Hacker News Reader

Comment by mtmail | Hacker News Reader

I'm with "Be aware that the author has low trust factor and may have put the piece together from other sources without having a clue what he was writing about." until I see credentials.

http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/index.php/2020/04/05/wuhan-f...

"All that hilariously misguided and counterproductive criticism the media piled on chloroquine (purely for political reasons) as a viable treatment will now go down as the biggest Fake News blunder to rule them all. The media actively engaged their activism to fight ‘bad orange man’ at the cost of thousands of lives. Shame on them."

The media critique part reads more like a political rant than scientific discourse.

View on HN

Never mind the author's credentials, there isn't even any citation for the statements of fact, particularly the premise of the essay, that the mechanism causing death has been misidentified.

> [The evidence is] not only piling up but now leading to a general field-level consensus backed up by a few previously little-known studies that we’ve had it all wrong the whole time.

Pardon my French, but name the studies or GTFO.

If his methodology is not on point, his hypothesis should be waaaay off point, and very easy to debunk.

If that is the case, why are you attacking his lack of credentials and politics instead of his hypothesis?

edit: here is an actual paper saying the same thing the medium post is

https://chemrxiv.org/ndownloader/files/22129965

Thank you for your argument... Seems we are losing our freedom of speech and expression...

Why not get your information from someone who cites their sources correctly instead of a crank who doesn't and mixes conspiracy theories in for good measure?

linked an academic paper... 33 citations... every actual MD I've shared it with has responded with something along the lines of "very interesting" or "compelling" or "explains what some of the nurses are seeing"

if a crank takes the theory of relativity to heart, does that invalidate it?

strong pedants aren't necessarily strong thinkers

This is more hearsay to lend support to a crank conspiracy theorist.

Yes, we can not have a discussion spawned from a crank conspiracy theorist about general relativity even if his ideas are sound.

> if a crank takes the theory of relativity to heart, does that invalidate it?

Absolutely not. Reread my comment. There are experts who describe the theory of relativity and link to papers supporting it. It is far better to link to articles from those experts than to articles from cranks who happen to get relativity correct but intersperse their articles with conspiracy theories.

A Flat Earther might write an article about geometry where the geometry is valid and then mix in unsubstantiated claims about the shape of the Earth. Would you say that is a good article about geometry? No. You would link to an article about geometry that sticks to just the facts.

"Why not get YOUR information from..."

I got my information from the academic article (https://chemrxiv.org/ndownloader/files/22129965). Then I saw this submission on HN that I felt was an OK summary of it. Then I saw your ilk flag it.

An interesting hypothesis is an interesting hypothesis--even when it does not come from our pill-pushing, astroturfing, tell-us-more-about-harry-and-meghan-while-the-bombs-are-falling mainstream media.

Nobody here is advocating upvoting articles about Harry and Meghan. Your error in reasoning is almost as bad as saying we shouldn't upvote Medium articles at all because a lot of articles on Medium are about frivolous hobbies.

You are advocating upvoting articles from blithering conspiracy theorists just because part of the article has something that is based in science. You should have just submitted the actual science article instead.

How about responding to the words I wrote instead of the ones you imagined? I did not advocate "upvoting articles from blithering conspiracy theorists."

I have advocated two things:

1. Not flagging/censoring/de-platforming people for their screwy opinions. Most people aren't stupid, and can assess statements well enough without your assistance. If you downvoted him because you disagree, great! That's what votes are for. However, flagging this is an abuse. His synopsis was mostly consistent with the research, and there was nothing uncivil in his "blithering."

2. If an idea is incorrect, attack the idea, not the person. Going after the guy's politics and his (lack of) credentials is just a lazy, thinly-veiled, ad hominem when the idea is of an objective nature.

And if you are going to ding him on credentials (not that you should), what exactly are yours?

Where did I ding him on credentials or politics, and where did I say that the post should be flagged?

I just said that it's a low quality article. There are many high quality articles on hydroxychloroquine with azithromycin treatment (https://lmgtfy.com/?q=hydroxychloroquine+azithromycin), some of which discuss additional treatments that are also undergoing testing based on the blood disease hypothesis, so there is no reason to upvote this one.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com