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Ivermectin is a good test how serious the person is. Obviously we all might have different beliefs, some of them will be wrong and others will be correct. I wouldn't disqualify anyone on that. But ivermectin issue is such a low bar that I use it as a filter whether a person takes time to verify his own opinions. I am sorry if it offends some.
It's not offensive really, just intellectually dishonest.
If you had any conviction you'd let your beliefs stand on their own without the need for ad hominem.
Filtering kooks not to waste your time may be appropriate in a lot of settings. Not here.
Believing ivermectin to be a cure for covid is intellectually lazy. Thanks for helping me to formulate what I meant with that.
But what does it mean to be intellectually dishonest? How is it different from just not being honest?
Honesty is the general category of being fair and straightforward. Intellectual honesty is that part of honesty that limits itself to Logos.
Ad hominem attacks are appeals to Ethos, to the credibility and authority of the speaker and are therefore subversive to the goal of discovering truth through reasoned discussion. Which is the declared goal of this forum.
For more on this, read Gorgias. Ethos is useful, but not to dialectic.
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The ivermectin enjoyers that I know were autistically combing through every study on the topic. Biased, stubborn, arrogant... there are many things one could call them before "intellectually lazy" starts making any sense.
It is mostly done with tribal mentality. It is common for people to have an idea, then search on pubmed scientific articles that support their idea.
I have to explain and again why this doesn't work. Mostly because you even start searching with keywords to support your idea. If you tried to search with keywords that would reject the idea, you would get articles that reject theses ideas.
The correct way is to start with neutral assumption and do real meta study. It is hard, very hard, take a lot of time. In most cases you are not able to do that. You have to admit that at some point that you don't have that much time, energy and probably even understanding to properly read even one study. Then you have to learn how to use secondary sources that summarizes meta studies, evaluate those sources, assign how much you trust them.
“Do your own research” is a good thing, but the problem with that is that you need to do your own research, correctly and not some half-assed version of it. Maybe laziness it is not the correct word. To me it is like building a house, you need to work hard, do it properly. Some people might just stick some wood in the ground, put a cover on top and call it a house. He just build a hut and even that was not good. You need an honesty to admit that you didn't do a good job. I don't know how to teach that. For me first it took 2 weeks to read one simple study. Even when it seems I understand it all, it wasn't the case. The scientific studies are written in a peculiar language and not a way that can be easily understood.
At university I started with simple assignments, like is polymorphism of beta-2 adrenoreceptors relevant for differentiating asthma treatments. Read a lot of studies, many positive. But the final conclusion, at current level of knowledge it cannot be done. You have to get used that most such searches will have negative result. It is easier if you start with null hypothesis. It is a hard work to find something. Scott Alexander is doing fantastic work with such reviews but I am afraid that even he doesn't have enough time and substitutes quality with quantity. I trusted his review of mask studies but it was incomplete. Cochrane review overturned his conclusions. But it wasn't possible for him to do in a few days what a group of dedicated and paid experts did during several months.
Contrarians sometimes challenge – how can you prove that earth is flat? It is actually a very good question in epistemology. You have limited resources to do actual experiments, travel to space and look at earth from outside. You only have access to the library. What are the methods to judge which information you can trust and why and which is not trustable. It opens whole philosophy of science, all about scientific paradigms and so on. Even scientists and engineers studying the actual things very deeply, like those who create and manage GPS system, haven't thought about these things. They are inside the paradigm but cannot describe it outsiders. Just like a native speaker often is unable to explain even simple phonetics of their own language. They have internalized them so deeply that they are unable to under realize that. Once I asked a native Japanese speaker, a linguist in fact, why I hear that in certain words they omit one sound. And his reaction was what? They never realized this omission.
Sure, but this is how it is on all sides. Surely, you don't believe that people sneering about "horse dewormers" started off from a place of neutrality, and only reached their conclusion after meticulous analysis? Even the top percentile of commentators like Scott or various deboonkers that were mentioned by Bleep didn't do that. Did academia? Maybe, I've seen them do good work, I've seen them do horrible work, and I've also seen them pull political strings to bury results they didn't like without it causing a career ending scandal.
I'm sure there's a non-zero amount of researchers that can leave their biases at the door, but that number can't be all that high either. Trivially, there's a reason why it's expected to disclose conflicts of interest. If it was so easy to approach things neutrally by an act of will, it wouldn't be necessary to disclose who funded what - you could just focus on proper methodology and arrive at neutral results, but for some reason it's not that simple. The same is true when a finding gets in the way of someone's politics with the difference being that it's harder to detect, finding a monetary conflict of interest is a matter of looking into their accounting, finding an ideological one can't be done without looking into their mind.
At the end of the day, it's treating a difference of opinion on a particular topic as a mark of intellectual laziness, that seems intellectually lazy.
I mentioned philosophy of science and the fact that most scientists haven't read it.
The question here is why would you believe the Flat earth society that has done studies to prove their point and not that the earth is round without any systematic proof?
I haven't done my own meta study about ivermectin. That would take too much time and energy. I just read expert group rationale, in this case NICE (https://www.nice.org.uk/guidance/NG191/chapter/4-therapeutics-for-covid-19#ivermectin) guidelines. It seems that they are accessible only from UK IP address however, therefore you might not be able to access them. But sure you have your own country guidelines.
Science works in paradigms, it also works in groups. The real question is not about your particular beliefs about ivermectin but understanding what is the current paradigm and which scientists work within that paradigm. Then many things will become easier. Those groups will have disagreements, that's how science progresses. But if you those disagreements are outside the parameters of the current paradigm, then that is either not science, or some revolution is going to happen that will change our understanding substantially.
As for ivermectin, I don't see anyone breaking the paradigm.
So which percentile of intellectual rigor do you think we're talking about here, in your opinion? To me it looks like it's the top fraction of a percentage point that meets your requirements, and you're talking about it like it's the baseline!
But you were using the beliefs about ivermectin to declare someone intellectually lazy without showing that they've broken the paradigm. Without even asking how they arrived at the conclusion!
The paradigm is in the link I provided with clear and detailed evidence – exactly which studies and how they showed that both groups (ivermectin and placebo) had no statistical differences. It is your homework now to see that other group is outside this paradigm.
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Since you did your own meta study which took a lot of time, could you go ahead and link it here for us?
Many of the ivermectin believers have done or contributed to their own meta-study with extensive and totally transparent results and discussion. Apparently, you classify this group as "intellectually lazy" who "don't take the time to verify [their] own opinions," which is beyond ridiculous.
You're wrong about ivermectin, but that's fine. You may find their work unconvincing and that's fine, too, but this is just ridiculous.
Scott Alexander's comments on every topic on Covid, including ivermectin, during the hysteria were wrong and he was corrected at the time. The people he relied on like healthnerd, sheldrick, the fraud squad, gidmk, were wrong too and were corrected at the time, too. AlexandrosM did like a 15 part series carefully explaining their flaws and bad arguments. Despite all of Scott&Co's copes about why they were wrong about the most important thing in their alleged fields of study in likely their entire lives, this should fall on deaf ears (and do) to all but those who were also wrong and want to join in on the excuses.
These people were wrong when it mattered, there were plenty of reasons which were pointed out to them why they were wrong, and yet they persisted and only relented when it was safe to do so. They regularly attacked and threatened the people who were right the entire time to boot. It was reprehensible behavior and they should never be allowed to forget it.
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As for intellectual laziness, I work in healthcare sector and try to absorb current consensus that I use to form my beliefs.
Covid pandemic made many people scared. I do not blame if someone overreacted but gradually we have to come to common understanding what it all was instead of holding our biases forever.
My beliefs are as follows:
I find it odd you imply people who think ivermectin was an effective early treatment for covid are too ridiculous to entertain their thoughts on entirely different subjects despite those exact people broadly agreeing with everything you wrote w/re the Covid hysteria here, but don't treat the clowns who were deeply wrong when it actually mattered even close to the same way.
Even if we concede your opinion about ivermectin, how are people who were right about Covid Hysteria on the 90% of other subjects at the time when it mattered and many of whom suffered for their beliefs being right too early even equal let alone worse than the clowns who were wrong (at best) when it mattered and caused enormous damage ?
Yes, a lot of people supported my idea that lockdowns are wrong and that vaccine mandates are wrong etc.
But if those people start repeating stories that are not based on facts, without any critical thinking, for example, that covid vaccines are poison, will shorten your life, cause turbo cancers (take your pick), I will not agree with them. Some even go as far as declaring this about all vaccines, good or bad.
In fact, the viewpoint that vaccines mandates are bad are almost universally interpreted as viewpoint that vaccines are bad. I don't know how to deal with that. People are not perceptive to details. But details are very important here.
No. Very few people in the medical field and certainly in the medical field with any power supported the idea that lockdowns are wrong/ineffective and vaccine mandates are wrong. Anyone who disagreed with this manufactured consensus were banned off social media during a time when that was the only place any dialogue was happening at all.
They spent years, when it actually mattered, repeating embarrassingly bad and flawed stories and studies to support all manner of nonsense and attack people who were correct the entire time. They spent years demanding censorship and attacking the licenses of doctors and lawyers who were saying the correct thing the entire time and defending people from the mandates.
Why do you give the people who were wrong and who caused enormous damage a pass, but write off the dissidents who were right the entire time and agree with you on most of your comments with respect to the Covid Hysteria? Perhaps this is mostly a language issue.
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