Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Regardless, this seems like a silly diatribe after the medical community has already investigated the Ivermectin idea to great lengths and at massive scale and concluded that any effects it might have are too small to be worth pursuing. It's weird to see someone writing volumes about re-litigating last years' amateur scientist social media battles. Many rationalists are driven by contrarianism and are the living em…
I used to think of myself as a rationalist, but after being wrong a few times in some passionate internet arguments I began to think about what it would mean to truly be a rationalist, and given my understanding of the fallibility of the human brain (evidenced by reproduced/reliable psychological studies), the best way to be rational would be to assume that I myself am not 100% rational (in the same sense that nobody…
In the end I think my issue that led me off it was that it just ended up being a) judgmental and b) like you, finding that I was just not right enough to justify it!
When I ran into more of those types (our types?) Who are a dime a dozen in a college engineering department my goto quip was:
The scientific method is the admission that rationality and logic are limited; they're just the first step — forming a hypothesis. The rest of it is about how your rationality and logic failed you.
I think this is partially why you find many rationalist and skeptic types not actually doing any science. They haven't had the humility beat into them by science yet, haha.