To give an overview of what I believe is a reasonable bounded-rationality basis to dismiss this objection:
I am not equipped to evaluate the claims in Alexandros's post in detail without significant effort and time investment (despite being a working academic in a quantitative field).
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. It seems unlikely to me that even if something like the contents of this post became widely accepted as truth, the societal response next time something COVID-shaped happens would be much beter.
Superficially, it seems there is no particular reason why something like Ivermectin (an antiparasitic that apparently works by disrupting the metabolism of fairly complex multicellular parasites) would work against COVID (a virus). I have a strong prior on most medicines claimed to have a minor beneficial effect on popular therapeutic targets actually being completely ineffectual (as this has been my experience).
On the other hand, the "parasite load" story seems superficially plausible.
Due to the culture-war dimension of Ivermectin, whose efficacy the red tribe in the US has entangled its social status with (no point in recounting the way this happened here), there is an obvious motivation for members of that tribe to produce compelling-looking arguments for its efficacy. Since Alexandros posts around this community, he seems a priori likely to harbour Red sympathies.
Moreover, there is a "contrarian" tribe that is motivated by taking down the rationality-orthogonal "trust the science" wing of the blue tribe, and therefore would also derive utility from successfully Eulering in favour of Ivermectin. Many people seem to talk about the abrasiveness of Alexandros's tone. This increases the probability that he's Red or Contrarian and would therefore have the motive to come to his conclusion.
In short, a situation that seems fairly symmetrical to "read this long and extremely compelling essay by a Harvard academic who is also a Twitter superstar using Science and Logic to prove that Blank Slatism is true". If you had unlimited time and resources or a particularly high stake in finding out whether desirable qualities of humans are genetic, sure, by all means you ought to read it and analyse the argument. For most everyone else, it would be more rational to ignore the essay, leave your prior largely unshifted and spend the time it would take to read on something with higher expected utility, like planning tomorrow's healthy breakfast or getting on top of your todo list.
Things that could convince me to take the essay more seriously:
Establish that the author does not stand to benefit from Ivermectin working, e.g. has impeccable blue tribe credentials.
Establish that rehabilitating Ivermectin would benefit me personally a great deal.
Propose a plausible mechanism by which Ivermectin (specifically!) might work against COVID. Some general handwaving like "it modulates the way the immune system operates" won't work; lots of drugs do that, so I don't see why specifically the one that the Blues are raging against and the Reds are swearing will prove once and for all they should actually be in charge should be the one that happens to modulate it just right.
Relatedly, but harder, shift my prior regarding medicines that purport to do anything more complex than targeting one particular well-understood metabolic pathway not working.
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.
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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Notes -
To give an overview of what I believe is a reasonable bounded-rationality basis to dismiss this objection:
I am not equipped to evaluate the claims in Alexandros's post in detail without significant effort and time investment (despite being a working academic in a quantitative field).
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. It seems unlikely to me that even if something like the contents of this post became widely accepted as truth, the societal response next time something COVID-shaped happens would be much beter.
Superficially, it seems there is no particular reason why something like Ivermectin (an antiparasitic that apparently works by disrupting the metabolism of fairly complex multicellular parasites) would work against COVID (a virus). I have a strong prior on most medicines claimed to have a minor beneficial effect on popular therapeutic targets actually being completely ineffectual (as this has been my experience).
On the other hand, the "parasite load" story seems superficially plausible.
Due to the culture-war dimension of Ivermectin, whose efficacy the red tribe in the US has entangled its social status with (no point in recounting the way this happened here), there is an obvious motivation for members of that tribe to produce compelling-looking arguments for its efficacy. Since Alexandros posts around this community, he seems a priori likely to harbour Red sympathies.
Moreover, there is a "contrarian" tribe that is motivated by taking down the rationality-orthogonal "trust the science" wing of the blue tribe, and therefore would also derive utility from successfully Eulering in favour of Ivermectin. Many people seem to talk about the abrasiveness of Alexandros's tone. This increases the probability that he's Red or Contrarian and would therefore have the motive to come to his conclusion.
In short, a situation that seems fairly symmetrical to "read this long and extremely compelling essay by a Harvard academic who is also a Twitter superstar using Science and Logic to prove that Blank Slatism is true". If you had unlimited time and resources or a particularly high stake in finding out whether desirable qualities of humans are genetic, sure, by all means you ought to read it and analyse the argument. For most everyone else, it would be more rational to ignore the essay, leave your prior largely unshifted and spend the time it would take to read on something with higher expected utility, like planning tomorrow's healthy breakfast or getting on top of your todo list.
Things that could convince me to take the essay more seriously:
Establish that the author does not stand to benefit from Ivermectin working, e.g. has impeccable blue tribe credentials.
Establish that rehabilitating Ivermectin would benefit me personally a great deal.
Propose a plausible mechanism by which Ivermectin (specifically!) might work against COVID. Some general handwaving like "it modulates the way the immune system operates" won't work; lots of drugs do that, so I don't see why specifically the one that the Blues are raging against and the Reds are swearing will prove once and for all they should actually be in charge should be the one that happens to modulate it just right.
Relatedly, but harder, shift my prior regarding medicines that purport to do anything more complex than targeting one particular well-understood metabolic pathway not working.
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.
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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