Anyone who has followed Alexandros will find this new response deeply disingenuous and unsatisfying, but it is par for Scott's MO when he throws out his whole rationalist dogma to just go with his gut:
1. Decent steelman review of the opposing side
2. Humorous and sincere response
3. Very lengthy review of some individual points with apparent concessions
4. Brief hand waving dismissal of the strongest and most relevant points (in this case the fundamental problems with the large industry funded studies that suffer conflicts of interest and which used *materially different protocols* from the studies on IP-protected drugs)
5. Quick, poorly-defended Hail Mary (i.e. parasites, new studies)
6. Non-sequitur conclusion and declaration of *even greater* victory.
This has been an especially interesting debate because Scott is rhetorically much more effective while Alexandros has been the dutiful rationalist. I can see why skimmers side with Scott.
I'm a tough customer for you though because I'm a) a long time SSC fan and b) close enough to Pharma to know that it's composed of true believers and the bias and corruption is a complex interaction, not a Dr. Evil scenario.
There's a much larger pool of people who never heard of SSC and think Big Pharma is evil from top to bottom.
You must not have heard my takes that Neuralink Is Good, Actually. Not quite the thing to say when you want to grift off the "back to nature" crowd.
Thankfully this isn't an exercise in audience gathering. It's an exercise in capable mind gathering. And in case this makes me sound like an ass, i hope my upcoming posts will help elucidate.
Besides, we are more similar than you might imagine. Other than a longtime SSC/LW fan, I have a hardwired heuristic that "everyone is the hero of their own story". So models that require entire industries to be populated by monsters are thrown out on sight. Even the stuff I'm alleging about the TOGETHER trial are the kinds of things that a single statistician in collaboration with a PI could come up with, and maybe tell themselves at the time that they're accelerating the inevitable demise of ivermectin to make sure there is no obstacle to developing vaccine herd immunity (for instance).
Let me rephrase that. I'm a tough customer because there seem to be so few of me. In fact our thinking is so well aligned that it doesn't bode well for a huge audience. So I'm glad that you're seeking to uncover reality, not become the next SSC!
I'll have to go back and make sure that I've read everything you've written because you're doing the critical work that's desperately needed. Something is really broken with our information systems and we need a stronger signal rather than just opposing noise. We're in the cockpit of a 747 and all of the devices are being manipulated or otherwise malfunctioning so we need to figure out our position, bearing and altitude not just smash all of the instruments.
I also appreciate watching you react to how shockingly quickly the world went crazy and even worse how the people who you'd expect to resist just enthusiastically jump on board and go along with it all.
Among the people in my circles that I considered smart and relatively independent thinkers, precious few expressed even the mildest reaction to all of the insanity. "Oh, yeah I agree that there shouldn't be censorship, but wow, that misinformation is a big problem." or "what do you want to say that you can't say?". They're completely oblivious to the problem of getting reliable information when you can't get an informed 2nd opinion.
To cite one example, of the few people I know who didn't take any mRNA shots, almost all them were generically suspicious of Big Pharma or were into some sort of alternative healing or something. I can't think of anyone who got there by being a voracious information consumer and rationalist. None of them were alarmed that the EUA included 15 year-olds right out of the gate despite the insanity of that risk/reward calculation. No one was concerned that the CDC was publishing studies that were absolute garbage with abstracts and news media reports that completely misrepresented the findings. No one was that concerned about the censorship. At best they might harp on media bias not the bipartisan info-bubble.
Worse yet the people with the capacity to understand this were non-plussed or even annoyed that I would bring it up. It's really made me rethink my basic model of human epistemology. I now think that intelligence is almost completely orthogonal to truth seeking or curiosity. So yes, finding one of those people with the Nietzschean curse of being hardwired to seek truth over power (and power-seeking comes in many forms, not least social approval) is a rare pleasure.
1: I dont think you can discuss publication bias in this context, without mentioning unitaid/hill/lawrie. Are you sure its those 3 well funded dots at the bottom of the graph you want to take as the baseline for funnel plot truth? Dont be too quick to say no, because im sure there will be plenty of 20M grants for you otherwise!
2: Where did those supposed 100s of unpublished negative IVM trials go? While I agree publication bias is a thing; how would you have been able to hide those, in a climate like this? Those trials involve a lot of researchers, and many more participants. Can we identify a single one such unpublished trial? Every single negative IVM study was shown as trending on google news to me for days; even if no journal would even touch it! (cough TOGETHER) This has never happened with any drug (nor positive IVM trials!) Thats the climate we are actually talking about. It really stretches my credulity beyond belief that those 100s of unpublished studies balancing out the funnel plot actually existed. It is hard to quantify these things using generally agreed upon methodology; yet I rank this as about a similar certainty as 'cogity, ergo sum'.
3: cannabis is a massive for profit industry in the US (10B a year), with a lot of people defending it with literal religious zeal. Whats wrong with these people, that they cant just un-publish a few negative trials? Are they too high on their own supply for such contrived plans? Or is 'publication bias' indeed far too simplistic an explanation?
- He is still an order of magnitude more hyped about the worms hypothesis then I am
- Some strong words being levelled at ivmmeta. It would be nice if those were balanced out with an actual critique, beyond 'I dont like their outcomes'. It seems to me ivmmeta and sister sites results are broadly consistent with the notion, that many of the nasty sides of covid are excessive inflammation, and lo and behold; most widely agreed upon inflammation-modulators show measurable effect against bad outcomes.
Fair enough... I was trying to be generous and emphasise the positive; but if the goal is to converge on a shared understanding, all we have is confirmation that this is not going to happen.
Its a shame that the discussion gets stuck in the technical details (and a lack of willingness on Scotts part to actually put in the time to get to the bottom of those); the more interesting questions are the high level ones, in my opinion. How to look at publication bias; how much trust to put in large studies, how much trust to put in experts, and so on. I think at the end of the day thats where the fundamental disagreements are; and on the bright side we have gotten some meaningful debate on those subjects.
I wish I could muster your good faith. I chased down the worms rabbit hole for Scott. I chased down the fraud rabbit hole. I even explained, in excruciating detail, all the conditions that have to be in place for a funnel plot to even enter the conversation. What does Scott do? He ignores everything I wrote, and throws up another funnel plot, without the analysis to go with it, with no information about inclusion criteria, what algorithm was used to compute it, nada. Just a funnel plot. And then, the certainty that it is publication bias.
As it turns out, I happen to have a way to check for publication bias. It will take some work, but I can do it. Is it worth my time though? Isn't it obvious that Scott will just say "OK fine maybe it's something else, now my confidence is increasing to 98%".
I should probably still do the work. But not because I expect Scott to care. I just can't see it. Maybe I've become too cynical.
No; I dont think you will get Scott to go deeper into detail; insofar as that was not implicitly obvious by his lack of reaction over the past years, he made that perfectly clear by owning up to the fact that actually reading your 21 pieces was too big of a commitment to the subject for him.
But still, I would classify this as 'meaningful debate' overall. Both for the lessons it contains about different peoples biases and priors, as well as the lessons it has thought me about funnel plots, as an example. (id never really given much thought to the subject until it came up here; and while I was always vaguely uncomfortable with them, I can articulate that discomfort much better now)
It's certainly not worth doing it to persuade SA or his band of defenders of the faith, but there's a much bigger audience and this level of rigor can persuade a handful of Brett Weinstein or Elon Musk types who are hard-wired for truth over conforming to the herd.
wrt ivmmeta; I also have mixed feelings about his somewhat backhanded compliment of their work.
He praises them for good presentation; as I think they should be praised. But its not just in presentation that they are ahead of the 'establishment'; it is in actually putting forward a coherent argument (flawed as you may believe it to be; looking forward to the details of the critique), that they are ahead of the establishment.
What *is* the position of the establishment on repurposed drugs? No, platitudes about drugs not being recommended for purposes for which they have not evaluated the evidence do not count. Nor do tweets about horse dewormers in a charming southern accent.
Please, give us anything! Make us submit a FOIA request for it, AND place it behind a paywall! But anything that may resemble a reasonably up to date official interpretation of the available evidence; id love to see it.
But the reality appears to be, that nothing resembling such a thing actually does exist. Whatever flaws ivmmeta may have, are arguably a bit of a distraction from that more salient point.
"But I erred on my earlier post by holding it up as “the” explanation for a large and heterogenous group of studies which were mostly looking at endpoints other than mortality, or as a counter to ivmmeta’s analysis which found positive results everywhere for everything through statistical incompetence."
I had to read it a few times, but it really sounds like the guy who pretended to do a meta-analysis with a t-test is accusing ivmmeta of statistical incompetence. With no substantiation whatsoever. Just throws it in there as an assertion. No big deal.
Nope, I got that. That what I meant to refer to when I said 'Some strong words being levelled at ivmmeta. It would be nice if those were balanced out with an actual critique, beyond 'I dont like their outcomes''.
I'm starting to think there is none. When I pushed Avi to explain his hatred of them, he described an extremely minor issue that didn't even feel worth chasing down, because even if he was 100% correct, it was totally within the realm of being arguable, and wouldn't move the conclusion at all. That has been the most substantial criticism I've come across. Everything else I've found, I let them know via their anonymous textbox, and most of the time it gets fixed within hours.
Right; the obvious proximate cause of negative sentiment towards IVMmeta, is that they so openly embarrass paywall-gated, credentialism-driven, 'I might give you the data one day' and 'ill think about updating mistakes if you put a gun to my head, maybe', type of science, and shows us what the ideals of science, wedded to modern publishing techniques, can be.
I've been thinking recently that the best case against ivermectin was impracticality. Giving a proper dose, length, and stage (early, during viral replication), it clearly works well. But maybe a lot of people wouldn't have sought treatment until inflammatory phase when the disease is much harder to treat. Probably still treatable but much more damage potential.
Now I'm seeing COVID PSAs all over national TV with celebrities telling us to "have a plan", "act fast", and "talk to your doctor about oral treatments". So it was practical if public health was the goal rather than free Pfizer marketing.
"No matter how cynical you are, you're still being naive."
I have not watched the video yet. Prefer to speedread transcripts for time. I did comment on Scotts piece after reading it, as I have the read 21 parts Alex wrote. My comment on his article is here. Same respectful sentiments to Alex really.
I have followed this since the start. In many respects, "can't see the wood for the trees" comes to mind. I am pro ivermectin but it is not available to me here in the UK so For prophylaxis I take Multivitamins, C, D3, zinc AND Quercetin as the ionophore. (Mercola Qurcetin articles and other studies show benefit).Got cold like symptoms once in 3 years. Never masked, never tested with PCR so I do not know if I had Covid. However, I now have parosmia so smell and taste ruined. Onion, garlic and certain toiletries are disgusting to me now. Meanwhile, not a hysterical Alex Jones type analysis....
https://21stcenturywire.com/2023/02/01/covid-19-vaccine-a-military-response-to-a-public-health-threat/ covers the framework and mechanism building on Katherine Watt and Sasha Latypova work around the bioweapon. Long but thorough. Far more pressing than a spat about a suppressed Nobel prize winning, cheap, safe and effective molecule that has been around for decades. Remember, EUAs predicated on no treatments available. Dont get me started on HCQ and the murderous Oxford overdosing trial. Dont worry after all is over we can Build Back Better. I mean us, not Schwab, Tedros, Gates, Fink and their cronies.
Unfortunately I saw this too late & Rumble does not work in France due to a conflict between France & Rumble ...
About Scott's answer. The problem is that even I lost the thread & patience to finish it. (And to be honest, your articles sometimes run in the same problem.) And I am very interested in this!
However, his conclusion seems odd after acknowledging several, imho important, errors that you pointed out. My biggest disappointment is that he acknowledges ivmmeta.com as a fantastic site but then does not use it in any way. It is a fantastic innovative tool that we never had before. E.g. he ignores the 30 newer studies since his article and of course he totally ignores all observational studies. If he does not believe the outcome of their automatic meta-study, he should indicate where they are wrong and ask them to correct. It is quite unbelievable that he does not leverage it in anyway.
My take therefore is that his take is still very much only based on intuition. However, I distinctly have the feeling that he will not touch this subject again. Ever. And also the commenters are not even remotely interested in finding out. There is a distinct sense of been there, done that, shut up.
Sadly, to me it looks like a failure of rationality if even Scott has to trust his gut feeling over actual analysis.
I've been running around with an idea for some time now. Twitter should organize a number of _courts_ every week. Topics could be selected by a way to raise money for the costs. The top funded topics would be elected. Twitter would then randomly choose 18 people for well paid jury duty. A professional judge would preside. The pro and con side would have professional lawyers, also paid for. It should follow a strict format. The proceedings should be available on video and all evidence online. I think this is the only way to provide a counterweight to the domination of these stories by a few interested parties. Maybe should send this to Elon Musk? Twitter courts! :-)
The lack of interest in the comments is the darkest of blackpills for me. Scott makes elementary errors that require only checking the sources to identify. Nobody cares. And if nobody is checking here, nobody is checking anywhere else, either. What's left of the rationality community are people who will sneer at Bret Weinstein while investing their lives' savings in FTX. Smart people who have made a deal with the powers that be to never delve into the dark corners, and even act as narrative enforcers when needed. That's what it feels like, anyway.
Yes, frustrating but a great illustration of why it's so much more important invest effort into freedom of speech and tolerance for those expressing wrong views rather than to try to establish the one true club focused on pure, untainted reason.
If there's one lesson I've learned from the Covid disaster, it's to be more respectful of the people that I've generally dismissed as anti-vaxxers or cranks based on my faith in the system.
Why is it rational to check the details of something that has no bearing on anything? It’s one thing if you have the power to use the conclusions in a meaningful way, but I struggle to see the argument that it’s rational for a powerless individual to spend more time on this subject vs the infinite other things they could be doing.
Leaving aside the life-saving potential of IVM, which is obviously a point of contention, sometimes people just like to flex their epistemological muscle; perhaps for intrinsic enjoyment, or in the hope those skills might come in useful at a later time.
Its the rationality of me here stating these obvious things that I question, now that I think of it... but hey my code isnt going to compile itself.
The lack of checking started with the original piece. Dozens of factual errors going unnoticed. And now, more errors, again unnoticed. And if you think that various large-platform influencers should be able to claim whatever they want and assume (correctly) that nobody in their supposedly rational and highly detail-oriented audience will notice, well, I disagree.
Basically you're missing the forest for the trees. The issue isn't ivermectin. The issue is the state of the rationalist community, both the leading voices and the audience. Epistemic hygeine has dropped through the floor.
I'm not saying everyone should be checking everything all the time. Just that I'd expect out of Scott's whole audience for *someone* to notice each of the several errors of fact and/or misrepresentation.
I don’t think you answered my question, and I don’t really think it’s relevant that you thought someone (other than yourself) would fact check it to a level you’d find satisfactory. Why is it rational to fact check some guys thoughts on a drug? I’d expect errors, that’s obvious. it’s not really illuminating to find some, nor what I would call rational.
I don’t think the rationality community is this monolithic entity that had made “its” beliefs clear on the matter. If you can point me to anything other than a lack of comments that meet whatever threshold you set on a blog post though, i’ll happily read up.
How can we recalibrate our info system if we don't know when it misfired? How do we adjust whom we trust or don't trust if we don't know if the info was right or wrong?
What says it was misfired? It only misfires if you implicitly believe everything you read as to be true, or in this case everything scott writes. That’s clearly not rational to start. Plus you can’t verify the truth of everything you come across. I’d say it’s better to focus on those things that have more actionable consequences than this.
Your reply made me realize something unfortunate about Scotts response.
On the one hand, he is trying to restrict the scope to settling questions about his original article; which is reasonable since we find that we are already running into the limits of peoples time investment with that.
But then on the other hand, he does make statements updating his overall belief in the efficacy of IVM, on the basis of some select pieces of newer data.
Now he has the rights to his opinions and he is allowed to update them on as select datapoints as he pleases; but it's a bit of a shame to drag that into an already complicated enough discussion. How he feels his original argument holds up, and how he feels about IVM today on the whole, are two quite different questions.
Precisely. My argument was simple. His original piece was broken in every way imaginable, should never have been published by a self-identifying rationalist, and should never have been tolerated by a community that calls itself rationalists, or even aspiring ones. "Yes but ever since then, let me tell you about these new studies that I'm totally interpreting correctly" has exactly zero value, especially after he admitted to making numerous very serious errors previously, and being out of his depth. "Yes but let me tell you about my hurt feelings" should never have come up by someone who is asking forgiveness for accusing others of fraud, even if he wasn't misrepresenting what I wrote. And yet, he didn't want to stick to the point.
'should never have been published by a self-identifying rationalist'
I diverge on that point. It may have contained many mistakes, and their rate of updating is less than stellar; nor did I find its original position/conclusion convincing. But I do see it as a genuine and worthwhile contribution to the discussion, that goes well beyond the time investment made by most. He was reasonably explicit in stating his biases; and I found it interesting to see where his biases led him. I much prefer that level of engagement to say, tweets about horse dewormer.
The second paragraph promised that he would show us how science works. What followed was anything but. And the folksy faux-bottom-up analysis was, as he admits now, irrelevant, as he is mostly interested in debunking his own conclusion. What's more, the appearance of effort and humility is what made most people who took that piece seriously update against ivermectin, falsely. I would have preferred a few tweets about horse dewormer. They would have been more honest.
Its true; "Y'all are not horses" is hard to argue with. :)
On a more serious note; yes, on a consequentialist level you may well argue, assuming the meaningful efficacy, (as I do) of IVM, and the substantial impact of his writing, that his article has cost lives.
But I dont want to hold that against Scott; I think thats on the readers. In a nutshell; what we got was a psychiatrists back of the envelope meta analysis; he concluded it technically was efficacious but that you shouldn't pay attention to that but leave such conclusions to the experts. (and big well funded studies as he added in his latest response; another prior I disagree with)
Indeed it may be hard to rhyme 'trust the experts' with the ideals of rationality; and indeed depending on your conception of rationality you can take that as support for the claim 'should never have been published by a self-identifying rationalist'. So maybe you are right about that; I wouldn't know since im much more of an empiricist myself.
Regardless, I did personally find positive value in his writing. I had seen someone try and tear down IVM in some level of detail; and I found it unconvincing. I find that a more satisfying state of affairs than just silence.
Did you ever do a written response and I missed it? Some people do still care about all this; and a written article would be a lot more digestible than your initial reaction.
Should we not all be able to agree that we can estimate an upper bound on the influence of publication bias, by separately funnelling pre-registered trials?
I suppose it also has its limits; pre-registered trial are likely later and bigger trials (and juicier target for buying of conclusions). But insofar as the pre-registered trials (including pre-registered and not0completed trials as presumed negative trials?) do not tell a different story, publication bias can not be the answer.
Anyone who has followed Alexandros will find this new response deeply disingenuous and unsatisfying, but it is par for Scott's MO when he throws out his whole rationalist dogma to just go with his gut:
1. Decent steelman review of the opposing side
2. Humorous and sincere response
3. Very lengthy review of some individual points with apparent concessions
4. Brief hand waving dismissal of the strongest and most relevant points (in this case the fundamental problems with the large industry funded studies that suffer conflicts of interest and which used *materially different protocols* from the studies on IP-protected drugs)
5. Quick, poorly-defended Hail Mary (i.e. parasites, new studies)
6. Non-sequitur conclusion and declaration of *even greater* victory.
This has been an especially interesting debate because Scott is rhetorically much more effective while Alexandros has been the dutiful rationalist. I can see why skimmers side with Scott.
It means a lot to see that at least *some* people are tracking. I appreciate it's not easy at this point.
I'm a tough customer for you though because I'm a) a long time SSC fan and b) close enough to Pharma to know that it's composed of true believers and the bias and corruption is a complex interaction, not a Dr. Evil scenario.
There's a much larger pool of people who never heard of SSC and think Big Pharma is evil from top to bottom.
You must not have heard my takes that Neuralink Is Good, Actually. Not quite the thing to say when you want to grift off the "back to nature" crowd.
Thankfully this isn't an exercise in audience gathering. It's an exercise in capable mind gathering. And in case this makes me sound like an ass, i hope my upcoming posts will help elucidate.
Besides, we are more similar than you might imagine. Other than a longtime SSC/LW fan, I have a hardwired heuristic that "everyone is the hero of their own story". So models that require entire industries to be populated by monsters are thrown out on sight. Even the stuff I'm alleging about the TOGETHER trial are the kinds of things that a single statistician in collaboration with a PI could come up with, and maybe tell themselves at the time that they're accelerating the inevitable demise of ivermectin to make sure there is no obstacle to developing vaccine herd immunity (for instance).
Let me rephrase that. I'm a tough customer because there seem to be so few of me. In fact our thinking is so well aligned that it doesn't bode well for a huge audience. So I'm glad that you're seeking to uncover reality, not become the next SSC!
I'll have to go back and make sure that I've read everything you've written because you're doing the critical work that's desperately needed. Something is really broken with our information systems and we need a stronger signal rather than just opposing noise. We're in the cockpit of a 747 and all of the devices are being manipulated or otherwise malfunctioning so we need to figure out our position, bearing and altitude not just smash all of the instruments.
I also appreciate watching you react to how shockingly quickly the world went crazy and even worse how the people who you'd expect to resist just enthusiastically jump on board and go along with it all.
Among the people in my circles that I considered smart and relatively independent thinkers, precious few expressed even the mildest reaction to all of the insanity. "Oh, yeah I agree that there shouldn't be censorship, but wow, that misinformation is a big problem." or "what do you want to say that you can't say?". They're completely oblivious to the problem of getting reliable information when you can't get an informed 2nd opinion.
To cite one example, of the few people I know who didn't take any mRNA shots, almost all them were generically suspicious of Big Pharma or were into some sort of alternative healing or something. I can't think of anyone who got there by being a voracious information consumer and rationalist. None of them were alarmed that the EUA included 15 year-olds right out of the gate despite the insanity of that risk/reward calculation. No one was concerned that the CDC was publishing studies that were absolute garbage with abstracts and news media reports that completely misrepresented the findings. No one was that concerned about the censorship. At best they might harp on media bias not the bipartisan info-bubble.
Worse yet the people with the capacity to understand this were non-plussed or even annoyed that I would bring it up. It's really made me rethink my basic model of human epistemology. I now think that intelligence is almost completely orthogonal to truth seeking or curiosity. So yes, finding one of those people with the Nietzschean curse of being hardwired to seek truth over power (and power-seeking comes in many forms, not least social approval) is a rare pleasure.
Agreed; it has been a wild ride.
Evil institutions tend to fill up with true believers because it's much easier to lie convincingly when you believe your own lies.
Funnel plot can also be due to politicized science. Big study = big money = orthodox result.
Ignoring ACTIV6 flaws should count as ignorance.
I've got an upcoming post or two that should make it abundantly clear that trusting the larger studies uncritically is a huge error. Probably so.
Good to see civil debate progress.
My initial takeaways from his response:
- We diverge on publication bias.
1: I dont think you can discuss publication bias in this context, without mentioning unitaid/hill/lawrie. Are you sure its those 3 well funded dots at the bottom of the graph you want to take as the baseline for funnel plot truth? Dont be too quick to say no, because im sure there will be plenty of 20M grants for you otherwise!
2: Where did those supposed 100s of unpublished negative IVM trials go? While I agree publication bias is a thing; how would you have been able to hide those, in a climate like this? Those trials involve a lot of researchers, and many more participants. Can we identify a single one such unpublished trial? Every single negative IVM study was shown as trending on google news to me for days; even if no journal would even touch it! (cough TOGETHER) This has never happened with any drug (nor positive IVM trials!) Thats the climate we are actually talking about. It really stretches my credulity beyond belief that those 100s of unpublished studies balancing out the funnel plot actually existed. It is hard to quantify these things using generally agreed upon methodology; yet I rank this as about a similar certainty as 'cogity, ergo sum'.
3: cannabis is a massive for profit industry in the US (10B a year), with a lot of people defending it with literal religious zeal. Whats wrong with these people, that they cant just un-publish a few negative trials? Are they too high on their own supply for such contrived plans? Or is 'publication bias' indeed far too simplistic an explanation?
- He is still an order of magnitude more hyped about the worms hypothesis then I am
- Some strong words being levelled at ivmmeta. It would be nice if those were balanced out with an actual critique, beyond 'I dont like their outcomes'. It seems to me ivmmeta and sister sites results are broadly consistent with the notion, that many of the nasty sides of covid are excessive inflammation, and lo and behold; most widely agreed upon inflammation-modulators show measurable effect against bad outcomes.
> Good to see civil debate progress
That's not what I see.
I see a dishonest rhetorical argument wrapped in this thick cloak of rationality and evenhandedness.
Fair enough... I was trying to be generous and emphasise the positive; but if the goal is to converge on a shared understanding, all we have is confirmation that this is not going to happen.
Its a shame that the discussion gets stuck in the technical details (and a lack of willingness on Scotts part to actually put in the time to get to the bottom of those); the more interesting questions are the high level ones, in my opinion. How to look at publication bias; how much trust to put in large studies, how much trust to put in experts, and so on. I think at the end of the day thats where the fundamental disagreements are; and on the bright side we have gotten some meaningful debate on those subjects.
I wish I could muster your good faith. I chased down the worms rabbit hole for Scott. I chased down the fraud rabbit hole. I even explained, in excruciating detail, all the conditions that have to be in place for a funnel plot to even enter the conversation. What does Scott do? He ignores everything I wrote, and throws up another funnel plot, without the analysis to go with it, with no information about inclusion criteria, what algorithm was used to compute it, nada. Just a funnel plot. And then, the certainty that it is publication bias.
As it turns out, I happen to have a way to check for publication bias. It will take some work, but I can do it. Is it worth my time though? Isn't it obvious that Scott will just say "OK fine maybe it's something else, now my confidence is increasing to 98%".
I should probably still do the work. But not because I expect Scott to care. I just can't see it. Maybe I've become too cynical.
No; I dont think you will get Scott to go deeper into detail; insofar as that was not implicitly obvious by his lack of reaction over the past years, he made that perfectly clear by owning up to the fact that actually reading your 21 pieces was too big of a commitment to the subject for him.
But still, I would classify this as 'meaningful debate' overall. Both for the lessons it contains about different peoples biases and priors, as well as the lessons it has thought me about funnel plots, as an example. (id never really given much thought to the subject until it came up here; and while I was always vaguely uncomfortable with them, I can articulate that discomfort much better now)
It's certainly not worth doing it to persuade SA or his band of defenders of the faith, but there's a much bigger audience and this level of rigor can persuade a handful of Brett Weinstein or Elon Musk types who are hard-wired for truth over conforming to the herd.
Just started watching your stream; and I see you made the same point wrt the 'principle of embarrassment', and publication bias.
wrt ivmmeta; I also have mixed feelings about his somewhat backhanded compliment of their work.
He praises them for good presentation; as I think they should be praised. But its not just in presentation that they are ahead of the 'establishment'; it is in actually putting forward a coherent argument (flawed as you may believe it to be; looking forward to the details of the critique), that they are ahead of the establishment.
What *is* the position of the establishment on repurposed drugs? No, platitudes about drugs not being recommended for purposes for which they have not evaluated the evidence do not count. Nor do tweets about horse dewormers in a charming southern accent.
Please, give us anything! Make us submit a FOIA request for it, AND place it behind a paywall! But anything that may resemble a reasonably up to date official interpretation of the available evidence; id love to see it.
But the reality appears to be, that nothing resembling such a thing actually does exist. Whatever flaws ivmmeta may have, are arguably a bit of a distraction from that more salient point.
You might have missed this part:
"But I erred on my earlier post by holding it up as “the” explanation for a large and heterogenous group of studies which were mostly looking at endpoints other than mortality, or as a counter to ivmmeta’s analysis which found positive results everywhere for everything through statistical incompetence."
I had to read it a few times, but it really sounds like the guy who pretended to do a meta-analysis with a t-test is accusing ivmmeta of statistical incompetence. With no substantiation whatsoever. Just throws it in there as an assertion. No big deal.
Nope, I got that. That what I meant to refer to when I said 'Some strong words being levelled at ivmmeta. It would be nice if those were balanced out with an actual critique, beyond 'I dont like their outcomes''.
I'm starting to think there is none. When I pushed Avi to explain his hatred of them, he described an extremely minor issue that didn't even feel worth chasing down, because even if he was 100% correct, it was totally within the realm of being arguable, and wouldn't move the conclusion at all. That has been the most substantial criticism I've come across. Everything else I've found, I let them know via their anonymous textbox, and most of the time it gets fixed within hours.
Right; the obvious proximate cause of negative sentiment towards IVMmeta, is that they so openly embarrass paywall-gated, credentialism-driven, 'I might give you the data one day' and 'ill think about updating mistakes if you put a gun to my head, maybe', type of science, and shows us what the ideals of science, wedded to modern publishing techniques, can be.
I've been thinking recently that the best case against ivermectin was impracticality. Giving a proper dose, length, and stage (early, during viral replication), it clearly works well. But maybe a lot of people wouldn't have sought treatment until inflammatory phase when the disease is much harder to treat. Probably still treatable but much more damage potential.
Now I'm seeing COVID PSAs all over national TV with celebrities telling us to "have a plan", "act fast", and "talk to your doctor about oral treatments". So it was practical if public health was the goal rather than free Pfizer marketing.
"No matter how cynical you are, you're still being naive."
I have not watched the video yet. Prefer to speedread transcripts for time. I did comment on Scotts piece after reading it, as I have the read 21 parts Alex wrote. My comment on his article is here. Same respectful sentiments to Alex really.
I have followed this since the start. In many respects, "can't see the wood for the trees" comes to mind. I am pro ivermectin but it is not available to me here in the UK so For prophylaxis I take Multivitamins, C, D3, zinc AND Quercetin as the ionophore. (Mercola Qurcetin articles and other studies show benefit).Got cold like symptoms once in 3 years. Never masked, never tested with PCR so I do not know if I had Covid. However, I now have parosmia so smell and taste ruined. Onion, garlic and certain toiletries are disgusting to me now. Meanwhile, not a hysterical Alex Jones type analysis....
https://21stcenturywire.com/2023/02/01/covid-19-vaccine-a-military-response-to-a-public-health-threat/ covers the framework and mechanism building on Katherine Watt and Sasha Latypova work around the bioweapon. Long but thorough. Far more pressing than a spat about a suppressed Nobel prize winning, cheap, safe and effective molecule that has been around for decades. Remember, EUAs predicated on no treatments available. Dont get me started on HCQ and the murderous Oxford overdosing trial. Dont worry after all is over we can Build Back Better. I mean us, not Schwab, Tedros, Gates, Fink and their cronies.
Unfortunately I saw this too late & Rumble does not work in France due to a conflict between France & Rumble ...
About Scott's answer. The problem is that even I lost the thread & patience to finish it. (And to be honest, your articles sometimes run in the same problem.) And I am very interested in this!
However, his conclusion seems odd after acknowledging several, imho important, errors that you pointed out. My biggest disappointment is that he acknowledges ivmmeta.com as a fantastic site but then does not use it in any way. It is a fantastic innovative tool that we never had before. E.g. he ignores the 30 newer studies since his article and of course he totally ignores all observational studies. If he does not believe the outcome of their automatic meta-study, he should indicate where they are wrong and ask them to correct. It is quite unbelievable that he does not leverage it in anyway.
My take therefore is that his take is still very much only based on intuition. However, I distinctly have the feeling that he will not touch this subject again. Ever. And also the commenters are not even remotely interested in finding out. There is a distinct sense of been there, done that, shut up.
Sadly, to me it looks like a failure of rationality if even Scott has to trust his gut feeling over actual analysis.
I've been running around with an idea for some time now. Twitter should organize a number of _courts_ every week. Topics could be selected by a way to raise money for the costs. The top funded topics would be elected. Twitter would then randomly choose 18 people for well paid jury duty. A professional judge would preside. The pro and con side would have professional lawyers, also paid for. It should follow a strict format. The proceedings should be available on video and all evidence online. I think this is the only way to provide a counterweight to the domination of these stories by a few interested parties. Maybe should send this to Elon Musk? Twitter courts! :-)
The lack of interest in the comments is the darkest of blackpills for me. Scott makes elementary errors that require only checking the sources to identify. Nobody cares. And if nobody is checking here, nobody is checking anywhere else, either. What's left of the rationality community are people who will sneer at Bret Weinstein while investing their lives' savings in FTX. Smart people who have made a deal with the powers that be to never delve into the dark corners, and even act as narrative enforcers when needed. That's what it feels like, anyway.
Yes, frustrating but a great illustration of why it's so much more important invest effort into freedom of speech and tolerance for those expressing wrong views rather than to try to establish the one true club focused on pure, untainted reason.
If there's one lesson I've learned from the Covid disaster, it's to be more respectful of the people that I've generally dismissed as anti-vaxxers or cranks based on my faith in the system.
For sure. Sounds like your story is similar to mine. I'd love to hear more.
'What's left of the rationality community are people who will sneer at Bret Weinstein while investing their lives' savings in FTX.'
Put that on a tile.
In moments like these, it is good to remember that you should never judge any period in history, by the median homo sapiens.
Why is it rational to check the details of something that has no bearing on anything? It’s one thing if you have the power to use the conclusions in a meaningful way, but I struggle to see the argument that it’s rational for a powerless individual to spend more time on this subject vs the infinite other things they could be doing.
Leaving aside the life-saving potential of IVM, which is obviously a point of contention, sometimes people just like to flex their epistemological muscle; perhaps for intrinsic enjoyment, or in the hope those skills might come in useful at a later time.
Its the rationality of me here stating these obvious things that I question, now that I think of it... but hey my code isnt going to compile itself.
The lack of checking started with the original piece. Dozens of factual errors going unnoticed. And now, more errors, again unnoticed. And if you think that various large-platform influencers should be able to claim whatever they want and assume (correctly) that nobody in their supposedly rational and highly detail-oriented audience will notice, well, I disagree.
Basically you're missing the forest for the trees. The issue isn't ivermectin. The issue is the state of the rationalist community, both the leading voices and the audience. Epistemic hygeine has dropped through the floor.
I'm not saying everyone should be checking everything all the time. Just that I'd expect out of Scott's whole audience for *someone* to notice each of the several errors of fact and/or misrepresentation.
I don’t think you answered my question, and I don’t really think it’s relevant that you thought someone (other than yourself) would fact check it to a level you’d find satisfactory. Why is it rational to fact check some guys thoughts on a drug? I’d expect errors, that’s obvious. it’s not really illuminating to find some, nor what I would call rational.
It is rational to believe that the rationality community cares about the accuracy of its beliefs. It's kinda the brand.
I don’t think the rationality community is this monolithic entity that had made “its” beliefs clear on the matter. If you can point me to anything other than a lack of comments that meet whatever threshold you set on a blog post though, i’ll happily read up.
How can we recalibrate our info system if we don't know when it misfired? How do we adjust whom we trust or don't trust if we don't know if the info was right or wrong?
What says it was misfired? It only misfires if you implicitly believe everything you read as to be true, or in this case everything scott writes. That’s clearly not rational to start. Plus you can’t verify the truth of everything you come across. I’d say it’s better to focus on those things that have more actionable consequences than this.
Your reply made me realize something unfortunate about Scotts response.
On the one hand, he is trying to restrict the scope to settling questions about his original article; which is reasonable since we find that we are already running into the limits of peoples time investment with that.
But then on the other hand, he does make statements updating his overall belief in the efficacy of IVM, on the basis of some select pieces of newer data.
Now he has the rights to his opinions and he is allowed to update them on as select datapoints as he pleases; but it's a bit of a shame to drag that into an already complicated enough discussion. How he feels his original argument holds up, and how he feels about IVM today on the whole, are two quite different questions.
Precisely. My argument was simple. His original piece was broken in every way imaginable, should never have been published by a self-identifying rationalist, and should never have been tolerated by a community that calls itself rationalists, or even aspiring ones. "Yes but ever since then, let me tell you about these new studies that I'm totally interpreting correctly" has exactly zero value, especially after he admitted to making numerous very serious errors previously, and being out of his depth. "Yes but let me tell you about my hurt feelings" should never have come up by someone who is asking forgiveness for accusing others of fraud, even if he wasn't misrepresenting what I wrote. And yet, he didn't want to stick to the point.
'should never have been published by a self-identifying rationalist'
I diverge on that point. It may have contained many mistakes, and their rate of updating is less than stellar; nor did I find its original position/conclusion convincing. But I do see it as a genuine and worthwhile contribution to the discussion, that goes well beyond the time investment made by most. He was reasonably explicit in stating his biases; and I found it interesting to see where his biases led him. I much prefer that level of engagement to say, tweets about horse dewormer.
The second paragraph promised that he would show us how science works. What followed was anything but. And the folksy faux-bottom-up analysis was, as he admits now, irrelevant, as he is mostly interested in debunking his own conclusion. What's more, the appearance of effort and humility is what made most people who took that piece seriously update against ivermectin, falsely. I would have preferred a few tweets about horse dewormer. They would have been more honest.
Its true; "Y'all are not horses" is hard to argue with. :)
On a more serious note; yes, on a consequentialist level you may well argue, assuming the meaningful efficacy, (as I do) of IVM, and the substantial impact of his writing, that his article has cost lives.
But I dont want to hold that against Scott; I think thats on the readers. In a nutshell; what we got was a psychiatrists back of the envelope meta analysis; he concluded it technically was efficacious but that you shouldn't pay attention to that but leave such conclusions to the experts. (and big well funded studies as he added in his latest response; another prior I disagree with)
Indeed it may be hard to rhyme 'trust the experts' with the ideals of rationality; and indeed depending on your conception of rationality you can take that as support for the claim 'should never have been published by a self-identifying rationalist'. So maybe you are right about that; I wouldn't know since im much more of an empiricist myself.
Regardless, I did personally find positive value in his writing. I had seen someone try and tear down IVM in some level of detail; and I found it unconvincing. I find that a more satisfying state of affairs than just silence.
Did you ever do a written response and I missed it? Some people do still care about all this; and a written article would be a lot more digestible than your initial reaction.
One more beating of this dead horse (dewormer):
Should we not all be able to agree that we can estimate an upper bound on the influence of publication bias, by separately funnelling pre-registered trials?
I suppose it also has its limits; pre-registered trial are likely later and bigger trials (and juicier target for buying of conclusions). But insofar as the pre-registered trials (including pre-registered and not0completed trials as presumed negative trials?) do not tell a different story, publication bias can not be the answer.
There is publication bias relating to registered trials that were not published though. I have some ideas how to handle this.
You've not started yet, right? Don't see anything.