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Comment by flr03 | Hacker News Reader

I'm not suprised to see this post so popular on Less Wrong/the rational community. I can easily imagine the fascination they have for crazy scientists doing experimentations on them selves, cutting all the corners and operating at fair distance of ethical concerns. I'm not very convinced by the "Motivations" section of the article by the way, but that's a nice stunt nonetheless, and quite fascinating indeed.

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This is unnecessarily dismissive. IIRC, Josiah Zayner home brewed a vaccine which led to a positive antibody test, which is in and of itself a pretty impressive outcome given the resources he had available to deploy.

The Bloomberg link posted above states he had a positive antibody test before administering the home brew.

That link seems to be quite incomplete. For example, it never mentions that there were two other people involved, at least one of whom didn’t have the same confounding issues. Here are the results: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WTuRBuy74KlaBzLrd0aTZl85...

There's no such thing as being too dismissive of LessWrong. It is among the more useless parts of the Internet. I fell for it hook, line, and sinker when I was younger and don't want to see anyone make the same mistakes I did.

Stay in school, kids. Or at least don't get your wisdom from a guy whose magnum opus is the world's worst Harry Potter fanfiction.

To the extent you are posting this as a warning to rationally inclined young people to not be seduced by the discourse on LessWrong, your warning is likely to be perceived as cranky by that audience and therefore ineffective. You may want to revisit your style, if that’s indeed your goal.

With the end result that he has no idea whether it actually did anything, and has declared all of medicine to be 'too messy.'

They've romanticised the stories of scientists self-testing and mixed it with the stories of Jenner and Fleming, misinterpreting their unethical (Jenner) and credit grabbing (Fleming) ways as brilliant contrarianism.

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