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Comment by bayesian_horse | Hacker News Reader

In my opinion it should be an argument, especially for people who don't have that expertise.

Also, even the "moderately convincing" evidence is in my opinion not nearly enough. It might be if Covid-19 were a modestly important disease with only a few labs and clinics running working on it. But it's not. Throw enough shit against the wall, eventually something will stick by chance. This is a globally distributed experiment, and it is impossible to control for publication bias and all quality issues...

The only reason to think why Ivermectin should work against Sars-Cov-2 is because it has shown some action in cell cultures at ridiculously high doses, and maybe there have been other anti-viral interactions in the literature. For widespread use, there needs to be more and better evidence, especially given the currently available vaccines and treatments.

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> In my opinion it should be an argument,

It is a fallacy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority . To make an argument, there needs to be an argument.

It is only a fallacy when you are an expert as well, but when you are a layperson in a field and you are discarding real expert opinions because you don't like them you don't get to claim that their opinions are arguments from authority and therefore by definition fallacies. Maybe actually read that wikipedia page instead of just linking to it?

This seems to be a common and recurring theme: my opinion is worth as much as the opinion of an expert in the field because their argument can be discarded as an argument from authority. But they are an authority and I'll be happy to believe them compared to believing you, who are not active in their field at all.

See:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28067406

and

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29235584

"I'm no medical anything but I do have extensive academic and statistical training."

But you forgot that that only applies to those fields that you actually know something about, otherwise this is about as transparent an appeal to authority as one can make. Who cares about your extensive academic and statistical training if you start off with nonsense? Garbage in, garbage out, no matter how good the program is.

> It is only a fallacy when you are an expert as well...

This is wrong to the point where you really might want to take a deep breath. The point of experts is they have thought about a field more and are better at making sound arguments in that field. "Most scientists/doctors believe..." is literally, exactly and unambiguously a fallacious argument. The only thing that matters is why they would believe that.

And if that why is "statistical significance", I'm friends with enough doctors to know I'm better at interpreting stats than they are. If the answer they go to is parasitic worms then yeah, that is why they are experts and I'm not. It is a compelling argument.

I stand by my comments and disagree that they make the point you want them to. The 1st isn't even about medical opinion if you read it closely, it is scepticism of politics.

"The point of experts is they have thought about a field more and are better at making sound arguments in that field."

This is an excellent point. It is so good that I think it may serve as the definition of an expert: An expert is someone who is better at making sound arguments in that field. Sound arguments being what matters and not the person making the argument, just as the calculations matter more than the mathematician.

No, if you are not a doctor your opinion on any of this doesn't matter at all, it's that simple.

Probability dictates that any doctor - let alone most doctors' - opinion trumps yours and everybody else that parrots you, because they will be right far more often than you about medical things.

You may be better at interpreting the statistics than your doctor friends but you are not better at medicine, are not wired into their world as much as they are and in fact are most likely blabbing nonsense.

You can stand by your comments but that just proves my original point: that you consider your own opinion to be a higher one than someone trained in the field that you have an opinion on. See your other comment in this thread regarding how medicine prescription works, it doesn't but that isn't going to stop you from being convinced and it would not surprise me if you felt that that doctor is making an argument from authority.

Suggestion: assume that you are a layperson in medicine, act accordingly. And go get vaccinated if you haven't been already, and ask your doctor if they thinks that's a good idea, rather than to believe me, yet another stranger on the internet.

I admire your conviction.

And I suspect you would have had the same conviction about smoking had you lived in the 1960s and noticed that many doctors recommended smoking.

No, it does matter why a doctor believes what they believe. The vast majority of them just follow the official top down advice. And some actors, notably tobacco and pharmaceutical industries, have been using that to subvert science (to great effect and profit) for decades.

Which, again, I note, is not a statement about IVM or HCQ or Cominraty - it’s about the reasons for your own convictions, which seem to completely ignore decades of evidence.

It does not at all matter that doctors know better than me about 99% of medical things. When I have a specific issue, it is far more likely I can know more about it by spending 100 hours studying, than a trained doctor does without studying. It is likely he would know more than me if he spent 5 hours, but it is very unlikely that he has.

I haven’t disagreed with doctor about many things in my life. But in the 3 or so things which I found vitally important to research, and in which I came to a different conclusion than the specialists, I was proven right.

In the 1960's smoking was already considered very bad for your health, in fact a large 1951 study amongst the doctors themselves pretty much proved that, but that didn't stop lobbying and advertising by the Tobacco companies, including the use of actors posing as doctors from continuing to push the false narrative and if not for some pretty heavy legal restrictions they would still be doing this today (and they still do, in some countries).

And real doctors promoting smoking goes back much further than that, all the way to the early 1900's.

It's that kind of activity that undermines the authority the profession, but it's the wrong conclusion to make that if doctors were wrong about smoking they are also wrong about everything else. Usually they are not.

https://www.rgare.com/knowledge-center/media/articles/smokin...

> but it's the wrong conclusion to make that if doctors were wrong about smoking they are also wrong about everything else. Usually they are not.

Indeed. And usually, there is no significant objection to the medical consensus, so it is irrelevant the "all medical advice" space.

The interesting (from my perspective, but also from an information theoretic one) things are those about which there is disagreement. And the "usually right" on those subjects goes down significantly - perhaps it's still "usually", but maybe it's just 60% rather than the 99% of the "right" things which inspire people to blindly believe doctors about everything. And perhaps it's just 20%; We'll likely know about today's status only in 30 years.

For example, there is still consensus about statin use to reduce cardiac problems through cholesterol lowering. I looked a little into that; the evidence is severely lacking, especially if you consider all cause mortality rather than just "lowering myocardial infraction risk" (which you can achieve 100% with Cyanide!). I have informally surveyed about 20 doctors, of which one was a cardiologist. Everyone other than the cardiologist was convinced statins are the best thing since sliced bread, have no risks, and excellent efficiency. Not one of them actually knew much about, e.g. statin effect on all cause mortality, or much of anything else related to statins except the official line and up-to-date (the service) summaries. The cardiologist still thought statins were a good thing, but was much more reserved about recommending them to anyone with high blood lipids, because he actually read the research and had actual experience (and discussions with informed colleagues).

The quote 'science improves one death at the time' comes to mind.

Ironically, if we apply your first statement generally you are likely excluding yourself from the debate.

"If you are not a logician your opinion on fallacies doesn't matter at all."

>No, if you are not a doctor your opinion on any of this doesn't matter at all, it's that simple.

>Probability dictates that any doctor - let alone most doctors' - opinion trumps yours and everybody else that parrots you, because they will be right far more often than you about medical things.

You really have not spent much time around doctors, I think. Doctors (GPs) know about as much on a topic as someone who Googles the current country guidelines. For anything novel, I'd trust a statistician over a GP to interpret data every time.

I've spent enough time around doctors to know that as long as you have something obvious they'll make the right diagnosis, and that if it is something rare they might get it right. But for GPs that doesn't really matter: they don't diagnose unless it is something simple, they just pass you on to the relevant expert after performing their filter function to avoid hypochondriacs from clogging the system.

Don't like it? Get a second opinion. Don't like that? Request a review. Don't like that? Self medicate to your hearts content, or go with crystals, aromatherapy or whatever you believe works. But don't go around the interwebs spouting your self derived conclusion from papers that you barely - if at all - understood as fact.

Because that's the rub: the people who were all over Vitamin-D, Bleach, HCQ and lately Ivermectin were just looking for excuses not to vaccinate and that is a problem, none of these miracle cures were miracle cures, they weren't even cures. At best they were no-ops, at worst they harmed the health of those that received them. By amplifying these messages thousands of people have needlessly died.

But Ivermectin seems to have run its course. I predict a new miracle cure with a new champion somewhere in the next couple of months, just like Vitamin-D and HCQ before it.

Most of that wikipedia article is devoted to pointing out that most of the time "argument from authority" is legitimate.

And to the extent that the article does say that even a legitimate authority needs to present an argument, in this context, they have!

Like the situation here is medical experts have said "hmm these studies that appear to show ivermectin's effectiveness are fraudulent and suspicious".

Like, with the exception of the complete theory that ivermectin studies in some nations are naturally confounded by the presence of worms, the arguments he's made about the unreliability of the ivermectin data is the mainstream argument about the unreliability of ivermectin data. He even cites a number of experts whose analysis he sometimes relies on!

It would be a fallacy to say "this argument is necessarily true because an authority claimed it was so", but it isn't a fallacy to say "this authority in this subject claimed it was so and it far more probable that they know what they are talking about than you, who are not an authority in this subject."

argument from authority is not a fallacy.

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