441–450 of 805 posts
> And it was! It was a fluke! A literal, physical, fluke! For my whole life, God has been placing terrible puns in my path to irritate me, and this would be the worst one ever! So it has to be true! I think I don't get the joke here. Can someone dissect it for me? (Yes, thereby killing it) I love this man's writing so much. Intelligent, empathetic, visionary, and simple. All at the same time. With no other author do…
Fluke is a type of worm
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Blame the Twitterati for the normalization of calling people "Nazis" over slight political disagreements.
It's a Twitter thing now, but it might be useful to understand that it predates Twitter. E.g., "Goodwin's Law" is supposed to have been coined in 1990, and of course it was a pretty well established phenomenon to earn a coined term. I know from first-hand experience it was happening on BBS's and newsgroups in the '80s. I would be more surprised than not if it wasn't happening before then too. (And if you want to gene…
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It's actually not, as it can induce temporary blindness if you overdose on it.
But overdose is a relative term, is it actually easy to overdose on ivermectin? Depending on the drug and how much a typical dosage is, overdosing could be a simple mistake like taking a second pill or be a ludicrous amount like eating hundreds of pills.
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> ignoring obvious heritability of things like wealth and social status He addresses that in the section section - besides the intro, he leads with it: "the next generation becomes semi-famous fashion designers and TV personalities and journalists, which seem like typical jobs for people who are well-connected and good at performing class, but don't need to be amazingly bright. Sometimes they become politicians, anot…
True, but that's an example of the endless hedging I mentioned: His writing style is very good at throwing in little counter examples here and there to give a "both sides" type impression, but then he pokes holes in the counter-arguments in the build-up to the conclusion he actually wants to present. If you read a few paragraphs past your quote, Scott comes right out and declares the "genetics" is the explanation tha…
There are many other problems with that analogy, but they all sum up to making the 'humans' seem way more reasonable than reality affords them.
Does his theory communicate something interesting? Yes. Is it nearly as impactful as he makes it sound? Hell, no.
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>on average, experts do spectacularly better than Joe Schmoe. Including science degree holders thinking they understand medical studies while missing the whole political and social context of the field. I'm saying that, when the data is unclear and Joe is thorough, I don't even think that's true. Or at least it's not spectacularly better. My point is that for something like Ivermectin where the data was initially nul…
Your Joe is the average HN reader. My Joe is my average patient. I completely agree that the word of experts is meaningless on matters where dust had no time to settle. I however maintain that practitioners have to follow guidelines and experts regardless because I believe in the principle (if not the current application) of evidence-based medicine, and that Joe should not be allowed free access to any drug he wants…
In my opinion, the main crux is this: there are moneyed interests who are motivated to generate mistrust and otherization based on political parties. In the USA, Fox News has a strong incentive to inspire hatred and fear of Democratic policy, and MSNBC has a strong incentive to inspire hatred of the GOP. The same is true for Twitter, FB, NYT, WSJ, WaPo, literally any media outlet. Hatred, fear, outrage, worry, anxiet…
> Now, the GOP has leaned into anti-scientist, anti-elitist sentiments, fed by Fox News and others.. I wouldn't fault them for your view of their broad sentiments on this trend but I think if you went back over the last twenty years, these sentiments were more often aligned for the left-wing. "The real conversation has to be about what solutions we're in favor of." -- Dan Crenshaw, on the Daily Show https://youtu.be/…
This is worth reading purely for the writing alone. Scott Alexander is a treasure: > As best I can tell, this is some kind of Egyptian trial. It might or might not be an RCT; it says stuff like “Patients were self-allocated to the treatment groups; the first 3 days of the week for the intervention arm while the other 3 days for symptomatic treatment”. Were they self-allocated in the sense that they got to choose? Doe…
Spoilers ahead, but I loved this pun: > The fraud-hunters have examined this paper closely and are unable to find any signs of fraud. I think this paper is legitimate and that its findings need to be seriously considered. ... And there’s always the chance it was a fluke, right? Can something have a p-value less than 0.001 and still be a fluke? ... > And it was! It was a fluke! A literal, physical, fluke! Edit: If you…
Also in the SPOILER reveal, you could just quote ”And it was!” to show you enjoyed the setup and delayed gratification pun w/o tipping the whole game.
‘Twas a gem though.
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…
Whilst journalist/PR summaries are so notoriously bad they're a punchline when you talk to actual researchers, I think we have to be charitable here and acknowledge that most communication about COVID doesn't have the luxury of writing about every single trial registered (or making puns on the word "fluke"!) So it tends to summarise it as "initially promising results for Invermectin were fraudulent, whilst large tria…
And I'm talking about basic things like getting the order of the facts correct, or who said what. Some times there is even video of the thing on the news, and the journalist narrates on the sequence, and says something different form what is on the video.
I do really not expect those teams to get the details behind medical research right.
By the way, with the amount of fraud going on those studies, I wouldn't trust "weak evidence that it has some effect" in any real extent. Also, the Brazilian numbers (that are uncontested on the article, just non-randomized) are completely fraudulent, it's a large scandal here, with the police investigating it and many people that may get some prison time for murdering; the people that took ivermectin died about 3 times more often than the ones that didn't.
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About 1.5 years ago, ivermectin was discussed in "conspiracy" channels like Reddit, and many people were helped by it. The mass media ignored it for over a year and when they did started covering it, they said it was a horse dewormer. The fact is, what people think is trustworthy news today is pure propaganda. You cannot make an informed decision based on what you read in the mass media.. It's all completely controll…
> About 1.5 years ago, ivermectin was discussed in "conspiracy" channels like Reddit, and many people were helped by it. How were they helped by it when the evidence shows that it doesn't work for COVID-19?
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The public is much more capable of processing and understanding nuance than we give them credit for. It's just not as profitable for the MSM.
I find HN to have quite a strain of absolutist thinking. Even when Scott rethought some of his SSC vs NYT positioning, the mob would have none of it.