9 ms·

Scott Alexander's correction on ivermectin and its meaning for the rationalists

81 points by alexandros 4y ago

PragmaticPulp 4y ago
The "rationalist community" is morbidly fascinating in their tendency to be so self-important while also having a deficit of self-awareness. The author of this piece can't understand why an internet-famous blogger/Substack writer that he follows doesn't have time to drop everything and debate the minutia of a blog post he wrong last year on a topic that has long since been settled. Note that Scott did listen to him, work through his reasoning, and update his blog with a note about it, but that didn't satisfy the author: > Step 6: Semi-Permeable Membranes > One thing that shocked me was how hard it was to discuss even a simple thing with Scott, even when he knew I could have made a big deal about this without giving him an opportunity to make whatever correction he thought appropriate. It felt like communicating through a straw. I get the sense that Scott is busy. Busy and/or surrounded by people who think the world of him; a community of readers that compliment his writing early and often. This piece also shares several other characteristics of "rationalist" writings: Unnecessarily long and rambling prose, flowery language and dramatic subsection titles when basic text would suffice, hedging in the middle of the article in case the author turns out to be incorrect, and a relentless insistence that the conversation revolve around their experience and some perceived sleights instead of letting the argument stand alone. Regardless, this seems like a silly diatribe after the medical community has already investigated the Ivermectin idea to great lengths and at massive scale and concluded that any effects it might have are too small to be worth pursuing. It's weird to see someone writing volumes about re-litigating last years' amateur scientist social media battles. This author is either obsessed with Ivermectin and the TOGETHER trial or playing a game to pander his Substack to a certain audience who loves this content. His first post was only a month ago but he's already written 11 articles suggesting errors and alluding to conspiracy theories.
- HideousKojima 4y ago
  >debate the minutia of a blog post he wrong last year on a topic that has long since been settled. Part of the point of the article you're commenting on is that the topic is not, in fact, settled.
- 323 4y ago
  You know those jokes about "how do you know someone is a vegan/PhD"? Well, how do you know someone is a rationalist? Don't worry, he will tell you soon that he's "updating".
- toolz 4y ago
  - dekhn 4y ago
    I didn't read this and suddenly think "oh my god- the whole establishment is wrong! How thankful I am that some rational person has done the hard math for me to explain why ivermectin is a magic cure". The current medical opinion is that ivermectin only appears to have an effect when it's actually treating an underlying condition (parasitic infection). I don't see that changing any time soon; certainly nobody has shown any truly strong data that resisted multiple attempts at falsification supported ivermectin being really effective against COVID, itself. As a biologist who works with data- it's realyl easy for smart people to read studies and totally fool themselves. That's what I think happened here.
    - toolz 4y ago
      As far as I know Scott was the first person to suggest the "worm theory" (parasites) and no study has shown that to be the case. Unless some new body of Ivermectin research has come out that I'm unaware of, then you're misrepresenting current medical opinion by a long shot.
      - dragonwriter 4y ago
        > As far as I know Scott was the first person to suggest the "worm theory" (parasites) and no study has shown that to be the case. I don't know if he is the first person to suggest it, but you are incorrect that there is no published research supporting it. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2790173#:~:text=Importance%20A%20widely%20cited%20meta,appropriate%20interpretation%20of%20this%20analysis https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle....
        dekhn 4y ago
        Doctors were discussing the idea in Grand Rounds at UCSF a couple years ago. I can't find the recording right now.
- topgun77 4y ago
  - PragmaticPulp 4y ago
    - guerrilla 4y ago
      - topgun77 4y ago
      - DonHopkins 4y ago
        topgun77 4y ago
        DonHopkins 4y ago
        topgun77 4y ago
    - topgun77 4y ago
      - Retric 4y ago
        That post wasn’t arguing a position or trying to convince people of something.
- IfOnlyYouKnew 4y ago
  It's a fascinating community, in some regards. Scott is among the few people where I consciously notice that they are highly intelligent. He's also a decent writer and, despite my lingering fear, has not gone down the Glenn-Greenwald-pipeline into obnoxious contrarianism. ...and then there is the rest of the community. They cargo-cult all the phrases and hobbies and opinions, but it's like when you wore that first suit: it wasn't yours, you didn't have the shoulders, and everyone but you knew it looked ridiculous. Seriously: even the other well-known people from that community (whose names I've since forgotten) are so obviously cosplaying the intellectualism. Even in the natural science I studied, I would not be able to identify the smart and the not-so-smart papers or professors with such ease.
- the_only_law 4y ago
  > The "rationalist community" is morbidly fascinating in their tendency to be so self-important while also having a deficit of self-awareness I’m about to start calling them what they are: Sophists.
- astrange 4y ago
  There was a lesswrong thread warning people about Leverage (a 100% literal Bay Area Scientology-like therapy cult, as opposed to the general LW community which is just a self-organized kind-of-a-sex-cult). I thought it was notable because it's written as if actually having an emotion or trying to look like it believed anything would be a deadly sin. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Kz9zMgWB5C27Pmdkh/common-knowledge-facts-about-leverage-research-1-0-1 https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Kz9zMgWB5C27Pmdkh/common-kno...
  - the_only_law 4y ago
    > I thought it was notable because it's written as if actually having an emotion or trying to look like it believed anything would be a deadly sin. We’re all sinners.
- heavyset_go 4y ago
  > Regardless, this seems like a silly diatribe after the medical community has already investigated the Ivermectin idea to great lengths and at massive scale and concluded that any effects it might have are too small to be worth pursuing. It's weird to see someone writing volumes about re-litigating last years' amateur scientist social media battles. Many rationalists are driven by contrarianism and are the living embodiments of second-option bias[1] and confirmation bias, so I don't find it weird anymore that they're still relitigating such issues, I just expect things like this from that crowd, now. [1] https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Essay:Second-option_bias https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Essay:Second-option_bias
  - astrange 4y ago
    > Governments have been caught committing conspiracies in the past, so this means every single conspiracy theory today is true...even the ones that contradict each other. Well, this is defensible, since if you read this with s/is true/gets an increased probability of truth/ it's just Bayesianism. Sadly, sometimes people are waiting till later to find out which contradictory thing is true, but sometimes they're just bullshitting.
  - dekhn 4y ago
    I used to think of myself as a rationalist, but after being wrong a few times in some passionate internet arguments I began to think about what it would mean to truly be a rationalist, and given my understanding of the fallibility of the human brain (evidenced by reproduced/reliable psychological studies), the best way to be rational would be to assume that I myself am not 100% rational (in the same sense that nobody can prove themselves to be objective, or truly disprove Descartes' Great Deceiver), and am prone to confirmation bias (and others). once i accepted that to be more rational I had to accept that I was not completely rational, I was able to reason more probabilistically. This helps, because there is actually no physical system that is truly logical (except for a bit, and making a logical bit is nontrivial), but rather, the only way to understand physical system is to apply probablistic (not logical) reasoning; think of the difference btween a perfect step function/dirac delta function versus a sigmoid. Thanks for the pointer to second option bias. I can already see I'm going to waste part of the rest of my day finding the part of rationalwiki where it turns out my beliefs were anticipated by Wittgenstein.
pasabagi 4y ago
I guess 'rationalism', as a name, calls a certain kind of person out of the ether: 1. They like rationality, and feel it's opposed by 'irrationality'. 2. They want to be part of some 'rational group'. 3. They're ignorant enough not to know the name is already taken. 4. They're ignorant enough not to know that the name means pretty much the opposite of what they believe. (A real rationalist, for instance, probably wouldn't be interested in modern science). 5. They're ignorant enough not to know that 'rational' and 'irrational' are usually demarcate lines of social hierarchy, not lines of theoretical commitment. This is an attractive pitch, so obviously, loads of people jump on. I think the main thing that's nice about it is that no real work is called for. Every smart white kid from a nice background has been called 'logical' or 'rational' at some point, because (5), so it's a value they identify with. It's a young group, full of energy, because the internet is biased young, and young people go for (2) through (5).
- toolz 4y ago
  Words and meanings change over time and depending on the context. Strangely you claim it's ignorance but then give supporting reasons why someone might label this "rationalism".
  - pasabagi 4y ago
    Rationalism is an important term in exactly the field they are supposed to be interested in. And they're using it in more or less the opposite of its conventional sense. I guess it could be just really perverse usage, but I figure it's more like 'objectivism', or 'scientology', words that sound big and impressive to people who are either dumb, or just not very well informed. You can't really change a term like rationalism, since it's really one of the biggest terms in philosophy, and philosophers are the kind of people who get upset when people use stuff like 'begging the question' wrong, which everybody does. So even if the 'rationalists' ended up having loads of great insights despite their inauspicious start, it would almost certainly never change the meaning of the word.
    - Isinlor 4y ago
robonerd 4y ago
Pursuit of rationality can be paradoxical in a sense, insofar as believing yourself capable attaining rationality is fundamentally irrational. You aren't a Vulcan, you're a Human. To err is human. All humans are irrational some of the time and if you believe yourself capable of being better than that, you're only proving yourself wrong with that very belief. Rationality done right is the pursuit of an unobtainable goal that yields better-than-average results even as you ultimately fall short of the ideal. So, basically like any other form of self-improvement. When you inevitably hit a setback, reorient and adjust your approach. But don't beat yourself up when you continue to fall short, because you will. We all will.
- reducesuffering 4y ago
  This is what rationalists like to refer to as a strawman. Show me any example of one claiming to eventually be without err or irrationality. The claims are simply that most people have many implicit biases and illogical means, and that there are some ways of bettering your thinking methods.
  - robonerd 4y ago
    > Show me any example of one claiming to eventually be without err or irrationality. Interact with them long enough and you'll come across a whole lot who act like it. What do you even think I'm strawmanning? That comment is a defense of Scott Alexander and rationalists generally.
    - sinity 4y ago
      I thought you meant to imply that rationalists believe they're perfectly rational. Lots of people do so.
  - dekhn 4y ago
    I think the idea is that the author of the post we're talking about doesn't consider the idea that they may be internally biased in a way that affects their ability to be rational. From my perspective, it looks like they started from the belief that ivermectin is an generally effective treatment for COVID and that "the data" (that is, a properly weighted and filtered version of the publication record) demonstrates that. To me that shows a lot of overconfidence. Even as I make statements saying that ivermectin isn't a generally effective treatment for COVID, I fully accept that it's possible my reasoning and interpretation of the evidence could be faulty and that some future study could somehow demonstrate a slam-dunk benefit even for countries with no level of parasitic infections, like the US. If that happened (seems very unlikely, but not impossible) I would change my statement (as would the mainstream medical establishment). The author of the above article doesn't really show that level of epistemic humility.
Izkata 4y ago
From the original article they're responding to: > This is still just a possibility. Maybe I’m over-focusing too hard on a couple positive results and this will all turn out to be nothing. Or who knows, maybe ivermectin does work against COVID a little - although it would have to be very little, fading to not at all in temperate worm-free countries. But this theory feels right to me. > It feels right to me because it’s the most troll-ish possible solution. Everybody was wrong! Actually, if it does pan out, score 1 for the conspiracy theorists. If you actually asked them by what mechanism they thought Ivermectin worked, they really had only two answers, and "alleviating strain on your immune system by killing parasites you didn't know you had" was one of them, from very early on.
marvin 4y ago
This article was a bit long-winded, but it makes a very fair point and I don't understand why it was flagged.
- wumpus 4y ago
- adamrezich 4y ago
  it's not complicated: people don't like heresy. notice how there are zero comments on this page that deal with the substance of the article in question, instead choosing to find various surface-level reasons unrelated to the findings in the article as cause to internally dismiss it. if the content of the article was not heresy and instead came from some trusted scientific authority, this would not be the case.
  - dekhn 4y ago
    It doesn't even rise to the level of being wrong. Nobody is even remotely interested in engaging what you call the "substance" of the article, because https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law The people who are working on COVID are too fucking busy to waste their time arguing with kooks who claim they are rational.
  - marvin 4y ago
    Yes. I would have written exactly what you did here, but then I’d probably have to fend off the comments you are referring to. So I worded it more diplomatically, or ambiguously. Shame; it’s interesting to get challenged. At least I got to read it before it got flushed.
    - native_samples 4y ago
      Tip: if you go to https://news.ycombinator.com/active https://news.ycombinator.com/active instead of the front page you can see stories that were flagged. This is how I read HN because the number of interesting, relevant and useful stories that get flagged for ideological reasons is just far too high. This one being a good case in point. It's a pattern: there's a group of people who will reliably flag any article demonstrating that official COVID science is wrong. Doesn't matter what it's about - if it contradicts official narratives then it's probably going to disappear within an hour or two. One might think a site dedicated to intellectual curiousity would be interested in stories like that, or that at least flagging such stories would be penalized, but no.
Gatsky 4y ago
This ivermectin thing is the premier example of motivated reasoning and wishful thinking in the last few years, something which seems lost on the author.
mpalczewski 4y ago
The "Do Your Own Research" title is about where he lost me. Without reading, I'm pretty sure the author didn't perform a double blind study himself, nor is he suggesting that we all perform one. The rest reads like gibberish.
- adamrezich 4y ago
  what value does this comment have? you dislike the title the author has chosen for his blog, and you are physically unable to read the text below it?
- native_samples 4y ago
  Researchers pretty regularly do meta-studies and call it research so that seems a poor basis on which to dismiss the article.
larryfreeman 4y ago
Rationality is only a pathway to reliable information when it makes clear its assumptions (i.e. axioms or postulates) and sticks to logical proof. Empiricism is only useful when it adequately adopts Occam's Razor to stay focused on the facts and has a clear understanding of the difference between correlation and causality. Want to disprove a mainstream position? Find a commonly held false assumption or some fact that cannot be explained by the current approaches. Keep it simple and be open to having this point explained with standard methods. Read T.S. Kuhn if necessary to understand what it typically takes to change a scientific paradigm. Everything else is just noise with the purpose of making a given community feel enlightened or smarter than the other "fools".

81 points by alexandros 4y ago

The "rationalist community" is morbidly fascinating in their tendency to be so self-important while also having a deficit of self-awareness. The author of this piece can't understand why an internet-famous blogger/Substack writer that he follows doesn't have time to drop everything and debate the minutia of a blog post he wrong last year on a topic that has long since been settled. Note that Scott did listen to him, work through his reasoning, and update his blog with a note about it, but that didn't satisfy the author: > Step 6: Semi-Permeable Membranes > One thing that shocked me was how hard it was to discuss even a simple thing with Scott, even when he knew I could have made a big deal about this without giving him an opportunity to make whatever correction he thought appropriate. It felt like communicating through a straw. I get the sense that Scott is busy. Busy and/or surrounded by people who think the world of him; a community of readers that compliment his writing early and often. This piece also shares several other characteristics of "rationalist" writings: Unnecessarily long and rambling prose, flowery language and dramatic subsection titles when basic text would suffice, hedging in the middle of the article in case the author turns out to be incorrect, and a relentless insistence that the conversation revolve around their experience and some perceived sleights instead of letting the argument stand alone. Regardless, this seems like a silly diatribe after the medical community has already investigated the Ivermectin idea to great lengths and at massive scale and concluded that any effects it might have are too small to be worth pursuing. It's weird to see someone writing volumes about re-litigating last years' amateur scientist social media battles. This author is either obsessed with Ivermectin and the TOGETHER trial or playing a game to pander his Substack to a certain audience who loves this content. His first post was only a month ago but he's already written 11 articles suggesting errors and alluding to conspiracy theories.

HideousKojima 4y ago
>debate the minutia of a blog post he wrong last year on a topic that has long since been settled. Part of the point of the article you're commenting on is that the topic is not, in fact, settled.
323 4y ago
You know those jokes about "how do you know someone is a vegan/PhD"? Well, how do you know someone is a rationalist? Don't worry, he will tell you soon that he's "updating".
toolz 4y ago
- dekhn 4y ago
  I didn't read this and suddenly think "oh my god- the whole establishment is wrong! How thankful I am that some rational person has done the hard math for me to explain why ivermectin is a magic cure". The current medical opinion is that ivermectin only appears to have an effect when it's actually treating an underlying condition (parasitic infection). I don't see that changing any time soon; certainly nobody has shown any truly strong data that resisted multiple attempts at falsification supported ivermectin being really effective against COVID, itself. As a biologist who works with data- it's realyl easy for smart people to read studies and totally fool themselves. That's what I think happened here.
  - toolz 4y ago
    As far as I know Scott was the first person to suggest the "worm theory" (parasites) and no study has shown that to be the case. Unless some new body of Ivermectin research has come out that I'm unaware of, then you're misrepresenting current medical opinion by a long shot.
    - dragonwriter 4y ago
      > As far as I know Scott was the first person to suggest the "worm theory" (parasites) and no study has shown that to be the case. I don't know if he is the first person to suggest it, but you are incorrect that there is no published research supporting it. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2790173#:~:text=Importance%20A%20widely%20cited%20meta,appropriate%20interpretation%20of%20this%20analysis https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle....
      - dekhn 4y ago
        Doctors were discussing the idea in Grand Rounds at UCSF a couple years ago. I can't find the recording right now.
topgun77 4y ago
- PragmaticPulp 4y ago
  - guerrilla 4y ago
    - topgun77 4y ago
    - DonHopkins 4y ago
      - topgun77 4y ago
        DonHopkins 4y ago
        topgun77 4y ago
  - topgun77 4y ago
    - Retric 4y ago
      That post wasn’t arguing a position or trying to convince people of something.
IfOnlyYouKnew 4y ago
It's a fascinating community, in some regards. Scott is among the few people where I consciously notice that they are highly intelligent. He's also a decent writer and, despite my lingering fear, has not gone down the Glenn-Greenwald-pipeline into obnoxious contrarianism. ...and then there is the rest of the community. They cargo-cult all the phrases and hobbies and opinions, but it's like when you wore that first suit: it wasn't yours, you didn't have the shoulders, and everyone but you knew it looked ridiculous. Seriously: even the other well-known people from that community (whose names I've since forgotten) are so obviously cosplaying the intellectualism. Even in the natural science I studied, I would not be able to identify the smart and the not-so-smart papers or professors with such ease.
the_only_law 4y ago
> The "rationalist community" is morbidly fascinating in their tendency to be so self-important while also having a deficit of self-awareness I’m about to start calling them what they are: Sophists.
astrange 4y ago
There was a lesswrong thread warning people about Leverage (a 100% literal Bay Area Scientology-like therapy cult, as opposed to the general LW community which is just a self-organized kind-of-a-sex-cult). I thought it was notable because it's written as if actually having an emotion or trying to look like it believed anything would be a deadly sin. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Kz9zMgWB5C27Pmdkh/common-knowledge-facts-about-leverage-research-1-0-1 https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Kz9zMgWB5C27Pmdkh/common-kno...
- the_only_law 4y ago
  > I thought it was notable because it's written as if actually having an emotion or trying to look like it believed anything would be a deadly sin. We’re all sinners.
heavyset_go 4y ago
> Regardless, this seems like a silly diatribe after the medical community has already investigated the Ivermectin idea to great lengths and at massive scale and concluded that any effects it might have are too small to be worth pursuing. It's weird to see someone writing volumes about re-litigating last years' amateur scientist social media battles. Many rationalists are driven by contrarianism and are the living embodiments of second-option bias[1] and confirmation bias, so I don't find it weird anymore that they're still relitigating such issues, I just expect things like this from that crowd, now. [1] https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Essay:Second-option_bias https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Essay:Second-option_bias
- astrange 4y ago
  > Governments have been caught committing conspiracies in the past, so this means every single conspiracy theory today is true...even the ones that contradict each other. Well, this is defensible, since if you read this with s/is true/gets an increased probability of truth/ it's just Bayesianism. Sadly, sometimes people are waiting till later to find out which contradictory thing is true, but sometimes they're just bullshitting.
- dekhn 4y ago
  I used to think of myself as a rationalist, but after being wrong a few times in some passionate internet arguments I began to think about what it would mean to truly be a rationalist, and given my understanding of the fallibility of the human brain (evidenced by reproduced/reliable psychological studies), the best way to be rational would be to assume that I myself am not 100% rational (in the same sense that nobody can prove themselves to be objective, or truly disprove Descartes' Great Deceiver), and am prone to confirmation bias (and others). once i accepted that to be more rational I had to accept that I was not completely rational, I was able to reason more probabilistically. This helps, because there is actually no physical system that is truly logical (except for a bit, and making a logical bit is nontrivial), but rather, the only way to understand physical system is to apply probablistic (not logical) reasoning; think of the difference btween a perfect step function/dirac delta function versus a sigmoid. Thanks for the pointer to second option bias. I can already see I'm going to waste part of the rest of my day finding the part of rationalwiki where it turns out my beliefs were anticipated by Wittgenstein.

pasabagi 4y ago

I guess 'rationalism', as a name, calls a certain kind of person out of the ether: 1. They like rationality, and feel it's opposed by 'irrationality'. 2. They want to be part of some 'rational group'. 3. They're ignorant enough not to know the name is already taken. 4. They're ignorant enough not to know that the name means pretty much the opposite of what they believe. (A real rationalist, for instance, probably wouldn't be interested in modern science). 5. They're ignorant enough not to know that 'rational' and 'irrational' are usually demarcate lines of social hierarchy, not lines of theoretical commitment. This is an attractive pitch, so obviously, loads of people jump on. I think the main thing that's nice about it is that no real work is called for. Every smart white kid from a nice background has been called 'logical' or 'rational' at some point, because (5), so it's a value they identify with. It's a young group, full of energy, because the internet is biased young, and young people go for (2) through (5).

toolz 4y ago
Words and meanings change over time and depending on the context. Strangely you claim it's ignorance but then give supporting reasons why someone might label this "rationalism".
- pasabagi 4y ago
  Rationalism is an important term in exactly the field they are supposed to be interested in. And they're using it in more or less the opposite of its conventional sense. I guess it could be just really perverse usage, but I figure it's more like 'objectivism', or 'scientology', words that sound big and impressive to people who are either dumb, or just not very well informed. You can't really change a term like rationalism, since it's really one of the biggest terms in philosophy, and philosophers are the kind of people who get upset when people use stuff like 'begging the question' wrong, which everybody does. So even if the 'rationalists' ended up having loads of great insights despite their inauspicious start, it would almost certainly never change the meaning of the word.
  - Isinlor 4y ago

robonerd 4y ago

Pursuit of rationality can be paradoxical in a sense, insofar as believing yourself capable attaining rationality is fundamentally irrational. You aren't a Vulcan, you're a Human. To err is human. All humans are irrational some of the time and if you believe yourself capable of being better than that, you're only proving yourself wrong with that very belief. Rationality done right is the pursuit of an unobtainable goal that yields better-than-average results even as you ultimately fall short of the ideal. So, basically like any other form of self-improvement. When you inevitably hit a setback, reorient and adjust your approach. But don't beat yourself up when you continue to fall short, because you will. We all will.

reducesuffering 4y ago
This is what rationalists like to refer to as a strawman. Show me any example of one claiming to eventually be without err or irrationality. The claims are simply that most people have many implicit biases and illogical means, and that there are some ways of bettering your thinking methods.
- robonerd 4y ago
  > Show me any example of one claiming to eventually be without err or irrationality. Interact with them long enough and you'll come across a whole lot who act like it. What do you even think I'm strawmanning? That comment is a defense of Scott Alexander and rationalists generally.
  - sinity 4y ago
    I thought you meant to imply that rationalists believe they're perfectly rational. Lots of people do so.
- dekhn 4y ago
  I think the idea is that the author of the post we're talking about doesn't consider the idea that they may be internally biased in a way that affects their ability to be rational. From my perspective, it looks like they started from the belief that ivermectin is an generally effective treatment for COVID and that "the data" (that is, a properly weighted and filtered version of the publication record) demonstrates that. To me that shows a lot of overconfidence. Even as I make statements saying that ivermectin isn't a generally effective treatment for COVID, I fully accept that it's possible my reasoning and interpretation of the evidence could be faulty and that some future study could somehow demonstrate a slam-dunk benefit even for countries with no level of parasitic infections, like the US. If that happened (seems very unlikely, but not impossible) I would change my statement (as would the mainstream medical establishment). The author of the above article doesn't really show that level of epistemic humility.

Izkata 4y ago

From the original article they're responding to: > This is still just a possibility. Maybe I’m over-focusing too hard on a couple positive results and this will all turn out to be nothing. Or who knows, maybe ivermectin does work against COVID a little - although it would have to be very little, fading to not at all in temperate worm-free countries. But this theory feels right to me. > It feels right to me because it’s the most troll-ish possible solution. Everybody was wrong! Actually, if it does pan out, score 1 for the conspiracy theorists. If you actually asked them by what mechanism they thought Ivermectin worked, they really had only two answers, and "alleviating strain on your immune system by killing parasites you didn't know you had" was one of them, from very early on.

marvin 4y ago

This article was a bit long-winded, but it makes a very fair point and I don't understand why it was flagged.

wumpus 4y ago
adamrezich 4y ago
it's not complicated: people don't like heresy. notice how there are zero comments on this page that deal with the substance of the article in question, instead choosing to find various surface-level reasons unrelated to the findings in the article as cause to internally dismiss it. if the content of the article was not heresy and instead came from some trusted scientific authority, this would not be the case.
- dekhn 4y ago
  It doesn't even rise to the level of being wrong. Nobody is even remotely interested in engaging what you call the "substance" of the article, because https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law The people who are working on COVID are too fucking busy to waste their time arguing with kooks who claim they are rational.
- marvin 4y ago
  Yes. I would have written exactly what you did here, but then I’d probably have to fend off the comments you are referring to. So I worded it more diplomatically, or ambiguously. Shame; it’s interesting to get challenged. At least I got to read it before it got flushed.
  - native_samples 4y ago
    Tip: if you go to https://news.ycombinator.com/active https://news.ycombinator.com/active instead of the front page you can see stories that were flagged. This is how I read HN because the number of interesting, relevant and useful stories that get flagged for ideological reasons is just far too high. This one being a good case in point. It's a pattern: there's a group of people who will reliably flag any article demonstrating that official COVID science is wrong. Doesn't matter what it's about - if it contradicts official narratives then it's probably going to disappear within an hour or two. One might think a site dedicated to intellectual curiousity would be interested in stories like that, or that at least flagging such stories would be penalized, but no.

Gatsky 4y ago

This ivermectin thing is the premier example of motivated reasoning and wishful thinking in the last few years, something which seems lost on the author.

mpalczewski 4y ago

The "Do Your Own Research" title is about where he lost me. Without reading, I'm pretty sure the author didn't perform a double blind study himself, nor is he suggesting that we all perform one. The rest reads like gibberish.

adamrezich 4y ago
what value does this comment have? you dislike the title the author has chosen for his blog, and you are physically unable to read the text below it?
native_samples 4y ago
Researchers pretty regularly do meta-studies and call it research so that seems a poor basis on which to dismiss the article.

larryfreeman 4y ago

Rationality is only a pathway to reliable information when it makes clear its assumptions (i.e. axioms or postulates) and sticks to logical proof. Empiricism is only useful when it adequately adopts Occam's Razor to stay focused on the facts and has a clear understanding of the difference between correlation and causality. Want to disprove a mainstream position? Find a commonly held false assumption or some fact that cannot be explained by the current approaches. Keep it simple and be open to having this point explained with standard methods. Read T.S. Kuhn if necessary to understand what it typically takes to change a scientific paradigm. Everything else is just noise with the purpose of making a given community feel enlightened or smarter than the other "fools".