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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

#211

Post by astrange »

csee wrote: post #183

While reading this piece I got a little depressed that most journalism is just such utter trash compared to it. I've read so many articles on ivermectin and none of them gave me even ten percent of the clarity that this article gave me. Can you imagine if writing and journalism of this calibre was commonplace among practising "journalists"? And look at how this piece compares to the CDC's and WHO's science communicat…

He has an earlier piece whose point is that the WHO can never be accurate, because they always have to prioritize "sounding trustworthy" over accuracy, and random blogs don't.

Re: Ivermectin: Much More Than You Wanted to Know

#212

Post by BaronSamedi »

roenxi wrote: post #125
jacquesm wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is only a fallacy when you are an expert as well, but when you are a layperson in a field and you are discarding real expert opinions because you don't like them you don't get to claim that their opinions are arguments from authority and therefore by definition fallacies. Maybe actually read that wikipedia page instead of just linking to it? This seems to be a common and recurring theme: my opinion is worth as muc…

> It is only a fallacy when you are an expert as well... This is wrong to the point where you really might want to take a deep breath. The point of experts is they have thought about a field more and are better at making sound arguments in that field. "Most scientists/doctors believe..." is literally, exactly and unambiguously a fallacious argument. The only thing that matters is why they would believe that. And if t…

"The point of experts is they have thought about a field more and are better at making sound arguments in that field."

This is an excellent point. It is so good that I think it may serve as the definition of an expert: An expert is someone who is better at making sound arguments in that field. Sound arguments being what matters and not the person making the argument, just as the calculations matter more than the mathematician.

Re: Ivermectin: Much More Than You Wanted to Know

#213

Post by jacquesm »

ddingus wrote: post #199
jacquesm wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you care about your mothers' health then you shouldn't engage in quackery. > The way someone gets ivermectin is to walk a doctor through the evidence they've seen and then ask them to prescribe it. That is factually incorrect, no doctor in their right mind will allow the patients to effectively prescribe their own controversial and in some cases downright dangerous medicine.

Is that not what the ADS we see on TV are helping patients to do? I am being dead serious here. Confused. And to be clear, it should not work that way at all. I think it does work that way a lot more than many of us would care to admit. Happy to be shown I am wrong.

That's one reason TV advertising for medication is strongly regulated in plenty of places.

Re: Ivermectin: Much More Than You Wanted to Know

#214

Post by jacquesm »

csee wrote: post #192
qqqwerty wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why wait? Why not take ivermectin as a precautionary therapeutic given it is well tolerated with low risk of side effects? There's a chasm between the epistemic question of "does this drug really work?" and the pragmatic question of "does a risk-reward analysis under uncertainty say that I should take this mostly safe drug that might slightly reduce my covid severity?" FWIW, I wouldn't take ivermectin either as a pro…

> given it is well tolerated with low risk of side effects

That's not a given, that depends on the patient, the dose and a host of other factors. You may well end up harming someone significantly. You are in no position to proscribe any kind of medication to someone else unless you happen to be a licensed practitioner.

Re: Ivermectin: Much More Than You Wanted to Know

#215

Post by orwin »

jesterson wrote: post #79
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 $…

> 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…

> A number of people (myself included) would perhaps pay less attention to ivermectin as in covid drug if crowd would really take it and do studies instead of just publicly mocking people who are trying to look into it.

I don't think i've ever mocked any ivermectine taker (at least not for taking a medecine that may help some of his problems), and most "vaxxed" didn't either. And i'm aware than not all unvaccinated people are anti-vax (my brother is waiting for the Valneva himself). But as long as people tell me "look at the data", i will send them the data from the least vaccinated country in europe, Bulgaria (i even have a quick link on my phone), and ask them to explain to me their mortality rates, and grin a little. I'm not really mocking them, i just like seeing people trying to justify themselves, i find it fascinating. Note that i like seeing this in the "i fucking love science" crowd as well (people really have trouble explaining the moon's crescents, it is really funny), but as this is a novelty, it have more potential.

Re: Ivermectin: Much More Than You Wanted to Know

#216

Post by astrange »

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?

Reading 30 studies certainly seems to be a bad way to learn anything unless you're conducting a meta-analysis of them. For one thing, you'd get tired. But just shoving 30 pieces of information into your head and forgetting some of them doesn't help you find out which of them were correct.

Re: Ivermectin: Much More Than You Wanted to Know

#217

Post by csee »

jacquesm wrote: post #214
csee wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why wait? Why not take ivermectin as a precautionary therapeutic given it is well tolerated with low risk of side effects? There's a chasm between the epistemic question of "does this drug really work?" and the pragmatic question of "does a risk-reward analysis under uncertainty say that I should take this mostly safe drug that might slightly reduce my covid severity?" FWIW, I wouldn't take ivermectin either as a pro…

> given it is well tolerated with low risk of side effects That's not a given, that depends on the patient, the dose and a host of other factors. You may well end up harming someone significantly. You are in no position to proscribe any kind of medication to someone else unless you happen to be a licensed practitioner.

  "That's not a given"
I never said it was a given. You're using another definition of the word "given" in order to argue.

  "You are in no position"
Who said I was in a position to be making that decision? That's completely irrelevant.

Re: Ivermectin: Much More Than You Wanted to Know

#218

Post by jacquesm »

astrange wrote: post #216
thaumaturgy wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Reading 30 studies certainly seems to be a bad way to learn anything unless you're conducting a meta-analysis of them. For one thing, you'd get tired. But just shoving 30 pieces of information into your head and forgetting some of them doesn't help you find out which of them were correct.

Especially in a field in which you are not trained, do not have the background knowledge required to understand the various qualifications and established best practices in. That gap can be absolutely enormous, even for fields that are peripherally related. Specialization is there for a reason, the body of knowledge that we now command is way too large for any single individual to absorb to a substantial depth.

Re: Ivermectin: Much More Than You Wanted to Know

#219

Post by astrange »

jacquesm wrote: post #78
nzmsv wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis

Are you suggesting that we didn't adopt his methods?

I don't think we adopted handwashing because of him.

Actually, the reason people didn't believe him is interesting because they were using an earlier scientific method - he didn't have a good explanation for the mechanism, so they dismissed it with "correlation is not causation". We're better at using things whose mechanism we don't understand now, like Tylenol.

Re: Ivermectin: Much More Than You Wanted to Know

#220

Post by ddingus »

jacquesm wrote: post #203
ddingus wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Sold out" is a real problem. More people than we want to admit see corruption coupled with big media as a enemy, not a thing to be trusted. Many ordinary people flat out do not know when to trust, so they don't. They then seek others and continue to have conversations, and they find others lacking trust resonates and that opens the door for a lot of BS normally and easily seen. Just an example of the difficulty we n…

I have slowly come to the conclusion that maybe we grew up a bit too fast with respect to media and social media in particular. In the past change to society came slow and we could internalize and stabilize it before the next round of changes appeared. Now the changes are coming so fast and are so drastic that we as society - including our legal system - have no way of keeping up with it. Technology routinely moves f…

That danger has been present for a while now.

However, and as a thought exercise, say we did not go down the Citizens United path after Reagan repealed the Fairness Doctrine, and Clinton Telecommunications Act of 1996.

Social media viewed through that lens, one where both the public interest is a thing we recognize must at least compete with profit, and the public trust is recognized and maintained as the high value part of our Democracy it is.

I do not disagree with you about tech and the law being behind. And right now we remain in a particularly difficult time due to so many legislators not understanding tech well enough to perform their role as well as it needs to be performed.

That said, our difficulty right now is greatly exacerbated by basic policy priority shifts that happened well in advance of tech.

Owning that is particularly difficult too. Money and markets are a higher priority than the public interest is, and that is true for government as well as big media.

The vacuum was there and significant, leaving tech, social media to rapidly expand into it.

Had that time been one of more robust public trust, social media would have to compete much harder, and regulation may well have both been more effective as well as earlier, more robust in its positive impact.

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