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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   35470 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 30, 2023

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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:

gestalt vibes of untrustworthiness

Cue 37-part series from Alexandros explaining why Scott is Betraying Rationalism by including such a phrase.

I jest, but Alexandros has gotten so much mileage out of waging the culture war on this topic. He has worked very hard to frame his stance as simultaneously subversive and indignant. This shouldn't detract from the legitimate research he has collected. But it does predict his response to any high-profile conversation with Scott.

Anything Scott says can and will be used...not exactly against him, but for retweets and Substack follows. That does mean against him if and when Alexandros can frame it as punching up.

So I'll be satisfied if this is the end of the line. Scott has engaged, over and over again, with the factual scaffolding of Alexandros' arguments. The 5-10% chance is an adequate conclusion. Let Pascal and Omura wager accordingly.

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:

Dr. Cadegiani has become a worldwide expert in both Endocrinology and Sports Medicine fields, providing a unique endocrinological perspective to Physical Activity.

Dr. Cadegiani is the only author of the sole book in Overtraining Syndrome, the prevailing sport-related disease among amateur and professional athletes. He is also responsible for approximately 70% of the articles published in the field in the world in the last 05 years, and reviewer for more than 90% of the manuscripts in the field.

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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