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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.
Right, I'm pretty sure it's still in accordance with the paradigm to make an argument for studies coming to a different conclusion being given more weight / not being excluded, for example. Even if the argument is ultimately wrong, it doesn't follow that it's intellectually lazy.
I understand the temptation to put someone in a "guilty until proven innocent" situation, but "he's guilty, it's your homework to see why" is taking it to another level.
In medicine the evidence is assessed by quality. I don't often do it myself because it takes a lot of time. We work in groups and we have to rely on groups that do good job assessing the quality of the evidence.
If you read the link and go deep, you will find that a lot of evidence about ivermectin is discarded because it was of very low quality.
Now, if some other group wants to change and say that it was actually better than we think, I need to see their reason. I need to see how they arrived to that conclusion, I need to be sure that they did a good job.
Unfortunately in most of the cases they didn't. Even Scott Alexander or Zvi, Hananiah and others do poor job many times. Sometimes they provide reasoning that would even get a poor mark at a university. And I did sometimes get low marks at uni and learned a lot from my mistakes.
My advice is – do your own research but learn to do it properly. Internet is not a good classroom. But some people can be very good with independent study so I don't want to exclude anyone beforehand.
Right, but you're acting like an assessment of "low quality" is the end of conversation, and anyone disagreeing with it is automatically intellectually lazy. It would be music to my ears, because that would mean anyone doubting, say, the Cass Review, gets to have all their opinions disregarded on all other subjects, but it's just not how it works, nor is it how it should work.
You're assuming way too much about me and what I'm saying. My only point is that people disagreeing with you on this aren't automatically intellectually lazy.
Even more interesting that you mentioned Cass Review. It is a high quality review that states that the evidence we have is of low quality. Anyone can see that. A lot of people try to argue against it by saying that the review is of low quality but I can only see (at least in 99% of conversation) bias and/or intellectual laziness.
Why am I obliged to engage in conversion with those people? I don't want to and I don't need to. It is not a productive use of my time. I would better discuss this with my peers who have put a lot of work to learn how to evaluate evidence.
I have not participated in discussions about Cass Review but certain groups of experts have. They certainly didn't start with consensus. The fact that puberty blockers in the UK were prescribed to minors shows that. But eventually experts have cooperated and come to the conclusion that based on current evidence or rather due to lack of good evidence we cannot allow puberty blockers to minors except for clinical studies.
This was brought to the attention of the UK government which now has made a law based on recommendation of experts. My duty is only to follow the law, otherwise I will be breaking the law, I could be held criminally liable and lose my pharmacist licence etc.
Again, I can participate in discussions but I don't see what's the point. The expert group suggestion seems reasonable and the law is reasonable. That's how it works. In fact, I had a case when I had to approve dispensing of puberty blocker in a pharmacy and it immediately reminded me of Cass Review.
Maybe you mean that sometimes experts need to sell their ideas to the politicians and society who are not able to evaluate anything. But that is a completely different thing from what I am doing here. I am not trying to convince anyone to vote for me or even spread my ideas. I mostly want to learn something interesting and insightful and share the same to others (if I have something to share).
Thanks for the more elaborate response, as I wasn't sure how to respond to the other one.
Because they're powerful people in influential positions of mainstream medical and academic institutions.
I have a different perspective on what happened.
There was a consensus of experts and it said the opposite. Just look at this article by Jack Turban, yeah yeah it's just pop-sci, but Turban is an acclaimed expert in the field, and his article cites an alphabet soup of psychological and medical associations, and it seemed pretty clear that the science was settled. This consensus was not shaken by internal debate among experts, Cass was ordered by the government to conduct her review, and for that matter the government did not do so at their own initiative either, but has done so due to public pressure stemming from the controversy. Now, I'm not familiar with who exactly lobbied for the review. For all their faults, the British medical experts seem to have a skeptical streak, so I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out some of them spearheaded it... that said, surely you see how the topic being controversial among the general public would prompt them to look into the issue?
In other words, at each step, the review was prompted by outsiders questioning the experts in their field of expertise, and none of it would have happened if people followed the approach you recommend. Further, despite evidence for "gender affirming care" being judged to be of poor quality, it seemed to have no impact on the worldwide status of the procedures themselves - some countries limited the precures in a UK-like fashion, but it's largely a local affair, not a global one like Ivermectin, and I haven't seen an analogue to pharmacies declining valid prescriptions from a doctor, which is what was happening with Ivermectin - or on the professional status of it's proponents.
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Low quality is low quality. Not much point to consider such evidence. I understand that when we have nothing else, we catch to straws but we shouldn't really.
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