Ivermectin: Much More Than You Wanted to Know
astralcodexten.substack.com
Ivermectin: Much More Than You Wanted to Know
1–10 of 805 posts
Re: Ivermectin: Much More Than You Wanted to Know
#2> Even an atheist can appreciate a cathedral, and even an ivermectin skeptic should be able to appreciate this website.
This is well put. It's pretty remarkable indeed.
Re: Ivermectin: Much More Than You Wanted to Know
#3Okay it was too long for me and I got side tracked. Is his opinion in the end that ivermectin helps if you have worms?
I got to the point where he talked about the studies showing no benefit were all from areas with low prevalence of worms and the studies showing benefits were all places with high prevalence of worms.
Re: Ivermectin: Much More Than You Wanted to Know
#4This guy is a brain genius according to a subset of the web and he spends this much real estate on invermectin and blesses us with this gem:
“Mainstream medicine has reacted with slogans like ‘believe Science’. I don’t know if those kinds of slogans ever help, but they’re especially unhelpful here. A quick look at ivermectin supporters shows their problem is they believed Science too much.”
Then he quotes. Their. Tweets. to tell us the ACTUAL problem with this contingent.
Talk about unhelpful. My man has less expertise in abnormal psych than the average sex worker and conflates his ability to dissect standard issue science publications with expertise in sociology (Nate Silver suffers from similar delusions of grandeur, and also writes insufferable, unhelpful, overconfident political diagnoses). I’d rather he didn’t amplify what he published, and I think it was not worth his time.
Re: Ivermectin: Much More Than You Wanted to Know
#5One time I didn't believe Scott when he wrote a "More than you wanted to know" article. This time, I took his word for it and scrolled (and scrolled and scrolled) to the bottom to read the summary.
Re: Ivermectin: Much More Than You Wanted to Know
#6This is exactly the sort of thing that YouTube, Twitter, et al are suppressing. Someone thoughtfully listening seriously to what the proponents of Ivermectin are saying, weighing it up and saying "looks good but you forgot...".
You can't get this sort of excellent rebuttal without allowing a site like https://ivmmeta.com/ into the debate.
Re: Ivermectin: Much More Than You Wanted to Know
#7This is great. It also underscores a methodological opportunity - is there a way to group together a huge amount of studies, regardless of disease or treatment, and create a semantic association graph that takes things like climate, culture, geography, and the like into account?
You could rank researchers and institutions and locations in order to weight contributions to meta-studies, but you would be also able to associate confounders like parasites almost immediately. I have to imagine it would be the ultimate tool in identifying novel uses for existing drugs.
If this could be done with open source software, it could be a killer app for scihub. Medicine, nutrition, chemical processes, energy science, all sorts of things could benefit the world.
Hell, what if there's a correlation with elevation? It looks like there's a lower death rate at higher elevation - how much air pressure is the threshold for viruses getting into lungs? Could a strong coughing fit at sea level be more dangerous than one at the summit of everest? Does less coughing occur in low humidity, low dust places?
Re: Ivermectin: Much More Than You Wanted to Know
#8"It feels right to me because it’s the most troll-ish possible solution. Everybody was wrong!" - I know this is said tongue-in-cheek, but this mischaracterizes the medical scientists who have been working themselves to the bone trying to understand this virus and disease.
Actual medical science, and science in general, doesn't make claims beyond what we know for certain (or at least, we're very explicit about the claim's certainty). And what we know for certain in medical science is actually quite small. People, both for clout and for profit, make up bullshit when there are gaps in knowledge.
"Believing science", as stated a few times in this article, should actually be framed as: reserving judgement until we have evidence. We should have a bit more respect and patience for the process of acquiring actual knowledge. And people who make claims beyond what we actually know should be held accountable culturally (and financially) for being liars.
Re: Ivermectin: Much More Than You Wanted to Know
#9Okay it was too long for me and I got side tracked. Is his opinion in the end that ivermectin helps if you have worms? I got to the point where he talked about the studies showing no benefit were all from areas with low prevalence of worms and the studies showing benefits were all places with high prevalence of worms.
It looks like it definitely helps if worms are a problem, and maybe possibly helps without, to the extent that further research is justified, but not so much that we should dose the world with ivermectin just in case.
Re: Ivermectin: Much More Than You Wanted to Know
#10[deleted]