> Now it turns out, laughably in hindsight, that the effect is probably whether people had parasites or not and I hadn't thought of that.
Your eagerness to jump on to this idea (which is a cool theory, and isn't meritless, but it should be stressed is a theory that a psychiatrist and social commentator came up with) makes me think you should be wary of how personally susceptible you are to what I'm going to call "fetishization of contrarianism". It's fun to be right, and fun to be right when other people are wrong. It's cool.
But its easy to move from "I don't implicitly value what experts say" to "I implicitly distrust so-called experts", which you appear to be doing throughout this and other threads. You've further jumped from what could uncharitably be called a conspiracy theory to a counter-conspiracy theory. Scott even presents his idea as, essentially a conspiracy theory:
> It feels right to me because it’s the most troll-ish possible solution. Everybody was wrong!
"everyone was wrong", look at me, I'm right, here's a fantastic narrative that perfectly ties up all the loose ends. He looks smart and cool. And you do too[1] if you agree with him. But, to keep on theme, this is a brain worm. (and since we're on a Scott Alexander post, I'll tie this into the broader theme of rationalism) And it's a brain worm that I think a lot of people who otherwise think they're rational/rationalist fall for. The conventional wisdom is, usually, mostly right. Not always all the way right, and sometimes really wrong. But usually, it's most of the way there.
This makes alternate modes of thinking really boring, because despite all the fancy self-reflection and attempts to be superior, you're going to draw relatively few conclusions that are all that different from the mainstream. So what's the point? Either you do all this work for a marginal gain, or...or...or, well what if the conventional wisdom is actually wrong a lot more often? What if the experts are misleading us? What if the experts fall into thinking traps that make them wrong all the time? We shouldn't just disregard the experts, we should actively distrust them and assume the opposite! This opens up lots of possibilities for cool ideas. Incredibly compelling narratives, narratives where you can say that everyone else was wrong, and you were right. You can be a hero, or at least feel like one. Outsmarting the experts is cool, and knowing things first is cool. It's cool. And the "problem" with this is that sometimes you'll be right. The government is spying on citizens illegally. Snowden was right. And Ivermectin might have a small effect on covid, and even cooler it might be due to worms! But there have been tons of quack covid cures (HCQ, bleach, silver, etc.) and not every conspiracy theory about the government is true, even if the narrative would be cooler, because we distrust the government and the profit motives of these corporations, and that makes us want to distrust everything they do.
But the world is more boring than that, and even though the contrary opinion is true sometimes, usually it isn't.
[1]: Another, potentially equally compelling take here is that Scott's presentation here has allowed you to change your mind without admitting (even to yourself) that you were wrong! Because as he presents it, you weren't "wrong". We really, really dislike doing that, but this way you don't have to. The data did/does show an an effect for Ivermectin. You were right. That the effect was due to a "global" confounding factor allows you to change your conclusion without admitting that you were wrong in how you did the analysis. Like, whether or not you were wrong, the people who disagreed with you were right: it's unlikely that it would be helpful for your mother or whomever to take Ivermectin. The rational thing to do here would be to update your priors to trust the "experts" a bit more, perhaps their expert analysis that you weren't willing to believe before, had some truth to it, even though you don't know precisely how or why they reached that conclusion!