or antivaxers.

jacquesm 5y ago
> Some people want to understand. So go study medicine, assuming you have 10 years to burn and are willing to take a massive pay cut. The average HN'er probably knows how to program a computer and some of them may even know how to program one well. If a guy that runs a fishing boat with not even the most basic idea about programming, hardware, software, satellite systems, general relativity and integrating all of the above into a working solution came to them with a request to really understand how his GPS works before he would put it to use we'd likely tell them to just trust the experts.
- moduspol 5y ago
  The experts involved in building / maintaining GPS haven't admitted to lying to him about it to preserve the use of GPS for people deemed more important, gone back and forth on whether or not he needs to use two GPS devices (instead of one) for the safety of others, and those experts' recommendations haven't led to policies that have destroyed the livelihoods of his or his friends' families--sometimes with unclear ties to actual societal well-being. It's not quite the same. The people who build / maintain GPS have a lot more reason to trust them, and as a result, people do.
  - oblio 5y ago
    Your comment is funny, in a roundabout way. Until a while ago, if I recall correctly. GPS was <<lying>>. Its accuracy was deliberately hobbled to within tens of meters in order to prevent it being used for destructive purposes, I believe.
    - moduspol 5y ago
      Framing "knowingly limited to accuracy within ~3 meters" as "lying" is a bit of a stretch.
      - oblio 5y ago
        It was ~5 meters and that wasn't the point. Did the GPS system know your position with a much greater accuracy ? Yes. Did the GPS system by design not provide this accurate information and instead sent something less accurate? Yes. How do you call that thing where you tell a partial truth? At best, a half truth. For example the US government remarks about masks in February 2020 (I think it was February), were partly true.
        moduspol 5y ago
        Saying "your location is somewhere within X, up to ~5 meters" isn't lying. It's not even a half truth, but it's still pretty far from the point here. It's trusted because it's been far more trustworthy than public health guidance and policy. And the same goes for airplanes, brake pads, and other tired comparisons. Trusting one does not imply one should trust all other proclaimed experts in all other fields in all other contexts.
        judahmeek 5y ago
        > It's trusted because it's been far more trustworthy... That's a tautology. It's more trustworthy because it hasn't been politicized.
  - manwe150 5y ago
    Not sure that’s the most comforting analogy to pick. GPS is maintained and controlled by the US military. They can shut it off, used to secretly make it intentionally inaccurate, have dual-band devices to protect against failures of GPS by using competitors, etc
    - moduspol 5y ago
      Perhaps, although I didn't pick the analogy, and even accepting at face value what you're saying: clearly there is justifiably a much higher level of trust in GPS than public health advice, and for good reason: its scope is limited and it's had a much better track record.
- AlgorithmicTime 5y ago
  I can pull out my phone, sit in my car, or grab my hiking GPS device to see 100% clear evidence that GPS works. For things that aren't so obvious, the explanations need to be made more clearly.
- shkkmo 5y ago
  The argument you are making is directly addressed in the article. > So “believe experts”? That would have been better advice in this case. But the experts have beclowned themselves again and again throughout this pandemic, from the first stirrings of “anyone who worries about coronavirus reaching the US is dog-whistling anti-Chinese racism”, to the Surgeon-General tweeting “Don’t wear a face mask”, to government campaigns focusing entirely on hand-washing (HEPA filters? What are those?) Not only would a recommendation to trust experts be misleading, I don’t even think you could make it work. People would notice how often the experts were wrong, and your public awareness campaign would come to naught. > But also: one of the data detectives who exposed some fraudulent ivermectin papers was a medical student, which puts him somewhere between pond scum and hookworms on the Medical Establishment Totem Pole. Some of the people whose studies he helped sink were distinguished Professors of Medicine and heads of Health Institutes. If anyone interprets “trust experts” as “mere medical students must not publicly challenge heads of Health Institutes”, then we’ve accidentally thrown the fundamental principle of science out with the bathwater. But Pierre Kory, spiritual leader of the Ivermectin Jihad, is a distinguished critical care doctor. What heuristic tells us “Medical students should be allowed to publicly challenge heads of Health Institutes” but not “Distinguished critical care doctors should be allowed to publicly challenge the CDC”? I think it is horribly demeaning to respond to someone asking how GPS work by saying "you can't try to understand without years of training, just trust us." That is exactly the kind of response that alienates people and fosters mistrust.
  - selimthegrim 5y ago
    Dinstinguished critical care doctors who go to Caribbean medical schools who have to pay hospitals to accept their graduates as residents probably should be given short shrift at first when challenging the CDC.
    - selimthegrim 5y ago
      Also people who can't spell lol
  - jacquesm 5y ago
    For small values of 'distinguished': https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Kory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Kory Really, in a just world that guy would lose his license to practice medicine. I find it interesting that 'the lone voice' has such a power over 'the establishment', as though the lone voice is always right because they're the underdog. There is an excellent movie about the theme of an infectious disease where some blogger/journalist goes all out on promoting 'Forsythia', a medication that does absolutely nothing against the disease, but that - using the exact same mechanisms as Ivermectin, HCQ and others - gets promoted to the hilt. I'm not sure if this is life imitating art or some kind of coincidence but it is uncanny to which degree the stories overlap: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1598778/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1598778/ We so want to believe in that miracle cure that big pharma is denying us.
- TigeriusKirk 5y ago
  No, I would definitely make an effort to explain it to him in ways he could understand. I mean, that's half the job of a professional programmer right there.
  - jacquesm 5y ago
    Not really, that's the job of a technical writer. The job of a programmer is implementation to spec.
    - TigeriusKirk 5y ago
      We've had very different career experiences, then.
stef25 5y ago
Sam Harris mentioned this theory of it being pointless to engage people who have their own theories because you'll be faced with a never ending stream of "yeah but did you read this random 90 page paper on X?" and all kinds of other questions even the best professional can't counter without wasting huge amounts of time. It's great you changed your mind but I bet there's plenty of people who haven't. Like I wonder what Bret Weinstein now thinks.
- saalweachter 5y ago
  There's another saying along the lines of "you can't reason someone out of a belief they didn't reason themselves into".
- angelzen 5y ago
  That is lazy. Indeed, there is no point in refuting a random 90 page paper. However, a good professional should be able to quickly summarize the state of the area touched by the paper and provide a short list of key citations and publications. A good professional should also be able to say "this is outside of my area of expertise" and point to the general direction of where expert feedback can be sought.

by gardnr 5y ago

jacquesm 5y ago

> Some people want to understand. So go study medicine, assuming you have 10 years to burn and are willing to take a massive pay cut. The average HN'er probably knows how to program a computer and some of them may even know how to program one well. If a guy that runs a fishing boat with not even the most basic idea about programming, hardware, software, satellite systems, general relativity and integrating all of the above into a working solution came to them with a request to really understand how his GPS works before he would put it to use we'd likely tell them to just trust the experts.

moduspol 5y ago
The experts involved in building / maintaining GPS haven't admitted to lying to him about it to preserve the use of GPS for people deemed more important, gone back and forth on whether or not he needs to use two GPS devices (instead of one) for the safety of others, and those experts' recommendations haven't led to policies that have destroyed the livelihoods of his or his friends' families--sometimes with unclear ties to actual societal well-being. It's not quite the same. The people who build / maintain GPS have a lot more reason to trust them, and as a result, people do.
- oblio 5y ago
  Your comment is funny, in a roundabout way. Until a while ago, if I recall correctly. GPS was <<lying>>. Its accuracy was deliberately hobbled to within tens of meters in order to prevent it being used for destructive purposes, I believe.
  - moduspol 5y ago
    Framing "knowingly limited to accuracy within ~3 meters" as "lying" is a bit of a stretch.
    - oblio 5y ago
      It was ~5 meters and that wasn't the point. Did the GPS system know your position with a much greater accuracy ? Yes. Did the GPS system by design not provide this accurate information and instead sent something less accurate? Yes. How do you call that thing where you tell a partial truth? At best, a half truth. For example the US government remarks about masks in February 2020 (I think it was February), were partly true.
      - moduspol 5y ago
        Saying "your location is somewhere within X, up to ~5 meters" isn't lying. It's not even a half truth, but it's still pretty far from the point here. It's trusted because it's been far more trustworthy than public health guidance and policy. And the same goes for airplanes, brake pads, and other tired comparisons. Trusting one does not imply one should trust all other proclaimed experts in all other fields in all other contexts.
        judahmeek 5y ago
        > It's trusted because it's been far more trustworthy... That's a tautology. It's more trustworthy because it hasn't been politicized.
- manwe150 5y ago
  Not sure that’s the most comforting analogy to pick. GPS is maintained and controlled by the US military. They can shut it off, used to secretly make it intentionally inaccurate, have dual-band devices to protect against failures of GPS by using competitors, etc
  - moduspol 5y ago
    Perhaps, although I didn't pick the analogy, and even accepting at face value what you're saying: clearly there is justifiably a much higher level of trust in GPS than public health advice, and for good reason: its scope is limited and it's had a much better track record.
AlgorithmicTime 5y ago
I can pull out my phone, sit in my car, or grab my hiking GPS device to see 100% clear evidence that GPS works. For things that aren't so obvious, the explanations need to be made more clearly.
shkkmo 5y ago
The argument you are making is directly addressed in the article. > So “believe experts”? That would have been better advice in this case. But the experts have beclowned themselves again and again throughout this pandemic, from the first stirrings of “anyone who worries about coronavirus reaching the US is dog-whistling anti-Chinese racism”, to the Surgeon-General tweeting “Don’t wear a face mask”, to government campaigns focusing entirely on hand-washing (HEPA filters? What are those?) Not only would a recommendation to trust experts be misleading, I don’t even think you could make it work. People would notice how often the experts were wrong, and your public awareness campaign would come to naught. > But also: one of the data detectives who exposed some fraudulent ivermectin papers was a medical student, which puts him somewhere between pond scum and hookworms on the Medical Establishment Totem Pole. Some of the people whose studies he helped sink were distinguished Professors of Medicine and heads of Health Institutes. If anyone interprets “trust experts” as “mere medical students must not publicly challenge heads of Health Institutes”, then we’ve accidentally thrown the fundamental principle of science out with the bathwater. But Pierre Kory, spiritual leader of the Ivermectin Jihad, is a distinguished critical care doctor. What heuristic tells us “Medical students should be allowed to publicly challenge heads of Health Institutes” but not “Distinguished critical care doctors should be allowed to publicly challenge the CDC”? I think it is horribly demeaning to respond to someone asking how GPS work by saying "you can't try to understand without years of training, just trust us." That is exactly the kind of response that alienates people and fosters mistrust.
- selimthegrim 5y ago
  Dinstinguished critical care doctors who go to Caribbean medical schools who have to pay hospitals to accept their graduates as residents probably should be given short shrift at first when challenging the CDC.
  - selimthegrim 5y ago
    Also people who can't spell lol
- jacquesm 5y ago
  For small values of 'distinguished': https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Kory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Kory Really, in a just world that guy would lose his license to practice medicine. I find it interesting that 'the lone voice' has such a power over 'the establishment', as though the lone voice is always right because they're the underdog. There is an excellent movie about the theme of an infectious disease where some blogger/journalist goes all out on promoting 'Forsythia', a medication that does absolutely nothing against the disease, but that - using the exact same mechanisms as Ivermectin, HCQ and others - gets promoted to the hilt. I'm not sure if this is life imitating art or some kind of coincidence but it is uncanny to which degree the stories overlap: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1598778/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1598778/ We so want to believe in that miracle cure that big pharma is denying us.
TigeriusKirk 5y ago
No, I would definitely make an effort to explain it to him in ways he could understand. I mean, that's half the job of a professional programmer right there.
- jacquesm 5y ago
  Not really, that's the job of a technical writer. The job of a programmer is implementation to spec.
  - TigeriusKirk 5y ago
    We've had very different career experiences, then.

stef25 5y ago

Sam Harris mentioned this theory of it being pointless to engage people who have their own theories because you'll be faced with a never ending stream of "yeah but did you read this random 90 page paper on X?" and all kinds of other questions even the best professional can't counter without wasting huge amounts of time. It's great you changed your mind but I bet there's plenty of people who haven't. Like I wonder what Bret Weinstein now thinks.

saalweachter 5y ago
There's another saying along the lines of "you can't reason someone out of a belief they didn't reason themselves into".
angelzen 5y ago
That is lazy. Indeed, there is no point in refuting a random 90 page paper. However, a good professional should be able to quickly summarize the state of the area touched by the paper and provide a short list of key citations and publications. A good professional should also be able to say "this is outside of my area of expertise" and point to the general direction of where expert feedback can be sought.