I'm not particularly worried about COVID and the societal excesses of the response seem to have already died down, so I personally don't see much value in learning about a surprising therapy for it.
Ivermectin is used as a weapon against the right in the culture war. Whether the right is actually correct, and whether the left made baseless attacks against the right for political reasons, will be important as long as we have a left and right around.
But I think it is clear what the collective knowledge about Ivermectin was at the time. Whether we later learned (or will learn) that it actually works against Covid (or not) will not change anything about how justifies these attacks were.
We had a time when the best meta-analysis as evaluated on LessWrong was pro-Ivermectin and the institutions were anti-Ivermectin.
The question of whether to follow the highest quality published metastudies or the institutions in cases where those differ is an important one. If the highest quality published metastudy was right about ivermectin and the institutions wrong that's a lesson for the future.
If the institutions are wrong and generally suppress the use of generics for important illnesses that suggests we should invest more money into studying whether generics are useful for problems that arise.
Lastly, if Ivermectin works for COVID there's a decent chance that it also works for other viruses. If we have another pandemic it's important to know whether we should run trials to test whether Ivermectin helps or don't run those trials.
I for my part am already fairly convinced that the left makes baseless attacks against the right for political reasons. (Of course, the converse is also true.) Is it that important whether there is one more or one fewer example?
"Baseless attacks for political reasons" was only a rough description. Maybe "baseless attacks for political reasons, that are highly signal-boosted by the media and social media", would be closer.
But again: this was definitely done for political reasons [0] at a time when the evidence was still inconclusive.
Whatever we found out between then and now doesn’t change anything about that.
[0] There are of course more benign motivations one could assume, e.g. protecting people from what was perceived as “false cures” that would end up harming people.
Just because the evidence was inconclusive doesn't mean that the attack was unimportant. For one thing, it's a signal that anyone who does try to do actual research and produce actual evidence in the future would be mercilessly attacked. Even if there's little evidence at the moment, this is a huge deal.
ersatz
defective eudaimonia maximizer
Jiro 1yr ago
Politically, what matters is who controls the institution that determines who is right. I could list a hundred things about which the left is wrong and yet which have been ascertained as true by consensus reality. It has always been so, those who are familiar with Roman history know how much who determines what is true has always been the decisive force in politics.
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Notes -
Ivermectin is used as a weapon against the right in the culture war. Whether the right is actually correct, and whether the left made baseless attacks against the right for political reasons, will be important as long as we have a left and right around.
But I think it is clear what the collective knowledge about Ivermectin was at the time. Whether we later learned (or will learn) that it actually works against Covid (or not) will not change anything about how justifies these attacks were.
We had a time when the best meta-analysis as evaluated on LessWrong was pro-Ivermectin and the institutions were anti-Ivermectin.
The question of whether to follow the highest quality published metastudies or the institutions in cases where those differ is an important one. If the highest quality published metastudy was right about ivermectin and the institutions wrong that's a lesson for the future.
If the institutions are wrong and generally suppress the use of generics for important illnesses that suggests we should invest more money into studying whether generics are useful for problems that arise.
Lastly, if Ivermectin works for COVID there's a decent chance that it also works for other viruses. If we have another pandemic it's important to know whether we should run trials to test whether Ivermectin helps or don't run those trials.
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I for my part am already fairly convinced that the left makes baseless attacks against the right for political reasons. (Of course, the converse is also true.) Is it that important whether there is one more or one fewer example?
"Baseless attacks for political reasons" was only a rough description. Maybe "baseless attacks for political reasons, that are highly signal-boosted by the media and social media", would be closer.
But again: this was definitely done for political reasons [0] at a time when the evidence was still inconclusive.
Whatever we found out between then and now doesn’t change anything about that.
[0] There are of course more benign motivations one could assume, e.g. protecting people from what was perceived as “false cures” that would end up harming people.
Just because the evidence was inconclusive doesn't mean that the attack was unimportant. For one thing, it's a signal that anyone who does try to do actual research and produce actual evidence in the future would be mercilessly attacked. Even if there's little evidence at the moment, this is a huge deal.
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Politically, what matters is who controls the institution that determines who is right. I could list a hundred things about which the left is wrong and yet which have been ascertained as true by consensus reality. It has always been so, those who are familiar with Roman history know how much who determines what is true has always been the decisive force in politics.
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