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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

#621

Post by throwawaycuriou »

toolz wrote: post #610
throwawaycuriou wrote: post #606

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Happy opposite day. Aside from all the other words, it ends in summary with a first item of 'Ivermectin doesn’t reduce mortality in COVID a significant amount'.

the final study list he compiled shows 80-85% confidence for Notably though, at no point does the author even suggest it doesn't work - just that the statistical significance isn't high

I'm not sure where you're reaching 'hundreds and hundreds of thousands', perhaps because there's a big range between zero and thirty percent.

In medical trials, statistical significance is the milestone to reach before broadly claiming something 'works'. Dozens of other treatments were put through trials. Some had promising initial results. Most didn't work.

Re: Ivermectin: Much More Than You Wanted to Know

#622

Post by pdonis »

rootusrootus wrote: post #432
pdonis wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1. Be 100% accurate and risk confusing people 2. Be strategic about it and for the greater good. Humans have a very poor track record at actually advancing any "greater good" when they choose option 2. In practice, "the greater good" turns out to be whatever helps those particular humans keep their power and status. That's why option 1 is the only acceptable one. > We need a narrative and the cost is accuracy. If t…

I feel like your underlying assumption here is that the average human has a similar level of intelligence and critical thinking skills as the average HN community member. At the risk of coming across as extremely snobby, that just isn't true at all.

> I feel like your underlying assumption here is that the average human has a similar level of intelligence and critical thinking skills as the average HN community member.

No. My underlying assumption is that my country (the US) is supposed to be a free country, where people are expected to make their own decisions and manage their own lives. If a significant fraction of people aren't capable of doing that, then, as I said in another post downthread, that's a problem, yes, but it's not a problem that can be fixed by just telling everyone to trust the experts. That makes the problem worse, not better.

Re: Ivermectin: Much More Than You Wanted to Know

#623

Post by pdonis »

rootusrootus wrote: post #432
pdonis wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1. Be 100% accurate and risk confusing people 2. Be strategic about it and for the greater good. Humans have a very poor track record at actually advancing any "greater good" when they choose option 2. In practice, "the greater good" turns out to be whatever helps those particular humans keep their power and status. That's why option 1 is the only acceptable one. > We need a narrative and the cost is accuracy. If t…

I feel like your underlying assumption here is that the average human has a similar level of intelligence and critical thinking skills as the average HN community member. At the risk of coming across as extremely snobby, that just isn't true at all.

> At the risk of coming across as extremely snobby, that just isn't true at all.

If you think the people who grow our food, make our clothes, build our houses and cars, fix our plumbing and heating and air conditioning when it breaks, run our electrical wiring safely, run the utility plants that provide our power and water and sewage disposal, and do the thousands of other things that are necessary to keep our technological society working, have less intelligence and common sense than you do, you don't come across to me as snobby, just woefully uninformed.

Re: Ivermectin: Much More Than You Wanted to Know

#624

Post by jacquesm »

mcguire wrote: post #615
judahmeek wrote: post #537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I don't remember that. Can you link to an archived news article saying this?

" In another promising medical development, the biotechnology company Moderna has announced its COVID-19 vaccine could be up to 94.5% effective. The news comes a week after Pfizer announced its vaccine could be up to 90% effective based on a similar, early analysis from its Phase 3 trial. " ( https://abcnews.go.com/Health/moderna-announces-initial-phas... ) " And then there were three. U.K. pharmaceutical giant Astra…

Note the 'could'. Which of course everybody skips.

Re: Ivermectin: Much More Than You Wanted to Know

#625

Post by danans »

azinman2 wrote: post #540
danans wrote: post #491

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody claims it to be a scientific statement. It's just a best practice in many circumstances.

What’s a better practice is to explain the rationale per situation, what is known and what is not known. The right turned science into a culture war flashpoint, which meant the left blindly preaches “believe in science” as if it’s about faith. This is all very disingenuous and not at all what science is actually about. It’s very unfortunate that Covid started under trump because being anti-science was part of his mar…

> The right turned science into a culture war flashpoint, which meant the left blindly preaches “believe in science” as if it’s about faith.

These two perspectives are not equivalent opposites though.

"Believe in science" is not a religious statement.

It is a shorthand for "trust in the scientific institutions that have proven their track record via decades of public health progress, and not in anti-scientific rhetoric with a culture war agenda".

That concept wasn't even controversial on most of the political right until their recent nationalist turn.

Re: Ivermectin: Much More Than You Wanted to Know

#626

Post by caffeine »

jacquesm wrote: post #586
azinman2 wrote: post #571

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except in this case the dewormer is the central focus of the study. The relationship between worms in the population and its influence on covid outcomes makes that highly relevant to the publications. If it's known to be present in the general public, then not controlling for that in your study is just shoddy science.

More likely: a case of wishful thinking. Need miracle cure, found miracle cure, look no further.

Wishful thinking IS shoddy science

Re: Ivermectin: Much More Than You Wanted to Know

#627

Post by jacquesm »

pdonis wrote: post #622
rootusrootus wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like your underlying assumption here is that the average human has a similar level of intelligence and critical thinking skills as the average HN community member. At the risk of coming across as extremely snobby, that just isn't true at all.

> I feel like your underlying assumption here is that the average human has a similar level of intelligence and critical thinking skills as the average HN community member. No. My underlying assumption is that my country (the US) is supposed to be a free country, where people are expected to make their own decisions and manage their own lives. If a significant fraction of people aren't capable of doing that, then, as…

> is supposed to be a free country

That's highly dependent on a bunch of stuff that you can not choose at birth. For some variations of those you are going to find yourself decidedly less free than others.

Agreed that blind trust in experts makes the problem worse - in principle. But with hysteria just around the corner (of which the wishful thinking that a cheap and common cure exists is one exponent) I can see why authorities chose to try to massage the message. Where they wrong? Probably, in the general case, yes. Were they wrong in this case? Possibly, but I would not be too sure of that, taking into account that even the highest levels of politics were actively spreading mis-information against informed scientific consensus. If we actually had trusted the experts things would likely look a lot better. But instead, we outsourced our trust and hence our decision making to committees, politicians and the lens of the media.

The fact that every country acted on its own was yet another confounding factor, if this had been a giant synchronized operation then it likely would have worked out differently as well. Even today we are still seeing giant differences between countries, rather than that the rich countries structurally help the poor.

Re: Ivermectin: Much More Than You Wanted to Know

#628

Post by tuatoru »

jacquesm wrote: post #612
tuatoru wrote: post #605

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ivermectin is cheap and out of patent. Cui bono?

Sorry, but no. "Ivermectin works" is the standard, not who benefits financially from some other medication.

I don't understand how that's relevant to a discussion about conflicts of interest.

If someone is promoting Ivermectin, how do they benefit from that given that anyone else can jump in and take away any increase in sales?

Re: Ivermectin: Much More Than You Wanted to Know

#629

Post by ImaCake »

commandlinefan wrote: post #354
roenxi wrote: post #6

This 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.

> This is exactly the sort of thing that YouTube, Twitter, et al are suppressing I fear that if it had any name except Scott Alexander's attached to it, it would have been flagged/dead on here within a few minutes as well.

This is maybe true. But I have seen more than a few dubious COVID articles gain traction on HN. There are several times I have tried to clarify basic statistical points as well. So it’s not a given that it would have been flagged/dead.

Re: Ivermectin: Much More Than You Wanted to Know

#630

Post by trhway »

The generic broad anti-viral props of ivermectin seems to have been established during the last decade https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016635422... so it isn't out of the blue that it may work as anti-covid, though whether it rises to a clinical effect that i guess is the question right now. To me it looks like the small positive clinical effect reported in many places matches that generic broad anti-viral props, and it also shows that it isn't a "cure", at least not in the current form. So all this drama is kind of strange - why not prescribe to the patients who want it? Not that doctors have anything better to offer anyway, and the patients will get a deworming as a bonus.
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