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.
This article has nothing to do with rehabilitating ivermectin. I myself am not sure how well it works today and if I had to guess, it worked a lot better for pre-Omicron variants. Naturally recent data is a mess, so it's hard to know, and I really should do some digging before I say much more because I could be very wrong. On whatever the "red tribe" is - I frequently tweet out about how I could never support a president who allowed Fauci to run the pandemic. As recent immigrant to the US, I have very little interest in whatever partisan bickering y'all are engaged in, other than that I'd prefer if the country my children were born in doesn't implode.
Rehabilitating the rationalist community (the actual intent of the essay) would benefit everyone a great deal. Ivermectin is the perfect case-study of why the rehabilitation is needed.
Once again, the article has nothing to do with defending ivermectin, and everything to do with defeating bad arguments. If you are interested in some material on mechanism of action, my friend Joomi has written a pretty good piece - https://joomi.substack.com/p/misconceptions-about-ivermectin-dosing
There are many drugs we don't understand the mechanisms of, and I can personally confirm that some of these definitely work: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanism_of_action#Drugs_with_unknown_MOA . In fact, as you can read in Joomi's article, ivermectin's anti-parasitic action also is somewhat mysterious, but nobody doubts it works.
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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.
This article has nothing to do with rehabilitating ivermectin. I myself am not sure how well it works today and if I had to guess, it worked a lot better for pre-Omicron variants. Naturally recent data is a mess, so it's hard to know, and I really should do some digging before I say much more because I could be very wrong. On whatever the "red tribe" is - I frequently tweet out about how I could never support a president who allowed Fauci to run the pandemic. As recent immigrant to the US, I have very little interest in whatever partisan bickering y'all are engaged in, other than that I'd prefer if the country my children were born in doesn't implode.
Rehabilitating the rationalist community (the actual intent of the essay) would benefit everyone a great deal. Ivermectin is the perfect case-study of why the rehabilitation is needed.
Once again, the article has nothing to do with defending ivermectin, and everything to do with defeating bad arguments. If you are interested in some material on mechanism of action, my friend Joomi has written a pretty good piece - https://joomi.substack.com/p/misconceptions-about-ivermectin-dosing
There are many drugs we don't understand the mechanisms of, and I can personally confirm that some of these definitely work: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanism_of_action#Drugs_with_unknown_MOA . In fact, as you can read in Joomi's article, ivermectin's anti-parasitic action also is somewhat mysterious, but nobody doubts it works.
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