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The media's lab leak fiasco

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Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#611

Post by shaicoleman »

mike_d wrote: post #605
shaicoleman wrote: post #489

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of the problem that there is censorship on publishing in the big journals. That said, there are published RCT showing Ivermectin effectiveness. In my second link on my first comment, there's a talk about the overwhelming data, censorship and hindrances for publishing. Sharing evidence on Ivermectin - Dr. Tess Lawrie https://player.vimeo.com/video/554350476?autoplay=1#t=5756

Effectiveness is not the only criteria that experts need to evaluate for treatments. Ivermectin is fairly easy to overdose on, and people started self-treating prophylactically because it was easy to find from veterinary supply chains. The majority of available Ivermectin also contained inactive ingredients that had no been safety tested on humans, again because of its primary veterinary uses. WHO looked at these fac…

Ivermectin is at least an order of magnitude safer than paracetamol. There's 30 years of safety data, more than 3.7 billion doses, and on average less than 1 death per year.

In the talk above, the Ivermectin safety profile is specifically discussed here: [1]

"Ivermectin was generally well tolerated, with no indication of associated CNS toxicity for doses up to 10 times the highest FDA-approved dose of 0.2mg/kg." [2]

The only way you can overdose is if you use horse paste, and get the dose wrong by more than an order of magnitude. Even then, it's unlikely to result in hospitalization or death. The only reason people have to use horse paste is because they are unable to safely obtain Ivermectin by other means.

1. https://player.vimeo.com/video/554350476?autoplay=1#t=6300

2. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12362927/

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#612

Post by eitland »

fartcannon wrote: post #464
Animats wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Each site seemed to be funneling you into a single source of truth and way of not only thinking, but FEELING about an event. Which is a big problem. In the intelligence community, people are taught to distinguish between data items from different sources, which may indicate confirmation, and data items from the same source via different paths, which don't.

I think this is a good place for authorship attribution AI's. A plugin that will identify text that resembles known PR and propaganda and links to the original source. Is this a real review or is this person writing their review from a script? Am I interacting with a real person or someone paid to sway the public opinion of something on a forum? Edit: Maybe we could prevent more influence by Satya @ MS and the like.…

> "In fact, this morning, I was reading a news article in Hacker News, which is a community where we have been working hard to make sure that Azure is growing in popularity and I was pleasantly surprised to see that we have made a lot of progress..."

Wow! That was unexpectedly - what should I say - candid?

And I actually appreciate you all being here : )

But please distinguish between

- "helping customers where they are" which is a great idea and

- secretly pushing an agenda.

And if anyone wonders about how do you distinguish between those two here's a rule of thumb:

in the first case if someone realizes you work for that company it feels good. In the second case it probably feels bad.

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#613

Post by michaelmrose »

iammisc wrote: post #501
onionisafruit wrote: post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can you read this then casually say Tom Cotton was spreading ridiculous theories that covid was engineered? One of the main points in the article is he never said that and what he did say was pretty reasonable. It’s ok if you think the article is wrong about that, but you should at least give a source for your claim at this point.

There is no source for these claims. Just like with Trump, people get angry and upset with what they think he said based on the impression from the media, not what was actually said. Just look at the 'fine people on both sides' comment that was taken ridiculously out of context. This same thing happened to Sarah Palin with the 'I can see Russia from my house' phrase, which she never said. It was part of a comedy sket…

Here is Sarah Palin actually making that claim on CBS. Not in those hilarious words but really and in fact. It's like 2 minutes long.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nokTjEdaUGg

The fine people on both sides was truly as horrific as it was made out to be. They had a torchlight nazi parade where they chanted jews will not replace us and they murdered people.

Here is a pic of people flying as they were hit by a car.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2/2f/2017_Charlott...

On February 20th 2020 Tom Cotton speculated that it was possible that China deliberately released the virus or that it could be a bioweapon that had been released.

https://twitter.com/sentomcotton/status/1229202139232292866

This isn't a hypothesis a US senator should throw out on twitter because the right wing completely ignored the speculative nature or any qualifications and completely ran with Tom says they Chinese attacked us.

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#614

Post by michaelmrose »

onionisafruit wrote: post #480
tootie wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I can tell this is a false premise. The scientific consensus on zoonotic origin was never really considered conclusive by anyone and was never really sold as being conclusive. There was a very strong backlash against the ridiculous theories spread by people like Tom Cotton that virus was engineered that absolutely soured the debate. And people like Trump and his sycophants who didn't just suggest lab leak b…

How can you read this then casually say Tom Cotton was spreading ridiculous theories that covid was engineered? One of the main points in the article is he never said that and what he did say was pretty reasonable. It’s ok if you think the article is wrong about that, but you should at least give a source for your claim at this point.

https://twitter.com/sentomcotton/status/1229202139232292866

He speculated that it could have been a bioweapon that was accidentally or deliberately released. You and I can speculate on twitter but a US senator should keep his trap shut on social media.

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#615

Post by aliasEli »

Mountain_Skies wrote: post #535
edgyquant wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook already does this and people just claim it’s fake news being pushed by “the elite.”

I've been on Facebook since you needed an edu address. I've never had anything I posted flagged in anyway until recently during the Colonial Pipeline shutdown. A friend posted a photo of a person filling up buckets with gasoline. I responded with "An oldie but goodie" and a photo of a woman filling up plastic shopping bag with gasoline. A couple days later I got a notification from Facebook that I was spreading disin…

I would expect that this was fully automatic response, so there was nobody reading your message. Facebook somehow detected that your photo was too old. On the internet "fake" photo's are frequently posted and it is understandable that Facebook takes countermeasures. It is really difficult to find a good solution.

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#616

Post by KirillPanov »

seattle_spring wrote: post #208
SCUSKU wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely. Discussion with friends about the goings ons of the world frequently just turns into taking turns regurgitating what we can recall from NPR and NYT's The Daily.

What sources would you recommend instead?

About 30% of the stories on zerohedge, as long as you're awake enough to filter out the remaining noise.

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#618

Post by KirillPanov »

seattle_spring wrote: post #206
arduinomancer wrote: post #137

I hate how it feels like there's such a "collective narrative" for everything now days with the internet. Whenever I talk to people about recent news stories in real life it feels like everyone is just repeating talking points they read online. Its like we've been absorbed into the internet consciousness and talking to a person is like talking to "the internet brain".

> Whenever I talk to people about recent news stories in real life it feels like everyone is just repeating talking points they read online. Would you mind sharing some examples, as well as the counterpoint arguments you add to the real life conversation? I've seen claims like this before, and it almost always comes from people who get their news from places like Zerohedge or Infowars.

You seem to have a real beef with Zerohedge.

Ironically, their twitter account was banned precisely for reporting on the possibility that the virus was a lab leak:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/zerohedge-twitter-ban-over-co...

A thread about how the mainstream media is eating crow over being so wrong here is not really the best place in the world for you to grind your axe with Zerohedge.

Also, what are info wars?

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#619

Post by michaelmrose »

BurningFrog wrote: post #247
scottrogowski wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This should be the top comment. Social media companies can either be monopolies or they can put limits on the speech of their platform... but they can't do both. While not against the law of freedom of speech, political moderation processes are certainly against the intent. Every once in a while we get a case like this where an unpopular fringe opinion becomes mainstream and underlines the point. But this isn't just…

What I would do, if elected Emperor over this, is to add warnings or links to debunkings of fringe theories, but never delete them. The power to silence will always be abused.

You are assuming that the net negative for society is never high enough to justify kicking liars and crazy people off your platform. That seems like a remarkable conclusion. Lets take for example Alex Jones spreading the lie that kids didn't die in school shootings and the people talking about their dead kids are making it up. Do you keep spreading it until a whack job kills somebody? Until some parent commits suicide?

What about health misinformation that if propagated will kill thousands? How many dead is enough to act?

What if false info about vaccines keeps enough from being vaccinated long enough for a new variant to emerge that infects the previously immune and the net effect is millions die?

I don't think you want to be elected Emperor over this at all its a shittier job than you imagine.

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#620

Post by shaicoleman »

pessimizer wrote: post #561
iammisc wrote: post #503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to be careful though because we've seen medical journals engage in deceptive practices recently around drugs that could potentially treat COVID. For example, the data showing hydroxychloroquine to be harmful to COVID patients was completely made up or non-existent. Unfortunately, medical academia, in some failed attempt to 'stick to the facts', have led themselves to have a lower a priori assumption of corre…

Yes. Hydroxychloroquine ultimately turned out to be nothing, but the media and journals did a shameful job covering it. The media made it the latest episode of the Trump show with all that entails, and journals published garbage quickly to back them up. The result is that Trumpers would never believe it didn't work, and the #resistance would never believe it did, no matter what the science would ever say. It's fine t…

There was a disinformation campaign against Hydroxychloroquine as well. In the failed JAMA study, they administered a nearly toxic dose at late stage patients (when there's no viral replication). This is now being investigated [1].

The largest peer-reviewed study on HCQ (29K patients) showed 70% reduction in death with early treatment. [2]

1. https://www.moneytimes.com.br/heinze-pede-a-pf-que-investigu... (In Portuguese)

2. https://c19hcq.com/mokhtari.html

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