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Ivermectin: Much More Than You Wanted to Know

astralcodexten.substack.com

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Re: Ivermectin: Much More Than You Wanted to Know

#161

Post by fallingknife »

jacquesm wrote: post #113
fallingknife wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I agree, that in the case of a pandemic, the health authorities interests are pretty well aligned with a member of the general public. However, there are always issues in this kind of situation when the authorities got it wrong. In a political environment, changing course is seen as an admission of being wrong, and a loss of face. So we continue on with the initial policy. We are currently facing this problem a…

Agreed that there is a lot of ego involved, and that certainly doesn't help. In NL we have a couple of nice examples of that. Pursuing herd immunity is a viable strategy only if you can actually achieve it. Sweden has done far worse than their neighbors in this respect. But given the fact that it drags on all you can say is that as long as we don't treat this as a global problem your local measures matter less than y…

That's not correct that Sweden has done much worse than its neighbors. It's actually below the median for Europe.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1111779/coronavirus-deat...

Re: Ivermectin: Much More Than You Wanted to Know

#162

Post by [deleted] »

bayesian_horse wrote: post #72
roenxi wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Going through one of those studies from https://ivmmeta.com/ on YouTube would be a risky proposition for a YouTuber. It goes against YouTube's medical misinformation policy [0]. It is pretty clear that a study with that sort of effect size could encourage someone to take Ivermectin. Particularly the "Categorical claims that Ivermectin is an effective treatment for COVID-19 " would be a worry depending on how the cens…

Nope, it's not against the medical misinformation policy. But that's a fine point in that case. And most people who talk about these studies will violate the policy by a wide margin, rather than doing a well rounded analysis. You can't deliberately encourage people to take Ivermectin. But JUST citing a study wouldn't do that. Especially not with all the debunking of the other stuff.

[deleted]

Re: Ivermectin: Much More Than You Wanted to Know

#163

Post by [deleted] »

beagle3 wrote: post #157
jacquesm wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This article doesn't move the needle at all for those that have a basic understanding of the mechanisms at work and who don't fall for the first conspiracy theory that gets lobbed their way. What you should do instead is to listen to your medical authorities who even if they do make mistakes have your best interests at heart, contrary to those that are pushing the quackery in an attempt to further destabilize our soc…

You may disregard my pseudonymous self’s statement, but one of my children had a weird disease, which I managed to figure out watching YouTube videos of similar symptoms and reading Wikipedia (at first, then pubmed etc) Over 40 doctors, most of them MD/PhDs, from 4 of the 10 top ranked hospitals in the world for the relevant issue, told me I’m an idiot, because that disease is a 1:10,000,000 thing, it can’t be the ca…

[deleted]

Re: Ivermectin: Much More Than You Wanted to Know

#164

Post by qqqwerty »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #51
roenxi wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is the first anti-Ivermectin argument that you want to believe... I discounted a highly biased echo chamber in social media and more traditional media and went with 30-odd studies that appear to have been assembled in good faith even now. I changed my mind immediately on seeing "Parasitic worms are a significant confounder in some ivermectin studies, such that they made them get a positive result even when hon…

May I ask, completely sincerely, what approach you would settle on for trying to discriminate truth from fiction if you believed you couldn't get reliable information from reading 30-odd studies?

Isn't the correct answer to wait for more reliable studies? Which is what most "anti-ivermectin" folks were saying to begin with? If your primary goal is to have a miracle cure in hand that would allow you to push back against vaccine mandates, then this approach probably won't sit well. But if you are interesting in actually finding truth, than waiting for larger, more robust studies was the answer.

Re: Ivermectin: Much More Than You Wanted to Know

#165

Post by pjc50 »

roenxi wrote: post #20
bayesian_horse wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Most scientists/doctors believe it to not work against Covid-19" wasn't a serious argument for you? It is a strange phenomenon that people are so ready to disagree with people who spent decades achieving exactly that kind of knowledge.

That literally isn't an argument. It is a statement. And if anyone who said "many scientists/doctors believe it to work against Covid-19" is getting banned, then that statement has 0 signal. As Scott points out in this article, without knowing about the parasitic worm situation https://ivmmeta.com/ is both reasonable and moderately convincing.

> is both reasonable and moderately convincing

No it isn't, it's full of obvious fraud! That's what the entire rest of the article points out. And they put an unwarranted warning against one of the few non-fraudulent studies because it doesn't go their way:

[re: Lopez-Medina et al]

> "I’m making a big deal of this because ivmmeta.com - the really impressive meta-analysis site I’ve been going off of - puts a special warning letter underneath their discussion of this study, urging us not to trust it. They don’t do this for any of the other ones we’ve addressed so far - not the one by the guy whose other studies were all frauds, not the one where 50% of 21 people had headaches, not the unrandomized one where the groups were completely different before the experiment started, not even the one by the guy accused of crimes against humanity. Only this one. This makes me a lot less charitable to ivmmeta than I would otherwise be; I think it’s hard to choose this particular warning letter strategy out of well-intentioned commitment to truth. They just really don’t like this big study that shows ivermectin doesn’t work."

That's the nearest Scott gets to directly accusing ivmmeta of fraud.

Re: Ivermectin: Much More Than You Wanted to Know

#166

Post by jack_pp »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #131
DoreenMichele wrote: post #17

This is wonderfully fun stuff to read: This is from ivmmeta.com, part of a sprawling empire of big professional-looking sites promoting unorthodox coronavirus treatments. I have no idea who runs it - they’ve very reasonably kept their identity secret - but my hat is off to them...Putting aside the question of accuracy and grading only on presentation and scale, this is the most impressive act of science communication…

I want to know who's behind those sites, the fact that nobody knows who's behind them is shady. Or is having sites pushing meta-studies about anything normal and I just missed it?

Is it so shady to mask your identity when so many people have been crucified for even hinting ivermectin might be beneficial?

Re: Ivermectin: Much More Than You Wanted to Know

#167

Post by jesterson »

Nursie wrote: post #136
jesterson wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> However I think he misrepresent some anti-vaxxers: it's not a matter of trusting science, it's a matter of trusting scientists with heavy conflict of interest to tell the truth while most of us don't have the required scientific knowledge to evaluate if they're telling the truth. That's an excellent point - unfortunately people who are easily labeled as "anti-vaxxers" and perceived as uneducated anti-scince crowd q…

Studies have been done. It has been found lacking. You're getting mocked because you're blind to this and sticking to something that bad actors are touting as a miracle cure, while science and medicine move on in the search for things that actually help. Like dexamethasone, remdesivir etc etc

The way you have responded is a perfect illustration of the crowd we are talking about.

You are trying to make a personal offence and claims without any references. That sounds like a blind repeating of the narrative, even if it wasn't intended to be so.

Re: Ivermectin: Much More Than You Wanted to Know

#168

Post by jacquesm »

fallingknife wrote: post #161
jacquesm wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed that there is a lot of ego involved, and that certainly doesn't help. In NL we have a couple of nice examples of that. Pursuing herd immunity is a viable strategy only if you can actually achieve it. Sweden has done far worse than their neighbors in this respect. But given the fact that it drags on all you can say is that as long as we don't treat this as a global problem your local measures matter less than y…

That's not correct that Sweden has done much worse than its neighbors. It's actually below the median for Europe. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1111779/coronavirus-deat...

I said neighbors, not all of Europe.

Denmark, Finland, Norway and Iceland all did considerably better, and have demographics and local conditions that are closer together than comparing Sweden with the rest of Europe. It's a thinly populated Nordic country, so the comparison material should be countries that match those criteria, not the average of the EU, which runs the gamut of high density extremely interconnected countries with major airline hubs all the way to vast emptiness with the occasional city.

It's an easy mistake to make though.

Re: Ivermectin: Much More Than You Wanted to Know

#169

Post by yholio »

> I want a world where “I did a study, but I can’t show you the data” should be taken as seriously as “I determined P = NP, but I can’t show you the proof.”

The fact that this is not standard practice highlights some societal bias in favor of people in white lab coats that can't possibly be suspected of fraud or incompetence - for it will shatter our sense of safety and control over the world.

People are people and power corrupts. When your publication has the power to turn you into a celebrity, skyrocket your career and land you a top paying job and speaking arrangements, the corruption potential is strong. As the author further elaborates:

> But even if it’s only 1%, these will make up much more than 1% of published studies, and much more than 1% of important ground-breaking published studies, because correct studies can only prove true things, but false studies can prove arbitrarily interesting hypotheses (did you know there was an increase in the suicide rate on days that Donald Trump tweeted?!?) and those are the ones that will get published and become famous.

> So if the lesson of the original replication crisis was “read the methodology” and “read the preregistration document”, this year’s lesson is “read the raw data”. Which is a bit more of an ask. Especially since most studies don’t make it available.

Re: Ivermectin: Much More Than You Wanted to Know

#170

Post by [deleted] »

stonogo wrote: post #82
jmnicolas wrote: post #24

Interesting read, I appreciate that the author isn't dogmatic and is open to discussion. However I think he misrepresent some anti-vaxxers: it's not a matter of trusting science, it's a matter of trusting scientists with heavy conflict of interest to tell the truth while most of us don't have the required scientific knowledge to evaluate if they're telling the truth. Pfizer and Moderna combined are making more than $…

Mind boggling? $1k/s is around $31 billion. First of all, just Pfizer brought in more money than that last year -- around $10 billion more. But let's set that aside for now, because they're slated to bring in twice as much this year. You think Pfizer and Moderna are somehow coordinating a global censorship campaign to defend that income? Sure, Pfizer's projects $82 billion in revenue is real money. But it's less than…

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