French Scientist Didier Raoult Given Rusty Razor Award For Pseudoscience

Thia still puzzles me, presumably he understands things like placebo effect and double-blind studies intuitively, and yet studies show no improvement.

On a similar note, the WHO recommendation against the use of Remdesivir is widely criticised by doctors in Poland, as based on a poorly-thought-through study. The claim is that Remdesivir helps patients only at certain stages of the disease, whereas the WHO study doesn't differentiate between such stages.

On the one hand, there's people who use the drug day-in-day-out, on the other a huge organisation which I'd think can do good-quality science. I remain confused.

Public Communications and Science are different things.

If masks are very scarce, and we need to ration, then we want to prioritize certain groups.

Once they are plentiful, the marginal benefit of masks becomes beneficial to the extent it doesn't interfere with front-line usage, in which case, we definitely want people o wear masks.

And so we use different words, mediums, forms of messaging to get people to change their behaviour, some of it more effective than others.

The medical community has to triage all the time, literally at your hospital right now, they are using their knowledge to ration the resources they have available at any given moment. If you complain of 'chest pain' then you go to the front of the line.

The Razor Award should be a thing now, because news about some kinds of science spreads quickly.

By the time Macron visited Raoult, the spotlight was already on and shining bright. He was more or less forced to visit him for domestic political reasons: Raoult tapped straight into the anti-establishment anti-elite yellow-vest zietgeist , if Macron hadn't at least shown some gesture towards him they would have seized the trope of the "intellectual snob who is too aloof to talk to the people and their hero". The populist politicians from the south of france were already riding the Raoult train by then: Estrosi, Melenchon etc

So he went, he talked, he got his photo taken, and he left. Raoult got the attention he craves, Macron took some bullets out of the guns of his enemies, and nothing much happened. I agree that a more principled stand would have been nice, but that's politics :/

> 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.