"In light of the ignorance of typical political leaders and members of the general public, we might be tempted by the idea of rule by experts, as in Plato’s Republic. 18 Unfortunately, when it comes to descriptive social theory, even the experts’ knowledge is unimpressive, as demonstrated recently by the social psychologist Phillip Tetlock. Tetlock conducted a fifteen-year study in which he collected tens of thousands of predictions from hundreds of political experts concerning matters within their areas of expertise (for example, would the economy slide into recession, would the Soviet Union survive, who would win the next Presidential election, and so on). Tetlock’s finding, in brief, was that the best experts did only slightly better than chance at predicting outcomes. When asked to assign probabilities to their predictions, experts proved systematically overconfident; for example, events predicted with 100% confidence happened less than 80% of the time."
I don't think this is a fair characterization. There are definitely subjects where expertise is real (infectious disease is probably actually one of the clearer-cut ones). Much of Tetlock's work is about identifying which subjects have real expertise and which ones don't.
What I quoted did note, "when it comes to descriptive social theory". I think it was Scott's claim that "Expertise isn't a sham" which isn't a fair characterization and is too broad. There's a separate and more complicated philosophical question of whether mental health fits into social theory or neurophysiology.
Medicine, even physical medicine, still seems much less scientific than something like aerospace engineering. As Greg Cochran & Nassim Taleb like to point out, doctors were on net harmful for most of the very long existence of their profession. And "public health experts" if anything seem to be more captured by political activism than your typical never-heard-of-Bayesian-probability doc.
My impression is that public health experts were pretty impressive when public health was a major concern -- say, during the Panama Canal era of the first half of the 20th Century.
But as infectious disease became less of a problem, public health experts tended to become more politicized and less useful. Few public health experts in the 1980s dared enunciate the chief cause of the AIDS epidemic in the US, Gay Liberation, which led to a lot of unnecessary paranoia among heterosexuals who had never been close to Castro Street, Santa Monica Boulevard, or Christopher Street. And in recent decades, public health experts who, deep down, know better, have shamefully countenanced the popular myth that AIDS was, somehow, due to the supposed homophobia of Ron and Nancy Reagan.
Wasn't the AIDS crisis actually a big problem caused by infectious disease? My understanding is that it was the biggest cause of death for adults under a certain age. Granted, it was highly concentrated in certain populations and not actually as prone to "breaking out" as the experts warned.
Polio got worse during the 20th Century in the US, with the 1952 outbreak being the worst in US history. My vague impression is that the post WWII fight against polio was more or less the climactic chapter of the heroic age of the struggle against infectious disease, which had included the triumph over yellow fever at the Panama Canal.
Over the next few decades, public health, especially in the US, became more routine. That's a good thing, but it also meant that less top talent flowed into the field and practitioners got less practice at dealing with novel crises. Perhaps this caused problems when AIDS and COVID came along?
Interestingly/bizarrely, there are or were a bunch of qualified experts who believe(d) that AIDS is not caused by HIV. They believe both exist but that HIV is a relatively harmless virus that was in effect 'framed' by bad science. The people in question had long careers in virology, microbiology or in one case as a journalist who covered the AIDS epidemic over a period of about a decade for a major national newspaper.
One of their many arguments is that it shouldn't be possible for a virus to express a preference for homosexuals, or at least not for very long, because they're too small and simple to be able to 'know' the orientation of their host. The long-predicted break-out into the heterosexual community never happened. Even today most AIDS cases are gay and male, except in Africa where AIDS affects both genders the same. This is also posited as being inexplicable if African AIDS is the same phenomenon as western AIDS, because again, a virus is too small and simple to prefer men in the west but have no gender preference in Africa.
Past tense used because I'm not sure if those people are still around. I found out about this because one of them was the inventor of PCR testing, but he's dead now.
The name familiar to me for that is Duesberg, and I believe his argument is that AIDS is actually caused by drug use, which was common for many of the victims at the time. The difference between sub-Saharan Africa and the rest of the world does seem odd. Here's the one theory I'm aware of to attempt to explain it: https://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/02/africa-hiv-perverts-or-bad-med.html
> Few public health experts in the 1980s dared enunciate the chief cause of the AIDS epidemic in the US
Early named for AIDS were literally "GRID" for "gay-related immune deficiency" and "4H" for the four groups (including "homosexuals") among which it initially clustered.
But of course this comment section being what it is, this claim got five upvotes despite this being common knowledge among anyone with even the slightest familiarity with the history of AIDS. Hey, fellow lurkers, I suggest you look up this person's name and tell me if you think that's the sort of person you want making undebunked claims in your intellectual space.
Obviously, the doctors and scientists dealing with Castro Street AIDS patients in the early 1980s knew how it was being spread.
Over the years, however, the Establishment has managed to obfuscate, such as by angrily denouncing anyone who points out the history, the role that Gay Liberation played in AIDS. So that today few seem aware anymore of the historical connection. I wouldn't be surprised if more people today thought AIDS was caused by homophobia.
Your claim wasn't about today. You literally said:
> Few public health experts *in the 1980s*
If public health experts are talking about it in the New York Times, it's not a victim of a hypothetical early-80s cancel-culture. Plain and simple.
---------
As to the rest of your claim:
I believe, and would discuss and have discussed with other members of the queer community, that being the receptive partner in anal sex is the riskiest common sexual activity with respect to HIV transmission.
No one (well, almost no one, there's always a crazy person or three) objects to this claim. You'll find this claim in a pamphlet on the table in every student queer group in America, in the waiting room of every LGBT-inclusive therapist's office, in the sidebar of every LGBT subreddit. I know this because I spent a good chunk of my 20s in those rooms and got really, really sick of it. And in fact, we can go to the CDC website right now (https://www.cdc.gov/hiv/basics/hiv-transmission/ways-people-get-hiv.html) and find exactly that claim in black and white:
"Anal sex is the riskiest type of sex for getting or transmitting HIV.
Being the receptive partner (bottom) is riskier for getting HIV than being the insertive partner (top)."
So your claim, basically, is that the feared "Establishment"'s best shot at suppressing news of the risks of anal sex is to promote them in every channel it has. If that's their best shot, well, I don't think you have much to worry about.
It seems rather likely that if we had legalized gay marriage back in the 1970s, HIV would have been less severe in the gay community.
The gay community was (and is) both promiscuous and engaged in the most dangerous type of sex (anal sex) regularly. It is still the highest risk factor in the US. The second highest is being black - 42% of HIV diagnoses are in black people, and it is likely actually worse than that because black people are probably less likely to get diagnosed because of anti-doctor sentiments in the black community.
Gay liberation wasn't really the issue; gay promiscuity was.
This is a mischaracterization of Tetlock's work which he himself has rebutted in the first chapter of Superforecasting
> But I realized that as word of my work spread, its apparent meaning was mutating. What my research had shown was that the average expert had done little better than guessing on many of the political and economic questions I had posed. “Many” does not equal all. It was easiest to beat chance on the shortest-range questions that only required looking one year out, and accuracy fell off the further out experts tried to forecast—approaching the dart-throwing-chimpanzee level three to five years out. That was an important finding. It tells us something about the limits of expertise in a complex world—and the limits on what it might be possible for even superforecasters to achieve. But as in the children’s game of “telephone,” in which a phrase is whispered to one child who passes it on to another, and so on, and everyone is shocked at the end to discover how much it has changed, the actual message was garbled in the constant retelling and the subtleties were lost entirely. The message became “all expert forecasts are useless,” which is nonsense. Some variations were even cruder—like “experts know no more than chimpanzees.” My research had become a backstop reference for nihilists who see the future as inherently unpredictable and know-nothing populists who insist on preceding “expert” with “so-called.”
And, it should be noted that not all experts were equally overconfident. Tetlock found that experts who used a particular framing 100% of the time were systematically overconfident and bad at forecasting, while experts who used multiple different framings of the issue and a variety of different philosophies of analysis were much more accurate. He dubbed the former "hedgehogs", and the ladder "foxes".
> One group tended to organize their thinking around Big Ideas, although they didn’t agree on which Big Ideas were true or false. Some were environmental doomsters (“We’re running out of everything”); others were cornucopian boomsters (“We can find cost-effective substitutes for everything”). Some were socialists (who favored state control of the commanding heights of the economy); others were free-market fundamentalists (who wanted to minimize regulation). As ideologically diverse as they were, they were united by the fact that their thinking was so ideological. They sought to squeeze complex problems into the preferred cause-effect templates and treated what did not fit as irrelevant distractions. Allergic to wishy-washy answers, they kept pushing their analyses to the limit (and then some), using terms like “furthermore” and “moreover” while piling up reasons why they were right and others wrong. As a result, they were unusually confident and likelier to declare things “impossible” or “certain.” Committed to their conclusions, they were reluctant to change their minds even when their predictions clearly failed. They would tell us, “Just wait.”
> The other group consisted of more pragmatic experts who drew on many analytical tools, with the choice of tool hinging on the particular problem they faced. These experts gathered as much information from as many sources as they could. When thinking, they often shifted mental gears, sprinkling their speech with transition markers such as “however,” “but,” “although,” and “on the other hand.” They talked about possibilities and probabilities, not certainties. And while no one likes to say “I was wrong,” these experts more readily admitted it and changed their minds
> ...
> Foxes beat hedgehogs. And the foxes didn’t just win by acting like chickens, playing it safe with 60% and 70% forecasts where hedgehogs boldly went with 90% and 100%. Foxes beat hedgehogs on both calibration and resolution. Foxes had real foresight. Hedgehogs didn’t.
How did hedgehogs manage to do slightly worse than random guessing? To answer that question, let’s meet a prototypic hedgehog.18
> Larry Kudlow hosted a business talk show on CNBC and is a widely published pundit, but he got his start as an economist in the Reagan administration and later worked with Art Laffer, the economist whose theories were the cornerstone of Ronald Reagan’s economic policies. Kudlow’s one Big Idea is supply-side economics. When President George W. Bush followed the supply-side prescription by enacting substantial tax cuts, Kudlow was certain an economic boom of equal magnitude would follow. He dubbed it “the Bush boom.” Reality fell short: growth and job creation were positive but somewhat disappointing relative to the long-term average and particularly in comparison to that of the Clinton era, which began with a substantial tax hike. But Kudlow stuck to his guns and insisted, year after year, that the “Bush boom” was happening as forecast, even if commentators hadn’t noticed. He called it “the biggest story never told.” In December 2007, months after the first rumblings of the financial crisis had been felt, the economy looked shaky, and many observers worried a recession was coming, or had even arrived, Kudlow was optimistic. “There is no recession,” he wrote. “In fact, we are about to enter the seventh consecutive year of the Bush boom.”19
As I was crafting my message to Dr. Huemer, I fail to understand what he mischaracterized. He wrote that experts' knowledge is "unimpressive" and characterized Tetlock's research as "the best experts did only slightly better than chance at predicting outcomes".
Is that incorrect? Your paragraphs on foxes and hedgehogs were interesting subset analyses but didn't cite any numbers. Did foxes do much better than chance?
Tetlock writes, "The message became “all expert forecasts are useless,” which is nonsense"
But I think this does not apply to the linked Huemer paper. Huemer ends with accepting that experts are often the best that we have:
"Political leaders, voters, and activists are well-advised to follow the dictum, often applied to medicine, to “first, do no harm.” A plausible rule of thumb, to guard us against doing harm as a result of overconfident ideological beliefs, is that one should not forcibly impose requirements or restrictions on others unless the value of those requirements or restrictions is essentially uncontroversial among the community of experts in conditions of free and open debate. Of course, even an expert consensus may be wrong, but this rule of thumb may be the best that such fallible beings as ourselves can devise."
I'll preface this by saying I only know that Tetlock thinks that
> As I was crafting my message to Dr. Huemer, I fail to understand what he mischaracterized. He wrote that experts' knowledge is "unimpressive" and characterized Tetlock's research as "the best experts did only slightly better than chance at predicting outcomes".
It's very hard to read, and would certainly benefit from some color-coding, but the best experts do slightly better than chance in calibration, and much better than chance in discrimination, even though the majority of experts, and the group's average do worse. Assuming the dotted lines indicate some kind of equivalence gradient, then the best experts do significantly better than random chance.
(Note too that "mindless competition" ranges from chimps throwing darts to "moderate and extreme case-specific extrapolation" (I have no idea what this means, since I haven't read Expert Political Judgement). Not everything in that category is pure chance. I made this mistake when first looking at the graph, and became very confused.)
> Tetlock writes, "The message became “all expert forecasts are useless,” which is nonsense"
> But I think this does not apply to the linked Huemer paper.
It's plausible that the paper's conclusion survives this relatively minor mistake, especially when it ends up concluding that despite the lack of high predictive-power experts, we still have nothing better (which I'd disagree with because a) superforecasters exist, and many others are anecdotally able to beat the experts very often, and b) points #35-37 do significantly better on discrimination and calibration than experts, dilettantes, foxes, and hedgehogs. Though as I've said I don't know what "moderate and extreme case-specific extrapolation" nor "generalized autoregressive distributed lag" are. Though I haven't read Huemer's essay in full, so maybe he addresses this, or it's irrelevant to his case.).
I was mainly arguing that Tetlock's work does not support the conclusion that expertise is a sham. Even if there are important considerations and grains of salt which you should take when making use of expert forecasts.
> A lot of what we get is adjacent expertise. So somebody who studies viruses, and maybe knows a lot about the protein structure of viruses, will opine about masks, right? And you’ve got to ask yourself, "Do they have subject matter expertise in this mask thing? Whose expertise do we need here?"
> Because one thing that I think clearly came out of the whole masks controversy is that public health experts underrated how easy it would be to get cloth masks in everybody's hands. It didn't occur to them as a solution to the PPE shortages that we could just get everybody a cloth mask.
> And that's because they're not experts in textile manufacturing. And it's no shame on them for not being experts in textile manufacturing. But they were thinking about, “Will masks give people a false sense of security?” Which is a psychology question. They were thinking about “Can we substitute away from surgical masks?” Which is a textile supply chain question. They were thinking about “Well, what are the antiviral properties of cloth masks?” Which again is a textile question. That's not a public health -- it's obviously relevant to public health, but it's a material science question.
> They didn't have expertise in those areas, and were in fact just on a par with me, or anybody else, right? But they had the, sometimes, arrogance that comes with believing you're being asked about your area of expertise.
As a general point, there are many kinds of experts. It looks like Tetlock is using "expert" as shorthand for "experts in fields related to political prediction". His work probably doesn't tell you anything about medical predictions.
Perhaps this could be an objective definition of an expert: An expert is somebody who is usually right about a topic too boring for the average person to have a strong opinion about. For example, most practicing tax lawyers are, under this definition, experts on what the IRS will and won't let you deduct on your 1040. They get the various questions right the great majority of the time. But they seldom get nationally famous for their expertise.
On the other hand, topics that huge numbers of people find interesting, such as who will win the Super Bowl, tend to be ones that are hard to predict. The NFL is set up so that if you can predict the eventual Super Bowl winner at the start of the NFL 10% of the time, you are doing well. And even predicting the winner right 70% of the time at the opening kickoff is pretty hard. You can be a famous expert Super Bowl forecaster on TV without being right very much at all if you are at least interesting in the way you defend your wrong predictions.
As for Dr. Fauci, I don't watch much TV, so I have less of an opinion about him that almost everybody. I presume that most of the time during Dr. Fauci's long career, practically nobody among the general public was interested in him. I imagine he was pretty accurate during those boring times, thus meeting my definition of an expert.
During the two times when people were interested in Dr. Fauci, AIDS and Covid, he was probably less accurate. Not because he changed, but because the topics at hand became less predictable by expertise and thus less boring.
So, if experts are people who are usually right about boring topics, interesting topics are those which even the experts are frequently wrong about.
I would imagine that there are hundreds of little known NFL obsessives who have a better track record predicting who will win NFL games than the famous people who give their opinion of who will win on TV.
It's also possible that there are also amateur tax experts with better track records at predicting IRS behavior than the paid experts. But, I suspect, there are more amateur hobbyists following the NFL for fun than following the tax code for grins.
Tetlock can be interpreted as not saying "experts are wrong", but rather "experts aren't great at probabilities". The people who do well in Tetlock's research are non-experts but they do consult experts. Most of their advantage comes from being well calibrated to produce probabilities based on interpretations of the experts.
Yes, I'm one of Tetlock's Superforecasters and I like this framing. I like to point out that Superforecasters *are* experts - at making and assigning probabilities to predictions.
Many 'experts' actually are bad (think stereotypical pundits). But plenty of experts do have real expertise but are just bad at thinking quantitatively or rigorously about uncertainty, and they could be competent forecasters with training.
A: We're monkeys who more or less only *just* upgraded from feudalism. Things are going well considering we just need to keep iterating
B: Decisions get made that so clearly go against everyone's best interest on the regular. We can glimpse a better world and what we've build (while keeping us safe) is blocking us from moving forward.
I think the more fully we can recognise both the better, but A is a lot less represented in the current discourse, thanks for the reminder.
Ada Palmer puts it this way in her Terra Ignota series:
Is there anything important enough that you would destroy this world for it? Would you destroy this world to build a better one? Or would you destroy the chance of a better world, to save this flawed but in many ways utopian society?
(The society in her books is more clearly utopian than ours, but also clearly flawed in recognizable ways.)
Gosh I love those books. Though I'm still holding out hope for iteration rather than choosing between stagnation or revolution. Ideally Atlantis never has to fall.
onically, with the WebMD example, if you want the most precise I formation without political/legal intfluence you would choose an even more specialist (or professional) resource, such as the BNF (for drugs in the UK, which definitely doesn't list all side effects; I find it odd when a patient asks me about a side effect of a drug that I've prescribed for them that they've read in the leaflet yet the side effect is not significant enough to warrant listing in the British National Formulary so when I look it up I can't find it), fpnotebook, CKS etc
So? Is it true that disproportionately many borderline personality cases are young women with lots of piercings and tattoos? What does that tell us about diagnosis and etiology?
Scott has written before about how the same symptoms get labelled differently on different people. So I'd guess self reinforcing stereotypes are to blame
If x is mildly correlated with y, that still doesn't mean it makes sense to treat x like a "warning sign", especially when y isn't that common. Bayesian rules still apply here.
Especially when x is in this case is something like "having a non-conformist appearance", which I'm sure does have some minimal correlation with certain psychological disorders, but also tens to correlate much more strongly with traits I actively seek out, like "being a highly creative person" or "having a tolerant worldview towards LGBT people."
Yes! Keeping power vs. being right is a great constraint to point out. I would maybe suggest expanding "being right" to "competence" though -- I'm willing to buy that Zvi is really good at being right, but he might not be nearly as good at hiring, leadership, working with other people, keeping schedules or any of the other things that are sometimes completely unimportant and sometimes absolutely critical to a job.
The head of the CDC job and benevolent dictator in particular probably require a LOT more in terms of managerial than predictive skills. Zvi would, I suspect, be most useful as an advisor to the benevolent dictator than the dictator himself. It's a shame that governments don't employ advisors anymore.
That’s true to some degree certainly. But this article could easily be a very different article, based around “the CDC director is chosen based on skill at managing all disease needs, and Dr Fauci is the best person out there who can handle the management of a large agency, making public health decisions on new pandemics, and spearheading efforts to deal with existing diseases. It’s doubtful that he’s the best at all three, but I’m also doubtful that Zvi is superior at that combination, even ignoring need to do politics. Zvi’s skills, based on his blogposts about COVID, are focused around things like statistical analysis and observing new research. But those are not at all the same skills as managing a large agency. One response then might be that we should split up those tasks to different people - the head person manager, the head disease predictor, etcetera. But of course then you get back to politics - what do you do when those people disagree about how to handle a situation?
Governments absolutely have advisors (for example, POTUS has 'senior advisors,' who are not confirmed by the Senate). Frequently, these advisors are part of the problem that Scott has identified, in that they frequently push their nominal superiors towards complying with the will of special interest rather than acting in the general interest, and/or to whatever is most likely to maintain the superior's power, which in turn is good for their power.
They're also frequently and more straightforwardly part of the corruption that makes being right difficult; often, such jobs are handed out as patronage or given to figures who would not (for instance) survive confirmation, or to tick special interest boxes themselves on an org chart.
Of course, the other kind, which you envision, exist as well. Smart and driven professionals who, by the nature of their appointments, are unbounded by the need to pander to the political breeze of the day or to special interests and who might be able deploy their skills towards the singular goal of being right as often as possible.
The key, I suppose, is to optimize for the latter over the former. I'm not sure there's a good way to do that, since it's always going to depend to a large degree on the character and priorities of the appointer. If the appointer is themselves appointed or elected, we know well that their characters vary widely and in ways that aren't straightforward to control (as in, who gets elected, and who those elected people then appoint to [for instance] Senate-confirmed posts, who then appoint advisors).
I'm sure our current system doesn't do a good job of optimizing for this. Even if we assume that there is one of the 'good' kind for every one of the 'bad' kind (which I doubt; I suspect the real distribution favors the 'bad'), the best you're likely to get is for them to cancel each other out. An advisor that makes the right call doesn't count for anything if her superior acts instead on the recommendation of another advisor who prioritizes power. And, under our current system, it's likely that there's more than one realpolitker for every truth-seeker.
In this regard, despite many efforts to curb patronage (that, historically speaking, have been unquestionably and extremely successful), it still definitely exists. Especially these days, when people desiring patronage frequently have impeccable CVs themselves, studded with degrees and honors from tier 1 institutions, work experience in tier 1 private entities, or government experience in tier 1 or 2, and reams of glowing recommendations. With an elite culture as credentialed and extensive as ours, it can be very difficult, even for an appointer who wants to stock their kitchen cabinet with the 'good' kind to pick them out of such a crowd. Frequently, the solution chosen is to pick people you've known your whole career, which of course has its own pitfalls.
And then these pitfalls lead to their own, and so and so on ad infinitum until you really do have to fall back on Scott's thesis, and hoping that we've built a sufficiently resilient and effective system that actually does optimize, in any marginal way, for obtaining the right outcome.
Cool hominid party trick: The world is abominably complex, so we call up organizational superstructures from the depths of meme hell and put them to work managing said abominable complexity. This is adaptive, apparently.
The dread blueprint of the FDA lurks latent in the collective unconscious, waiting to manifest and consume the souls of unsuspecting hunter-gatherers.
Killing someone to take all their stuff is adaptive for the killer, but probably not adaptive for society at large. Summoning the FDA is adaptive for Anthony Fauci, but...
Are you referring to the articles on lorienpsych.com as your small database? I thought you meant more like a weighted average of patient ratings like when you recently compared different amphetamines.
Yes - the amazing thing is that our society works far better than we have any right to expect. (And far better than it would if 99% of reform proposals were adopted.)
And...just put a link to this post on your database (BTW, where is it?).
That *ought* to be sufficient, but of course it won't be for some people. You just have to live with that - valuable info online will help many people and hurt a few who misuse it. But it does net positive good.
The alternative is to become WebMD. They're *cowards*. They know they're destroying the utility of the information they offer, but they have shareholders to appease and lawyers to fear.
You can, and must, be braver. Probably you won't get sued over this, and if you do you'll probably win. But you're in the lucky position - unlike WebMD - of having a large fanbase who appreciate what you do and will bail you out if all goes pear shaped. I can (and do) guarantee that you'll never have to worry about financial hardship because of losing a lawsuit over this stuff - somebody in your fanbase will ensure you have a well-paying job (in the unlikely event you need help).
> you're in the lucky position - unlike WebMD - of having a large fanbase who appreciate what you do and will bail you out if all goes pear shaped. I can (and do) guarantee that you'll never have to worry about financial hardship because of losing a lawsuit over this stuff - somebody in your fanbase will ensure you have a well-paying job (in the unlikely event you need help).
in other words, scott has his own political capital he can draw on to do things in the world, much as faucci has his political capital. i wonder if there's something here... for instance, what if faucci had his own circle of fans who would protect him if things went "pear shaped"? i guess he actually probably does, but he still wouldn't be able to continue occupying his current position in his current power structure.
is it just the problem that faucci's power structure is too big, and his enemies too diffuse in too many other competing power structures? going too far, does our utopian future lie in smaller, more distributed power structures?
Fauci clearly has a lot of political capital. He has survived in his current role since at least the 1980s, through two pandemics that he partially mismanaged, but then greatly improved his management of (and improved more than any of the obvious replacements seem like they would have). He seems to be one of the very few Trump administration executive officers that survived long past crossing Trump many times.
"What I sometimes call Marx's Fallacy is that if we burnt down the current system, some group of people who optimized for things other than power would naturally rise to the top. Wrong. People who most brutally and nakedly optimized for power would gain power; that's what "optimize" means. The interesting thing about the current system is that, after millions of very smart and altruistic people have contributed to it over generations, sometimes gaining and keeping power within it is modestly correlated with being good and right."
This is so brutally insightful and hilarious at the same time.
Where did Marx say anything like that? If it's an "insight" it has to correlate to something Marx wrote. Scott Alexander provided absolutely no evidence that this fallacy can be traced to Marx.
I don't know a whole lot about Marxism (despite the profile picture), but I'm actually under the impression that he believed the opposite - that to get to communism, after destroying capitalism an intermediate strong government would be needed to gradually transition the country to communism.
Perhaps he underestimated the difficulty in ensuring such an intermediate government would remain true to the goals of the revolution that got them there, but he certainly didn't think communist utopia would naturally emerge.
As a former citizen of the USSR I would say that the socialistic government always remained true to the goal of building communism and that's why they were a failure. In this I totally agree with Scott Alexander and I am even surprised how he can have such great insights. Most Americans simply don't get it and they think of the USSR only in terms of a culture war – that they were bad because they wanted to take over the world or something like that.
Being a former citizen of the USSR doesn't make you an expert in Marxist thought. If you want to defend Scott's point here you should quote Marx using primary sources - not give us anecdotes.
It makes me a test subject and my verdict is – it doesn't work and experts were wrong.
I actually had to study Marxism-Leninism at school. It does not matter if Marx said precisely those words or not. It is something what a reasonable person looking at the history would conclude.
Test subjects aren't the one writing scientific reports and conclusions, so your metaphor doesn't make sense.
>It does not matter if Marx said precisely those words or not.
If Scott Alexander wants to call something "Marx's fallacy" then I suggest he prove that Marx thought something along those lines. This really should not be too difficult (if Marx indeed made such a mistake) using primary sources. Otherwise it seems more like Scott Alexander is failing an Ideological Turing Test.
"Marx believed that all world history was a “history of class struggles.” According to Marx, oppressor and oppressed have always “stood in constant opposition to one another.” One group—the oppressors—owned the means of production, such as land, raw materials, and money. They controlled government and society. The other group—the oppressed—owned nothing and depended on the owners of the means of production. Marx believed he saw a society that was "more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie and Proletariat." The bourgeoisie—the middle class—were the oppressors. The proletariat (PROH•luh•TEHR•ee•uht)—the working class—were the oppressed. Marx predicted that the struggle between the two groups would finally lead to a revolution. The proletariat would violently overthrow the bourgeoisie. After their victory, the proletariat would form a dictatorship to organize the means of production. However, because the proletariat victory would essentially abolish the economic differences that create separate social classes, Marx believed the final revolution would ultimately produce a classless society. The state itself, which had been a tool of the bourgeoisie, would wither away." -Mcgraw Hill Education company. (if you think this one is inaccurate, it's literally being used in schools)
I don't think he needs to correlate it because it's the foundation of Marxism.
Marx revised to define exactly what communism is because it must arise from the conditions of the world when the revolution comes.
That is: Marx believed so strongly in the fact that the revolution would make things perfect that he refused to guide that revolution at all.
Here is a relevant quote:
"Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence."
That is, Marx defined communism as the complete overthrow of the current state of affairs. This is the basis of communism.
"That is: Marx believed so strongly in the fact that the revolution would make things perfect"
He doesn't say anything about the revolution making things "perfect" in the quote you offered. Neither does it say anything about " if we burnt down the current system, some group of people who optimized for things other than power would naturally rise to the top".
He's saying that Marxism says that communism will naturally arise from revolution/when the current state of affairs are overthrown. It's saying that communism (the "perfect" system) will naturally rise to the top.
Where does Marx call communism a "perfect" system? If we're attributing words and ideas to Marx we should probably be very careful about finding primary sources. I also think people are putting an undue emphasis on "naturally" here, as if it occurs without foresight. Marx is talking about very deliberate political movements, which yes, arise from the seeds sown by capitalism.
For anyone wondering, MarxBro is a dedicated troll of the rationalish community, coming out of the woodwork anytime Marx is mentioned to make ever escalating demands for rigor. No criticism or even mention of Marx or Marxism is well-founded unless it engages with primary sources to MarxBro's standards, a standards which tellingly has never been met by any interlocutor ever. Don't waste your time.
When someone has claimed Marx has made a "fallacy" I'm well within my rights (and indeed, common sense in general) to ask where that fallacy exists in their original works. Using citations. If that seems like an "escalating demand" then I'm very happy to escalate the rationalist community by uplifting their standards.
As a reader with no dog in this hunt, I'm not sure what to make of this ad hominem comment about marxbro1917. Maybe my troll-o-meter is not very sensitive.
I thought Marx argued that capitalism bore the seeds of its own destruction, that this was a core tenet of dialectical materialism, not that Marx was a kind of crass "burn it down" accelerationist nor a theorist ignorant of how power corrupts. So it seemed reasonable to me that someone might ask why is Scott attributing this very common human fallacy to Marx specifically.
There are legions of people fantasizing in our present-day moment about how if we burned everything down, something better would just naturally kind of spring up. Of all the ideological lineages that feed this kind of naivete, I wouldn't associate it mainly with Marxism. So in that sense, I'm sympathetic to the request for greater precision.
I guess I would wish for more tolerance in our conversational norms around calling people out for politely requesting greater precision or clarity or whatever to any given point. If we have a dedicated Marxist in our midst who can do that around Marx-adjacent thoughts, isn't that a good thing?
We have libertarian economists on here who can press fine points around their arenas of concern and anti-feminists around their arenas of concern, and I've done my share around the finer points of Buddhist philosophy or non-pharmaceutical mental healthcare, or the particular brokenness of the U.S. health insurance system. If someone's not just ranting angrily but is bringing some (dare I say?) expertise to the conversation, is that not welcome, even if they only have one arena of expertise they tend to bring?
I guess maybe this raises a larger question about where is the line between troll, hobby horse, and desire for clarity around things one knows something about?
"As a reader with no dog in this hunt, I'm not sure what to make of this ad hominem comment about marxbro1917. Maybe my troll-o-meter is not very sensitive."
You perhaps were not around for previous interactions with Marxbro before he came back as Marxbro1917. But even in this exchange, can you not see his modus operandi? "I don't care that you grew up in a country that implemented Communism, you had to study Marxist-Leninism, and you can comment on how the theory works out in practice, I still maintain that flying elephants are totally possible!" He's not honest in his interactions.
I'm very honest in my interactions. And if I'm being honest, I'm not impressed by people who say "I've studied Marxism-Leninism" but then fail to produce the primary sources and citations I've been asking for. My point here is very simple, Marx regards socialism as developing and superseding capitalism from within the capitalist system itself. He does not advocate to "burn it all down" (not sure what this would even mean when we're talking about international economies), nor does he have the naive analysis of power that Scott Alexander attributes to him (without citation, of course).
Therefore, I am asking for evidence, please. If "Marx's fallacy" exists in Marx's writings then someone should be able to find it, using quotes from the source.
I'm very suspicious of the troll label based on the comments of others who have a social history with the accused -- especially when the accused appears transparent and thus vulnerable in advocating for their project. As a relative newcomer here, this forum appears above average when it comes to the expression of independent thought (rather than piling on socially with the intent to suppressing others).
But, perhaps, Marxbro, you are guilty of pedanticism, which is nowhere in the neighborhood of trolling. Trolling employs a very wide and shallow focus, while pedanticism is laser focused -- and your defensively-trained laser may be missing a wider, more social point about Marxism writ large. I.e., "Marxism" today is an enormous trope that we all play around with for various reasons -- which your project naturally bristles at.
When it comes to primary source material, the thing that's more relevant to me than whether Marx actually penned certain words, is how ideas and history actually merged, and I was blown away (and thoroughly entertained) recently by the English-dubbed "Comrade Detective" series (the dubbing making it primarily a primary source) -- which helped give me a glimpse of both how huge and complex the commitment to socialism still was by that time, but also, simultaneously, how correct the notion seemed that, in human cultures, those who optimize for power always seem to perform the act of power most efficiently.
Well, yes, for a certain value of "honest". We can always depend on you to tell us that no matter who, no matter what, no matter that you did live in a country basing itself on an understanding of Marx's thought that "she doesn't have the range" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zq97J-7Mwzc
You do remind me of the literalists going "Where is that in the Bible?"
I definitely don't have the insight into what Marx actually meant that say, his 103-year-old brother might possess. But when he writes: "The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win." in The Communist Manifesto (part IV) it seems to me that he is advocating "burn it all down" when he says "forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions". Of course, I'm sure I probably didn't even cite it in the proper formatting (MLA? APA? USSR?) Full disclosure, I don't know a lot about Marx [insert your own Duck Soup joke here] nor have I studied Marxism-Leninism. I also don't know why I'm posting here, I feel like I'm giving a whining 3-year-old the sucker they've been throwing a tantrum about only to have them tell me it's not the right flavour (just wait, it'll happen).
I think that Scott described his view leading him to call it Marx's Fallacy in his Marxism related book reviews. I think it was this one in particular: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/13/book-review-singer-on-marx/ . But there might be other related ones that I've forgotten.
I do not think that Scott Alexander has undertaken an accurate reading of Marx. His presentation of "Marx's fallacy" - which I, as a Marxist, do not recognise at all. I think Scott is failing the Ideological Turing Test here. This is why I'm challenging him to find a primary source where Marx says anything like
"if we burnt down the current system, some group of people who optimized for things other than power would naturally rise to the top."
If that's "Marx's fallacy", if that's what Marx said, then it should be easy for Scott Alexander (or anybody else) to find Marx saying this in his writings. I believe in evidence, and I'm asking for evidence on this matter.
I've read both Scott's piece and your response. I didn't find your response convincing. I'll take one argument to explain why, rather than go through every single one.
Marx says: "But the essence of man is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In reality, it is the ensemble of the social relations." Scott/Singer summarise this as he "believed there was no such thing as human nature and everything was completely malleable".
That seems like an accurate summary to me. Marx is saying quite clearly that merely being human tells you nothing whatsoever about how that person might behave, think or live their life. Nothing. Zero. Whether you call it "essence of man" or "human nature", in normal English these terms mean "that which is common to every [developed] human regardless of their experience of background".
Yet here Marx claims that this thing, which is literally defined as "that which is inherent to any individual" is actually not inherent at all, it's rather socially constructed and is thus, by definition, malleable, because the "ensemble of the social relations" is neither fixed or inherent. Indeed Marx's entire philosophy was that by changing that ensemble, humanity could become greater.
You keep demanding primary sources, but in your review Scott/Singer literally quote Marx word for word and you just claim their rephrasing into more modern English is wrong. If Marx is so hard to interpret that people can read completely opposite things into the same sentence then he is just an objectively terrible writer, but I don't think this passage is actually hard to interpret. He rejects the notion of a fixed, immutable human nature and claims that what makes people act the way they do is purely social in nature (implication: and thus can be changed via social means, like revolution).
Marx could certainly have been philosophically and theoretically correct about human nature, while still being clueless about pragmatics (such as scope and timeframe and other material complexities). Maybe it's not so fair to judge philosophers by how politicians and societies attempted to adopt and manifest (and fight against) their philosophies?
>Marx is saying quite clearly that merely being human tells you nothing whatsoever about how that person might behave, think or live their life. Nothing. Zero.
He doesn't say that, though. He says that " the essence of man is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In reality, it is the ensemble of the social relations." i.e that generalisation about human nature are only describing wide ensembles of human behavior, not any particular individual. "Malleable" is also different to "completely malleable" - notice the shifting goalposts here.
> If Marx is so hard to interpret
Marx isn't really hard to interpret, which is why I suspect that Scott Alexander simply didn't read it very carefully.
For another point of data, I would call myself a Marxist. I have read Kapital but not the Communist Manifesto or any of his other works. I think Marx was notably good in diagnosis of the political economy of his time, but notably poor in prescription of how to fix it, and particularly what a better functioning political economy would look like. I don't begrudge him this, the latter are much harder problems.
I think he was conflicted about the question of who would rise to the top after a revolution. On the one hand, a lot of what I read from him was at pains to try and conceive of an organisation that could ensure that future leaders better represented working class people. I don't think he did a particularly good job of describing or building that organisation but he certainly tried and recognised it to be a hard problem. On the other, he seemed to maintain a confidence that revolution was inevitable and that the world would be better afterwards. A contradiction between faith and rationality, perhaps? I sorta recognise that you have to maintain some kind of faith in the possibility that things will ever get better to remain sane in this world.
I agree with this analysis of "politics vs being right/doing the right thing" but it creates another obvious problem: the good of being right in the moment is bounded, but the good of being right in the future is unbounded
One of my favorite scenes from the Wire is when the newly-elected mayor of Baltimore has a problem. He needs money to bail out the public school system, which he can get from the governor, but if he does, he becomes "the mayor whose failing public schools forced the governor to get involved and the state as a whole to contribute tax dollars to bail him out," thus ending his future ambitions of becoming governor himself. And of course, once he is governor, his ability to do good things will be much greater than his ability as mayor. So he decides to let the school system continue to collapse to preserve his opportunity at future success, and future good.
I think almost every politician or person who has a political component to their job has made this calculation at some point in their lives. And in some sense its hard to say they are making the wrong call. Because if that fictional politician goes on to become President and signs a bill which ends child poverty, whose to say it wasn't worth a few thousand kids in Baltimore?
I don't have a solution to this problem, except to say that at some point everybody in every position that might even have a glimmer of power has to ask themselves "what's the absolute amount of good worth sacrificing today for the prospect of being able to do good tomorrow?" And to think really hard about the answer.
Flip side- nobody who habitually compromises the public good for advancement will ever, ever, sign a bill that ends child poverty. The selection process weeds out the ones who would.
The Wire also depicts the same problem with lawyers; anyone who presses real cases that could a difference would upset the apple cart and prevent career advancement. The prosecutors who don’t play politics never become judges. The solution presented- STOP TRYING TO BE JUDGES.
I recently read an interesting blog post somewhere (I misremember where) carving out a workable, useful definition of decadence. Rather than resort to stereotypes about Manly Men Becoming Comfortable and Weak or sex orgies or drug use, it defined decadence as when the elites of a society stop competing with each to see who can provide the greatest benefit to the community, and start jockeying for the greatest *status* within the community. The moment you take what power you have and start scheming on how to get ahead of the pack to higher honors and more power instead of focusing on doing the best damn job you can do today, you have left virtue behind and are now part of the problem.
"History isn’t going to rap you on the knuckles because people are having a bit too much gay sex or men have long hair now, history is going to rap you on the knuckles if people aren’t committed to larger projects than themselves."
Not exactly-- it's important for people to be committed to projects (of whatever size and requiring however much commitment) which actually work.
That sounds like Peter Turchin's theories about an overproduction of elites who squabble against each other for the few available spots at the top. Of course, he borrowed his logic from Ibn Khaldun.
> at some point everybody in every position that might even have a glimmer of power has to ask themselves "what's the absolute amount of good worth sacrificing today for the prospect of being able to do good tomorrow?" And to think really hard about the answer.
this is almost the opposite of the discount rate -- what is the amount of good in the future that i can discount to get a smaller amount of good right now. in ksr's recent "ministry for the future" there's a section arguing that we place too *high* a value on present good, at the cost to our future selves/descendants. i find the same problem occurs with thinkers like, e.g., tyler cowen -- "ignore climate change now and focus on getting rich, and we'll be so rich in the future that climate change will be super-cheap to solve relative to our newfound wealth"
You are missing the HCQ elephant in the room (and the Ivermectin rhino too....). This makes your otherwise excellent post dismayingly close to worthless, until you can come to terms with the extraordinary number of lives lost due to the corruption of the process that Fauci, putting it enormously too mildly, allowed to occur.
While there are some side effects, I really don't think the emergency prescription of HCQ caused an extraordinary number of lives to be lost, main harm would be the money wasted and some nausea in patients who wouldn't otherwise need to feel it
That is so unbelievably backwards that I’m not going to even argue with you, you’re a hopeless case. The consensus is FINALLY coming around to “HCQ and Ivermectin are effective treatments if given EARLY”, which most of the rest of the world has known for many months, but which people who only consume US media have been shockingly gaslighted about.
Could you point me to some high quality research, so I can be de-gaslighted? Preferentially research in which the control group wasn't significantly older or more comorbid than the HCQ group, or meta-analysis that know you can't just multiply p-values?
I gave a link which is somewhat polemical but full of references to both studies and meta-analyses. In this very special case indeed, polemics are appropriate, because there has been intentional bad faith and lying. The bad faith and lying is so shocking that you may need to see the references in the context of the narrative given in this article to overcome the initial reaction that 95% of English-speaking medical professionals have (“this can’t possibly be right because my sources have so universally told me it is wrong therefore I do not need to pay attention to it”).
Sadly, when looking at the individual studies, you can always spot very important methodological flaws (usually, the placebo group will be significant older or have more diseases previous to COVID infection, when compared to the HCQ group). Whenever this selection effect is corrected by proper randomization of patients into treatment/placebo group, HCQ fails to show an effect. You can check this by yourself, usually on table 1 of any paper about the treatment. This raises the question: if the treatment is so effective, why don't the researchers publish a well-researched study, to actually convince people that it works? Why are all positive studies filled with so much shoddy statistics? Dexamethasone, a cheap over-the-counter drug IS accepted as a treatment, so why wouldn't HCQ be too?
(for context: I am a Brazilian physician working in emergency care, so I am familiar with the narrative purported by Filipe Rafaeli in the original publication)
In the Supplementary Materials: look at page 17, titled "Figure S1. Forest Plot of A Priori Identified Subgroups" (based on page 13, titled "Table S6. Subgroup Analysis of Risk of New Covid-19 Compatible Illness"). Look especially at the "days exposure" section of page 17.
When I look at Figure S1 overall what jumps out is that using the protocol of this study nearly *every* subgroup did better with HCQ than without it but *how* well they did is *time-dependent*, meaning *the sooner post-exposure treatment started, the larger the positive effect*. That looks to me like a dose-response relationship! 1 day worked *very* well, 2 days worked well, 3 days worked kind-of-okay, and waiting as long as 4 days was worse than placebo.
If you take that set of results and toss ALL the data together in one bucket the "4-days" negative result and "3-days" marginal result drag down the average effectiveness but if you just look at day 1 or days 1 and 2, treatment was effective at the .05 level. Based on that study one should assume HCQ DOES help (especially for younger people) if started right away or better yet if started *prior* to exposure. The results suggest that young medical workers should keep it on hand and start taking it right away upon any accidental exposure unless and until there's a better option.
(one worrisome fly in the soup is that subgroup "age>50" also failed to be helped by HCQ. Maybe the older patients were less likely to start treatment right away? Dunno, that's something to look at in a larger followup study, but it shouldn't have stopped us from at LEAST advocating that younger medics use HCQ early on).
How are those results significant? They are a very small relative risk reduction, with a wide confidence interval that covers both "no effect" and "may increase risk"
The confidence interval is very wide because the N is too small. A drug that on its own (without help from any other assisting intervention) reduces your risk of covid symptoms by merely ~33% (rather than the intended 50%) is still worth taking and would save thousands of lives, but needs a larger N than was used to show a .05 certainty level in a study such as this. If you re-ran this study with twice the participants the confidence interval would narrow; assuming a similar pattern for the mean expected result the interval wouldn't have to narrow *much* to exclude "may increase risk" for days=1, right?
(I take back the claim that days={1,2} are *already* shown to be "effective at the .05 level" - I was reading the wrong data column. Drat this interface that doesn't let you revise after posting!)
The paper I linked has a long analysis of the NEJM Boulware study and shows how the data of that study was misinterpreted. I had come to similar conclusions at the time it was published. The study really shows that HCQ has a benefit but the statistical significance of the effect was underestimated.
As I said, there is a big difference between USA and areas very influenced by it, and other parts of the world (much of which has a great deal of experience with HCQ over the last 75 years and knows things about its toxicity profile that writers and researchers here have sometimes been quite ignorant of). The most recent work seems to show that Ivermectin is at least as good; but I already knew last April that HCQ was good and last May that Ivermectin was good because I was paying attention to the entire world. Much more on this at my link.
The most recent This Week in Virology had a really interesting paper they discussed going into the details as to why HCQ did so badly in *in vivo* studies despite doing so well *in vitro*. https://www.microbe.tv/twiv/twiv-715/
It failed when given late, succeeded when given early, and there was an unbelievably intense effort in the USA to obliterate all knowledge of this distinction in order to portray it as “HCQ doesn’t work” full stop.
Congratulations on being part of the 95%. I TOLD you there were references to both studies and meta-analyses, I EXPLAINED that this was a special case where it was necessary to read something even though it had a polemical tone, but STILL you sought and found an excuse to avoid it. F*** off, I’m done here.
Apologies, I now realize you may have been responding to one of my previous two replies without having seen the other one, due to delays in comments showing up on the site.
Nobody is going to read 50,000 words filled with irrelevant minutiae presumably designed to answer every argument this dude has ever heard from anyone. Just link what you consider to be the best studies, otherwise you come off like guys who can only "prove their point" with rambling 90 minute youtubes.
There’s a big difference between a 90 minute youtube and a paper written in several dozen numbered sections with hyperlinks to actual studies. The whole point is that it is a complicated story so I am not going to over simplify it, I am instead giving you the best summary I know of of the entire STORY which is about not only medical truth but a great deal more!
Enjoy it, or enjoy the feeling of satisfaction finding an excuse to snarkily avoid it gives you, I won’t presume to tell you which of those to prefer.
This is not "a polemical tone." This is 90% polemics. I could flip to literally any paragraph and find either an irrelevant side-story or a ramble about why the establishment got it wrong. He spends 7 paragraphs saying that the scientific establishment wouldn't have believed Yuri Gagarin when he said the Earth is blue.
You're correct, I didn't see your other post saying that this was a special case, but "this is a special case" is hardly convincing either way. Every crackpot claims that they're not like all those other conspiracy theorists, they're a special case, and just this once, you should read 15,000 words about how the establishment is lying and suppressing the truth.
Just the facts, please. I've seen many websites like this and approximately 0% of them have been worth my time. I'm not going to dig through all this crap about Yuri Gagarin and pandas, just link to the scientific evidence that supports your case.
Oh wait, not 15,000 words, there are like 5 different essays on that site and I have no way of knowing which one you're actually referring to, and they're all equally long and equally crackpot-looking. You are literally telling me to read a novel's worth of text on the hopes that there are actual studies somewhere in there.
I'd like to think I read about all the major studies on HCQ that came out over the summer and I don't think that's a fair summary of the evidence. Dosing time has been a routine cofounder as people do RCTs on people who show up in the hospital 7 to 10 days after symptom onset for drugs like broad spectrum antivirals, monoclonal antibodies, and vitamin D. But the only study I'd say looked good for HCQ was one out of India looking a prophylactic dosing and that wasn't a RCT so I don't think I trust it.
Your tone and choice to be hyperbolic are disappointingly out of keeping with the spirit of the SSC community. It's still an open question whether inflammatory phrasing and hot takes like yours becomes the norm due to this new blog transition or whether behavior like yours is discouraged well enough that people either self-regulate or go elsewhere. I hope it's the latter.
Sorry, but that’s totally wrong. My ORIGINAL reply was quite “normal” in tone, and I shall re-paste it here:
“It failed when given late, succeeded when given early, and there was an unbelievably intense effort in the USA to obliterate all knowledge of this distinction in order to portray it as “HCQ doesn’t work” full stop.”
AFTER I posted that reply, I encountered resistance and snark, and responded in kind, so don’t go lecturing me about the “spirit” of the “community”.
My understanding is that HCQ is effective when combined with another medication to block another pathway for the virus for transmit, but not especially otherwise, and this explains the divergent results in studies. __ice9 has written about this, although unfortunately on twitter rather than blogging like a civilized person.
The combination with another drug such as azithromycin is important, but much more important is the fact that it is proven effective when given in the first few days (outpatient basis) after symptoms appear, and a large number of studies which showed no effectiveness or low effectiveness for patients who had already become sick enough to be hospitalized were systematically misrepresented (I know because I was paying very close attention all along) so that early use was discouraged or discontinued (including some actually fraudulent studies!).
I see one snarky comment from beleester, but other than that it's mostly people being extremely charitable to a position that you've so far only defended by linking to one website that pings an awful lot of red flags for being conspiracy theory nonsense.
I'm certainly not seeing anything that would warrant replies like:
>>That is so unbelievably backwards that I’m not going to even argue with you, you’re a hopeless case.
> Expertise isn't a sham.
Tetlock begs to differ: https://spot.colorado.edu/~huemer/papers/passivity.htm
"In light of the ignorance of typical political leaders and members of the general public, we might be tempted by the idea of rule by experts, as in Plato’s Republic. 18 Unfortunately, when it comes to descriptive social theory, even the experts’ knowledge is unimpressive, as demonstrated recently by the social psychologist Phillip Tetlock. Tetlock conducted a fifteen-year study in which he collected tens of thousands of predictions from hundreds of political experts concerning matters within their areas of expertise (for example, would the economy slide into recession, would the Soviet Union survive, who would win the next Presidential election, and so on). Tetlock’s finding, in brief, was that the best experts did only slightly better than chance at predicting outcomes. When asked to assign probabilities to their predictions, experts proved systematically overconfident; for example, events predicted with 100% confidence happened less than 80% of the time."
I don't think this is a fair characterization. There are definitely subjects where expertise is real (infectious disease is probably actually one of the clearer-cut ones). Much of Tetlock's work is about identifying which subjects have real expertise and which ones don't.
What I quoted did note, "when it comes to descriptive social theory". I think it was Scott's claim that "Expertise isn't a sham" which isn't a fair characterization and is too broad. There's a separate and more complicated philosophical question of whether mental health fits into social theory or neurophysiology.
Medicine, even physical medicine, still seems much less scientific than something like aerospace engineering. As Greg Cochran & Nassim Taleb like to point out, doctors were on net harmful for most of the very long existence of their profession. And "public health experts" if anything seem to be more captured by political activism than your typical never-heard-of-Bayesian-probability doc.
My impression is that public health experts were pretty impressive when public health was a major concern -- say, during the Panama Canal era of the first half of the 20th Century.
But as infectious disease became less of a problem, public health experts tended to become more politicized and less useful. Few public health experts in the 1980s dared enunciate the chief cause of the AIDS epidemic in the US, Gay Liberation, which led to a lot of unnecessary paranoia among heterosexuals who had never been close to Castro Street, Santa Monica Boulevard, or Christopher Street. And in recent decades, public health experts who, deep down, know better, have shamefully countenanced the popular myth that AIDS was, somehow, due to the supposed homophobia of Ron and Nancy Reagan.
Wasn't the AIDS crisis actually a big problem caused by infectious disease? My understanding is that it was the biggest cause of death for adults under a certain age. Granted, it was highly concentrated in certain populations and not actually as prone to "breaking out" as the experts warned.
Polio got worse during the 20th Century in the US, with the 1952 outbreak being the worst in US history. My vague impression is that the post WWII fight against polio was more or less the climactic chapter of the heroic age of the struggle against infectious disease, which had included the triumph over yellow fever at the Panama Canal.
Over the next few decades, public health, especially in the US, became more routine. That's a good thing, but it also meant that less top talent flowed into the field and practitioners got less practice at dealing with novel crises. Perhaps this caused problems when AIDS and COVID came along?
Interestingly/bizarrely, there are or were a bunch of qualified experts who believe(d) that AIDS is not caused by HIV. They believe both exist but that HIV is a relatively harmless virus that was in effect 'framed' by bad science. The people in question had long careers in virology, microbiology or in one case as a journalist who covered the AIDS epidemic over a period of about a decade for a major national newspaper.
One of their many arguments is that it shouldn't be possible for a virus to express a preference for homosexuals, or at least not for very long, because they're too small and simple to be able to 'know' the orientation of their host. The long-predicted break-out into the heterosexual community never happened. Even today most AIDS cases are gay and male, except in Africa where AIDS affects both genders the same. This is also posited as being inexplicable if African AIDS is the same phenomenon as western AIDS, because again, a virus is too small and simple to prefer men in the west but have no gender preference in Africa.
Past tense used because I'm not sure if those people are still around. I found out about this because one of them was the inventor of PCR testing, but he's dead now.
The name familiar to me for that is Duesberg, and I believe his argument is that AIDS is actually caused by drug use, which was common for many of the victims at the time. The difference between sub-Saharan Africa and the rest of the world does seem odd. Here's the one theory I'm aware of to attempt to explain it: https://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/02/africa-hiv-perverts-or-bad-med.html
> Few public health experts in the 1980s dared enunciate the chief cause of the AIDS epidemic in the US
Early named for AIDS were literally "GRID" for "gay-related immune deficiency" and "4H" for the four groups (including "homosexuals") among which it initially clustered.
You can't seriously claim no one was considering orientation when they literally named the damn thing after it and then got a whole New York Times article to themselves entitled "NEW HOMOSEXUAL DISORDER WORRIES HEALTH OFFICIALS" (https://www.nytimes.com/1982/05/11/science/new-homosexual-disorder-worries-health-officials.html)
But of course this comment section being what it is, this claim got five upvotes despite this being common knowledge among anyone with even the slightest familiarity with the history of AIDS. Hey, fellow lurkers, I suggest you look up this person's name and tell me if you think that's the sort of person you want making undebunked claims in your intellectual space.
Obviously, the doctors and scientists dealing with Castro Street AIDS patients in the early 1980s knew how it was being spread.
Over the years, however, the Establishment has managed to obfuscate, such as by angrily denouncing anyone who points out the history, the role that Gay Liberation played in AIDS. So that today few seem aware anymore of the historical connection. I wouldn't be surprised if more people today thought AIDS was caused by homophobia.
Your claim wasn't about today. You literally said:
> Few public health experts *in the 1980s*
If public health experts are talking about it in the New York Times, it's not a victim of a hypothetical early-80s cancel-culture. Plain and simple.
---------
As to the rest of your claim:
I believe, and would discuss and have discussed with other members of the queer community, that being the receptive partner in anal sex is the riskiest common sexual activity with respect to HIV transmission.
No one (well, almost no one, there's always a crazy person or three) objects to this claim. You'll find this claim in a pamphlet on the table in every student queer group in America, in the waiting room of every LGBT-inclusive therapist's office, in the sidebar of every LGBT subreddit. I know this because I spent a good chunk of my 20s in those rooms and got really, really sick of it. And in fact, we can go to the CDC website right now (https://www.cdc.gov/hiv/basics/hiv-transmission/ways-people-get-hiv.html) and find exactly that claim in black and white:
"Anal sex is the riskiest type of sex for getting or transmitting HIV.
Being the receptive partner (bottom) is riskier for getting HIV than being the insertive partner (top)."
So your claim, basically, is that the feared "Establishment"'s best shot at suppressing news of the risks of anal sex is to promote them in every channel it has. If that's their best shot, well, I don't think you have much to worry about.
It seems rather likely that if we had legalized gay marriage back in the 1970s, HIV would have been less severe in the gay community.
The gay community was (and is) both promiscuous and engaged in the most dangerous type of sex (anal sex) regularly. It is still the highest risk factor in the US. The second highest is being black - 42% of HIV diagnoses are in black people, and it is likely actually worse than that because black people are probably less likely to get diagnosed because of anti-doctor sentiments in the black community.
Gay liberation wasn't really the issue; gay promiscuity was.
Aerospace engineering was also net-harmful before the 20th century.
There wasn't nearly as much of it as there was medicine.
"infectious disease is probably actually one of the clearer-cut ones"
Doesn't seem like it.
This is a mischaracterization of Tetlock's work which he himself has rebutted in the first chapter of Superforecasting
> But I realized that as word of my work spread, its apparent meaning was mutating. What my research had shown was that the average expert had done little better than guessing on many of the political and economic questions I had posed. “Many” does not equal all. It was easiest to beat chance on the shortest-range questions that only required looking one year out, and accuracy fell off the further out experts tried to forecast—approaching the dart-throwing-chimpanzee level three to five years out. That was an important finding. It tells us something about the limits of expertise in a complex world—and the limits on what it might be possible for even superforecasters to achieve. But as in the children’s game of “telephone,” in which a phrase is whispered to one child who passes it on to another, and so on, and everyone is shocked at the end to discover how much it has changed, the actual message was garbled in the constant retelling and the subtleties were lost entirely. The message became “all expert forecasts are useless,” which is nonsense. Some variations were even cruder—like “experts know no more than chimpanzees.” My research had become a backstop reference for nihilists who see the future as inherently unpredictable and know-nothing populists who insist on preceding “expert” with “so-called.”
And, it should be noted that not all experts were equally overconfident. Tetlock found that experts who used a particular framing 100% of the time were systematically overconfident and bad at forecasting, while experts who used multiple different framings of the issue and a variety of different philosophies of analysis were much more accurate. He dubbed the former "hedgehogs", and the ladder "foxes".
> One group tended to organize their thinking around Big Ideas, although they didn’t agree on which Big Ideas were true or false. Some were environmental doomsters (“We’re running out of everything”); others were cornucopian boomsters (“We can find cost-effective substitutes for everything”). Some were socialists (who favored state control of the commanding heights of the economy); others were free-market fundamentalists (who wanted to minimize regulation). As ideologically diverse as they were, they were united by the fact that their thinking was so ideological. They sought to squeeze complex problems into the preferred cause-effect templates and treated what did not fit as irrelevant distractions. Allergic to wishy-washy answers, they kept pushing their analyses to the limit (and then some), using terms like “furthermore” and “moreover” while piling up reasons why they were right and others wrong. As a result, they were unusually confident and likelier to declare things “impossible” or “certain.” Committed to their conclusions, they were reluctant to change their minds even when their predictions clearly failed. They would tell us, “Just wait.”
> The other group consisted of more pragmatic experts who drew on many analytical tools, with the choice of tool hinging on the particular problem they faced. These experts gathered as much information from as many sources as they could. When thinking, they often shifted mental gears, sprinkling their speech with transition markers such as “however,” “but,” “although,” and “on the other hand.” They talked about possibilities and probabilities, not certainties. And while no one likes to say “I was wrong,” these experts more readily admitted it and changed their minds
> ...
> Foxes beat hedgehogs. And the foxes didn’t just win by acting like chickens, playing it safe with 60% and 70% forecasts where hedgehogs boldly went with 90% and 100%. Foxes beat hedgehogs on both calibration and resolution. Foxes had real foresight. Hedgehogs didn’t.
How did hedgehogs manage to do slightly worse than random guessing? To answer that question, let’s meet a prototypic hedgehog.18
> Larry Kudlow hosted a business talk show on CNBC and is a widely published pundit, but he got his start as an economist in the Reagan administration and later worked with Art Laffer, the economist whose theories were the cornerstone of Ronald Reagan’s economic policies. Kudlow’s one Big Idea is supply-side economics. When President George W. Bush followed the supply-side prescription by enacting substantial tax cuts, Kudlow was certain an economic boom of equal magnitude would follow. He dubbed it “the Bush boom.” Reality fell short: growth and job creation were positive but somewhat disappointing relative to the long-term average and particularly in comparison to that of the Clinton era, which began with a substantial tax hike. But Kudlow stuck to his guns and insisted, year after year, that the “Bush boom” was happening as forecast, even if commentators hadn’t noticed. He called it “the biggest story never told.” In December 2007, months after the first rumblings of the financial crisis had been felt, the economy looked shaky, and many observers worried a recession was coming, or had even arrived, Kudlow was optimistic. “There is no recession,” he wrote. “In fact, we are about to enter the seventh consecutive year of the Bush boom.”19
What an excellent reply. Thanks for spending the time to add it.
Thanks. I will ask Dr. Huemer to see what he responds.
That would be very cool. If he has any criticisms I'd like to know them.
As I was crafting my message to Dr. Huemer, I fail to understand what he mischaracterized. He wrote that experts' knowledge is "unimpressive" and characterized Tetlock's research as "the best experts did only slightly better than chance at predicting outcomes".
Is that incorrect? Your paragraphs on foxes and hedgehogs were interesting subset analyses but didn't cite any numbers. Did foxes do much better than chance?
Tetlock writes, "The message became “all expert forecasts are useless,” which is nonsense"
But I think this does not apply to the linked Huemer paper. Huemer ends with accepting that experts are often the best that we have:
"Political leaders, voters, and activists are well-advised to follow the dictum, often applied to medicine, to “first, do no harm.” A plausible rule of thumb, to guard us against doing harm as a result of overconfident ideological beliefs, is that one should not forcibly impose requirements or restrictions on others unless the value of those requirements or restrictions is essentially uncontroversial among the community of experts in conditions of free and open debate. Of course, even an expert consensus may be wrong, but this rule of thumb may be the best that such fallible beings as ourselves can devise."
I'll preface this by saying I only know that Tetlock thinks that
> As I was crafting my message to Dr. Huemer, I fail to understand what he mischaracterized. He wrote that experts' knowledge is "unimpressive" and characterized Tetlock's research as "the best experts did only slightly better than chance at predicting outcomes".
Here's a graph summarizing some results from Expert Political Judgement https://imgur.com/a/3rxoNAx
It's very hard to read, and would certainly benefit from some color-coding, but the best experts do slightly better than chance in calibration, and much better than chance in discrimination, even though the majority of experts, and the group's average do worse. Assuming the dotted lines indicate some kind of equivalence gradient, then the best experts do significantly better than random chance.
(Note too that "mindless competition" ranges from chimps throwing darts to "moderate and extreme case-specific extrapolation" (I have no idea what this means, since I haven't read Expert Political Judgement). Not everything in that category is pure chance. I made this mistake when first looking at the graph, and became very confused.)
> Tetlock writes, "The message became “all expert forecasts are useless,” which is nonsense"
> But I think this does not apply to the linked Huemer paper.
It's plausible that the paper's conclusion survives this relatively minor mistake, especially when it ends up concluding that despite the lack of high predictive-power experts, we still have nothing better (which I'd disagree with because a) superforecasters exist, and many others are anecdotally able to beat the experts very often, and b) points #35-37 do significantly better on discrimination and calibration than experts, dilettantes, foxes, and hedgehogs. Though as I've said I don't know what "moderate and extreme case-specific extrapolation" nor "generalized autoregressive distributed lag" are. Though I haven't read Huemer's essay in full, so maybe he addresses this, or it's irrelevant to his case.).
I was mainly arguing that Tetlock's work does not support the conclusion that expertise is a sham. Even if there are important considerations and grains of salt which you should take when making use of expert forecasts.
On reflection, I don't think Tetlock's work is even very highly relevant to the question of whether expertise is a sham. He was testing experts' ability to forecast general questions, while the whole point of expertise is to be *really good* at only one particular thing. I like Matt Yglesias's framing here http://static1.1.sqspcdn.com/static/f/468275/28400876/1612383295720/rs251transcript.pdf?token=heYBwKmPnUMuTcXxQ4rRIEXSyEQ%3D
> A lot of what we get is adjacent expertise. So somebody who studies viruses, and maybe knows a lot about the protein structure of viruses, will opine about masks, right? And you’ve got to ask yourself, "Do they have subject matter expertise in this mask thing? Whose expertise do we need here?"
> Because one thing that I think clearly came out of the whole masks controversy is that public health experts underrated how easy it would be to get cloth masks in everybody's hands. It didn't occur to them as a solution to the PPE shortages that we could just get everybody a cloth mask.
> And that's because they're not experts in textile manufacturing. And it's no shame on them for not being experts in textile manufacturing. But they were thinking about, “Will masks give people a false sense of security?” Which is a psychology question. They were thinking about “Can we substitute away from surgical masks?” Which is a textile supply chain question. They were thinking about “Well, what are the antiviral properties of cloth masks?” Which again is a textile question. That's not a public health -- it's obviously relevant to public health, but it's a material science question.
> They didn't have expertise in those areas, and were in fact just on a par with me, or anybody else, right? But they had the, sometimes, arrogance that comes with believing you're being asked about your area of expertise.
Oops. That first sentence should be deleted. Curse you Substack for your lack of editable comments!
> I don't think Tetlock's work is even very highly relevant to the question of whether expertise is a sham
IIRC, he taught or organized generalists to dominate DARPA forecasting competitions, no?
Isn't his later work highly suggestive that you can actually train (some) people to excel at forecasting itself, across domains?
As a general point, there are many kinds of experts. It looks like Tetlock is using "expert" as shorthand for "experts in fields related to political prediction". His work probably doesn't tell you anything about medical predictions.
Perhaps this could be an objective definition of an expert: An expert is somebody who is usually right about a topic too boring for the average person to have a strong opinion about. For example, most practicing tax lawyers are, under this definition, experts on what the IRS will and won't let you deduct on your 1040. They get the various questions right the great majority of the time. But they seldom get nationally famous for their expertise.
On the other hand, topics that huge numbers of people find interesting, such as who will win the Super Bowl, tend to be ones that are hard to predict. The NFL is set up so that if you can predict the eventual Super Bowl winner at the start of the NFL 10% of the time, you are doing well. And even predicting the winner right 70% of the time at the opening kickoff is pretty hard. You can be a famous expert Super Bowl forecaster on TV without being right very much at all if you are at least interesting in the way you defend your wrong predictions.
As for Dr. Fauci, I don't watch much TV, so I have less of an opinion about him that almost everybody. I presume that most of the time during Dr. Fauci's long career, practically nobody among the general public was interested in him. I imagine he was pretty accurate during those boring times, thus meeting my definition of an expert.
During the two times when people were interested in Dr. Fauci, AIDS and Covid, he was probably less accurate. Not because he changed, but because the topics at hand became less predictable by expertise and thus less boring.
So, if experts are people who are usually right about boring topics, interesting topics are those which even the experts are frequently wrong about.
I would imagine that there are hundreds of little known NFL obsessives who have a better track record predicting who will win NFL games than the famous people who give their opinion of who will win on TV.
It's also possible that there are also amateur tax experts with better track records at predicting IRS behavior than the paid experts. But, I suspect, there are more amateur hobbyists following the NFL for fun than following the tax code for grins.
Tetlock can be interpreted as not saying "experts are wrong", but rather "experts aren't great at probabilities". The people who do well in Tetlock's research are non-experts but they do consult experts. Most of their advantage comes from being well calibrated to produce probabilities based on interpretations of the experts.
Yes, I'm one of Tetlock's Superforecasters and I like this framing. I like to point out that Superforecasters *are* experts - at making and assigning probabilities to predictions.
Many 'experts' actually are bad (think stereotypical pundits). But plenty of experts do have real expertise but are just bad at thinking quantitatively or rigorously about uncertainty, and they could be competent forecasters with training.
It's useful to hold the tension between
A: We're monkeys who more or less only *just* upgraded from feudalism. Things are going well considering we just need to keep iterating
B: Decisions get made that so clearly go against everyone's best interest on the regular. We can glimpse a better world and what we've build (while keeping us safe) is blocking us from moving forward.
I think the more fully we can recognise both the better, but A is a lot less represented in the current discourse, thanks for the reminder.
Ada Palmer puts it this way in her Terra Ignota series:
Is there anything important enough that you would destroy this world for it? Would you destroy this world to build a better one? Or would you destroy the chance of a better world, to save this flawed but in many ways utopian society?
(The society in her books is more clearly utopian than ours, but also clearly flawed in recognizable ways.)
Gosh I love those books. Though I'm still holding out hope for iteration rather than choosing between stagnation or revolution. Ideally Atlantis never has to fall.
onically, with the WebMD example, if you want the most precise I formation without political/legal intfluence you would choose an even more specialist (or professional) resource, such as the BNF (for drugs in the UK, which definitely doesn't list all side effects; I find it odd when a patient asks me about a side effect of a drug that I've prescribed for them that they've read in the leaflet yet the side effect is not significant enough to warrant listing in the British National Formulary so when I look it up I can't find it), fpnotebook, CKS etc
So? Is it true that disproportionately many borderline personality cases are young women with lots of piercings and tattoos? What does that tell us about diagnosis and etiology?
Scott has written before about how the same symptoms get labelled differently on different people. So I'd guess self reinforcing stereotypes are to blame
Or perhaps lots of piercings, tattoos, and, especially, nose rings are a warning sign?
who hurt you
If x is mildly correlated with y, that still doesn't mean it makes sense to treat x like a "warning sign", especially when y isn't that common. Bayesian rules still apply here.
Especially when x is in this case is something like "having a non-conformist appearance", which I'm sure does have some minimal correlation with certain psychological disorders, but also tens to correlate much more strongly with traits I actively seek out, like "being a highly creative person" or "having a tolerant worldview towards LGBT people."
Yes! Keeping power vs. being right is a great constraint to point out. I would maybe suggest expanding "being right" to "competence" though -- I'm willing to buy that Zvi is really good at being right, but he might not be nearly as good at hiring, leadership, working with other people, keeping schedules or any of the other things that are sometimes completely unimportant and sometimes absolutely critical to a job.
The head of the CDC job and benevolent dictator in particular probably require a LOT more in terms of managerial than predictive skills. Zvi would, I suspect, be most useful as an advisor to the benevolent dictator than the dictator himself. It's a shame that governments don't employ advisors anymore.
Yes, expand it to general competence. The head of the CDC is chosen for keeping power at the expense of being a good manager.
That’s true to some degree certainly. But this article could easily be a very different article, based around “the CDC director is chosen based on skill at managing all disease needs, and Dr Fauci is the best person out there who can handle the management of a large agency, making public health decisions on new pandemics, and spearheading efforts to deal with existing diseases. It’s doubtful that he’s the best at all three, but I’m also doubtful that Zvi is superior at that combination, even ignoring need to do politics. Zvi’s skills, based on his blogposts about COVID, are focused around things like statistical analysis and observing new research. But those are not at all the same skills as managing a large agency. One response then might be that we should split up those tasks to different people - the head person manager, the head disease predictor, etcetera. But of course then you get back to politics - what do you do when those people disagree about how to handle a situation?
Governments absolutely have advisors (for example, POTUS has 'senior advisors,' who are not confirmed by the Senate). Frequently, these advisors are part of the problem that Scott has identified, in that they frequently push their nominal superiors towards complying with the will of special interest rather than acting in the general interest, and/or to whatever is most likely to maintain the superior's power, which in turn is good for their power.
They're also frequently and more straightforwardly part of the corruption that makes being right difficult; often, such jobs are handed out as patronage or given to figures who would not (for instance) survive confirmation, or to tick special interest boxes themselves on an org chart.
Of course, the other kind, which you envision, exist as well. Smart and driven professionals who, by the nature of their appointments, are unbounded by the need to pander to the political breeze of the day or to special interests and who might be able deploy their skills towards the singular goal of being right as often as possible.
The key, I suppose, is to optimize for the latter over the former. I'm not sure there's a good way to do that, since it's always going to depend to a large degree on the character and priorities of the appointer. If the appointer is themselves appointed or elected, we know well that their characters vary widely and in ways that aren't straightforward to control (as in, who gets elected, and who those elected people then appoint to [for instance] Senate-confirmed posts, who then appoint advisors).
I'm sure our current system doesn't do a good job of optimizing for this. Even if we assume that there is one of the 'good' kind for every one of the 'bad' kind (which I doubt; I suspect the real distribution favors the 'bad'), the best you're likely to get is for them to cancel each other out. An advisor that makes the right call doesn't count for anything if her superior acts instead on the recommendation of another advisor who prioritizes power. And, under our current system, it's likely that there's more than one realpolitker for every truth-seeker.
In this regard, despite many efforts to curb patronage (that, historically speaking, have been unquestionably and extremely successful), it still definitely exists. Especially these days, when people desiring patronage frequently have impeccable CVs themselves, studded with degrees and honors from tier 1 institutions, work experience in tier 1 private entities, or government experience in tier 1 or 2, and reams of glowing recommendations. With an elite culture as credentialed and extensive as ours, it can be very difficult, even for an appointer who wants to stock their kitchen cabinet with the 'good' kind to pick them out of such a crowd. Frequently, the solution chosen is to pick people you've known your whole career, which of course has its own pitfalls.
And then these pitfalls lead to their own, and so and so on ad infinitum until you really do have to fall back on Scott's thesis, and hoping that we've built a sufficiently resilient and effective system that actually does optimize, in any marginal way, for obtaining the right outcome.
These are good points.
I went to college, Rice U., with the head of the CDC, Steve Hahn, and was the friend of Steve Hahn at Rice.
But, it turns out, they are two different Steve Hahns.
Cool hominid party trick: The world is abominably complex, so we call up organizational superstructures from the depths of meme hell and put them to work managing said abominable complexity. This is adaptive, apparently.
The dread blueprint of the FDA lurks latent in the collective unconscious, waiting to manifest and consume the souls of unsuspecting hunter-gatherers.
Only when our self created kafkaesque systems are as impentrable and complex as external reality can they succeed in taming it
Killing someone to take all their stuff is adaptive for the killer, but probably not adaptive for society at large. Summoning the FDA is adaptive for Anthony Fauci, but...
Are you referring to the articles on lorienpsych.com as your small database? I thought you meant more like a weighted average of patient ratings like when you recently compared different amphetamines.
Yes, I'm referring to Lorien Psych.
Best post since you came back online, Scott!
Yes - the amazing thing is that our society works far better than we have any right to expect. (And far better than it would if 99% of reform proposals were adopted.)
And...just put a link to this post on your database (BTW, where is it?).
That *ought* to be sufficient, but of course it won't be for some people. You just have to live with that - valuable info online will help many people and hurt a few who misuse it. But it does net positive good.
The alternative is to become WebMD. They're *cowards*. They know they're destroying the utility of the information they offer, but they have shareholders to appease and lawyers to fear.
You can, and must, be braver. Probably you won't get sued over this, and if you do you'll probably win. But you're in the lucky position - unlike WebMD - of having a large fanbase who appreciate what you do and will bail you out if all goes pear shaped. I can (and do) guarantee that you'll never have to worry about financial hardship because of losing a lawsuit over this stuff - somebody in your fanbase will ensure you have a well-paying job (in the unlikely event you need help).
> you're in the lucky position - unlike WebMD - of having a large fanbase who appreciate what you do and will bail you out if all goes pear shaped. I can (and do) guarantee that you'll never have to worry about financial hardship because of losing a lawsuit over this stuff - somebody in your fanbase will ensure you have a well-paying job (in the unlikely event you need help).
in other words, scott has his own political capital he can draw on to do things in the world, much as faucci has his political capital. i wonder if there's something here... for instance, what if faucci had his own circle of fans who would protect him if things went "pear shaped"? i guess he actually probably does, but he still wouldn't be able to continue occupying his current position in his current power structure.
is it just the problem that faucci's power structure is too big, and his enemies too diffuse in too many other competing power structures? going too far, does our utopian future lie in smaller, more distributed power structures?
Fauci clearly has a lot of political capital. He has survived in his current role since at least the 1980s, through two pandemics that he partially mismanaged, but then greatly improved his management of (and improved more than any of the obvious replacements seem like they would have). He seems to be one of the very few Trump administration executive officers that survived long past crossing Trump many times.
"What I sometimes call Marx's Fallacy is that if we burnt down the current system, some group of people who optimized for things other than power would naturally rise to the top. Wrong. People who most brutally and nakedly optimized for power would gain power; that's what "optimize" means. The interesting thing about the current system is that, after millions of very smart and altruistic people have contributed to it over generations, sometimes gaining and keeping power within it is modestly correlated with being good and right."
This is so brutally insightful and hilarious at the same time.
Where did Marx say anything like that? If it's an "insight" it has to correlate to something Marx wrote. Scott Alexander provided absolutely no evidence that this fallacy can be traced to Marx.
I don't know a whole lot about Marxism (despite the profile picture), but I'm actually under the impression that he believed the opposite - that to get to communism, after destroying capitalism an intermediate strong government would be needed to gradually transition the country to communism.
Perhaps he underestimated the difficulty in ensuring such an intermediate government would remain true to the goals of the revolution that got them there, but he certainly didn't think communist utopia would naturally emerge.
As a former citizen of the USSR I would say that the socialistic government always remained true to the goal of building communism and that's why they were a failure. In this I totally agree with Scott Alexander and I am even surprised how he can have such great insights. Most Americans simply don't get it and they think of the USSR only in terms of a culture war – that they were bad because they wanted to take over the world or something like that.
Being a former citizen of the USSR doesn't make you an expert in Marxist thought. If you want to defend Scott's point here you should quote Marx using primary sources - not give us anecdotes.
It makes me a test subject and my verdict is – it doesn't work and experts were wrong.
I actually had to study Marxism-Leninism at school. It does not matter if Marx said precisely those words or not. It is something what a reasonable person looking at the history would conclude.
Test subjects aren't the one writing scientific reports and conclusions, so your metaphor doesn't make sense.
>It does not matter if Marx said precisely those words or not.
If Scott Alexander wants to call something "Marx's fallacy" then I suggest he prove that Marx thought something along those lines. This really should not be too difficult (if Marx indeed made such a mistake) using primary sources. Otherwise it seems more like Scott Alexander is failing an Ideological Turing Test.
"What Is Marxism? Marxism is a social, political, and economic philosophy named after Karl Marx. It examines the effect of capitalism on labor, productivity, and economic development and argues for a worker revolution to overturn capitalism in favor of communism." - https://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/marxism.asp#:~:text=Was%20Marx%20Right%3F-,What%20Is%20Marxism%3F,capitalism%20in%20favor%20of%20communism.
"Marx believed that all world history was a “history of class struggles.” According to Marx, oppressor and oppressed have always “stood in constant opposition to one another.” One group—the oppressors—owned the means of production, such as land, raw materials, and money. They controlled government and society. The other group—the oppressed—owned nothing and depended on the owners of the means of production. Marx believed he saw a society that was "more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie and Proletariat." The bourgeoisie—the middle class—were the oppressors. The proletariat (PROH•luh•TEHR•ee•uht)—the working class—were the oppressed. Marx predicted that the struggle between the two groups would finally lead to a revolution. The proletariat would violently overthrow the bourgeoisie. After their victory, the proletariat would form a dictatorship to organize the means of production. However, because the proletariat victory would essentially abolish the economic differences that create separate social classes, Marx believed the final revolution would ultimately produce a classless society. The state itself, which had been a tool of the bourgeoisie, would wither away." -Mcgraw Hill Education company. (if you think this one is inaccurate, it's literally being used in schools)
I don't think he needs to correlate it because it's the foundation of Marxism.
Marx revised to define exactly what communism is because it must arise from the conditions of the world when the revolution comes.
That is: Marx believed so strongly in the fact that the revolution would make things perfect that he refused to guide that revolution at all.
Here is a relevant quote:
"Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence."
That is, Marx defined communism as the complete overthrow of the current state of affairs. This is the basis of communism.
"That is: Marx believed so strongly in the fact that the revolution would make things perfect"
He doesn't say anything about the revolution making things "perfect" in the quote you offered. Neither does it say anything about " if we burnt down the current system, some group of people who optimized for things other than power would naturally rise to the top".
He's saying that Marxism says that communism will naturally arise from revolution/when the current state of affairs are overthrown. It's saying that communism (the "perfect" system) will naturally rise to the top.
Where does Marx call communism a "perfect" system? If we're attributing words and ideas to Marx we should probably be very careful about finding primary sources. I also think people are putting an undue emphasis on "naturally" here, as if it occurs without foresight. Marx is talking about very deliberate political movements, which yes, arise from the seeds sown by capitalism.
For anyone wondering, MarxBro is a dedicated troll of the rationalish community, coming out of the woodwork anytime Marx is mentioned to make ever escalating demands for rigor. No criticism or even mention of Marx or Marxism is well-founded unless it engages with primary sources to MarxBro's standards, a standards which tellingly has never been met by any interlocutor ever. Don't waste your time.
When someone has claimed Marx has made a "fallacy" I'm well within my rights (and indeed, common sense in general) to ask where that fallacy exists in their original works. Using citations. If that seems like an "escalating demand" then I'm very happy to escalate the rationalist community by uplifting their standards.
As a reader with no dog in this hunt, I'm not sure what to make of this ad hominem comment about marxbro1917. Maybe my troll-o-meter is not very sensitive.
I thought Marx argued that capitalism bore the seeds of its own destruction, that this was a core tenet of dialectical materialism, not that Marx was a kind of crass "burn it down" accelerationist nor a theorist ignorant of how power corrupts. So it seemed reasonable to me that someone might ask why is Scott attributing this very common human fallacy to Marx specifically.
There are legions of people fantasizing in our present-day moment about how if we burned everything down, something better would just naturally kind of spring up. Of all the ideological lineages that feed this kind of naivete, I wouldn't associate it mainly with Marxism. So in that sense, I'm sympathetic to the request for greater precision.
I guess I would wish for more tolerance in our conversational norms around calling people out for politely requesting greater precision or clarity or whatever to any given point. If we have a dedicated Marxist in our midst who can do that around Marx-adjacent thoughts, isn't that a good thing?
We have libertarian economists on here who can press fine points around their arenas of concern and anti-feminists around their arenas of concern, and I've done my share around the finer points of Buddhist philosophy or non-pharmaceutical mental healthcare, or the particular brokenness of the U.S. health insurance system. If someone's not just ranting angrily but is bringing some (dare I say?) expertise to the conversation, is that not welcome, even if they only have one arena of expertise they tend to bring?
I guess maybe this raises a larger question about where is the line between troll, hobby horse, and desire for clarity around things one knows something about?
"As a reader with no dog in this hunt, I'm not sure what to make of this ad hominem comment about marxbro1917. Maybe my troll-o-meter is not very sensitive."
You perhaps were not around for previous interactions with Marxbro before he came back as Marxbro1917. But even in this exchange, can you not see his modus operandi? "I don't care that you grew up in a country that implemented Communism, you had to study Marxist-Leninism, and you can comment on how the theory works out in practice, I still maintain that flying elephants are totally possible!" He's not honest in his interactions.
I'm very honest in my interactions. And if I'm being honest, I'm not impressed by people who say "I've studied Marxism-Leninism" but then fail to produce the primary sources and citations I've been asking for. My point here is very simple, Marx regards socialism as developing and superseding capitalism from within the capitalist system itself. He does not advocate to "burn it all down" (not sure what this would even mean when we're talking about international economies), nor does he have the naive analysis of power that Scott Alexander attributes to him (without citation, of course).
Therefore, I am asking for evidence, please. If "Marx's fallacy" exists in Marx's writings then someone should be able to find it, using quotes from the source.
I'm very suspicious of the troll label based on the comments of others who have a social history with the accused -- especially when the accused appears transparent and thus vulnerable in advocating for their project. As a relative newcomer here, this forum appears above average when it comes to the expression of independent thought (rather than piling on socially with the intent to suppressing others).
But, perhaps, Marxbro, you are guilty of pedanticism, which is nowhere in the neighborhood of trolling. Trolling employs a very wide and shallow focus, while pedanticism is laser focused -- and your defensively-trained laser may be missing a wider, more social point about Marxism writ large. I.e., "Marxism" today is an enormous trope that we all play around with for various reasons -- which your project naturally bristles at.
When it comes to primary source material, the thing that's more relevant to me than whether Marx actually penned certain words, is how ideas and history actually merged, and I was blown away (and thoroughly entertained) recently by the English-dubbed "Comrade Detective" series (the dubbing making it primarily a primary source) -- which helped give me a glimpse of both how huge and complex the commitment to socialism still was by that time, but also, simultaneously, how correct the notion seemed that, in human cultures, those who optimize for power always seem to perform the act of power most efficiently.
"I'm very honest in my interactions".
Well, yes, for a certain value of "honest". We can always depend on you to tell us that no matter who, no matter what, no matter that you did live in a country basing itself on an understanding of Marx's thought that "she doesn't have the range" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zq97J-7Mwzc
You do remind me of the literalists going "Where is that in the Bible?"
I definitely don't have the insight into what Marx actually meant that say, his 103-year-old brother might possess. But when he writes: "The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win." in The Communist Manifesto (part IV) it seems to me that he is advocating "burn it all down" when he says "forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions". Of course, I'm sure I probably didn't even cite it in the proper formatting (MLA? APA? USSR?) Full disclosure, I don't know a lot about Marx [insert your own Duck Soup joke here] nor have I studied Marxism-Leninism. I also don't know why I'm posting here, I feel like I'm giving a whining 3-year-old the sucker they've been throwing a tantrum about only to have them tell me it's not the right flavour (just wait, it'll happen).
I think that Scott described his view leading him to call it Marx's Fallacy in his Marxism related book reviews. I think it was this one in particular: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/13/book-review-singer-on-marx/ . But there might be other related ones that I've forgotten.
I have covered Scott Alexander's misunderstandings of Marx here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/gc27k5/author_reacts_to_ssc_book_review/fpbulfv/
I do not think that Scott Alexander has undertaken an accurate reading of Marx. His presentation of "Marx's fallacy" - which I, as a Marxist, do not recognise at all. I think Scott is failing the Ideological Turing Test here. This is why I'm challenging him to find a primary source where Marx says anything like
"if we burnt down the current system, some group of people who optimized for things other than power would naturally rise to the top."
If that's "Marx's fallacy", if that's what Marx said, then it should be easy for Scott Alexander (or anybody else) to find Marx saying this in his writings. I believe in evidence, and I'm asking for evidence on this matter.
I've read both Scott's piece and your response. I didn't find your response convincing. I'll take one argument to explain why, rather than go through every single one.
Marx says: "But the essence of man is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In reality, it is the ensemble of the social relations." Scott/Singer summarise this as he "believed there was no such thing as human nature and everything was completely malleable".
That seems like an accurate summary to me. Marx is saying quite clearly that merely being human tells you nothing whatsoever about how that person might behave, think or live their life. Nothing. Zero. Whether you call it "essence of man" or "human nature", in normal English these terms mean "that which is common to every [developed] human regardless of their experience of background".
Yet here Marx claims that this thing, which is literally defined as "that which is inherent to any individual" is actually not inherent at all, it's rather socially constructed and is thus, by definition, malleable, because the "ensemble of the social relations" is neither fixed or inherent. Indeed Marx's entire philosophy was that by changing that ensemble, humanity could become greater.
You keep demanding primary sources, but in your review Scott/Singer literally quote Marx word for word and you just claim their rephrasing into more modern English is wrong. If Marx is so hard to interpret that people can read completely opposite things into the same sentence then he is just an objectively terrible writer, but I don't think this passage is actually hard to interpret. He rejects the notion of a fixed, immutable human nature and claims that what makes people act the way they do is purely social in nature (implication: and thus can be changed via social means, like revolution).
Marx could certainly have been philosophically and theoretically correct about human nature, while still being clueless about pragmatics (such as scope and timeframe and other material complexities). Maybe it's not so fair to judge philosophers by how politicians and societies attempted to adopt and manifest (and fight against) their philosophies?
>Marx is saying quite clearly that merely being human tells you nothing whatsoever about how that person might behave, think or live their life. Nothing. Zero.
He doesn't say that, though. He says that " the essence of man is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In reality, it is the ensemble of the social relations." i.e that generalisation about human nature are only describing wide ensembles of human behavior, not any particular individual. "Malleable" is also different to "completely malleable" - notice the shifting goalposts here.
> If Marx is so hard to interpret
Marx isn't really hard to interpret, which is why I suspect that Scott Alexander simply didn't read it very carefully.
For another point of data, I would call myself a Marxist. I have read Kapital but not the Communist Manifesto or any of his other works. I think Marx was notably good in diagnosis of the political economy of his time, but notably poor in prescription of how to fix it, and particularly what a better functioning political economy would look like. I don't begrudge him this, the latter are much harder problems.
I think he was conflicted about the question of who would rise to the top after a revolution. On the one hand, a lot of what I read from him was at pains to try and conceive of an organisation that could ensure that future leaders better represented working class people. I don't think he did a particularly good job of describing or building that organisation but he certainly tried and recognised it to be a hard problem. On the other, he seemed to maintain a confidence that revolution was inevitable and that the world would be better afterwards. A contradiction between faith and rationality, perhaps? I sorta recognise that you have to maintain some kind of faith in the possibility that things will ever get better to remain sane in this world.
I agree with this analysis of "politics vs being right/doing the right thing" but it creates another obvious problem: the good of being right in the moment is bounded, but the good of being right in the future is unbounded
One of my favorite scenes from the Wire is when the newly-elected mayor of Baltimore has a problem. He needs money to bail out the public school system, which he can get from the governor, but if he does, he becomes "the mayor whose failing public schools forced the governor to get involved and the state as a whole to contribute tax dollars to bail him out," thus ending his future ambitions of becoming governor himself. And of course, once he is governor, his ability to do good things will be much greater than his ability as mayor. So he decides to let the school system continue to collapse to preserve his opportunity at future success, and future good.
I think almost every politician or person who has a political component to their job has made this calculation at some point in their lives. And in some sense its hard to say they are making the wrong call. Because if that fictional politician goes on to become President and signs a bill which ends child poverty, whose to say it wasn't worth a few thousand kids in Baltimore?
I don't have a solution to this problem, except to say that at some point everybody in every position that might even have a glimmer of power has to ask themselves "what's the absolute amount of good worth sacrificing today for the prospect of being able to do good tomorrow?" And to think really hard about the answer.
Flip side- nobody who habitually compromises the public good for advancement will ever, ever, sign a bill that ends child poverty. The selection process weeds out the ones who would.
The Wire also depicts the same problem with lawyers; anyone who presses real cases that could a difference would upset the apple cart and prevent career advancement. The prosecutors who don’t play politics never become judges. The solution presented- STOP TRYING TO BE JUDGES.
I recently read an interesting blog post somewhere (I misremember where) carving out a workable, useful definition of decadence. Rather than resort to stereotypes about Manly Men Becoming Comfortable and Weak or sex orgies or drug use, it defined decadence as when the elites of a society stop competing with each to see who can provide the greatest benefit to the community, and start jockeying for the greatest *status* within the community. The moment you take what power you have and start scheming on how to get ahead of the pack to higher honors and more power instead of focusing on doing the best damn job you can do today, you have left virtue behind and are now part of the problem.
Regarding decadence, I think you're referring to DePonySum's recent post https://deponysum.com/2021/01/26/reflections-occasioned-by-reading-michael-sandels-the-tyranny-of-merit-part-1/
Heyyyy there it is. I should bookmark that site.
"History isn’t going to rap you on the knuckles because people are having a bit too much gay sex or men have long hair now, history is going to rap you on the knuckles if people aren’t committed to larger projects than themselves."
Not exactly-- it's important for people to be committed to projects (of whatever size and requiring however much commitment) which actually work.
That sounds like Peter Turchin's theories about an overproduction of elites who squabble against each other for the few available spots at the top. Of course, he borrowed his logic from Ibn Khaldun.
Sounds like what Ibn Khaldun said about North African politics 700 years ago.
> at some point everybody in every position that might even have a glimmer of power has to ask themselves "what's the absolute amount of good worth sacrificing today for the prospect of being able to do good tomorrow?" And to think really hard about the answer.
this is almost the opposite of the discount rate -- what is the amount of good in the future that i can discount to get a smaller amount of good right now. in ksr's recent "ministry for the future" there's a section arguing that we place too *high* a value on present good, at the cost to our future selves/descendants. i find the same problem occurs with thinkers like, e.g., tyler cowen -- "ignore climate change now and focus on getting rich, and we'll be so rich in the future that climate change will be super-cheap to solve relative to our newfound wealth"
You are missing the HCQ elephant in the room (and the Ivermectin rhino too....). This makes your otherwise excellent post dismayingly close to worthless, until you can come to terms with the extraordinary number of lives lost due to the corruption of the process that Fauci, putting it enormously too mildly, allowed to occur.
HCQ?
hydroxychloroquine
Can you be more explicit?
While there are some side effects, I really don't think the emergency prescription of HCQ caused an extraordinary number of lives to be lost, main harm would be the money wasted and some nausea in patients who wouldn't otherwise need to feel it
That is so unbelievably backwards that I’m not going to even argue with you, you’re a hopeless case. The consensus is FINALLY coming around to “HCQ and Ivermectin are effective treatments if given EARLY”, which most of the rest of the world has known for many months, but which people who only consume US media have been shockingly gaslighted about.
Could you point me to some high quality research, so I can be de-gaslighted? Preferentially research in which the control group wasn't significantly older or more comorbid than the HCQ group, or meta-analysis that know you can't just multiply p-values?
I gave a link which is somewhat polemical but full of references to both studies and meta-analyses. In this very special case indeed, polemics are appropriate, because there has been intentional bad faith and lying. The bad faith and lying is so shocking that you may need to see the references in the context of the narrative given in this article to overcome the initial reaction that 95% of English-speaking medical professionals have (“this can’t possibly be right because my sources have so universally told me it is wrong therefore I do not need to pay attention to it”).
https://truthabouthcq.com/hcq-works/
Sadly, when looking at the individual studies, you can always spot very important methodological flaws (usually, the placebo group will be significant older or have more diseases previous to COVID infection, when compared to the HCQ group). Whenever this selection effect is corrected by proper randomization of patients into treatment/placebo group, HCQ fails to show an effect. You can check this by yourself, usually on table 1 of any paper about the treatment. This raises the question: if the treatment is so effective, why don't the researchers publish a well-researched study, to actually convince people that it works? Why are all positive studies filled with so much shoddy statistics? Dexamethasone, a cheap over-the-counter drug IS accepted as a treatment, so why wouldn't HCQ be too?
(for context: I am a Brazilian physician working in emergency care, so I am familiar with the narrative purported by Filipe Rafaeli in the original publication)
Did you look at the subgroup analysis of the NEJM prophylaxis study?
The study (which claims to show HCQ doesn't help) is here: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2016638
and the subgroup analysis is in the "Supplementary Materials" here: https://www.nejm.org/doi/suppl/10.1056/NEJMoa2016638/suppl_file/nejmoa2016638_appendix.pdf
In the Supplementary Materials: look at page 17, titled "Figure S1. Forest Plot of A Priori Identified Subgroups" (based on page 13, titled "Table S6. Subgroup Analysis of Risk of New Covid-19 Compatible Illness"). Look especially at the "days exposure" section of page 17.
When I look at Figure S1 overall what jumps out is that using the protocol of this study nearly *every* subgroup did better with HCQ than without it but *how* well they did is *time-dependent*, meaning *the sooner post-exposure treatment started, the larger the positive effect*. That looks to me like a dose-response relationship! 1 day worked *very* well, 2 days worked well, 3 days worked kind-of-okay, and waiting as long as 4 days was worse than placebo.
If you take that set of results and toss ALL the data together in one bucket the "4-days" negative result and "3-days" marginal result drag down the average effectiveness but if you just look at day 1 or days 1 and 2, treatment was effective at the .05 level. Based on that study one should assume HCQ DOES help (especially for younger people) if started right away or better yet if started *prior* to exposure. The results suggest that young medical workers should keep it on hand and start taking it right away upon any accidental exposure unless and until there's a better option.
(one worrisome fly in the soup is that subgroup "age>50" also failed to be helped by HCQ. Maybe the older patients were less likely to start treatment right away? Dunno, that's something to look at in a larger followup study, but it shouldn't have stopped us from at LEAST advocating that younger medics use HCQ early on).
How are those results significant? They are a very small relative risk reduction, with a wide confidence interval that covers both "no effect" and "may increase risk"
The confidence interval is very wide because the N is too small. A drug that on its own (without help from any other assisting intervention) reduces your risk of covid symptoms by merely ~33% (rather than the intended 50%) is still worth taking and would save thousands of lives, but needs a larger N than was used to show a .05 certainty level in a study such as this. If you re-ran this study with twice the participants the confidence interval would narrow; assuming a similar pattern for the mean expected result the interval wouldn't have to narrow *much* to exclude "may increase risk" for days=1, right?
(I take back the claim that days={1,2} are *already* shown to be "effective at the .05 level" - I was reading the wrong data column. Drat this interface that doesn't let you revise after posting!)
The paper I linked has a long analysis of the NEJM Boulware study and shows how the data of that study was misinterpreted. I had come to similar conclusions at the time it was published. The study really shows that HCQ has a benefit but the statistical significance of the effect was underestimated.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2007.09477
Ivermectin I'll grant you, but my impression is that boosters of antivirals still aren't enthusiastic about HCQ.
As I said, there is a big difference between USA and areas very influenced by it, and other parts of the world (much of which has a great deal of experience with HCQ over the last 75 years and knows things about its toxicity profile that writers and researchers here have sometimes been quite ignorant of). The most recent work seems to show that Ivermectin is at least as good; but I already knew last April that HCQ was good and last May that Ivermectin was good because I was paying attention to the entire world. Much more on this at my link.
This kind of gratuitous personal attack is the antithesis of what I come here for.
not sure if you're right or wrong but I am sure your being a dick sapped my energy to find out
The most recent This Week in Virology had a really interesting paper they discussed going into the details as to why HCQ did so badly in *in vivo* studies despite doing so well *in vitro*. https://www.microbe.tv/twiv/twiv-715/
It failed when given late, succeeded when given early, and there was an unbelievably intense effort in the USA to obliterate all knowledge of this distinction in order to portray it as “HCQ doesn’t work” full stop.
Details here:
https://truthabouthcq.com/
Boy, that site looks something that is definitely trustworthy and free from bias! /s
Congratulations on being part of the 95%. I TOLD you there were references to both studies and meta-analyses, I EXPLAINED that this was a special case where it was necessary to read something even though it had a polemical tone, but STILL you sought and found an excuse to avoid it. F*** off, I’m done here.
Apologies, I now realize you may have been responding to one of my previous two replies without having seen the other one, due to delays in comments showing up on the site.
Nobody is going to read 50,000 words filled with irrelevant minutiae presumably designed to answer every argument this dude has ever heard from anyone. Just link what you consider to be the best studies, otherwise you come off like guys who can only "prove their point" with rambling 90 minute youtubes.
There’s a big difference between a 90 minute youtube and a paper written in several dozen numbered sections with hyperlinks to actual studies. The whole point is that it is a complicated story so I am not going to over simplify it, I am instead giving you the best summary I know of of the entire STORY which is about not only medical truth but a great deal more!
Enjoy it, or enjoy the feeling of satisfaction finding an excuse to snarkily avoid it gives you, I won’t presume to tell you which of those to prefer.
This is not "a polemical tone." This is 90% polemics. I could flip to literally any paragraph and find either an irrelevant side-story or a ramble about why the establishment got it wrong. He spends 7 paragraphs saying that the scientific establishment wouldn't have believed Yuri Gagarin when he said the Earth is blue.
You're correct, I didn't see your other post saying that this was a special case, but "this is a special case" is hardly convincing either way. Every crackpot claims that they're not like all those other conspiracy theorists, they're a special case, and just this once, you should read 15,000 words about how the establishment is lying and suppressing the truth.
Just the facts, please. I've seen many websites like this and approximately 0% of them have been worth my time. I'm not going to dig through all this crap about Yuri Gagarin and pandas, just link to the scientific evidence that supports your case.
Oh wait, not 15,000 words, there are like 5 different essays on that site and I have no way of knowing which one you're actually referring to, and they're all equally long and equally crackpot-looking. You are literally telling me to read a novel's worth of text on the hopes that there are actual studies somewhere in there.
I'd like to think I read about all the major studies on HCQ that came out over the summer and I don't think that's a fair summary of the evidence. Dosing time has been a routine cofounder as people do RCTs on people who show up in the hospital 7 to 10 days after symptom onset for drugs like broad spectrum antivirals, monoclonal antibodies, and vitamin D. But the only study I'd say looked good for HCQ was one out of India looking a prophylactic dosing and that wasn't a RCT so I don't think I trust it.
Your tone and choice to be hyperbolic are disappointingly out of keeping with the spirit of the SSC community. It's still an open question whether inflammatory phrasing and hot takes like yours becomes the norm due to this new blog transition or whether behavior like yours is discouraged well enough that people either self-regulate or go elsewhere. I hope it's the latter.
Sorry, but that’s totally wrong. My ORIGINAL reply was quite “normal” in tone, and I shall re-paste it here:
“It failed when given late, succeeded when given early, and there was an unbelievably intense effort in the USA to obliterate all knowledge of this distinction in order to portray it as “HCQ doesn’t work” full stop.”
AFTER I posted that reply, I encountered resistance and snark, and responded in kind, so don’t go lecturing me about the “spirit” of the “community”.
My understanding is that HCQ is effective when combined with another medication to block another pathway for the virus for transmit, but not especially otherwise, and this explains the divergent results in studies. __ice9 has written about this, although unfortunately on twitter rather than blogging like a civilized person.
The combination with another drug such as azithromycin is important, but much more important is the fact that it is proven effective when given in the first few days (outpatient basis) after symptoms appear, and a large number of studies which showed no effectiveness or low effectiveness for patients who had already become sick enough to be hospitalized were systematically misrepresented (I know because I was paying very close attention all along) so that early use was discouraged or discontinued (including some actually fraudulent studies!).
I see one snarky comment from beleester, but other than that it's mostly people being extremely charitable to a position that you've so far only defended by linking to one website that pings an awful lot of red flags for being conspiracy theory nonsense.
I'm certainly not seeing anything that would warrant replies like:
>>That is so unbelievably backwards that I’m not going to even argue with you, you’re a hopeless case.