This is a public peer review of Scott Alexander’s essay on ivermectin. You can find an index containing all the articles in this series here. We’ve reached the part of the essay where Scott is ready to tell us how he really feels about the various prominent characters in this saga.
"This article is a monument to how truly wrong one can get things and not have most people notice. Most rationalists, even. The modern rationalist movement used to be about finding truth. Somewhere along the way it became about getting a high-end finance job so you can redirect resources to buying malaria nets. I’m exaggerating, but not by much."
My god. It feels like exposing the Wizard of Oz ... You clearly have brought more ammunition to the table than Biden donated to Zelensky but I am flabbergasted about the sheer quantity of weak spots you've found. I wonder if Scott felt the same pressure I see on other substack writers, to publish too frequently.
This part of your series is actually quite cathartic to read, to clean out the sad aftertaste of having read SA's original article all those months ago (and knowing its lasting impact). Thank you.
"After talking to Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz and other people who presumably watched “Thank You For Smoking” as a manual for life, he concluded “I’ve seen enough!” and got down to business, typing frantically."
Until encountering S.A. as an object of critique here some months ago, I did not know of Astral Codex, probably because my reading is directed to what I am interested in, so that I have no time for magazine-style online publications. Examining Astral Codex, I found a strong signal of Dark Triad attitudes. My experience in such assessments over fifty years as an adult has been extensive and accurate. Invariably when I ignored my inklings and did not proceed with caution, there were costs.
Additionally, I question the motives of such prolific production. And I find the writing style hurried, peripatetic, and often snarky. Astral Codex is everything that Do Your Own Research is not. S.A. being widely followed and Alexandros not is a sign that humanity will be unable to save itself.
So here's a funny bit of innumeracy that I first remember seeing in the Bell Curve but which SA also trots out in his Ivermectin piece. It betrays weak mathematical intuition that might explain why SA, despite his obvious verbal IQ, seems to struggle to grasp the Ivm picture:
"About half of Americans are young-earth creationists. I have nothing against these people, I don’t deliberately ostracize them - yet none of my closest hundred friends are in this category. There’s about an 0.5^100 = 10^-31 chance that would happen by coincidence. Some powerful combination of class, cultural, and geographic barriers prevent me from meeting them."
No, that just means that your friends are not selected randomly from the 330 million people in the country. Calculating the odds of selecting them randomly doesn't give you any insight into how "powerful" the filters are.
If Sally, the only member of the Anaheim women's softball club happens to be a woman, the odds of that happening by "coincidence" are 1 in 2. If all 64 people in the Bakersville women's club are women, the odds jump to a staggering 1 in 18,446,744,073,709,551,616! Clearly in Bakersville, there is a much more "powerful combination" of filters at work, right?
The deepest lesson of this saga:
"This article is a monument to how truly wrong one can get things and not have most people notice. Most rationalists, even. The modern rationalist movement used to be about finding truth. Somewhere along the way it became about getting a high-end finance job so you can redirect resources to buying malaria nets. I’m exaggerating, but not by much."
My god. It feels like exposing the Wizard of Oz ... You clearly have brought more ammunition to the table than Biden donated to Zelensky but I am flabbergasted about the sheer quantity of weak spots you've found. I wonder if Scott felt the same pressure I see on other substack writers, to publish too frequently.
This part of your series is actually quite cathartic to read, to clean out the sad aftertaste of having read SA's original article all those months ago (and knowing its lasting impact). Thank you.
Lol can’t believe you actually found a picture of worms in a funnel.
Thanks for writing these. What an unbelievably dark view of the world from Scott. Now it's time for me to forget but never forgive.
"Somewhere along the way it became about getting a high-end finance job so you can redirect resources to buying malaria nets." LOL
Thank you. This episode is so great
"After talking to Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz and other people who presumably watched “Thank You For Smoking” as a manual for life, he concluded “I’ve seen enough!” and got down to business, typing frantically."
Seriously, you saved the best burns for last. 🤣
Until encountering S.A. as an object of critique here some months ago, I did not know of Astral Codex, probably because my reading is directed to what I am interested in, so that I have no time for magazine-style online publications. Examining Astral Codex, I found a strong signal of Dark Triad attitudes. My experience in such assessments over fifty years as an adult has been extensive and accurate. Invariably when I ignored my inklings and did not proceed with caution, there were costs.
Additionally, I question the motives of such prolific production. And I find the writing style hurried, peripatetic, and often snarky. Astral Codex is everything that Do Your Own Research is not. S.A. being widely followed and Alexandros not is a sign that humanity will be unable to save itself.
So here's a funny bit of innumeracy that I first remember seeing in the Bell Curve but which SA also trots out in his Ivermectin piece. It betrays weak mathematical intuition that might explain why SA, despite his obvious verbal IQ, seems to struggle to grasp the Ivm picture:
"About half of Americans are young-earth creationists. I have nothing against these people, I don’t deliberately ostracize them - yet none of my closest hundred friends are in this category. There’s about an 0.5^100 = 10^-31 chance that would happen by coincidence. Some powerful combination of class, cultural, and geographic barriers prevent me from meeting them."
No, that just means that your friends are not selected randomly from the 330 million people in the country. Calculating the odds of selecting them randomly doesn't give you any insight into how "powerful" the filters are.
If Sally, the only member of the Anaheim women's softball club happens to be a woman, the odds of that happening by "coincidence" are 1 in 2. If all 64 people in the Bakersville women's club are women, the odds jump to a staggering 1 in 18,446,744,073,709,551,616! Clearly in Bakersville, there is a much more "powerful combination" of filters at work, right?
No. It's meaningless nonsense.