17 Comments
Sep 5, 2022·edited Sep 5, 2022Liked by Alexandros Marinos

While I don't consider the target of your critique to be a scientist, his biased mindset and dishonest methods are far from uncommon among academic scientists. A couple of anecdotes from my 30 years in academic biology.

Shortly after I retired, I was eating at a crowded cafe next to the university that generously gave me a doctorate. At the next table were a middle-aged man and a young man, the former apparently being the graduate advisor and the latter his grad student. The conversation consisted of the advisor recounting with evident pride how he had blocked an academic rival's publication and his participation in a symposium. The man was as physically repulsive as morally, and I easily imagined that his only pleasure in life was dirty dealing.

As an evolutionary ecologist, I often took up projects in subareas that were new to me. After all, evolution intersecting with ecology spans a huge range of phenomena. Usually in publishing I had some trouble with territorial reviewers, but always managed to satisfy editors. The worst reviewer corruption, however, was appalling. That fellow's review stated that if he were put on as an author and rewrote one section, then the paper could be accepted for publication.

An editor of a journal bragged to a group of grad students that he had rejected a manuscript because it used a one-sided t-test instead of a two-sided. Rejected, not requested a recalculation and resubmission of the manuscript.

There are plenty of people in science who, while as pacific as can be, display attitudes that would be attributed to anti-social personality disorder if they were physical acts rather than attitudes and tricks of the trade.

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Sep 5, 2022·edited Sep 5, 2022Liked by Alexandros Marinos

Thank you for all this great work. I just commented over at Scott's substack, urging him to read this and correct his article.

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Sep 5, 2022Liked by Alexandros Marinos

Haha! How can you expect to be taken seriously when there are two "Bad level 6" paragraphs? Someone who can't count up to 7 is not worth reading! <GMK-mode off>

One thing, though : it could be useful to explicit somewhere that every time you say "confidence interval", you specifically refer to the "95% confidence interval", i.e the interval inside which we're 95% confident the actual value of the risk ratio stands. A 90% confidence interval would be narrower, for example, and a 99% confidence interval much wider. (And a 100% confidence interval would go from 0 to infinite.)

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Sep 6, 2022Liked by Alexandros Marinos

The Ivermectin debacle is another in a series of public questions that have filled me with epistemological doom.

It's almost impossible for me to discover the truth and to make matters worse, in the last 6 years, Fiat censorship has reared its ugly head on the internet.

As a pest control guy, my newest approach is to simply guess that only truth that pushes back at centralized power is censored.

Therefore, it's easy to conclude that Ivermectin works, the jabs don't work and cause death, and that Covid was always overdiagnosed.

Maybe I'm wrong but I can't see how my epistemolgical approach is any worse than Scott Alexander's.

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Sep 6, 2022Liked by Alexandros Marinos

At first I thought this was going to be a beating on a dead horse. But I'm surprised there's a lot of attention to how to work and to details. I enjoy that the review of Scott work brings me gives me humility when reading someone else work. Since most of my hubris comes from my lack of knowledge.

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I feel like you already destroyed and buried his reputation. Now you're just dancing on his grave 🤣

That's reasonable to me. 👍

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Great article and this whole experience has been very enlightening because it really makes me question how gullible I can be when reading scientific-sounding people (as I felt when originally reading Scott's easy).

One quibble though on this:

> If we’re being strict about it, any evidence that emerged after this tweet should be considered tainted, given that this is a pretty direct threat for the careers of any perceptive scientist who sees it:

The linked FDA article does note, "the FDA has received multiple reports of patients who have required medical attention, including hospitalization, after self-medicating with ivermectin intended for livestock."

So the simpler explanation of that tweet is that some non-scientist that runs the FDA's social media was emphasizing that point in a catchy way.

I think the better argument about unscientific bias would be the media lying about Joe Rogan after Rogan mentioned Ivermectin, although that doesn't have nearly as direct a line to the government and/or Pharma companies.

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I'm afraid that as with everything related to the pandemic response this response to Alexander's piece is as far as its going to get. That for those that want to believe in the FDA and CDC and mainstream stances on all the issues, they get their studies and think pieces which are published and promoted full force. While those of us convinced that there was something to early treatments have works like this one, which spell it all out and affirm that there is more than enough evidence to to back our heterodox views. But this won't go mainstream and will only be circulated among those of us that already believed. At least this has helped me with my own sense making. Thanks.

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