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Looks like I missed Scott's latest on the Alexandros front.
On a factual level, it's high-quality and it seems he comes surprisingly close to Alexandros' perceived effect size.
On a conversational level, I hope that he considers this final. From my comment on the article:
I only skimmed Scott's post and didn't read any of Alexandros because most of the stats and analysis stuff just goes over my head if I don't spend a lot of time trying to understand it, and covid's just never been a topic that really deeply interested me. My general conclusion is that Scott was right when he said he wasn't really qualified to do a big detailed analysis defending the establishment position on ivermectin, but also that he was right that it needed to be done and no one that was qualified was doing it. Scott's more of a 7/10 on analyzing lots of studies and 10/10 on conveying information in a concise, intellectually honest, entertaining way. Ideally for this sort of thing Scott could've outsourced the work of really analyzing which studies did a good job vs cheated and what the real results of each study were to an expert, then type of a blog post summarizing the results. But of course the problem with that is that it's pretty hard to know if the expert outsourced to is actually both competent enough and honest enough, since analyzing a couple dozen studies on covid is both very difficult and very prone to bias from the analyzer.
My main beef with this entire thing is that Alexandros included one study, which Scott acknowledged was decent, and which to me does seem to lift ivermectin out of the "works as dewormer only" pile into the "maybe could be useful" pile, and that's the Israeli study.
But Alexandros bangs on about this Cadegiani guy and his "studies" (and I put that in inverted commas for a reason) and this bloke is a total snake oil salesman:
Very easy to become a "worldwide expert" in a field where you're writing 70% of the articles. He moved on from ivermectin to an anti-androgen which first looked to be promising, but then oh dear the entire paper was withdrawn because of dodgy methodology, plus he's in trouble with the Brazilian government for getting permission to do a particular trial one way, then going off and doing it completely differently, with possibly bad results for patients who died.
If Alexandros stuck to "this one study is promising" instead of ploughing on with "everyone is WRONG except me" and "this batch of really badly done studies worldwide are EVIDENCE", I could be more easily convinced. As it stands, I thought ivermectin worked, if at all, due to reducing parasite load before Scott came to that conclusion, and I'm sticking to it even after the response to the rebuttal to the original.
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Here's Alexandros's live response, if anyone wants the other side of it.
No. It's pretty disappointing. At the very least he should be able to repeat Alexandros' arguments in a way that he will recognize as his own. He fails that repeatedly. Then doubling down on the whole Bounded Distrust framework is a major turn off as well.
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Do you really think Alexandros' main motivation was followers? I don't get that impression from him, I think he genuinely cares a lot (maybe too much) about this stuff. That said I suppose it's often quite easy to convince yourself of something when it's profitable to do so, so maybe there's not a clear dividing line between "doing it for clout" and "doing it because you care" when the incentives align.
No, I won’t say main motivation. What you say about incentive alignment is more likely correct.
Edit: since this response I’ve checked Alexandros’ blog. He’s diversified into blaming FTX, like all right-thinking rationalists, and to live-streaming his opinions on Sam Harris. I think it’s obvious that he enjoys playing a certain kind of policy wonk, and has found a ready audience.
Oh, great. Now he's gone full tinfoil hat. He was always anti the TOGETHER trial, now he's trying to claim that of course it didn't find anything beneficial for ivermectin because SINISTER CONSPIRACY? I don't know if it's because Bankman-Fried is enemy of the month or what, but this is scraping the bottom of the barrel.
I can only speculate that the alien abductions and repeated mindwiping have affected Alexandros badly. We can only speculate, after all, that things happened because of other things that people now want to cover up!
No. Can you please point me to where exactly he's saying that?
Why does it matter if TOGETHER got funding from Bankman-Fried, before it became known that FTX was a fraud? A lot of people received funding and donations and now have egg on their faces because of it. His argument seems to be that TOGETHER is trying to cover that up, because it looks bad, and if that looks bad, it means people won't trust them, and if people don't trust them, that means they don't trust the study. Indeed, he came right out and said they lied:
Hey, the study that didn't find a miracle cure effect for ivermectin? That study? The one Alexandros has been constantly criticising? Well now I'm just sayin', folks, not of course that TOGETHER can't be trusted because they took money they knew was the profits of fraud and then lied about it and that means they fiddled the study to come out that ivermectin was no good because FTX and EA and Big Pharma and billionaires and politicians and all that, but isn't it coincidental, hmmmm? That I was right all along that they're no good?
For the same reason it matters that Cadegiani looks like a Minecraft character. Which is to say, it doesn't, but it was a bit too good to pass on without comment. The thing that's driving me somewhat crazy about this conversation is the double standards. Why is it such a big deal Alexandros made fun of TOGETHER being funded by FTX in light everything Scott said in his post?
You're acting like that's his entire argument against TOGETHER. The TOGETHER trial was a clown show. If the same standards Gideon used to reject the other IVM studies were applied here, it should have been rejected many times over.
Because they did! What do you want him to say? For whatever it's worth he also pointed out in the article itself, and on twitter that they didn't fund the IVM branch of the trial.
If Scott was above these kind of swipes in this conversation, I'd see your point. But since he's not, I don't.
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Feels like he's dug himself too deep of a hole at this point. Not to say I'm positive he's wrong, but it seems that way. Going against your own pride, reputation, and financial and social incentives to recant years of blog posts on a single topic would be incredibly difficult for anyone.
It feels like no one bothers addressing any of his arguments, and that they were just waiting for Scott to write a response post so they can pretend it's the final word.
Look, way back when, for my sins I trawled through that Cochrane meta roundup of all the ivermectin and other possible cures studies, and the vast majority of them were shoddy, threw everything in so it's hard to say which if any had a positive effect, and the best effects constantly and consistently showed up in developing world countries and/or areas with high poverty levels and high parasitic infection levels (including the study from Florida - which is an area of high parasite load).
So the conclusion "ivermectin helps by reducing parasite load" is the reasonable one, not that "ivermectin has an anti-viral effect". The only study that would make me incline to the second one is the Israeli one, because that seems to have been carried out on a city population with high standards of living (on the other hand, it was formerly agricultural region, is to the west of the West Bank which does have high parasitic infection levels, and it may have included poorer/immigrant population in the study, I haven't looked into it deeply enough yet).
Alexandros ignores any comments to that effect and continues on with "all the studies show this works! Cadegiani shows it works!" while Cadigiani is a huckster and the other co-authors of his study all have bees in their bonnets about vaccination.
Frankly, if I were looking to buy a new kettle and looking for recommendations, I wouldn't trust Alexandros on that.
Ok, and the counter argument to that is that even if you throw out all the supposedly shoddy studies, you still have a signal, that the negative studies are just as shoddy if you hold them to the same standard, and that if the worms are responsible, we should see some evidence specifically in support of that hypothesis. You do have an advantage on me, in that I didn't actually look up all the relevant studies, but it's just weird how no one is responding to the points he's raising.
It's just bizarre to feel so strongly about him, but think Scott is ok at the same time.
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You know, just for that I'm going to read some more of his posts, because you seem to have accurately described my unconscious process. I'm pretty much in the "Ivermectin probably has little effect on Covid, and all the studies purportedly showing that are terrible." But I'll at least give him a chance to address that position.
Oh wow, wasn't expecting that. Kudos!
If you want to cut through the unrelated side swipes, and the minutiae, I'd say the core of the argument is that even if you remove the studies Gideon / Scott don't like you still have a strong pro-ivermectin signal, and that the worms hypothesis doesn't hold water. I don't know if I can point to a specific place this is well articulated, because 37 blog posts... but if you want to give him a fair shot, this is what I'd focus on.
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Scott's posts contain so much content that fully responding to him requires 37 parts (or a less exaggerated version thereof). You don't get to post something containing large numbers of arguments that would take enormous amounts of space to respond to and then complain that your opponents are using up enormous amounts of space in replying to it.
This is why people don't like Gish gallops, and it seems like a no-win demand. Don't respond to some of what Scott said, letting him win because of volume regardless of his argument quality, or respond and get people complaining that you wrote 37 parts.
Alexandros' fanboys kept turning up over on ACX and nagging Scott about when was he going to respond to Alexandros and had he seen the most recent studies and when was he going to admit he was wrong, publicly apologise to Alexandros, and use his influence and reach to spread the message about ivermectin and Alexandros being the only right person ever.
Now there are complaints that Scott's response was too thorough? There's no winning. Had he not dotted every i and crossed every t, the fanboys would have been back claiming "Aha, he never said anything about paragraph 98 of page 150 of part 19, that means he knows he's wrong but won't admit it!"
I normally really enjoy your posts, but you're acting very weird whenever this topic comes up. It's like everything you filtering everything you read about it through some fun-house mirror.
Netstack was making fun Alexandros posting a 37 part response. Jiro was criticizing Netstack for making fun of that, because how are you going to to respond to Scott's post without it escalating into a 37 part response? See here for a condensed version of Jiro's argument.
Somehow you take that to mean he's criticizing Scott for being too thorough... how?
I'm tired of this debate, as much as I'm tired of the HBD stuff. Whatever A says, B objects to, then A replies to B, then B rebuts A, then A - and so on and so on. Alexandros is convinced of ivermectin's effectiveness, let it lie there. The problem is the fanboys wanting Scott to do his Canossa moment and use his 'influence' to tell the entire Internet he was abjectly wrong and Alexandros was perfectly right and everyone should listen to Alexandros and give him the position of public intellectual.
I think right now everyone is entrenched in their positions (including me). Scott is honest and diligent enough to go "Okay, I said I'd respond and so I must do that" but it's never-ending. Just say on both sides "I've said what I've said, end of the entire matter" and let it die.
I'm tired of the HBD stuff as well, which is why you don't see me posting on it. This whole thing is bizarre to me, because the anti-Alexadros people seem to simultaneously want to take swipes at the guy, while refusing to engage his arguments.
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Funny, because I’ve made very similar arguments. One of the parties involved made a regular schedule of turning out new complaints, day after day, and it wasn’t Scott.
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Scott wrote a bunch because he was responding to a bunch, and he was responding to a bunch because a meta analysis just genuinely is a bunch, and a meta analysis was necessary to draw any conclusions at all because there was, at the time, no single RCT with solid enough procedures and a sufficiently large sample size to draw reliable conclusions from that alone.
I don't know that I'd use "gish gallop" to describe someone dropping a meta-analysis of dubious quality into the discussion, despite the structural similarity.
That said, I do think an adversarial collaboration would have been a better way at making their argument legible to everyone else than a series of blog posts sniping at each other.
In which case, you shouldn't be complaining that someone used 37 parts to talk about it! It's a bunch, and you can't fully discuss it without using 37 parts.
We're both talking about the paragraph
right? I took that more as a complaint of the form "21 posts is a number of posts that outweighs my desire to engage with this topic", not "writing 21 posts about this topic is bad". Complaining that something is a lot of work doesn't mean that you're saying that there's any specific thing that a specific person should have done to make the thing be less work, sometimes a complaint is just venting. And I think this is one of those times.
I was referring to this
where netstat seems to think that there's something wrong with Alexandros posting something long, because it's long.
Oh. Never mind then, I just fail at reading comprehension.
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