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French Scientist Didier Raoult Given Rusty Razor Award For Pseudoscience

skeptic.org.uk

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Re: French Scientist Didier Raoult Given Rusty Razor Award For Pseudoscience

#31

Post by rq1 »

steeve wrote: post #28
rq1 wrote: post #5

Didier Raoult is one of the brightest scientists in the world. Period. There’s no “major” flaw in his studies as people keep repeating. He was studying viral load in patients and excluded those who were in ICU because they did not have enough virus left. Thus suggesting his cocktail as an early treatment. There is indeed pseudoscientists and corrupt ones who published the famous now but ridiculous study in “the lance…

The cherry on top is the c19study link, which is a well known website in the conspiracy theorists sphere, and was debunked time and time again.

I'm not aware of any "theory" nor "conspiracy" or whatever.

The website lists all kind of studies, you can get the data if you want and build your own website. :)

If you have no argument, just put "conspiracy theory" etiquette on your opponent. Huge win.

Re: French Scientist Didier Raoult Given Rusty Razor Award For Pseudoscience

#32

Post by florianp »

steeve wrote: post #28
rq1 wrote: post #5

Didier Raoult is one of the brightest scientists in the world. Period. There’s no “major” flaw in his studies as people keep repeating. He was studying viral load in patients and excluded those who were in ICU because they did not have enough virus left. Thus suggesting his cocktail as an early treatment. There is indeed pseudoscientists and corrupt ones who published the famous now but ridiculous study in “the lance…

The cherry on top is the c19study link, which is a well known website in the conspiracy theorists sphere, and was debunked time and time again.

Could you please elaborate on this (links)? I am looking for discussion about how this would be inaccurate or biased? Thanks

Re: French Scientist Didier Raoult Given Rusty Razor Award For Pseudoscience

#33

Post by gameswithgo »

helen___keller wrote: post #18
_Wintermute wrote: post #11

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.

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…

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.

Re: French Scientist Didier Raoult Given Rusty Razor Award For Pseudoscience

#34

Post by pjc50 »

_Wintermute wrote: post #11

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.

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".

Re: French Scientist Didier Raoult Given Rusty Razor Award For Pseudoscience

#35

Post by raverbashing »

hocuspocus wrote: post #12

> “It is hard to find an example of quackery that has spread so far, influencing the public health response to a deadly pandemic and creating widespread confusion across the entire globe.” It isn't hard: the Lancet has published a completely made-up study written by an unknown team, before they retracted the paper. If I wanted to fuel conspiracy theories, I don't think I could come up with anything better.

Yeah don't remind me. People pulling numbers out of thin air to feed fuel to the fire (and apparently no reviewer with TL suspected that "AI driven data collection").

Re: French Scientist Didier Raoult Given Rusty Razor Award For Pseudoscience

#36

Post by rich_sasha »

_Wintermute wrote: post #11

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.

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.

Re: French Scientist Didier Raoult Given Rusty Razor Award For Pseudoscience

#37

Post by raverbashing »

dmix wrote: post #30

Technically the Chinese Wuhan Institute was first to recommended hydroxychloroquine as a possible solution (among at least one other drug) months before this guy and the politicians ever published anything about it. There was also a small town US doctor who claimed anecdotal success among his hundreds of clients who was highly influential very early on. And tons of other speculative ‘experts’ talking about it on YouT…

There was a small suspicion and some previous studies that maybe (a big maybe) HCQ would help in some infections (parasitic and virotic - well, it does help with Malaria)

But that was that, a suspicion, not to take it as the holy grail of the disease

Re: French Scientist Didier Raoult Given Rusty Razor Award For Pseudoscience

#38

Post by ekianjo »

hocuspocus wrote: post #12

> “It is hard to find an example of quackery that has spread so far, influencing the public health response to a deadly pandemic and creating widespread confusion across the entire globe.” It isn't hard: the Lancet has published a completely made-up study written by an unknown team, before they retracted the paper. If I wanted to fuel conspiracy theories, I don't think I could come up with anything better.

> “It is hard to find an example of quackery that has spread so far, influencing the public health response to a deadly pandemic and creating widespread confusion across the entire globe.”

Or the WHO themselves claiming that masks do not work for months then suddenly reversing their position in the middle of the pandemic. But "Trust Science" they said.

Re: French Scientist Didier Raoult Given Rusty Razor Award For Pseudoscience

#39

Post by hyper_reality »

ekianjo wrote: post #38
hocuspocus wrote: post #12

> “It is hard to find an example of quackery that has spread so far, influencing the public health response to a deadly pandemic and creating widespread confusion across the entire globe.” It isn't hard: the Lancet has published a completely made-up study written by an unknown team, before they retracted the paper. If I wanted to fuel conspiracy theories, I don't think I could come up with anything better.

> “It is hard to find an example of quackery that has spread so far, influencing the public health response to a deadly pandemic and creating widespread confusion across the entire globe.” Or the WHO themselves claiming that masks do not work for months then suddenly reversing their position in the middle of the pandemic. But "Trust Science" they said.

I'm fed up of people repeating this over-simplified putdown of WHO on HN.

The advice about masks was on their website on March 2020 largely because they were worried about mass public buying of masks, leaving a shortage for frontline medical workers (https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-who/ma...).

The guidance was updated as more evidence came in and production of masks scaled up. This should not be compared to outright quackery.

Re: French Scientist Didier Raoult Given Rusty Razor Award For Pseudoscience

#40

Post by zests »

pjc50 wrote: post #34
_Wintermute wrote: post #11

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.

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".

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.

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