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Sorry, I don't engage in obvious falsehoods.
I have so many Kremlin apologists doubting that MH17 happened. I don't have time and energy to respond to all this. It is not very productive use of my time.
Doubting Bucha when we have so much confirmed evidence is pointless. It is what before we used to call FUD at the start of internet. I am that old.
That argument is as relevant to this topic as if I brought up Ukraine apologists doubting that Azov is led by neonazis as an argument against a Bucha massacre.
I'm pretty sure the term was around long after the average Mottizen (wasn't our average age in the mid-thirties last time anyone polled?) started using the internet.
Anyway, I actually reviewed the Wikipedia page before making my initial response, and from what I can tell, there is still no evidence of more than some tens of victims from any party that is not either directly controlled by pro-Ukrainian interests or citing their numbers. We used to have mechanisms to get neutral information in these situations (e.g. the Indian observers in the Korean war, who also uncovered a lot of BS that was and is sometimes still being treated as fact in US reporting - just compare the account of the Geoje uprising in "This Kind of War" to what has by now even made it into the Wikipedia article); if this case is so clear-cut, why is nobody inviting a neutral party to investigate here?
As I said, I rest my case. You will probably ask next why no neutral party investigates ivermectin?
Are you unable to make your case without insinuating that those who disagree must also hold some other beliefs (that you presumably find it easier to argue against)? Unfortunately for you, I am not an Ivermectin believer.
Ivermectin is a good test how serious the person is. Obviously we all might have different beliefs, some of them will be wrong and others will be correct. I wouldn't disqualify anyone on that. But ivermectin issue is such a low bar that I use it as a filter whether a person takes time to verify his own opinions. I am sorry if it offends some.
It's not offensive really, just intellectually dishonest.
If you had any conviction you'd let your beliefs stand on their own without the need for ad hominem.
Filtering kooks not to waste your time may be appropriate in a lot of settings. Not here.
Believing ivermectin to be a cure for covid is intellectually lazy. Thanks for helping me to formulate what I meant with that.
But what does it mean to be intellectually dishonest? How is it different from just not being honest?
The ivermectin enjoyers that I know were autistically combing through every study on the topic. Biased, stubborn, arrogant... there are many things one could call them before "intellectually lazy" starts making any sense.
It is mostly done with tribal mentality. It is common for people to have an idea, then search on pubmed scientific articles that support their idea.
I have to explain and again why this doesn't work. Mostly because you even start searching with keywords to support your idea. If you tried to search with keywords that would reject the idea, you would get articles that reject theses ideas.
The correct way is to start with neutral assumption and do real meta study. It is hard, very hard, take a lot of time. In most cases you are not able to do that. You have to admit that at some point that you don't have that much time, energy and probably even understanding to properly read even one study. Then you have to learn how to use secondary sources that summarizes meta studies, evaluate those sources, assign how much you trust them.
“Do your own research” is a good thing, but the problem with that is that you need to do your own research, correctly and not some half-assed version of it. Maybe laziness it is not the correct word. To me it is like building a house, you need to work hard, do it properly. Some people might just stick some wood in the ground, put a cover on top and call it a house. He just build a hut and even that was not good. You need an honesty to admit that you didn't do a good job. I don't know how to teach that. For me first it took 2 weeks to read one simple study. Even when it seems I understand it all, it wasn't the case. The scientific studies are written in a peculiar language and not a way that can be easily understood.
At university I started with simple assignments, like is polymorphism of beta-2 adrenoreceptors relevant for differentiating asthma treatments. Read a lot of studies, many positive. But the final conclusion, at current level of knowledge it cannot be done. You have to get used that most such searches will have negative result. It is easier if you start with null hypothesis. It is a hard work to find something. Scott Alexander is doing fantastic work with such reviews but I am afraid that even he doesn't have enough time and substitutes quality with quantity. I trusted his review of mask studies but it was incomplete. Cochrane review overturned his conclusions. But it wasn't possible for him to do in a few days what a group of dedicated and paid experts did during several months.
Contrarians sometimes challenge – how can you prove that earth is flat? It is actually a very good question in epistemology. You have limited resources to do actual experiments, travel to space and look at earth from outside. You only have access to the library. What are the methods to judge which information you can trust and why and which is not trustable. It opens whole philosophy of science, all about scientific paradigms and so on. Even scientists and engineers studying the actual things very deeply, like those who create and manage GPS system, haven't thought about these things. They are inside the paradigm but cannot describe it outsiders. Just like a native speaker often is unable to explain even simple phonetics of their own language. They have internalized them so deeply that they are unable to under realize that. Once I asked a native Japanese speaker, a linguist in fact, why I hear that in certain words they omit one sound. And his reaction was what? They never realized this omission.
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