Comment by coryfklein | Hacker News Reader

Comment by coryfklein | Hacker News Reader

Stepping back, is this simply pointing out that Rule 34 also applies to scientific research? If a claim can be made, there is a scientific study that "proves" the claim true.

If someone came to me with some outlandish claim, "Studies show that singing in the shower lowers cancer risk," I honestly won't be surprised if they could produce 2-4 white papers published in modern journals in support of it. So much of modern science seems to be reading between the lines and meta-analyses of scientific studies.

Scott Alexander's review of Ivermectin[0] is a great example of this. Bold claim is made, everyone divides into two camps, and in fact both camps have multiple peer reviewed studies backing their side, and to arrive at some semblance of understanding of the topic you need to spend hours diving into the studies and checking off boxes: were they peer reviewed, were there confounders, do the authors have a history of fraud, and on and on and on.

[0] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/ivermectin-much-more-than-y...

I get what you're saying, but "rule 34 also applies to scientific research" is a bizarre way to word it; the way I'd interpret that phrase out of context is just that it logically follows because scientific research is a subset of "things that exist".

I thought you were going a different tack when I read rule 34 - That I think is more apropos to the article's intent - If something is interesting, someone is getting excited about it, and charging forward into fan art. Papers and news articles are unfortunately just real-world fan art.

To add, if a claim can be made that can be turned into a product, there will be a paid-for study that proves it to be effective.

When it comes to ivermectin though, I'm not convinced that was for profit per se, I think that was a crowd looking for a cure or something to latch onto because ????.

Breakfast is the most important meal of the day*

*-scientifically proven.

I like the one that considered the additional factor of people just having invasive worms in them already, especially those living in squalor in the heavily Republican southeast.

American healthcare is such that this would never be tested for until it becomes a problem, when your immune system is strained by other things the worms become a burden to your body. COVID is that other thing. So taking Ivermectin kills the worms as it was designed to do and this results in the body being able to focus just on fighting COVID. Given the "improved outcomes" being such low percentages to begin with, that fits pretty well to the distribution of the population that maybe have worms. So they say, "aha ivermectin did it, big pharma doesn't want you to know!" despite ivermectin being big pharma and just not being in on the conspiracy club

so then the other camp tries to do a controlled study of just covid patients and finds no link. their headline says "no link found, not recommended" of course, because they're John Hopkins instead of their next door neighbor, this is just a symptom of the conspiracy theory and leftist institutions.

but beyond that, it is a symptom of Republicans feeling accurately underserved by those institutions. There is an obsession with pointing out how dumb someone is, instead of empathizing and doing the additional study. "ah I see how you reached that conclusion, a bunch of people have been in a symbiotic relationship with parasites the whole time!"

On the other side, though, there was a huge financial incentive to discredit ivermectin.

If it turned out that ivermectin was effective at treating covid, the emergency authorization would no longer hold, and it would have ended the extremely lucrative business of covid vaccines. There was incentive to design studies that, on purpose, applied ivermectin incorrectly (not the right time, not the right dosage).

In the media, ivermectin was described as horse dewormer, a fake story about hospitals being overwhelmed by people overdosing ivermectin was repeated for weeks in mainstream media, even though before covid, it was considered a low risk medication, and was described as a wonder drug.

I'm not implying ivermectin successfully treated covid, mind you. I'm just saying that it's hard to trust the people that were saying it doesn't and, going further, they said it was a silly dangerous idea to even try using it for treating covid under medical supervision.

With that in mind, I can see how some people could come to the conclusion that, if big pharma and its lackeys in media and government want to discredit it so hard, it might even work.

You can slap this kind of “maybe X really cures Y but big pharma doesn’t want you to know” onto essentially any X and Y. It’s a conspiracy which is an unfalsifiable patch of epistemological quicksand: the more proof you provide, the more bs “evidence” and bad faith skepticism comes up.

At the end of the day, if X really cured Y, I don’t see why big pharma wouldn’t be all over it as well. There are plenty of countries that didn’t have American resources to buy expensive vaccines, why wouldn’t they use something cheap like ivermectin? In India they were manufacturing ivermectin and shipping it out to rich countries like the US while they were burning bodies in the streets because they couldn’t afford treatments. If ivermectin really worked, they would’ve used it.

There was certainly profit made, but not so much by manufacturers. Many folks looking for miracle cures were duped into “health consultations” and bilked for $100-200 a pop during the pandemic. Frequently these services were advertised to church mailing lists.

https://theintercept.com/2021/10/13/intercepted-podcast-covi...

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