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Comment by ghufran_syed | Hacker News Reader

Not sure why you’re getting downvoted - here’s a page about post-intensive care syndrome, on the website of the society for critical care medicine, that’s concordant with what you said: https://www.sccm.org/MyICUCare/THRIVE/Post-intensive-Care-Sy...

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Possibly for what HN calls "middlebrow dismissal" - wandering in and dismissing the article with blindingly obvious issues ("probably caused by the sedatives, immobilization" etc) as if professional medical researchers wouldn't have thought of them. They plainly need a clear-eyed HN reader on staff to help them.

> Possibly for what HN calls "middlebrow dismissal" - wandering in and dismissing the article with blindingly obvious issues ("probably caused by the sedatives, immobilization" etc) as if professional medical researchers wouldn't have thought of them. They plainly need a clear-eyed HN reader on staff to help them.

That term is very apt. I found this blog post about it, which I think really hits the nail on the head, too:

http://www.byrnehobart.com/blog/why-are-middlebrow-dismissal...

> Paul Graham, News.YC’s moderator emeritus, says that “The defining quality of the middlebrow dismissal is that it’s a cache dump of the writer’s prejudices…” This probably explains why they’re so common. It’s natural to see any news story as confirmation of your existing prejudices—but it’s easy to read confirmation where it’s not there. So it’s easy to see Groupon or Zynga as a “failure” for being worth merely a couple billion dollars when they were once worth ten billion plus apiece. (You could get pretty rich failing like that a few times.)

> But the real driver is not just that it’s easy to misread a story as confirming your beliefs. It’s that the alternative is to read a story and realize you were wrong. And since a middlebrow dismissal is a dismissal of something, it’s generally a dismissal of something that disagrees with the reader’s bias.

That last paragraph was oddly hard for me to parse this morning, possibly because I havn’t thought enough about this aspect of confirmation bias.

Be conciencious when dismissing something that’s inconsistent with your world view, seems like very good advice, at least if the source is credible.

Ahh, that's helpful, thanks! I think I unconsciously strip out a lot of that tone when I read, but I can see how it would be unhelpful

A bigger problem on HN these days is the highbrow lowbrow dismissal, wherein people come up with fancy-sounding reasons for rejecting comments, that are actually themselves lazy/incorrect arguments.

For example: when the paper itself says that the cognitive declines seen in people who don’t spend time hospitalized are a small fraction of the magnitude of the cognitive declines seen in hospitalized patients (Figures 2, 3; in some cases a cognitive benefit is seen in mild cases), yet a comment observing that the effects are confined to a small population is dismissed for the reason that “professional medical researchers would have thought of that”.

I was specifically referring to the claim the effects were probably due to sedation, etc. , not the observation that the study was of hospitalized cases.

So? The OP observed that the most severe effects were in a very small population of hospitalized patients. You fixated on a (plausible) hypothesis made that this could be due to sedation, and used it to reject the entire argument, even though the OP’s point is right, and your argument is a lowbrow dismissal that “experts would have thought of it”.

By the way: as far as I can tell, the paper doesn’t discuss this issue anywhere.

Probably because according to the paper, Covid-positive patients not on ventilators also had the mental impairment problems, only to a lesser degree.

He's replying to the comment in front of him. Seems relevant.

I think it was the 'almost nobody' crack. Everybody is somebody.

> Not sure why you’re getting downvoted

I think he overlooked that the people were hospitalized and on ventilators because they had covid.

But it's still an effect of the treatment. If you perform a study on people whom have been ill you're going to get results that show all the symptoms of illness.. the study could have been done with any illness and likely show cognitive decline.

symptoms of illness is the illness itself. Ignoring these symptoms of covid or results of the treatment is saying something like "bullets don't kill people, it ruptures blood vessels and you die due to loss of blood"

You misunderstand the ambiguous wording. If you study only includes people with an illness, the illness itself is a confounder.

The point is that if you have a non-ICU covid case, this research is unlikely to apply.

It feels like we didn't read the same article, they break down numbers for people on ventilators but also hospitalized, non-ventilator patients all the way down to those who received no particular care.

The findings were concerning to anyone who had it, they also mention cases where the cognitive deficit was the first reported symptom.

Symptoms from chemo therapy are NOT commonly classified as symptoms of the cancer that it's supposed to treat.

Why do we have to make up extra rules for everything Covid-19 related?

This is a good analogy, but the conclusion I take from it is different from yours. Whether an effect of a disease is a symptom of the treatment or of the disease itself doesn't matter to me. Either way, I'd rather not get the disease if I can help it.

> symptoms of illness is the illness itself

Is it a symptom of the illness or a symptom of the treatment? If you had a better treatment protocol, would it still happen to the same degree?

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