and none of the alternatives are even 1/100 as good or have nearly the same reach as youtube, which is how youtube is able to get away with what they do.
VCs are much more interested these days in payment processing, which is where the money is, than video, which is expensive and hard to monetize..
>...and none of the alternatives are even 1/100 as good or have nearly the same reach as youtube
None of this is the concern of YT and the content that they choose to host. By that logic, someone should be able to spam HN with information about my car's extended warranty due to it's reach.
The most bizarre (or perhaps not..) part of this conversation is how many of the people that seem to promote the idea that YouTube should be compelled to host speech because of its reach self identify as libertarian.
Many of those are filled with even more fringe stuff like conspiracy theories, precisely because they wouldn't be allowed on YouTube. That makes it convenient for normalising public opinion, as anything on these alternative sites would be associated with even worse misinformation.
> …if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches. - Scott Alexander
What do you think censorship actually means? Private and Public organizations engage in censorship all the time. Youtube doesn't have to host these videos but it is still censorship. The word is morally neutral.
There’s a grey area between censorship and editorial choice. For example is YouTube disallowing porn censorship? Pornhub seems to be doing very well.
I think some of the social media platforms are making mistakes sometimes at the moment, but honestly they’re faced with very difficult choices. Ultimately they do have to make those choices, there’s no such thing as broadcast communications platforms without editorial selection of some kind.
“Censorship” is never used neutrally. It’s a term that is exclusively used to mean the moralistic enforcement of certain political viewpoints. Almost always this coupled with the ideas of oppression and/or backwardness.
> Only someone that doesn’t understand what censorship is would say this.
Censorship is the suppression of speech, public communication, or other information, on the basis that such material is considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, or "inconvenient." Censorship can be conducted by governments, private institutions, and other controlling bodies.
Amazon, Apple, Google, Twitter, Facebook, etc. are multibillion-dollar corporations that control a colossal share of online communications.
Based on YouTube’s reply, seems they took his video down for promoting dangerous medical misinformation. If that’s what happened, I don’t see an issue.
"Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus (2019-nCoV) identified in #Wuhan, #China."
It basically makes it impossible to propose any new medical treatment on Youtube when their definition of "misinformation" is really just "not proven to work."
This would be more acceptable if they only banned discussion of treatments that are proven not to work, but that doesn't seem to be the case here.
In fact you'd still need a prescription for Ivermectin from a physician, and that's where the curation/filter layer should be occurring - distributed amongst thousands of doctors vs. dictated by YouTube et al.
> Based on YouTube’s reply, seems they took his video down for promoting dangerous medical misinformation. If that’s what happened, I don’t see an issue.
After the bang up job they've done dealing with copyright strikes, demonetizing their political enemies, and providing virtually zero support and feedback for the very creators that contribute to the popularity of their platform, you'd have to be a sadomasochist to trust YouTube to be the arbiter for "dangerous medical misinformation" or any other "dangerous * misinformation" they decide to sensor.
Do Google/Alphabet/YouTube have an on-staff biology team who are actively publishing in the field to counter his information? Or are they doing take downs at the request of anonymous dissenters?
It is always strange the dichotomy of views here. Since COVID it seems to be trending towards "Question everything, except the current dogma".
YouTube allows pro-anorexia content and influencers to influence young girls - but having a couple PhD's discuss possible off label uses for ivermectin is going too far?
The issue is that YouTube has no ability to determine what is or isn't dangerous medical information. Running a video distribution service doesn't make you a medical expert.
"Puberty blockers are fully reversible and their long-term effects are safe and well-understood" is dangerous medical misinformation too, but YouTube doesn't take those videos down.
I'm sure they would if it were national news that they weren't. Just because they haven't taken it down doesn't mean that they approve of it. You're just resorting to whataboutism.
"You didn't catch my mate Dave when he murdered that guy so I don't see why you should care about this little stabbing here..."
This seems to say his proposed "Theory of everything" is lacking in several regards and not a good candidate for scientific or academic research. I don't see how that makes him a clown. He's interested in physics, educated in it, and made some effort to contribute that doesn't seem to have panned out. That strikes me as laudable behavior and not like a "clown".
Perhaps you'll say he is a clown because he really believed in his own theory or tried to promote his work. Again, I'd disagree. He should believe in his work, if he didn't believe in it he should do something else. If he does believe in it then advocating for his own seems natural and appropriate.
Regardless, this tweet is about YouTube censoring a discussion on the usefulness of ivermectin for covid patients. Eric Weinstein's physics ambitions hardly seem related.
The same should be said for everyone who makes a good faith effort to contribute to human knowledge. Trying to contribute in a productive way is laudable.
As I understand it Eric has his theory, he wrote it up, and published it on his YouTube channel or a similar platform and a few interested people critiqued it. Great. It would be one thing if he was emailing the editors at Nature every week with a new crazy idea, that would be "crank" territory. That doesn't seem like what happened.
Regardless, this tweet is about Eric's brother who had a conversation with a doctor about possible use of ivermectin to treat Covid. Entirely separate from Eric Weinstein's physics credibility.
So now you have to be 100% correct about every field of everything to have any opinion? I'd love for that standard to be applied to anyone religious.
There's no way I'd let that Christian doctor try to save my dying child, their beliefs about a zombie savior that flew to heaven are "crank" like so they're disqualified.
Seriously - a crank about physics? The majority of those people are crazy in some regard, that's why they love physics!
There are many such types who reformulate various types of physics from a mathematical pov -- these attempts rarely have any deep upside... but it is a hobby of mathematical physicists.
This isn't a great line of reasoning. We have evidence that even the smartest individuals can be exceptional in one field while being regarded as cranks in others. Failures and mistakes are inevitable as you try doing more things and branching out. Taking on this mindset forces brilliant individuals to remain in the safe lane without experimenting, potentially stifling progress. The expectation of perfection seems like an unreasonably high bar. Is it not better to try and fail than to have not tried at all? Perhaps the broader issue is that there's insufficient interdisciplinary communication and collaboration.
For example, the Nobel laureate Linus Pauling made outstanding contributions to chemistry in explaining the nature of the chemical bond. He also believed vitamin C could help cure or prevent cancer, for which there doesn't appear to be much evidence.
> The Author is not a physicist and is no longer an active academician, but is an Entertainer
and host of The Portal podcast. This work of entertainment is a draft of work in progress
which is the property of the author and thus may not be built upon, renamed, or profited from
without express permission of the author.
* Eight years passed until Weinstein released a draft paper of Geometric Unity on April 1, 2021. The paper qualifies that the author "is not a physicist" but an "entertainer"*
By his own admission definitely more clown than physicist.
I've banned this account because you've been creating various accounts to troll HN (or borderline-troll, which still isn't ok). Can you please not do that? We're trying for more thoughtful conversation here.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Not as clownish as including an unnecessary “like”, a filler word for speech and therefore completely unnecessary in a written comment.
See what I did there? Its called an ad-hominem, an attack to the person instead of the argument. Thats what you did when you attacked Eric Weinstein instead of his argument.
I didn’t realize clowns weren’t allowed on YouTube, I’m surprised so much discussion on this thread is whether Eric is right or wrong and not whether YouTube is right to remove him.
What else should scientists do than challenging the status quo?
Bret (Eric's brother, biology PhD) had a 2h long conversation with Pierre Kory (MD) and it was taken down by YT. One of the things they talked was the recommendations of WHO and other organisations to focus on supportive care only (supporting the patient while their organism fights the disease by itself). They insist on not using other treatments outside clinical trials. The argument that running experiments would cost lives doesn't seem coherent. It's not like we have this 100+ yrs practice of dealing with SARS-CoV-2 epidemic with well established protocols. What if we're clinging to a suboptimal strategy?
> insist on not using other treatments outside clinical trials
That signals they may have conflict of interest. For example accidentally finding a treatment that works, could mean huge loss for vaccine business.
(Just to be clear, I am not anti-vax. I got vaccinated myself and I believe there is no better option right now, however, trying to limit doctors in finding other means sounds extremely fishy)
Telling doctors to not randomly experiment on their patients outside of a controlled studies seems perfectly reasonable. Most medical groups tend to view uncontrolled human experimentation as very unethical and have for a long time.
SSRI off-label for chronic pain. Many drugs routinely prescribed have or had unknown mechanism of action (prime example Acetaminophen (Tylenol)). Here we have no double blind trials for vaccines, no long term effect studies and every doctor is happy to jab everyone including kids.
Thanks god doctors don't wait to have a random double blind experiment peer reviewed and published to act. I understand the practice of putting ICU patients on ventilators was found to be more harmful and following word of mouth, ICU specialists switched to less invasive care. Was that unethical?
The person I responded to alluded to a conspiracy while I simply pointed out that this seems standard guidance from medical groups. Which is a separate topic from it being good or bad for patients.
Most doctors don't bother treating a patient with anything other than standard care procedures.
Why--I honesty believe most don't care enough to look beyond the usual treatment.
8 minutes per patient, collect the most money from the out of the patient, and insurance company. Do not say or do anything than might bring a lawsuit. Write a script, or recommend a Nettie Pot. (I still think about a guy here whom paid $450 out of packet for a sinus infection, and was told to buy a nettie pot. Nothing wrong with not doing anything though. It was the price of the office visit.) Determine if you can get the patent in for another pricey office visit. Repeat.
Go back to writing that vanity novel, or checking the stock market. (This has been my experience. They have about 50 drugs they commonly use, and when things get complicated, they refer, or claim it might be psychosomatic?)
There's always a risk of a lawsuit too.
Then there are doctors whom sometimes prescribe off label for a condition, or honestly try to keep current. I appreciate those doctors.
Medicine isn't an exact science. In the real world physicians conduct n=1 experiments on their patients all the time. They try a treatment and if the patient doesn't respond then they try something else. Decisions are often based on clinical experience and intuition rather than defined protocols.
the question I would ask is when a new virus caused a pandemic, would you want the medical/healthcare system to test existing drugs for suitability? if some drugs are know to treat various pathogens and have a well established safety record shouldn't we allow any doctor to experiment using their experience and informed consent?
waiting for a properly run study will cost lived especially when there are corporate and political interests controlling these tests.
it would have been easy to run dozens of prophylactic studies while this virus was running rampant. same for testing the dozens of clinical sourced protocols. instead the medical testing establishment shutdown and ignore all clinical protocols that were successful used, and put the message out so that medical journals, big tech, pharmacy boards, hospitals, suppressed more discussion and application of these protocols.
> They insist on not using other treatments outside clinical trials. The argument that running experiments would cost lives doesn't seem coherent.
Clinical trials are structured experiments which follow a certain protocol, ethical review, etc...
> It's not like we have this 100+ yrs practice of dealing with SARS-CoV-2 epidemic with well established protocols
We do have 100+ years of practice in dealing with various diseases, circumstances, including pandemics, etc... In that sense SARS-CoV-2 is nothing special.
Protocols have been developed to ensure that we actually gain knowledge, and not at the expense of the patients.
Should we skip on ethical review boards? Or patient confidentiality? Which part of a clinical study are you suggesting are superfluous?
All these protocols for treating disease was changed for this virus. Patients were banned from taking HCQ in the state. I know several this happened too.
Pretending the system is working as intended is a farce.
Yes. Ethical review boards, patient confidentiality, and modern clinical studies did not exist during any other pandemic comparable with SARS-CoV-2. Like in wartime, when the threat is to society as a whole not just individuals, individual rights take a back seat.
You're not protecting anyone from the next Tuskegee Experiment by witholding potentially lifesaving medications from them. You're _repeating it_.
According to Worldofmeters: At the moment the United States has 1848 deaths per million people. Thailand has 21. Cambodia has 20. Taiwan 18. Vietnam 0.6. Laos 0.4.
Tuskegee wasn’t an experiment in “we don’t know if this drug works” it was explicitly intended to study the progression of syphilis - they weren’t withholding drugs because they didn’t know if they worked, they were withholding them because black people weren’t human to them.
ERBs and the FDA both exist to protect people from becoming victims.
> Protocols have been developed to ensure that we actually gain knowledge, and not at the expense of the patients.
If medicine could be reduced to protocols, we wouldn't need the doctors.
You can rest assured right now many MDs are prescribing off-label meds, diagnostics tests, making non-protocol judgement calls etc all around the world. And I am glad they are doing that, because front-line medicine is more engineering than science and their job is ultimately to heal, not being protocol-only automatons.
> SARS-CoV-2 is nothing special
It is special in that everything about it has been very high profile, and in this day and age of hyper-connectedness, when expert institutions mess things up it is harder to cover up and their authority is at a greater risk.
Let's be honest that is why they are being very iron fisted about out-of-band covid treatments, not because of a proportional threat to life.
> You can rest assured right now many MDs are prescribing off-label meds, diagnostics tests, making non-protocol judgement calls etc all around the world. And I am glad they are doing that, because front-line medicine is more engineering than science and their job is ultimately to heal, not being protocol-only automatons.
Well, yeah. One important point about health policy is that it's designed with the knowledge — the assumption — of some level of non-compliance.
Health policy design is game-theoretic, like overbidding in a negotiation: rather than choosing rules that are logically correct, you pick optimal rules to get your own population — a portfolio of people with different feelings toward authority — to on average do the thing you want them to do, or a set of different useful things you want them to do.
When regulating doctors, that means that you take into account that the doctor "on the ground" always has more knowledge than the regulator, and so you can phrase the regulations as absolutes to not do X, Y, or Z, knowing that the doctor will still do X/Y/Z anyway if they have information you don't that leads them to know better in a specific situation.
This is very different from actually making a recommendation to do X/Y/Z in those situations, because such a recommendation can be interpreted out-of-context to imply that doing X/Y/Z might be helpful, and may mislead some doctors into doing X/Y/Z in situations where it wouldn't be helpful — especially in situations where they don't have enough information, but are just falling ever downward on a flowchart of things-to-try.
Basically, when the regulations say "don't do X/Y/Z", what they mean is "if you do do X/Y/Z, we consider you to be taking a heterodox-to-the-medical-establishment position and will discourage others from giving you a platform to promote doing X/Y/Z, lest others not-as-informed as you hear from you and try X/Y/Z themselves without the same justified niche situation. But you can go ahead and keep doing X/Y/Z yourself; we'll turn a blind eye to that. Just do it quietly."
Re: a now-deleted comment about how doctors elsewhere in the world suffer strict consequences for their actions, rather than getting "turned a blind eye":
That still happens in the US regulatory environment as well! Implicit to "we'll turn a blind eye" is the context "as long as you do the due diligence of creating an alternative above-board explanation for what you were doing, so that there's no official record of your heterodox practice."
The most serious and flagrant example of this effect occurs in assisted suicides. It is malfeasance to knowingly kill a patient, and even if no criminal charges occur, you'll have your license to practice permanently revoked if it can be proven that that was your intent.
So no doctor who sets out to assist a patient in suicide ever has the words "assisted suicide" come out of their mouths in a provable way. Instead, they talk about "optimizing quality of life" and "mitigating suffering", through the mechanisms of large doses of drugs that can coincidentally, potentially cause death.
As long as the death can be justified with the above-board explanation ("the patient's pain was so great that they needed this amount of narcotics to rest; and then this dose of narcotics ended up stopping their breathing during the night, and by the time a nurse responded, they were already gone") then the medical establishment — who 100% knows what the doctor was really doing — lets it go.
But if the doctor doesn't bother to hide their approach behind a justification like this? Then they get the book thrown at them.
> But you can go ahead and keep doing X/Y/Z yourself; we'll turn a blind eye to that. Just do it quietly."
This is not true; the only MD in the discussion mentions he was strong-armed out of his personal off-label use, which is also contrary to the non-compliance slack you've mentioned.
> This is very different from actually making a recommendation to do X/Y/Z in those situations, because such a recommendation can be interpreted out-of-context to imply that doing X/Y/Z might be helpful
I don't know if you've seen the video in question, but they are not trying to make a medical recommendation at all. It is more of a meta-discussion, e.g on several institutional games (in the sense of game theory) including the implications of finding out a cheap off-patent drug that could contend with multi-billion-if-not-trillion-dollar global-scale vaccination drive.
> can be interpreted out-of-context to imply that doing X/Y/Z might be helpful, and may mislead some doctors into doing X/Y/Z in situations where it wouldn't be helpful
Youtube should not be in the business of assessing this risk, because they don't have the competence for this. I bet they don't even have one person with a medical degree in their policy team that made the takedown decision. When they take down an on-topic video of an MD and a PhD Biology, however unorthodox their expert position might be, it has the contrary effect of promoting folk medicine, not advancing scientific medicine.
> > Protocols have been developed to ensure that we actually gain knowledge, and not at the expense of the patients.
> If medicine could be reduced to protocols, we wouldn't need the doctors.
They are called protocols and not algorithms for a reason.
> You can rest assured right now many MDs are prescribing off-label meds, diagnostics tests, making non-protocol judgement calls etc all around the world.
Sure, sometimes for good reasons, others for less so. Every patient is different and the doctor has incomplete knowledge, and the protocols are in the end just that: Guidelines.
I would be happy, if I get a doctor, which is critical of guidelines in the sense of being aware of their limitations and won't follow them like they are written in stone (on a case by case basis).
However, as I understand it, we are talking here about deviating from the guidelines without good evidence or without a procedure to gain knowledge from it in a structured manner, not a case-by-case basis, but on principle.
Quite frankly, I would stay the hell away from such doctor, which thinks that is a good idea.
>It is special in that everything about it has been very high profile, and in this day and age of hyper-connectedness, when expert institutions mess things up it is harder to cover up and their authority is at a greater risk.
>Let's be honest that is why they are being very iron fisted about out-of-band covid treatments, not because of a proportional threat to life.
I had limited contact with the expert institutions, but do have direct contact to people who did work in an ICU with Covid-19, (and a below average mortality rate).
Whenever the topic of, as you call them "out-of-band" treatments arose, the look on their faces would silence the topic.
So, if you feel adventurous, I would suggest to cross-check your opinion with someone in the field.
> Whenever the topic of, as you call them "out-of-band" treatments arose, the look on their faces would silence the topic. So, if you feel adventurous, I would suggest to cross-check your opinion with someone in the field.
Let's agree that "the field" is not exclusive to US medicine with all the associated malpractice litigation risks. That might be an explanation for faces turning sour in your personal sample of acquaintances.
> They are called protocols and not algorithms for a reason.
> Every patient is different and the doctor has incomplete knowledge, and the protocols are in the end just that: Guidelines.
> we are talking here about deviating from the guidelines without good evidence or without a procedure to gain knowledge from it in a structured manner
I think you are taking a very elastic view on what protocols are. They either demand adherence or they are mere guidelines. Either evidence is required before straying out of protocol or doctors are expected to operate under incomplete knowledge.
This doesn't address all of your comment but specifically with patient confidentiality – Israel agreed to share more data with vaccine manufacturers in order to get quicker access to the vaccines. There are obviously problems with bilateral dealmaking and Israeli distribution (the article below points them out), but Israel almost certainly saved lives by weakening confidentiality. I think that was the right call.
Ivermectin is not a newly-discovered drug. There were hundereds of millions of courses administered world wide (it even got a Nobel prize). It has been used for decades. [1]
The only unknown right now is the long term effect of ivermectin in patients with covid. It seems to me that it's the same unknown as with the vaccines. You don't have a clinical trial for effects of the vaccines after 5 years, do you? Why don't we wait for it, just to make sure? And it's even worse for the mRNA vaccines, which have not been around for decades and only got the emergency authorization.
Btw the emergency authorization can only be granted by the FDA if there are no alternatives. [2]
> For FDA to issue an EUA, there must be no adequate, approved, and available alternative to the candidate product for diagnosing, preventing, or treating the disease or condition.
I'm not sure if "approved" (as a treatment for covid) would have applied to Ivermectin at the time the EUA was granted but it's not like there were trials to decide that.
>Btw the emergency authorization can only be granted by the FDA if there are no alternatives. [2]
Bingo. If there was a treatment for covid they couldn't administer the vaccines anymore. There are a lot of entrenched positions and people in power who stand to lose lots of dollars.
And such hypothetical alternative would also only have EUA under your argument. But that then wouldn’t stop them from administering the vaccine, as many of the various not-hypothetical vaccines work well and are cheap, so your overall statement seems a non-sequitur. E.g. it may have been true 6-12 months ago, but the available information has changed.
> There were hundereds of millions of courses administered world wide
Except that the doses involved are way lower than what's being speculated about (on flimsy evidence) as a possible COVID-19 treatment. And this drug has severe side effects at such higher doses. There's no way in hell that this stuff is ever going to be safer than mRNA vaccines, let alone more effective.
No, you’re like a year behind on that rebuttal. Go look at the doses they are recommending. They are talking around 25mg, and it’s demonstrably safer already. Efficacy is less clear, but very compelling. The issue is the refusal to do an RCT, probably because it would wipe out billions of dollars of it succeeds.
Merck announced a $3000/dose drug with billions in preorders just a few days ago. They aren’t interested in seeing if $3 ivermectin, which they also make, works.
We also have decades of experience with Ivermectin, Hydroxychloroquine, and other repurposed drugs out of patent. Ivermectin in particular looks like it's working quite well in practice. Isn't it funny that we will hold those to ridiculously high standards, and devote resources to get much newer interventions like Remdesivir, the upcoming Molnupiravir [2] and others, that are still under patent, through requirements? Especially when every second counts, and when people are actively dying?
I think arguing that supportive care is grossly suboptimal is going to be a pretty difficult take to sustain, given that a huge majority of the infected manage a full recovery from SARS-CoV-2 with no treatment at all. This complicates the cost-benefit outlook for any early treatment; it would be entirely wasted on those patients, while the potential for severe side effects (as seen also, e.g. from HCQ) would remain.
Then why administer the vaccines? (With potential side effects due to the short period of clinical trials compared to the use of Ivermectin.) The way to control the epidemic is to make enough people immune to drive it to extinction. It would be preferable to use all available means to attain that. This way you protect all people (not only the people who got the treatment), including the vulnerable ones.
> What else should scientists do than challenging the status quo?
Refuse to work for Google. Shun and shame every single Google employee. Exclude them from intellectual circles. Those furthering our dystopian future should be treated as such.
> What else should scientists do than challenging the status quo?
Sure, and I rather suspect there are all sorts of venues that scientists could use to communicate scientific reasons challenging the status quo, ones in which there'd be a process of discourse with other domain experts capable of independently evaluating claims.
YouTube is significant mass media. But the idea that it's a crucial early stage link in the scientific process is one of the most ridiculous things about this conversation.
When you deal in mass distribution, the dynamics and responsibilities are different than when you're in conversation/process with other domain experts. If you can't build up a decent threshold of support within circles of expertise first, it's likely your counterclaim won't have real value for a mass market. Or worse.
And if you want access to a mass market anyway without having to face those challenges first, it's possible that what you're about is more personal privilege than substantial contribution to the marketplace of ideas.
And given how ridiculously diverse and incredibly free the online marketplace for ideas is right now, considering how it has never been easier to get mass distribution of even pretty questionable ideas, it's a pretty weird time to take the posture that we're actually suffering under an oppressively censored discourse regime.
> When you deal in mass distribution, the dynamics and responsibilities are different than when you're in conversation/process with other domain experts.
Why? Is the implicit assumption here that people are too stupid or irresponsible to handle hearing information & coming to their own conclusion on it?
This seems like a distressingly common viewpoint nowadays...
“If there be time to expose through discussion, the falsehoods and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.”
"The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude larger than to produce it."
Is free discourse about being free from consequences? Is it about equal representation/distribution? I am curious about ideological harm when compared to things like offering legal or medical advice.
What does a private company/platform have to do with censorship? Why does a private company/platform need to represent and publish all ideological viewpoints, and what is that company’s responsibility to free discourse?
You seem to have chosen "too stupid or irresponsible" when I chose my words to focus on "lacking education and domain expertise."
Perhaps you were just helping my case out by demonstrating how easily people sometimes confuse even relatively accessible topics like the difference between stupidity and ignorance?
Restricting access to information because you feel that its potential audience is too ignorant seems a little counter-productive to me :/. Wouldn't the idea be to provide them with more information?
YouTube isn’t just mass-media though - it’s a general-purpose video hosting and sharing site.
I’m not familiar with the current story nor the work of those involved, but academics and researchers can and do use YouTube to share information between themselves - *if* this was, say, a highly technical or academic video with a specialised intended audience and YouTube took that down then that’s different compared to a heterodox (read: quack) researcher putting out a video intending to make their argument directly to laypersons.
> ...compared to a heterodox (read: quack) researcher
You do realise that it often takes heterodoxy - i.e. going against the orthodoxy in a field - to achieve a breakthrough? You also realise that the people Brett Weinstein is talking to are anything but quacks?
Why, then, this cheap shot of implying that what they are discussing is quackery? What is to be gained by such behaviour? It is not as if the orthodox approach to the treatment of SARS2 has been set in stone, nor is it a spectacular success. If the treatment they discuss - mainly Ivermectin as prophylaxis, Ivermectin in combination with Fluvoxamine and some other preparations as treatment - work they should be used given the long experience with and low cost of these preparations. They indicate these preparations help against 'long-term covid', they claim to have proof of their efficacy. What is to be gained by ignoring what they have to say? I understand that Pfizer, Moderna, Curevac, Astra-Zeneca, J&J, Merck and a few others potentially stand to loose a great deal should the emergency use authorisation for their vaccines be withdrawn prematurely because of the proven efficacy of other preparations - this is what would happen if the rules were followed which state that EUA is only given where there are no alternatives. That is not a valid reason for not allowing them to present their claimed evidence.
What is to be gained by defending the continued suppression of this information? It is clear that the information will come out in any case, most likely soon - it will be published no matter the hurdles which are being thrown up. Should their proof hold it will be yet another blow against the trust people have in the institutions of government.
I say publish this information, without censorship, without interference. The mantra of "trust the science" can only hold when the scientific method is allowed to function. Censoring anything which goes against the orthodoxy is not science, it is authoritarianism. It is what allowed Trofim Lysenko to push his Lamarckian nonsense which eventually led to disastrous famines in the Soviet Union and Communist China [1]. Just like Lysenkoism was not science, authoritarian dogmatic orthodoxy is not science.
Publish and discuss, in the open, without fear of repercussions, without censorship.
> The mantra of "trust the science" can only hold when the scientific method is allowed to function.
Do you have any evidence that the scientific method is currently not allowed to function in communities of expertise?
Because even if ALL contrarian ideas were aggressively crushed in venues like YouTube or USA Today (not actually happening, plenty of contrarianism available on YouTube), it seems like the biological sciences might have their own venues for robust discussion.
Yes, there is plenty of evidence. One quick way of getting some of it is by actively seeking out those sources which are being blocked and checking their "credentials" (i.e. checking out their work more than which school they happened to have gone to). The scientific method can not function when part of the discussion is suppressed, for whatever reason.
Also, nobody states that all contrarian ideas are being suppressed. The discussion here is on the subject of SARS2 treatments which are being suppressed.
Do I know whether these suggested treatments work? No, I do not. Neither do you. The reason why none of us knows this is because discussion on the subject is being suppressed, not because there is evidence of these suggested treatments being ineffective. A good example of this is the recent disclosure of the combination of hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin leading to a doubling of the survival rates of ventilated patients [1]. The paper is interesting, the discussion following the paper even more so. It is this discussion which should be allowed, not suppressed. This discussion should not consist of solely criticism of "this paper is not peer-reviewed" or "this paper has not been published in a major journal", the discussion should instead be had around the subject matter. Peer review and journal impact measurements are means to an end, not ends in and of themselves. I'd like to see the same type of paper and discussion around e.g. the efficacy of ivermectin and/or fluvoxamine, out in the open, without accusations of quackery, without politics, without interference by commercial interests.
In short, I want the scientific process to work as intended.
You seem to be getting reflexive downvotes, but let's stop for a minute and see what you are actually proposing according to the rules you mentioned:
If something else gets an EUA at this point, it would have to have nothing comparable and solve a critical issue in the US. We have now considerable evidence that multiple different vaccines are highly effective at training your body to defend itself against COVID. Therefore, your statement implies this is new wonder drug which does better. So, it must both reverse permanent damage and be almost 100% effective at stopping and curing COVID. And it must both be something we've always known about and is something we have never seen before.
Clearly this wasn't true 9-12 months ago before the vaccine trials finished, so this would have been quite different then, but I digress: we probably don't have a time machine (or do we? Pfizer et al. might stand to lose a great deal if we do).
And, yes, if somehow all that happened, I think we'd all be very happy, even Pfizer et al. Also very confused. But happy.
It's actually not a new wonder drug. It's an old generic drug that doctors have been experimenting with for COVID treatment for quite some time now, which has passed all safety trials a long time ago, and which is cheap and widely available.
You aren't aware of these things because Ivermectin has been the target of a massive campaign of information suppression, exactly of the type that is being reported on here. In contrast vaccines have been given emergency approval without finishing their trials, despite being based on entirely new technology, despite absolute risk reductions of less than 1% and despite that giving any medical treatment to an entire population including healthy people must always raise the question of side effects vs disease severity - questions that are also being suppressed.
For example, here is an open letter written by some doctors who have run out of patience with medical authorities and their refusal to talk about early drug-based treatment:
I am aware of Ivermectin. It is hard not to be, given how often people talk about it being censured.
The site you link seems to be asking for a EUA for giving it to the entire population, despite being less effective and higher side effects than vaccines. That does not meet the criteria for a hypothetical wonder drug.
Looking somewhat briefly, I will note that site you link even states that the current vaccines are preferable, but that Ivermectin should have been considered as an interim measure.
I’m quoting your link, by the people who argue for ivermectin: “We understand why policymakers are focused on vaccines. Vaccines will offer better, or longer-lasting, protection than any drug.”
Yes, they will, but protection is not the only way to solve a health problem, and if that protection comes at unacceptable cost, then it's possible for treatment to be the better option.
It doesn't mean that's the case here, but it's certainly possible. The suppression of discussion of it means it's hard to really know.
Hmm I'm not trying to be difficult but where does it say that? I can't find any language like that on the page. Rather the opposite, it says:
"Special emphasis must be placed on the harm of excluding trials data supporting ivermectin in the prevention of COVID-19. If the preventive efficacy of ivermectin were to be known or accepted, this would allow deployment in regions without vaccines."
I wouldn’t say that is the opposite, as it is suggesting both that ivermectin would be needed to be take as a preventative to slow the spread, and implies that vaccination is needed to stop it. My quote is taken from this page: https://covid19criticalcare.com/guide-for-this-website/expan...
What you are implicitly proposing is that whenever there is disagreement within the scientific community, that disagreement should be kept behind closed doors and hidden from the public until some Institution (CDC/WHO/etc) decides on a Consensus of Truth, and that this Consensus of Truth is the only narrative that can be communicated to the public.
This raises a lot of questions. For instance, what happens when the Consensus of Truth changes, as we’ve seen with the lab leak hypothesis and the efficacy of wearing masks? The “mass media” goes back and ninja edits their historical news coverage so it fits the new narrative.
As for YouTube being “mass media”, come on—it’s filled with random crap uploaded by members of the public. It’s not the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite.
There are two things there... the lab leak thing has always been consistent and regardless of that we didn't really need to know the origin of it at the time; it changed nothing material of how to handle a large pandemic which was killing thousands of people daily. Yeah there has always been the possibility that the lab accidentally leaked it but there wasn't much evidence of that other than coincidence.
masks have been similar in general outside of a few fringe idiots speaking out of turn. they know and knew that well fitted n95 masks were effective in slowing the spread and should be used in the hospital settings. the advice was not to buy masks. they didn't know the efficacy of general cloth masks at the time and weather or not having them on would be a net detriment because it might cause people to touch their face more often while adjusting the masks and cause contaminated hands to come in contact with the face more often. the data showed that those fears were not fruitful and thus the recommendation changed.
there is also the disastrous TB paper that took the conclusion from a miner's lung paper as gospel and misinterpreted the results of that and then every subsequent paper used that erroneous data in their papers. (mining paper said that the nose was very good at blocking out everything down to 5 microns and aerosolized particles could be 100 microns or smaller but since the nose was effective at blocking particles larger than 5 microns you needed to worry about masks that block the small stuff. well the TB paper used the 5 micron aerosol particles as TB only infects you if you get the particles deep in your lungs. The problem is that aerosol particles greater than 5 microns can infect you with other diseases if the receptors for those are not deep in the lungs. in the end 5 micron was chosen as a magical aerosol particle threshold when the actual threshold is 100 microns and one scientist finally got the WHO et al to understand this after doing much research and advocacy)
in the end science is messy even when done with rigor.
> until some Institution (CDC/WHO/etc) decides on a Consensus of Truth, and that this Consensus of Truth
No need to draw unfounded "implicit" proposals. I explicitly invoked a body of everyone with domain expertise to evaluate claims, not a singular institution.
Those people often do connect via institutionS created to support and benefit from their work and its utility, like professional associations, journals and trade publications, domain-specific forums, research arms, university departments.
The emphasized plural in institutionS should underscore the point that as neat a rhetorical flourish the invocation of an oppressive capital-I Institution is, it's actually substantially wrong as a way of engaging this topic. The actual truth is not going to be somehow hamstrung or stamped out if the stewards of a large public platform like YouTube follow the conversations in these communities of expertise on some topics rather than letting Lone Gunmen lead them into controversy-view battle against it.
Like Paul Graham recently said "Most implausible-sounding ideas are in fact bad and could be safely dismissed. But not when they're proposed by reasonable domain experts." The first best way to tell if someone is a domain expert is to become one; the second best is to see if the maverick can convince other domain experts.
If collective expertise itself sounds oppressive to you, wait until you try the oppression from giving authority to collective ignorance.
> the efficacy of wearing masks?
If this is talking about the surgeon general's take circa Feb/Mar 2020, I welcome its admission to this discussion, because it's actually an illustration about the problems of mass communication and how someone can say something where every last word is defensible and most of it holds up over a year later ... and yet harmful mass misunderstanding (and a handle for disinformation) can follow. And that should encourage people towards more cautious use/responsibility when it comes to media reach.
And still, even with all the problems with that... the official narrative that you seem eager to characterize as potentially misleading or oppressive had actually fixed itself, accompanied with accessible arguments and demonstrations within months.
> As for YouTube being “mass media”, come on—it’s filled with random crap uploaded by members of the public.
Walter Cronkite broadcast on narrow-producer mass-audience media.
Youtube is both mass-audience AND mass-producer. Some videos on the long tail see a few dozen views. Some videos have reached more of the world than Cronkite ever did and may still be doing so long after everyone who ever heard his voice live or even remembers his name is dead.
Seems to me that doesn't make YouTube any less "mass."
> No need to draw unfounded "implicit" proposals. I explicitly invoked a body of everyone with domain expertise to evaluate claims, not a singular institution.
We’re discussing a video of such “domain experts” themselves discussing and evaluating such claims openly, having been taken down by the singular Institution of Alphabet Inc.
Your argument would be more compelling if it were really specific to YouTube but guess what, all kinds of institutions have been suppressing all kinds of topics, including journals, arXiv sites, ResearchGate and so on. The problem here is not scientific debate happening with the "wrong" technologies (lol) but rather than some ideas are simply being suppressed by certain factions within society for their own ends, in ways that are both:
a. Illegitimate
b. Foolish
If collective expertise itself sounds oppressive to you, wait until you try the oppression from giving authority to collective ignorance.
That's exactly what has happened here. The actual expertise is being oppressed by YouTube moderators, who are themselves responding to instructions decided by Susan Wojcicki, a woman with no scientific or medical expertise whatsoever, who isn't even a software engineer, in fact a woman who is famous primarily for losing against YouTube in the market when she had to compete against them. An outcome that occurred largely because YouTube bet on user generated content, whilst Wojcicki became obsessed with professionally produced movies and TV shows.
Now, in a display of extraordinary hubris, arrogance and a mind-blowing inability to learn from mistakes, she has again decided that the whole user-generated content thing isn't the right way to go and that the only content allowed on the platform should be whatever institutions with "World" in their title approve of. She does this despite the fact that she lost the video war last time because of the same elitist views, despite that the WHO is not run by a doctor or medical specialist of any kind, despite that the WHO constantly changes its mind and is by now totally discredited, and despite many other factors that should have led to this policy being scrapped within minutes of being proposed.
This is a strange take on how issues should be discussed in a free society.
Rather than have ideological gate keeping at every level, I believe we in tech should advocate for a plurality of viewpoints discussed in the open. Probing, reasonable discourse is the best antidote to propaganda and confusion.
It clearly is in this case. Nothing YouTube is doing is anything to do with factual understanding - Google's understanding of the topics in question is extremely poor and certainly not justified with any medical evidence. Their FAQ on the topics simply says they'll block "medical misinformation" which they define as anything the WHO disagrees with. As the WHO has repeatedly disagreed with itself there's no way to be consistent with that standard, at least not without erasing all material from the WHO and its supporters too, but they don't do that. Of course they don't because in the end, this is pure authoritarianism. No fact-finding has gone into this decision.
> Their FAQ on the topics simply says they'll block "medical misinformation" which they define as anything the WHO disagrees with
This seems entirely sensible to me.
> As the WHO has repeatedly disagreed with itself
Unless I misunderstand you, you're saying this as if it's a bad thing. No one's saying the the decision-making processes at the WHO are perfect, but shifts in stance and advice in response to newly available evidence is not "disagreeing with oneself". It's fundamentally how science works.
In fact, most of the criticisms from credible experts have been that the WHO have been too resistant to updating their positions (in the face of the increasingly overwhelming evidence last year that the virus is airborne, for example).
> this is pure authoritarianism. No fact-finding has gone into this decision.
You consider their policy of deferring to an internationally recognised public health body to inform their content guidelines to be an example of authoritarianism?
If so, what alternative "fact-finding" approaches would you suggest?
Because if we imagine for the sake of argument that YouTube somehow had the means, resources and competence to conduct their own rigorous studies and research, in such a notoriously complex field as public health, and used this to inform their content moderation decisions instead of information from the WHO, how would this be any less "authoritarian"?
The WHO hasn't changed its views due to "new science", the shifts have all been for political reasons, as was sometimes admitted by their own staff. Additionally this notion that it's ok for "experts" to set policies and claim science as justification then totally change them on a dime largely voids the whole original justification. It implies their original "science" was totally wrong in ways they couldn't detect and thus they presented it with absolute confidence, then they discovered they had badly screwed up but never admitted to it or investigated what went wrong.
In the end, science is respected because it claims to reveal universal truths about nature. If those truths are constantly being announced to be obsolete such that the new truths aren't mere refinements but totally different, what use is science?
As for authoritarianism, preventing people disagreeing with a global authority is a pure example of it, no? YouTube shouldn't even bother trying to figure out the truth here, they aren't able to do so. Just let people thrash it out amongst themselves.
I think spreading new thinking on treatments for a pandemic that is killing millions, might actually be "crucial". May turn out to be right, may turn out to be wrong, but we've already seen lots of "wrong" information turn out to have been actually right, and the successful censorship of that "wrong-but-soon-to-be-right" information was in retrospect unfortunate, to say the least.
YouTube's position is that this is medical misinformation about Ivermectin.
One of the comments on this Twitter thread argues the video "isn’t just advocating for more complete Ivermectin trials, he’s recommending its use based on a collection of low quality studies. That’s dangerous, and I don’t see how you can blame YouTube for deferring to the advice of the major health bodies on this matter."
Personally I'd never heard of Ivermectin, so I Googled it, and for what it's worth the top result that came up was an official page at FDA.gov headlined "Why You Should Not Use Ivermectin to Treat or Prevent COVID-19"
The only downside your possibly protecting people from is “false hope”, as the medication is very safe.
The possible up side you’ll miss is an actual treatment that prevents an unnecessary negligent massacre of elderly people.
Ivermectin was so effective early on that India gave it put for free to citizens early on in the pandemic. Many studies show it works well. The negative studies from the centralized institutes are possibly explained by regulatory capture and corruption.
I remember doctors at UCSF saying last year that they were treating patients within the bounds of what they know. And not just trying random stuff. I think SF case fatality rate is lower than other places. Just saying.
Disturbing to me is constant claims that treatment X is being failed not failing. Yes that's happened in practice. But people making that claim need to put up[1].
[1] First doctors that came up with an effective chemotherapy for leukemia faced a backlash when other doctors it didn't work. They had to show that the other doctors were making changes to the drug protocol.
Have you read the FDA's article? Let me summarize. Thou shalt not use Ivermectin because:
> Ivermectin tablets are approved [...] for some parasitic worms.
> Taking large doses of this drug is dangerous and can cause serious harm.
(Unlike any other drug.)
> There’s a lot of misinformation around, and you may have heard that it’s okay to take large doses of ivermectin.
...while also...
> The FDA has not reviewed data to support use of ivermectin in COVID-19 patients to treat or to prevent COVID-19; however, some initial research is underway. Taking a drug for an unapproved use can be very dangerous. This is true of ivermectin, too.
> Ivermectin Products for Animals Are Different from Ivermectin Products for People
> > Ivermectin tablets are approved [...] some parasitic worms.
Doctors prescribe stuff off-label all the time. I've taken off-label prescriptions before. Our son takes off-label prescriptions. The fact that X has not been approved for Y doesn't mean much.
Now that's not saying anyone should take ivermectin for COVID-19. I myself probably wouldn't, and if a doctor wanted to prescribe it to me I'd be sceptical. But my reasons for not wanting to take ivermectin for COVID-19 have little to do with the issue of on-label vs off-label use.
I agree with highlighting efficacy as a main discussion topic as well. However, I disagree the controversy doesn’t include arguments around drug safety. As long as the FDA has guidance up like this [1] it’s going to be a part of the discussion.
From the link above:
“The FDA has not reviewed data to support use of ivermectin in COVID-19 patients to treat or to prevent COVID-19; however, some initial research is underway.”
This is a serious failure of the FDA. ivmmeta.com is a meta-analysis of all ivermectin studies (58 studies as of now). This meta-analysis shows ivermectin to be very effective, and the FDA isn’t even looking. This has been the situation for 9 months now.
They seem to be the same site as https://hcqmeta.com/, and while their data collection and aggregation looks excellent, their use of meta-statistics seemed mathematically questionable to me in the past, potentially leading to confusing messaging: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26949919.
Also perhaps worth highlighting the note at the top of their pages saying they believe vaccination is better: "While many treatments have some level of efficacy, they do not replace vaccines and other measures to avoid infection." This seems mathematically defensible to me, since a vaccine that is 95% effective is a 33% risk reduction over a treatment that is 80% effective, per some of the estimated averages on that page (since going from 5% remaining risk to 15% risk is 3 times more cases).
Here in Brazil there have been numerous reports of people getting sick from ivermectin overdose, including people needing liver transplants.
When ivermectin is used for it's original purpose, the treatment is usually a one-time dose. However for covid people have been taking higher doses and for a prolonged period of time, in the misguided belief that it protects against covid.
While ridiculous, Eric Weinstein is a bit over the top with his accusations from time to time. For example Blaming the physics community for not looking in to his personal “unity” theories more.
Sounds like the physics community wrote him off without actually considering his ideas because he didn't fit the charlatan-leftist mold of your typical physicist academic.
Per Wikipedia[1]: The paper qualifies that the author "is not a physicist" but an "entertainer", and it has received strong criticism from the scientific community
This guy doesn’t fit the mold? He’s got all the crank characteristics: you have to subscribe to his newsletter to download the draft of this so called GU model, it apparently says he’s an entertainer not a physicist, etc.
I’m happy to oppose placing YouTube in the position where they have to censor stuff.
But that doesn’t change that this guy’s behavior is pure bozo bit setting. And sure he’s the brother or whatever but that’s who we’re discussing.
Maybe it "sounds like" that to you, but as far as I can see, the physics community considered Weinstein's theory, and disagreed because they thought it was wrong: See [1].
Does everything have to be seen through this left-right lens? I'm highly sceptical that an important discovery in physics would be written off by any academic because its author didn't appear left-wing enough.
E: To add, I'm not a doctor but Brett Weinstein seems adamant that ivermectin is a very safe drug for humans.
One point he has made is that because ivermectin is safe for consumption, there's no (Or very little) downside to taking it in an attempt to prevent or help with COVID.
I don't get it, why would Merck leave money on the table. Merck has and will develop many more Covid drugs. It does not make sense to bet everything on one horse where there is a lot of uncertainty and risk that any drug will see the light of day.
I get that it makes sense as a narrative device to discredit Merck ("big pharma has acted against our interest in the past, so they are acting against our interest here"), but it does not make sense from Merck's point of view.
> In marketing strategy, cannibalization refers to a reduction in sales volume, sales revenue, or market share of one product as a result of the introduction of a new product by the same producer.
That's a valid argument if marketing was the primary decision maker in drug development. But that is not the case, at this very moment Merck is likely developing several potential drugs for Covid in parallel, and there is no guarantee any of them will make it to market, costing Merck millions (probably billions) in development cost.
I'm no proponent of big pharma, and it's possible executives at Merck convened and decided to bet it all on drug X and at the same time not to profit from ivermectin. I think it's very unlikely, because it doesn't make sense.
It only makes sense in a comic world where everything is black and white and the motive of the bad guy solves the mystery.
I'm very confused that Bret, who I respect, is falling for this simplistic ad-hominem argument.
Merck can't benefit from both ivermectin & their new emergency-use-authorized drug. Emergency use authorization requires "no adequate, approved, and available alternatives." [1]
Ivermectin is an old drug, so cannot be patented, which means that Merck has no way to prevent competitors from selling the drug, so no way to keep prices high.
Yes, because we all know that insulin can be had for ten cents a vile right now....oh...wait.
Can we please stop trying to rationalize an irrational market. There is no reason to believe that the age of the drug has anything to do with it's profitability.
There are different insulins. It might be that the expensive ones are still under patent (and genuinely work better than the old ones for many patients).
Also, it might be that some or all of the insulins are just naturally costly to manufacture, so that when competition is not prevented by patents, the price stays high. (This would be the case for example if the insulin must be extracted from pigs and if each pig yields only a few doses of insulin.) That doesn't contradict the fact that many drugs still under patent sell for 100s of times their cost of manufacture, then when the patent expires the sell price drops to close to the cost of manufacture.
No. Ivermectin is off patent. There is no money to be made. That is the point. Everyone wants to invent new drugs and vaccines to make a buck. Btw, Merck is distancing themselves from Ivermectin because they have a new drug in the works. Please read/watch more.
Seems like there's a ton of money to be made with the drug. Just call it a "miracle cure" and sell it to all of the anti vax conspiracy theorists for $500 a dose. Works great for chronic Lyme antibiotics and essential oils, why not ivermectin too?
Another video Bret had to re-upload and only a short amount of it, because YouTube removed the original and gave him a strike for it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q01LUg97eto
That statement that Malone"invented"is mRNA vaccines is internet heresay. My information is that this woman did the most to creat mRNA vaccines. Her position as EVP of BioNGen suggest that she is the more respected scientist ...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katalin_Karik%C3%B3
The wikipedia article about him cites a few things. Who actually invented what and when is probably a bigger research project. Anyway: it doesn't matter much, I think. More important should be the answer to the question: is he right?
I don't have an answer to that, though.
Ironic comment made in ignorance scientific history.
People might take you seriously if you were Michał Sędziwój and had the published studies from the 1600s to prove it. But then they may not, as they did with Sędziwój. Malone has published studies on mRNA from ‘89.
It does appear Malone, working at the Salk Institute, headlined the earliest published research proposing that mRNA could transfect into cells via nano particles.
1. There's no patent on Ivermectin. (Correct me if I got it wrong) 2. Merck has announced an agreement with US gov for 1.7 mln courses of anew antiviral treatment for $1.2 bln. Also they have no real argument against IM:
> No scientific basis for a potential therapeutic effect against COVID-19 from pre-clinical studies;
No meaningful evidence for clinical activity or clinical efficacy in patients with COVID-19 disease, and;
A concerning lack of safety data in the majority of studies.
> > No scientific basis for a potential therapeutic effect against COVID-19 from pre-clinical studies; No meaningful evidence for clinical activity or clinical efficacy in patients with COVID-19 disease, and; A concerning lack of safety data in the majority of studies.
If "no basis for a potential therapeutic effect" is not an argument against using it, then why suggest Ivermectin and not some other drug with no known connection to Covid-19? Why Ivermectin and not, I don't know, Escitalopram?
What you're missing is that Ivermectin is decades old and off patent so anyone can make it cheap. Merck is against it because they are working on a new drug that they'll have a monopoly on. Typical of big pharma.
Why are people blindly accepting what big pharma says when it comes to Covid, as though the industry has suddenly turned a new leaf?
This is all about making money...including the covid vaccine. Covid is even more of a goldmine because they locked in special liability protections.
Big money has a decent amount of influence over what information is accessible to the general public. We're witnessing the modern version of burning books...but many are too WOKE to realize.
On the’censored’ man’s attempted foray into a different field, physics:
“ The paper qualifies that the author "is not a physicist" but an "entertainer", and it has received strong criticism from the scientific community, including having "no visible impact" and having "gaps both mathematical and physical in origin that jeopardize Geometric Unity as a well-defined theory, much less one that is a candidate for a theory of everything.”
What is this slander? That is a completely separate topic, one which wikipedia cannot do justice in a paragraph, and neither can you. Second, the tweet is about Brett's censored video, not Eric. Watch the video.
I looked the man up, found an interesting tidbit, and posted it.
I can see how it comes off as me not liking him, but I really have no idea who he is, so I’ll explain why I posted that quote I saw:
If an individual is in question for taking non-standard stances in an academic field, then any history of non-standard stances from said individual in other fields, and responses to them, are relevant IMO.
If you disagree no worries, downvotes can reduce the opacity to zero.
Well, in that case I disagree with your assertion that scientists who put out publications of average-in-that-field’s quality are “worse than useless”.
Yeahhhh, that's not what you said in your original comment at all.
> if an individual is in question for taking non-standard stances in an academic field
If you meant to say "low quality" then say that, but that is not what anyone takes to mean from "non-standard", as non-standard can equally mean exceptional if you are talking about quality.
But in this case I didn’t mean low-quality. It just turned out that’s how his work in that moment was judged by other experts in the field.
Which is exactly why I brought it up, as I literally explained in my comment above - his history of non-standard ideas doesn’t have a great track record. I think that’s relevant. (But for some reason I’m here explaining it again.)
Your point about less-than-useless (so harmful?) scientists is still absolutely ridiculous, as much scientific progress (and many scientific careers) comes from improving non-exceptional ideas in straightforward manners with expected results.
Joking about something doesn't change the fact that he is a trained physicist, nor does it change the OP's misleading description. "Attempted foray into another field", indeed.
He's joking about being a physicist to deflect any criticism of his crackpot theory he peddled for years before putting up a half baked paper that was quickly found out to be basic quackery and adding insult to (cognitive) injury, put that paper behind a 'waitlist' that you have to sign up with your email for, presumably so he can market to the poor fellow wanting to read his amazing paper.
There are so many intellectual red flags bundled into a person it beggars belief seeing so many people on HN being ensnared by such a totally obvious grifter.
The subject of discussion is the video that was taken down but almost half the replies are about Eric Weinstein's credibility as if that's relevant somehow.
Open-Label studies on some poor country are not "quality evidence". (On the other hand I don't take that manufacturer's statement as a fair and honest assessment of the drug)
We do need serious studies on the repurposing of drugs, but people take it as their silver bullet.
> No one is paying for studies where there is no money to be made later
A number of public and philanthropic groups write grants. I’ve written grants. And just because a commercial interest funds a study doesn’t mean it’s B.S.
Garbage sure, as the many testimonies from doctors all around the world that say it works spectaculary.
Big Pharma is running the show so no one is going to finance fancy double blind RCT´s.
It´s completely crazy to ignore treatments for C19, this disease is easily treatable on symptom onset.
> testimonies from doctors all around the world that say it works spectaculary
I have no view on this drug. But this standard of evidence is useless.
Every substance-disease pair has positive testimony from doctors around the world. Ground tiger bones for cancer? Paprika for polio? Leeches for fever? tons of testimony. Totally worthless. What you need are quality studies.
This is an offshoot, but I wish this form of hyperbole would stop. “Crime against humanity” is a technical term. Watering it down to refer to everything one doesn’t like dilutes it. We have actual crimes against humanity that cannot find political ground, in part due to the term’s semantic satiation.
> Suppressing a safe & effective drug is a crime against humanity, there is no other way to qualify it
It’s not and there are.
It’s not part of a widespread or systematic policy directed against civilians by a political group of state. There were no associated crimes against peace or war crimes. Not a crime against humanity. If what you allege were happening, and were happening intentionally, it could be one among many crimes. But not this one.
This is the direct result of giving out too many phds. There’s no signal, only noise. Trust in our academics, rightfully, in rapid decline. Habermas come to pass.
The purpose of a site like HN is exactly to give quality 2nd or 3rd hand accounts, so I don't need to watch an hour long video to form an opinion on it. There are many, many orders of magnitude too much 1st hand knowledge in the world for anyone to comb through. If you want to be informed on a broad range of topics, the only chance is to go by reporting that you trust, and for a great many people, that includes comments on HN.
If you have a contrary read of the video, it would be better to share it rather than lamenting that the thousands reading this thread don't each spend time watching it in person.
The bits I watched were just full on conspiracy type comments about how even the manufacturer is only saying the drug doesn't work due to various conspiracy reasons. I recommend people to watch it to see how much of a crank bret is and how its clearly dangerous conspiracy nonsense being spouted
This is HN, full of as many ideologues as anywhere else, perhaps on average of higher intellect - though as Jordan Peterson mentions in Beyond Order - intelligent ideologues are the most dangerous.
It is hard to come up with a good framework for this: this is a classic exploration (possibly effective and cheap remedy) versus exploitation (known remedies that are really mostly unavailable to the developing world) mechanism.
In general, even there exploitation mechanism has been questionable for many things COVID-related (debate around making), and the establishment flip-flipping on the lab leak theory doesn’t inspire confidence.
Sorry, what exactly do you think is wrong with shutting down cranks and conspiracy theorists?
You may hope we live in a happy world where everyone can evaluate information fairly and detect nonsense perfectly but I'm afraid we don't. Go and have a conversation with my aunt who thinks that the government (there's only one I guess) created Covid in order to kill all the old people and save money on state pensions. Guess where she learned that.
It takes orders of magnitude more effort to counteract bullshit than it does to produce it. Your opinion doesn't scale and not only is it easily exploitable by bad actors, it's happening in practice all over the place these days and is a huge, huge problem.
"If it's a crank conspiracy theory it should be easy to disprove."
I might have agreed with that a few years ago, but crank conspiracy theories have gotten mainstream traction like I have never seen previously.
"Prove" and "disprove" are never fully black and white. It isn't easy to disprove the theory that the Chinese engineered Covid (i.e SARS-CoV-2) and its spike protein RNA so they could insert arbitrary genetic code into non-Chinese people via the inevitable mRNA vaccine they knew would be created (which itself contains genetic code directly copied from the virus itself). Maybe they want to control our minds, or make us susceptible to some future engineered virus that will take out everyone on the planet that was vaccinated.
I can't disprove that. Maybe someone can.... but whoever they are, they will hardly be able to communicate this to average internet users and YouTube consumers being as it is extremely technical.
But I can make a rational, reasonable analysis of this, and conclude it is unlikely enough that getting a vaccine is a good idea.
And by the way, it's not a matter of determining that you are the "smart guy in the room," it's really more a matter of determining what is the general consensus of many smart people in the room. Obviously that is getting harder to do.
> If it's a crank conspiracy theory it should be easy to disprove.
Have you never spoken to conspiracy theorists? Go and watch one of the Flat Earth documentaries. If Flat Earth is a crank conspiracy theory then it should be easy to disprove and the conspiracy would die out, right?
I spent the entire day discussing this in a flame war with some arrogant asshole on Wikipedia, he seemed quite involved in tech so I hope that he sees this just to spite him.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Kory
To be very clear, I am not inviting a continuation of the flames.
If McDonald's mistreats me, I can go to Wendy's or Burger King and get a similar meal for a similar price. When Youtube mistreats me, where am I supposed to go? BitChute? Vimeo? Neither of those have even half the creators as Youtube. And if creators want to migrate off Youtube, how are they supposed to do that when they'll get less than 10% of the audience on the other sites? Youtube's moat way is too deep to be threatened by any competition no matter how technically advanced the competition is.
Youtube is a monopoly and needs to be regulated as such. The electric company can't cut off my power because I was using their electricity to discuss experimental medications, so why should Youtube be allowed to deny me access to the online public square for the same reason? If Youtube wants to be the thought police of their users, they need to first allow an alternative to survive.
Youtube is owned by a private entity that regularly exerts influence on the government, but it is not the government itself. The favoritism afforded to companies like Youtube is due to changing antitrust laws, and the rise of free market fundamentalism in the US, more than anything else.
The notion that the state is is favorable to Youtube because it wants exert some kind of control over people is true; the nature of that control, however, is fundamentally oligarchical, rather than cultural or whatever is being implied here.
On the one hand, you're pointing at these alternative video hosting sites' lack of engaged audience as the problem with switching over to them. On the other hand, you're saying YouTube needs to be forced to allow anyone and everyone to stay on the site — literally, to have a channel at all.
But you're making a very important hidden leap here: between people being allowed to have a channel on YouTube; and those channels being recommended by YouTube's algorithm.
Because it's the YouTube recommendation algorithm that determines whether you get an audience of millions. Without the algorithm, YouTube is just a video hosting platform with some not-very-good search-based discoverability, where you'd need to do your own off-platform SEO to get your videos seen.
Ignoring the discoverability you get through YouTube's algorithm, and assuming you only care about having a video at a URL you can link to from elsewhere, there's literally no benefit to using YouTube over one of those other video-hosts. They all give you a video at a URL.
In a world where YouTube was regulated as a utility, that would presumably involve the video-hosting infrastructure itself being content-neutral. But implicit to that would be a divorcing of the video-hosting component, from the discoverability component. YouTube the video host would be a utility, while YouTube the recommendation engine would be a separate company (not a utility), but only one of many able to run its own indexing and next-to-watch recommendations against the same store of content.
But again, that hidden leap. What's to say YouTube the recommendation engine, divorced from the video-hosting component, wouldn't still end up, through network effects, as the only site people care about? I would think it almost inevitable — especially starting from current conditions where everyone already knows about YouTube, and would still already know about YouTube (the index) after the split.
In such a world, the "public square" of video content — control over what video content most people happen to see by default — would still be controlled by the video-indexing company YouTube. Just like the "public square" of web content is controlled by the web-indexing company Google. Google never had to host the web, to end up with a degree of control over its public-visible curation.
In that world, does your demand for regulation still stand? If so, what does it mean? Would you demand the index itself to be regulated? Does that mean it would then be the government's job to define content moderation rules for YouTube's index? Would the government have to spend man-centuries or more on auditing for YouTube's approach to content moderation, to ensure they're following the rules as laid out? Or what?
This is silly. You have alternatives, but you still are dismissing them. You could similarly say that if "McDonald mistreats me, where I'm going to go? Wendy? or Burger King? no one is going there"
Also your argument with electric company doesn't make sense, in this you could maybe compare it to an ISP, which I agree should be treated as an utility.
YouTube is just one of many services available. Your only argument about competitors is that not many creators are there, well, how do you think that will change? Are you expecting court to move some of YouTube users to Vimeo?
Well, what's the BurgerKing of YouTube? I don't think there is one. At best Google has Bing, but I think the performance gap is a lot bigger than the gap between chains.
I think people expect the competition to be too perfect of a substitute when it comes to the internet. You are picking the most competitive market - burger joints - in an industry that everyone is forced to partake in: food. On a calorie basis, McDonald's and Burger King actually have some of the most cost effective foods. To me, it is like asking "who is the competitor to Costco? A membership bulk-only retailer, only Sam's Club!"
If we relabel YouTube as "short segment internet video entertainment" than we have things like Twitch, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat that all compete for our attention. I would even say that Netflix, Amazon Video, Apple TV+, Disney+, etc. all compete with YouTube. Of course, they are all unique, but that shouldn't be the bar of measuring "competition". When I used to run a university bar, I would say "we aren't competing with the other bars in town, we are competing with Netflix. How do we convince people to leave their rooms and walk across campus?"
That's true from the perspective of users, but not content creators. 3Blue1Brown can't put videos on Netflix or Disney+, and I don't think Twitch would work. It's the content creators that are cornered YouTube's effective monopoly on serving user-uploaded videos with ads.
From the content creator viewpoint, I concede the landscape is much different. But again, is “user-uploaded videos with ads” what we are really talking about? They can sell their own ads and roll their own hosting quite easily. What you really mean is “user-uploaded videos with ads with the reach of YouTube” but of course there’s only one #1 user-uploaded video website.
>but of course there’s only one #1 user-uploaded video website.
That comment makes the issue sound a lot more slippery and ill-defined than it really is. If you're a small content creator, YouTube is your only option. It is actually quite simple; you don't have any plausible way to get people on your website, you won't get any views on Vimeo and you can't monetize it there, and Tiktok won't work unless you're running at most a few seconds. YouTube has a total sector monopoly on doing business with 3Blue1Brown.
> you don’t have any plausible way to get people on your website
Again, you mean “instantaneous access to millions of people who like to go to YouTube”. A website for $5/month opens you to more people than YouTube. If 3Blue1Brown has decided YouTube is best for them, then that’s great. But
> monopoly on “doing business with 3Blue1Brown.”
Sounds just as silly as Universal Pictures having a monopoly on movie series that involve bad acting and fast cars.
If you want to sell a script, you have Universal, WB, Netflix, I mean, I'm not in the industry, but it's a pretty long list. Every time another industry is brought up we quickly find that a person wanting to do business there has several major, practical routes to choose from. Wanting to make 12-60 minute videos for a living from a starting point of no budget or clout? YouTube is the only option. That's very strange from the perspective of every other industry or even other segments of the same industry. It's not normal for there to only be one business that you have any practical chance of succeeding with.
If it starts looking complicated, just take it back down to the specifics. If you are H3H3, you have no other options. You either do business with YouTube or do some other kind of business. That's the end of the story, and kind of weird, because there aren't any other absolute monopolies like that. For example, hosting a donate button is a practical alternative to Patreon.
I guess we should also be concerned with Tesla’s monopoly on supercharger networks. Just because there is no perfect substitution it does not mean there is no direct competition.
I’m not the person you’re replying to but can I take another shot at expressing their opinion?
Let’s take the argument away from food and move back to networks like YouTube. I’d argue that the best, most innovative thing YouTube accomplished is that they managed to solve a huge chicken or the egg problem. They managed to get enough of an audience to attract creators which has only attracted more of an audience.
How do we deal with companies like that in the context of speech? On one hand, they’re a private company and should have the right to exclude anyone they want for any reason. But what happens when they have so much attention that that exclusion deprives people of hearing right or wrong dissenting opinions?
I genuinely don’t know and my own opinion has swayed so much over the last few months that I’m either dumb or a hypocrite.
Well, they didn't solve the chicken & egg problem, they bought the first platform that was created.
But I don't understand how large audience matters to anyone else than to the platform.
If you're just an user, there's nothing stopping you to use all of these services. In fact given the problem mentioned no one should stick to just one, because that leads to creating a monopoly.
If you're content creator, less of other creators means less competition, your videos are more likely to be featured etc.
Google ensures YT is pre installed on android phones. They also bias searches towards YT in their search engine. This is classic monopoly behavior; using market dominance in one area to maintain dominance in another. People aren't using YT because they try out the alternatives and decide YT is superior, they are funneled there by google and never know alternatives exist.
YouTube is not a monopoly and you do not have any right to any kind of creators or audience at all.
If McDonald's mistreats you, and every other restaurant tastes like garbage to you: tough titty, but that doesn't provide grounds for the govt. to regulate McDonald's.
If you used your electricity to kill people by electrocution, what would the authorities do?
So if you suggest weak/indecisive/unknowledgeable people avoid vaccination for measles/smallpox/covid/polio are you sugesting they kill themselves? Should the authorities take action?
A parent whose child dies from one of these diseases might differ. Measles has a 2% death risk, smallpox 30%, covid 0.5%, polio ~~25% paralysis of symptomatic cases.
Back when Columbus came here, measles had a 50% death rate as there was near zero herd immunity, now we have it and death and severe stuff is~2%
> Neither of those have even half the creators as Youtube.
> Youtube is a monopoly and needs to be regulated as such.
I don't think this is the right argument against big tech in general. "They are more popular" when it comes to entertainment and when there are other ways to share content that people willingly refuse to use just doesn't demonstrate a clear abuse in my opinion.
The most convincing I have seen is when public officials are using them to communicate directly with their constituents (have you seen a government ad on BitChute, Parler, Minds or Gab?) and when they coordinate to ban competitors, collude directly with government officials (wink wink Fauci wink wink Zuckerberg) and when they suppress information and people that are not in line with the main institutional narratives.
And personally billionaires with a messianic complex just creeps me out.
Because mass-killers never used other means of communications to publish their manifestos before and they were always fascist and were never motivated by other ideologies.
People with deep agendas like to imagine everyone else has an agenda as well. In reality, YouTube just wants to make as much money as possible. If people die taking alternative medical treatments for covid, an angry mob will come and demand Disney pull ads from YouTube again. If you have a problem with the censorship, blame the cancellers, not YouTube.
This is what people have always wanted. The bloody paternalists are winning in America and they want to tell us what we’re allowed to watch. “Facebook is responsible for radicalization”
Nah, Facebook just links you to like minded people. You have a problem facing the fact that it’s your grandpa who is a racist shit, that your brother is an incel, and that your sister thinks trans women shouldn’t be allowed to use women’s toilets. So you blame Facebook.
So you guys decide you want to blame Facebook and Twitter and YouTube. They’re “not doing enough”. Let them be and get your grandpa off them if you care so much.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 272 ms ] threadCentralized : Bitchute, Rumble, DTube, Dailymotion, Vimeo, Vidlii
Decentralized : Odysee(LBRY), Peertube
VCs are much more interested these days in payment processing, which is where the money is, than video, which is expensive and hard to monetize..
None of this is the concern of YT and the content that they choose to host. By that logic, someone should be able to spam HN with information about my car's extended warranty due to it's reach.
As they gain traction, they become more "normal".
You’re arguing for government compelled speech.
I think some of the social media platforms are making mistakes sometimes at the moment, but honestly they’re faced with very difficult choices. Ultimately they do have to make those choices, there’s no such thing as broadcast communications platforms without editorial selection of some kind.
Its a loaded term.
Censorship is the suppression of speech, public communication, or other information, on the basis that such material is considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, or "inconvenient." Censorship can be conducted by governments, private institutions, and other controlling bodies.
Amazon, Apple, Google, Twitter, Facebook, etc. are multibillion-dollar corporations that control a colossal share of online communications.
I'm guessing it's probably based on WHO guidelines, which means a very large number of things are off limits.
https://twitter.com/WHO/status/1217043229427761152
This would be more acceptable if they only banned discussion of treatments that are proven not to work, but that doesn't seem to be the case here.
Who determines what "dangerous medical misinformation" is?
As shown, today's "debunked conspiracy theory" can be deemed credible next year.
big tech colluding with gov entities to punish dissenting views seems like a very bad idea.
After the bang up job they've done dealing with copyright strikes, demonetizing their political enemies, and providing virtually zero support and feedback for the very creators that contribute to the popularity of their platform, you'd have to be a sadomasochist to trust YouTube to be the arbiter for "dangerous medical misinformation" or any other "dangerous * misinformation" they decide to sensor.
It is always strange the dichotomy of views here. Since COVID it seems to be trending towards "Question everything, except the current dogma".
The issue is that YouTube has no ability to determine what is or isn't dangerous medical information. Running a video distribution service doesn't make you a medical expert.
"You didn't catch my mate Dave when he murdered that guy so I don't see why you should care about this little stabbing here..."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Weinstein#Physics
Perhaps you'll say he is a clown because he really believed in his own theory or tried to promote his work. Again, I'd disagree. He should believe in his work, if he didn't believe in it he should do something else. If he does believe in it then advocating for his own seems natural and appropriate.
Regardless, this tweet is about YouTube censoring a discussion on the usefulness of ivermectin for covid patients. Eric Weinstein's physics ambitions hardly seem related.
As I understand it Eric has his theory, he wrote it up, and published it on his YouTube channel or a similar platform and a few interested people critiqued it. Great. It would be one thing if he was emailing the editors at Nature every week with a new crazy idea, that would be "crank" territory. That doesn't seem like what happened.
Regardless, this tweet is about Eric's brother who had a conversation with a doctor about possible use of ivermectin to treat Covid. Entirely separate from Eric Weinstein's physics credibility.
There's no way I'd let that Christian doctor try to save my dying child, their beliefs about a zombie savior that flew to heaven are "crank" like so they're disqualified.
Seriously - a crank about physics? The majority of those people are crazy in some regard, that's why they love physics!
There are many such types who reformulate various types of physics from a mathematical pov -- these attempts rarely have any deep upside... but it is a hobby of mathematical physicists.
Nothing "crank" about it.
For example, the Nobel laureate Linus Pauling made outstanding contributions to chemistry in explaining the nature of the chemical bond. He also believed vitamin C could help cure or prevent cancer, for which there doesn't appear to be much evidence.
> The Author is not a physicist and is no longer an active academician, but is an Entertainer and host of The Portal podcast. This work of entertainment is a draft of work in progress which is the property of the author and thus may not be built upon, renamed, or profited from without express permission of the author.
* Eight years passed until Weinstein released a draft paper of Geometric Unity on April 1, 2021. The paper qualifies that the author "is not a physicist" but an "entertainer"*
By his own admission definitely more clown than physicist.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
― Carl Sagan, Broca's Brain: Reflections on the Romance of Science
See what I did there? Its called an ad-hominem, an attack to the person instead of the argument. Thats what you did when you attacked Eric Weinstein instead of his argument.
Bret (Eric's brother, biology PhD) had a 2h long conversation with Pierre Kory (MD) and it was taken down by YT. One of the things they talked was the recommendations of WHO and other organisations to focus on supportive care only (supporting the patient while their organism fights the disease by itself). They insist on not using other treatments outside clinical trials. The argument that running experiments would cost lives doesn't seem coherent. It's not like we have this 100+ yrs practice of dealing with SARS-CoV-2 epidemic with well established protocols. What if we're clinging to a suboptimal strategy?
That signals they may have conflict of interest. For example accidentally finding a treatment that works, could mean huge loss for vaccine business.
(Just to be clear, I am not anti-vax. I got vaccinated myself and I believe there is no better option right now, however, trying to limit doctors in finding other means sounds extremely fishy)
I do believe doctors use too many medications off-label although I acknowledge that FDA on-label approval can be a large barrier.
Most doctors don't bother treating a patient with anything other than standard care procedures.
Why--I honesty believe most don't care enough to look beyond the usual treatment.
8 minutes per patient, collect the most money from the out of the patient, and insurance company. Do not say or do anything than might bring a lawsuit. Write a script, or recommend a Nettie Pot. (I still think about a guy here whom paid $450 out of packet for a sinus infection, and was told to buy a nettie pot. Nothing wrong with not doing anything though. It was the price of the office visit.) Determine if you can get the patent in for another pricey office visit. Repeat.
Go back to writing that vanity novel, or checking the stock market. (This has been my experience. They have about 50 drugs they commonly use, and when things get complicated, they refer, or claim it might be psychosomatic?)
There's always a risk of a lawsuit too.
Then there are doctors whom sometimes prescribe off label for a condition, or honestly try to keep current. I appreciate those doctors.
waiting for a properly run study will cost lived especially when there are corporate and political interests controlling these tests.
it would have been easy to run dozens of prophylactic studies while this virus was running rampant. same for testing the dozens of clinical sourced protocols. instead the medical testing establishment shutdown and ignore all clinical protocols that were successful used, and put the message out so that medical journals, big tech, pharmacy boards, hospitals, suppressed more discussion and application of these protocols.
Clinical trials are structured experiments which follow a certain protocol, ethical review, etc...
> It's not like we have this 100+ yrs practice of dealing with SARS-CoV-2 epidemic with well established protocols
We do have 100+ years of practice in dealing with various diseases, circumstances, including pandemics, etc... In that sense SARS-CoV-2 is nothing special. Protocols have been developed to ensure that we actually gain knowledge, and not at the expense of the patients.
Should we skip on ethical review boards? Or patient confidentiality? Which part of a clinical study are you suggesting are superfluous?
Pretending the system is working as intended is a farce.
What good old days those were.
According to Worldofmeters: At the moment the United States has 1848 deaths per million people. Thailand has 21. Cambodia has 20. Taiwan 18. Vietnam 0.6. Laos 0.4.
Tuskegee wasn’t an experiment in “we don’t know if this drug works” it was explicitly intended to study the progression of syphilis - they weren’t withholding drugs because they didn’t know if they worked, they were withholding them because black people weren’t human to them.
ERBs and the FDA both exist to protect people from becoming victims.
If medicine could be reduced to protocols, we wouldn't need the doctors.
You can rest assured right now many MDs are prescribing off-label meds, diagnostics tests, making non-protocol judgement calls etc all around the world. And I am glad they are doing that, because front-line medicine is more engineering than science and their job is ultimately to heal, not being protocol-only automatons.
> SARS-CoV-2 is nothing special
It is special in that everything about it has been very high profile, and in this day and age of hyper-connectedness, when expert institutions mess things up it is harder to cover up and their authority is at a greater risk.
Let's be honest that is why they are being very iron fisted about out-of-band covid treatments, not because of a proportional threat to life.
Well, yeah. One important point about health policy is that it's designed with the knowledge — the assumption — of some level of non-compliance.
Health policy design is game-theoretic, like overbidding in a negotiation: rather than choosing rules that are logically correct, you pick optimal rules to get your own population — a portfolio of people with different feelings toward authority — to on average do the thing you want them to do, or a set of different useful things you want them to do.
When regulating doctors, that means that you take into account that the doctor "on the ground" always has more knowledge than the regulator, and so you can phrase the regulations as absolutes to not do X, Y, or Z, knowing that the doctor will still do X/Y/Z anyway if they have information you don't that leads them to know better in a specific situation.
This is very different from actually making a recommendation to do X/Y/Z in those situations, because such a recommendation can be interpreted out-of-context to imply that doing X/Y/Z might be helpful, and may mislead some doctors into doing X/Y/Z in situations where it wouldn't be helpful — especially in situations where they don't have enough information, but are just falling ever downward on a flowchart of things-to-try.
Basically, when the regulations say "don't do X/Y/Z", what they mean is "if you do do X/Y/Z, we consider you to be taking a heterodox-to-the-medical-establishment position and will discourage others from giving you a platform to promote doing X/Y/Z, lest others not-as-informed as you hear from you and try X/Y/Z themselves without the same justified niche situation. But you can go ahead and keep doing X/Y/Z yourself; we'll turn a blind eye to that. Just do it quietly."
That still happens in the US regulatory environment as well! Implicit to "we'll turn a blind eye" is the context "as long as you do the due diligence of creating an alternative above-board explanation for what you were doing, so that there's no official record of your heterodox practice."
The most serious and flagrant example of this effect occurs in assisted suicides. It is malfeasance to knowingly kill a patient, and even if no criminal charges occur, you'll have your license to practice permanently revoked if it can be proven that that was your intent.
So no doctor who sets out to assist a patient in suicide ever has the words "assisted suicide" come out of their mouths in a provable way. Instead, they talk about "optimizing quality of life" and "mitigating suffering", through the mechanisms of large doses of drugs that can coincidentally, potentially cause death.
As long as the death can be justified with the above-board explanation ("the patient's pain was so great that they needed this amount of narcotics to rest; and then this dose of narcotics ended up stopping their breathing during the night, and by the time a nurse responded, they were already gone") then the medical establishment — who 100% knows what the doctor was really doing — lets it go.
But if the doctor doesn't bother to hide their approach behind a justification like this? Then they get the book thrown at them.
This is not true; the only MD in the discussion mentions he was strong-armed out of his personal off-label use, which is also contrary to the non-compliance slack you've mentioned.
> This is very different from actually making a recommendation to do X/Y/Z in those situations, because such a recommendation can be interpreted out-of-context to imply that doing X/Y/Z might be helpful
I don't know if you've seen the video in question, but they are not trying to make a medical recommendation at all. It is more of a meta-discussion, e.g on several institutional games (in the sense of game theory) including the implications of finding out a cheap off-patent drug that could contend with multi-billion-if-not-trillion-dollar global-scale vaccination drive.
> can be interpreted out-of-context to imply that doing X/Y/Z might be helpful, and may mislead some doctors into doing X/Y/Z in situations where it wouldn't be helpful
Youtube should not be in the business of assessing this risk, because they don't have the competence for this. I bet they don't even have one person with a medical degree in their policy team that made the takedown decision. When they take down an on-topic video of an MD and a PhD Biology, however unorthodox their expert position might be, it has the contrary effect of promoting folk medicine, not advancing scientific medicine.
They are called protocols and not algorithms for a reason.
> You can rest assured right now many MDs are prescribing off-label meds, diagnostics tests, making non-protocol judgement calls etc all around the world.
Sure, sometimes for good reasons, others for less so. Every patient is different and the doctor has incomplete knowledge, and the protocols are in the end just that: Guidelines.
I would be happy, if I get a doctor, which is critical of guidelines in the sense of being aware of their limitations and won't follow them like they are written in stone (on a case by case basis).
However, as I understand it, we are talking here about deviating from the guidelines without good evidence or without a procedure to gain knowledge from it in a structured manner, not a case-by-case basis, but on principle. Quite frankly, I would stay the hell away from such doctor, which thinks that is a good idea.
>It is special in that everything about it has been very high profile, and in this day and age of hyper-connectedness, when expert institutions mess things up it is harder to cover up and their authority is at a greater risk.
>Let's be honest that is why they are being very iron fisted about out-of-band covid treatments, not because of a proportional threat to life.
I had limited contact with the expert institutions, but do have direct contact to people who did work in an ICU with Covid-19, (and a below average mortality rate).
Whenever the topic of, as you call them "out-of-band" treatments arose, the look on their faces would silence the topic. So, if you feel adventurous, I would suggest to cross-check your opinion with someone in the field.
Let's agree that "the field" is not exclusive to US medicine with all the associated malpractice litigation risks. That might be an explanation for faces turning sour in your personal sample of acquaintances.
> They are called protocols and not algorithms for a reason.
> Every patient is different and the doctor has incomplete knowledge, and the protocols are in the end just that: Guidelines.
> we are talking here about deviating from the guidelines without good evidence or without a procedure to gain knowledge from it in a structured manner
I think you are taking a very elastic view on what protocols are. They either demand adherence or they are mere guidelines. Either evidence is required before straying out of protocol or doctors are expected to operate under incomplete knowledge.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/israel-trades-pfizer-va...
The only unknown right now is the long term effect of ivermectin in patients with covid. It seems to me that it's the same unknown as with the vaccines. You don't have a clinical trial for effects of the vaccines after 5 years, do you? Why don't we wait for it, just to make sure? And it's even worse for the mRNA vaccines, which have not been around for decades and only got the emergency authorization.
Btw the emergency authorization can only be granted by the FDA if there are no alternatives. [2]
> For FDA to issue an EUA, there must be no adequate, approved, and available alternative to the candidate product for diagnosing, preventing, or treating the disease or condition.
I'm not sure if "approved" (as a treatment for covid) would have applied to Ivermectin at the time the EUA was granted but it's not like there were trials to decide that.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivermectin#Cost [2] https://www.fda.gov/regulatory-information/search-fda-guidan...
Bingo. If there was a treatment for covid they couldn't administer the vaccines anymore. There are a lot of entrenched positions and people in power who stand to lose lots of dollars.
This is mostly true, but mRNA vaccines have gone through human trials before covid.
Except that the doses involved are way lower than what's being speculated about (on flimsy evidence) as a possible COVID-19 treatment. And this drug has severe side effects at such higher doses. There's no way in hell that this stuff is ever going to be safer than mRNA vaccines, let alone more effective.
Here is a 12 min clip with Bret and Pierre Kory about Ivermectin use for Covid / safety record: https://youtu.be/4O7uy4tzI8A
Merck announced a $3000/dose drug with billions in preorders just a few days ago. They aren’t interested in seeing if $3 ivermectin, which they also make, works.
[1] https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2021/05/india-just-became-la... [2] https://news.yahoo.com/merck-says-u-govt-buy-110024197.html
https://www.bitchute.com/video/qHjNQIynVb5O/
https://vimeo.com/557811163
Refuse to work for Google. Shun and shame every single Google employee. Exclude them from intellectual circles. Those furthering our dystopian future should be treated as such.
Sure, and I rather suspect there are all sorts of venues that scientists could use to communicate scientific reasons challenging the status quo, ones in which there'd be a process of discourse with other domain experts capable of independently evaluating claims.
YouTube is significant mass media. But the idea that it's a crucial early stage link in the scientific process is one of the most ridiculous things about this conversation.
When you deal in mass distribution, the dynamics and responsibilities are different than when you're in conversation/process with other domain experts. If you can't build up a decent threshold of support within circles of expertise first, it's likely your counterclaim won't have real value for a mass market. Or worse.
And if you want access to a mass market anyway without having to face those challenges first, it's possible that what you're about is more personal privilege than substantial contribution to the marketplace of ideas.
And given how ridiculously diverse and incredibly free the online marketplace for ideas is right now, considering how it has never been easier to get mass distribution of even pretty questionable ideas, it's a pretty weird time to take the posture that we're actually suffering under an oppressively censored discourse regime.
Why? Is the implicit assumption here that people are too stupid or irresponsible to handle hearing information & coming to their own conclusion on it?
This seems like a distressingly common viewpoint nowadays...
At risk of being flippant, have you been on Facebook lately at all in the past 5-6 years?
This is a very condescending and authoritarian position that I would hope those of us who care about free discourse would eschew.
I'm not saying that.
"The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude larger than to produce it."
Is free discourse about being free from consequences? Is it about equal representation/distribution? I am curious about ideological harm when compared to things like offering legal or medical advice.
What does a private company/platform have to do with censorship? Why does a private company/platform need to represent and publish all ideological viewpoints, and what is that company’s responsibility to free discourse?
Perhaps you were just helping my case out by demonstrating how easily people sometimes confuse even relatively accessible topics like the difference between stupidity and ignorance?
I’m not familiar with the current story nor the work of those involved, but academics and researchers can and do use YouTube to share information between themselves - *if* this was, say, a highly technical or academic video with a specialised intended audience and YouTube took that down then that’s different compared to a heterodox (read: quack) researcher putting out a video intending to make their argument directly to laypersons.
You do realise that it often takes heterodoxy - i.e. going against the orthodoxy in a field - to achieve a breakthrough? You also realise that the people Brett Weinstein is talking to are anything but quacks?
Why, then, this cheap shot of implying that what they are discussing is quackery? What is to be gained by such behaviour? It is not as if the orthodox approach to the treatment of SARS2 has been set in stone, nor is it a spectacular success. If the treatment they discuss - mainly Ivermectin as prophylaxis, Ivermectin in combination with Fluvoxamine and some other preparations as treatment - work they should be used given the long experience with and low cost of these preparations. They indicate these preparations help against 'long-term covid', they claim to have proof of their efficacy. What is to be gained by ignoring what they have to say? I understand that Pfizer, Moderna, Curevac, Astra-Zeneca, J&J, Merck and a few others potentially stand to loose a great deal should the emergency use authorisation for their vaccines be withdrawn prematurely because of the proven efficacy of other preparations - this is what would happen if the rules were followed which state that EUA is only given where there are no alternatives. That is not a valid reason for not allowing them to present their claimed evidence.
What is to be gained by defending the continued suppression of this information? It is clear that the information will come out in any case, most likely soon - it will be published no matter the hurdles which are being thrown up. Should their proof hold it will be yet another blow against the trust people have in the institutions of government.
I say publish this information, without censorship, without interference. The mantra of "trust the science" can only hold when the scientific method is allowed to function. Censoring anything which goes against the orthodoxy is not science, it is authoritarianism. It is what allowed Trofim Lysenko to push his Lamarckian nonsense which eventually led to disastrous famines in the Soviet Union and Communist China [1]. Just like Lysenkoism was not science, authoritarian dogmatic orthodoxy is not science.
Publish and discuss, in the open, without fear of repercussions, without censorship.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trofim_Lysenko#Consequences_of...
Do you have any evidence that the scientific method is currently not allowed to function in communities of expertise?
Because even if ALL contrarian ideas were aggressively crushed in venues like YouTube or USA Today (not actually happening, plenty of contrarianism available on YouTube), it seems like the biological sciences might have their own venues for robust discussion.
Also, nobody states that all contrarian ideas are being suppressed. The discussion here is on the subject of SARS2 treatments which are being suppressed.
Do I know whether these suggested treatments work? No, I do not. Neither do you. The reason why none of us knows this is because discussion on the subject is being suppressed, not because there is evidence of these suggested treatments being ineffective. A good example of this is the recent disclosure of the combination of hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin leading to a doubling of the survival rates of ventilated patients [1]. The paper is interesting, the discussion following the paper even more so. It is this discussion which should be allowed, not suppressed. This discussion should not consist of solely criticism of "this paper is not peer-reviewed" or "this paper has not been published in a major journal", the discussion should instead be had around the subject matter. Peer review and journal impact measurements are means to an end, not ends in and of themselves. I'd like to see the same type of paper and discussion around e.g. the efficacy of ivermectin and/or fluvoxamine, out in the open, without accusations of quackery, without politics, without interference by commercial interests.
In short, I want the scientific process to work as intended.
[1] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.05.28.21258012v...
If something else gets an EUA at this point, it would have to have nothing comparable and solve a critical issue in the US. We have now considerable evidence that multiple different vaccines are highly effective at training your body to defend itself against COVID. Therefore, your statement implies this is new wonder drug which does better. So, it must both reverse permanent damage and be almost 100% effective at stopping and curing COVID. And it must both be something we've always known about and is something we have never seen before.
Clearly this wasn't true 9-12 months ago before the vaccine trials finished, so this would have been quite different then, but I digress: we probably don't have a time machine (or do we? Pfizer et al. might stand to lose a great deal if we do).
And, yes, if somehow all that happened, I think we'd all be very happy, even Pfizer et al. Also very confused. But happy.
You aren't aware of these things because Ivermectin has been the target of a massive campaign of information suppression, exactly of the type that is being reported on here. In contrast vaccines have been given emergency approval without finishing their trials, despite being based on entirely new technology, despite absolute risk reductions of less than 1% and despite that giving any medical treatment to an entire population including healthy people must always raise the question of side effects vs disease severity - questions that are also being suppressed.
For example, here is an open letter written by some doctors who have run out of patience with medical authorities and their refusal to talk about early drug-based treatment:
https://covid19criticalcare.com/videos-and-press/flccc-relea...
The site you link seems to be asking for a EUA for giving it to the entire population, despite being less effective and higher side effects than vaccines. That does not meet the criteria for a hypothetical wonder drug.
Looking somewhat briefly, I will note that site you link even states that the current vaccines are preferable, but that Ivermectin should have been considered as an interim measure.
It doesn't mean that's the case here, but it's certainly possible. The suppression of discussion of it means it's hard to really know.
"Special emphasis must be placed on the harm of excluding trials data supporting ivermectin in the prevention of COVID-19. If the preventive efficacy of ivermectin were to be known or accepted, this would allow deployment in regions without vaccines."
This raises a lot of questions. For instance, what happens when the Consensus of Truth changes, as we’ve seen with the lab leak hypothesis and the efficacy of wearing masks? The “mass media” goes back and ninja edits their historical news coverage so it fits the new narrative.
As for YouTube being “mass media”, come on—it’s filled with random crap uploaded by members of the public. It’s not the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite.
masks have been similar in general outside of a few fringe idiots speaking out of turn. they know and knew that well fitted n95 masks were effective in slowing the spread and should be used in the hospital settings. the advice was not to buy masks. they didn't know the efficacy of general cloth masks at the time and weather or not having them on would be a net detriment because it might cause people to touch their face more often while adjusting the masks and cause contaminated hands to come in contact with the face more often. the data showed that those fears were not fruitful and thus the recommendation changed.
there is also the disastrous TB paper that took the conclusion from a miner's lung paper as gospel and misinterpreted the results of that and then every subsequent paper used that erroneous data in their papers. (mining paper said that the nose was very good at blocking out everything down to 5 microns and aerosolized particles could be 100 microns or smaller but since the nose was effective at blocking particles larger than 5 microns you needed to worry about masks that block the small stuff. well the TB paper used the 5 micron aerosol particles as TB only infects you if you get the particles deep in your lungs. The problem is that aerosol particles greater than 5 microns can infect you with other diseases if the receptors for those are not deep in the lungs. in the end 5 micron was chosen as a magical aerosol particle threshold when the actual threshold is 100 microns and one scientist finally got the WHO et al to understand this after doing much research and advocacy)
in the end science is messy even when done with rigor.
No need to draw unfounded "implicit" proposals. I explicitly invoked a body of everyone with domain expertise to evaluate claims, not a singular institution.
Those people often do connect via institutionS created to support and benefit from their work and its utility, like professional associations, journals and trade publications, domain-specific forums, research arms, university departments.
The emphasized plural in institutionS should underscore the point that as neat a rhetorical flourish the invocation of an oppressive capital-I Institution is, it's actually substantially wrong as a way of engaging this topic. The actual truth is not going to be somehow hamstrung or stamped out if the stewards of a large public platform like YouTube follow the conversations in these communities of expertise on some topics rather than letting Lone Gunmen lead them into controversy-view battle against it.
Like Paul Graham recently said "Most implausible-sounding ideas are in fact bad and could be safely dismissed. But not when they're proposed by reasonable domain experts." The first best way to tell if someone is a domain expert is to become one; the second best is to see if the maverick can convince other domain experts.
If collective expertise itself sounds oppressive to you, wait until you try the oppression from giving authority to collective ignorance.
> the efficacy of wearing masks?
If this is talking about the surgeon general's take circa Feb/Mar 2020, I welcome its admission to this discussion, because it's actually an illustration about the problems of mass communication and how someone can say something where every last word is defensible and most of it holds up over a year later ... and yet harmful mass misunderstanding (and a handle for disinformation) can follow. And that should encourage people towards more cautious use/responsibility when it comes to media reach.
And still, even with all the problems with that... the official narrative that you seem eager to characterize as potentially misleading or oppressive had actually fixed itself, accompanied with accessible arguments and demonstrations within months.
> As for YouTube being “mass media”, come on—it’s filled with random crap uploaded by members of the public.
Walter Cronkite broadcast on narrow-producer mass-audience media.
Youtube is both mass-audience AND mass-producer. Some videos on the long tail see a few dozen views. Some videos have reached more of the world than Cronkite ever did and may still be doing so long after everyone who ever heard his voice live or even remembers his name is dead.
Seems to me that doesn't make YouTube any less "mass."
We’re discussing a video of such “domain experts” themselves discussing and evaluating such claims openly, having been taken down by the singular Institution of Alphabet Inc.
a. Illegitimate
b. Foolish
If collective expertise itself sounds oppressive to you, wait until you try the oppression from giving authority to collective ignorance.
That's exactly what has happened here. The actual expertise is being oppressed by YouTube moderators, who are themselves responding to instructions decided by Susan Wojcicki, a woman with no scientific or medical expertise whatsoever, who isn't even a software engineer, in fact a woman who is famous primarily for losing against YouTube in the market when she had to compete against them. An outcome that occurred largely because YouTube bet on user generated content, whilst Wojcicki became obsessed with professionally produced movies and TV shows.
Now, in a display of extraordinary hubris, arrogance and a mind-blowing inability to learn from mistakes, she has again decided that the whole user-generated content thing isn't the right way to go and that the only content allowed on the platform should be whatever institutions with "World" in their title approve of. She does this despite the fact that she lost the video war last time because of the same elitist views, despite that the WHO is not run by a doctor or medical specialist of any kind, despite that the WHO constantly changes its mind and is by now totally discredited, and despite many other factors that should have led to this policy being scrapped within minutes of being proposed.
Sorry but put it more clearly we definetely should treat non expert as children, for their own good.
Rather than have ideological gate keeping at every level, I believe we in tech should advocate for a plurality of viewpoints discussed in the open. Probing, reasonable discourse is the best antidote to propaganda and confusion.
Are you taking the position that all gatekeeping is ideological?
Because otherwise, bringing it up when the topic seems to be gatekeeping of factual understanding seems off topic.
This seems entirely sensible to me.
> As the WHO has repeatedly disagreed with itself
Unless I misunderstand you, you're saying this as if it's a bad thing. No one's saying the the decision-making processes at the WHO are perfect, but shifts in stance and advice in response to newly available evidence is not "disagreeing with oneself". It's fundamentally how science works.
In fact, most of the criticisms from credible experts have been that the WHO have been too resistant to updating their positions (in the face of the increasingly overwhelming evidence last year that the virus is airborne, for example).
> this is pure authoritarianism. No fact-finding has gone into this decision.
You consider their policy of deferring to an internationally recognised public health body to inform their content guidelines to be an example of authoritarianism?
If so, what alternative "fact-finding" approaches would you suggest?
Because if we imagine for the sake of argument that YouTube somehow had the means, resources and competence to conduct their own rigorous studies and research, in such a notoriously complex field as public health, and used this to inform their content moderation decisions instead of information from the WHO, how would this be any less "authoritarian"?
In the end, science is respected because it claims to reveal universal truths about nature. If those truths are constantly being announced to be obsolete such that the new truths aren't mere refinements but totally different, what use is science?
As for authoritarianism, preventing people disagreeing with a global authority is a pure example of it, no? YouTube shouldn't even bother trying to figure out the truth here, they aren't able to do so. Just let people thrash it out amongst themselves.
One of the comments on this Twitter thread argues the video "isn’t just advocating for more complete Ivermectin trials, he’s recommending its use based on a collection of low quality studies. That’s dangerous, and I don’t see how you can blame YouTube for deferring to the advice of the major health bodies on this matter."
Personally I'd never heard of Ivermectin, so I Googled it, and for what it's worth the top result that came up was an official page at FDA.gov headlined "Why You Should Not Use Ivermectin to Treat or Prevent COVID-19"
https://www.fda.gov/consumers/consumer-updates/why-you-shoul...
The possible up side you’ll miss is an actual treatment that prevents an unnecessary negligent massacre of elderly people.
Ivermectin was so effective early on that India gave it put for free to citizens early on in the pandemic. Many studies show it works well. The negative studies from the centralized institutes are possibly explained by regulatory capture and corruption.
Its medical information by a medical Dr. Its unclear who advices YouTube.
As to the FDA, theres a long list of by government agencies making mistakes. Thats why open debate in necessary in an open society.
Disturbing to me is constant claims that treatment X is being failed not failing. Yes that's happened in practice. But people making that claim need to put up[1].
[1] First doctors that came up with an effective chemotherapy for leukemia faced a backlash when other doctors it didn't work. They had to show that the other doctors were making changes to the drug protocol.
> Ivermectin tablets are approved [...] for some parasitic worms.
> Taking large doses of this drug is dangerous and can cause serious harm.
(Unlike any other drug.)
> There’s a lot of misinformation around, and you may have heard that it’s okay to take large doses of ivermectin.
...while also...
> The FDA has not reviewed data to support use of ivermectin in COVID-19 patients to treat or to prevent COVID-19; however, some initial research is underway. Taking a drug for an unapproved use can be very dangerous. This is true of ivermectin, too.
> Ivermectin Products for Animals Are Different from Ivermectin Products for People
Scientific authority is an oxymoron.
Doctors prescribe stuff off-label all the time. I've taken off-label prescriptions before. Our son takes off-label prescriptions. The fact that X has not been approved for Y doesn't mean much.
Now that's not saying anyone should take ivermectin for COVID-19. I myself probably wouldn't, and if a doctor wanted to prescribe it to me I'd be sceptical. But my reasons for not wanting to take ivermectin for COVID-19 have little to do with the issue of on-label vs off-label use.
That website is run by FLCCC / Pierre Kory
Here is a video about Ivermectin for covid, with Pierre Kory: https://youtu.be/4O7uy4tzI8A
Edit: the issue surrounds efficacy too.
This is a discussion around efficacy.
It is similar to the MD asks around using a Zpak for Covid.
[1] https://www.fda.gov/consumers/consumer-updates/why-you-shoul...
This is a serious failure of the FDA. ivmmeta.com is a meta-analysis of all ivermectin studies (58 studies as of now). This meta-analysis shows ivermectin to be very effective, and the FDA isn’t even looking. This has been the situation for 9 months now.
Also perhaps worth highlighting the note at the top of their pages saying they believe vaccination is better: "While many treatments have some level of efficacy, they do not replace vaccines and other measures to avoid infection." This seems mathematically defensible to me, since a vaccine that is 95% effective is a 33% risk reduction over a treatment that is 80% effective, per some of the estimated averages on that page (since going from 5% remaining risk to 15% risk is 3 times more cases).
When ivermectin is used for it's original purpose, the treatment is usually a one-time dose. However for covid people have been taking higher doses and for a prolonged period of time, in the misguided belief that it protects against covid.
https://oglobo.globo.com/sociedade/ao-menos-quatro-pacientes...
Per Wikipedia[1]: The paper qualifies that the author "is not a physicist" but an "entertainer", and it has received strong criticism from the scientific community
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Weinstein#
I’m happy to oppose placing YouTube in the position where they have to censor stuff.
But that doesn’t change that this guy’s behavior is pure bozo bit setting. And sure he’s the brother or whatever but that’s who we’re discussing.
Does everything have to be seen through this left-right lens? I'm highly sceptical that an important discovery in physics would be written off by any academic because its author didn't appear left-wing enough.
1: https://timothynguyen.files.wordpress.com/2021/02/geometric_...
...not attack him based on some past efforts.
https://www.merck.com/news/merck-statement-on-ivermectin-use...
The dissenters are advocating things even the company that stands to profit from those things opposes.
That’s how off the deep end this is.
E: To add, I'm not a doctor but Brett Weinstein seems adamant that ivermectin is a very safe drug for humans.
One point he has made is that because ivermectin is safe for consumption, there's no (Or very little) downside to taking it in an attempt to prevent or help with COVID.
I get that it makes sense as a narrative device to discredit Merck ("big pharma has acted against our interest in the past, so they are acting against our interest here"), but it does not make sense from Merck's point of view.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannibalization_(marketing)
I'm no proponent of big pharma, and it's possible executives at Merck convened and decided to bet it all on drug X and at the same time not to profit from ivermectin. I think it's very unlikely, because it doesn't make sense.
It only makes sense in a comic world where everything is black and white and the motive of the bad guy solves the mystery.
I'm very confused that Bret, who I respect, is falling for this simplistic ad-hominem argument.
it's not like riverblindness is a first-world problem you can charge people more money for treating
It's against their financial incentive to have ivermectin, an out-of-patent drug, be authorized for treatment of covid. See https://twitter.com/BretWeinstein/status/1402647948371005441...
[1] https://www.fda.gov/vaccines-blood-biologics/vaccines/emerge...
Or are you saying Merck couldn't go for several EUAs for Covid at the same time?
Same thing for the mRNA vaccines. They're all under EUA. It would've been impossible to get them an EUA if we had found out Ivermectin worked.
Can we please stop trying to rationalize an irrational market. There is no reason to believe that the age of the drug has anything to do with it's profitability.
Also, it might be that some or all of the insulins are just naturally costly to manufacture, so that when competition is not prevented by patents, the price stays high. (This would be the case for example if the insulin must be extracted from pigs and if each pig yields only a few doses of insulin.) That doesn't contradict the fact that many drugs still under patent sell for 100s of times their cost of manufacture, then when the patent expires the sell price drops to close to the cost of manufacture.
"Dr. Robert Malone is the inventor of mRNA Vaccine technology." - here he is discussing Ivermectin with Bret Weinstein: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_NNTVJzqtY
Another video Bret had to re-upload and only a short amount of it, because YouTube removed the original and gave him a strike for it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q01LUg97eto
https://m.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/jul/25/bret-weinstei...
People might take you seriously if you were Michał Sędziwój and had the published studies from the 1600s to prove it. But then they may not, as they did with Sędziwój. Malone has published studies on mRNA from ‘89.
https://www.pnas.org/content/86/16/6077.long
> No scientific basis for a potential therapeutic effect against COVID-19 from pre-clinical studies; No meaningful evidence for clinical activity or clinical efficacy in patients with COVID-19 disease, and; A concerning lack of safety data in the majority of studies.
https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210609005142/en/Mer...
https://mobile.twitter.com/BretWeinstein/status/140264794837...
> > No scientific basis for a potential therapeutic effect against COVID-19 from pre-clinical studies; No meaningful evidence for clinical activity or clinical efficacy in patients with COVID-19 disease, and; A concerning lack of safety data in the majority of studies.
If "no basis for a potential therapeutic effect" is not an argument against using it, then why suggest Ivermectin and not some other drug with no known connection to Covid-19? Why Ivermectin and not, I don't know, Escitalopram?
In the topsy turvy world of ivermectin proponents, this is seen as a argument in favor of ivermectin
Why are people blindly accepting what big pharma says when it comes to Covid, as though the industry has suddenly turned a new leaf?
Big money has a decent amount of influence over what information is accessible to the general public. We're witnessing the modern version of burning books...but many are too WOKE to realize.
“ The paper qualifies that the author "is not a physicist" but an "entertainer", and it has received strong criticism from the scientific community, including having "no visible impact" and having "gaps both mathematical and physical in origin that jeopardize Geometric Unity as a well-defined theory, much less one that is a candidate for a theory of everything.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Weinstein#Physics
I can see how it comes off as me not liking him, but I really have no idea who he is, so I’ll explain why I posted that quote I saw:
If an individual is in question for taking non-standard stances in an academic field, then any history of non-standard stances from said individual in other fields, and responses to them, are relevant IMO.
If you disagree no worries, downvotes can reduce the opacity to zero.
But according to the standard definition of standard, which makes it synonymous with "average" or "norm", then my point very much stands.
Well, in that case I disagree with your assertion that scientists who put out publications of average-in-that-field’s quality are “worse than useless”.
Not how science works!
> if an individual is in question for taking non-standard stances in an academic field
If you meant to say "low quality" then say that, but that is not what anyone takes to mean from "non-standard", as non-standard can equally mean exceptional if you are talking about quality.
But in this case I didn’t mean low-quality. It just turned out that’s how his work in that moment was judged by other experts in the field.
Which is exactly why I brought it up, as I literally explained in my comment above - his history of non-standard ideas doesn’t have a great track record. I think that’s relevant. (But for some reason I’m here explaining it again.)
Your point about less-than-useless (so harmful?) scientists is still absolutely ridiculous, as much scientific progress (and many scientific careers) comes from improving non-exceptional ideas in straightforward manners with expected results.
How can you ever falsify anything if you only take the standard stance.
> Weinstein received his PhD in mathematical physics from Harvard University
How is that "not a physicist"?
I'm not saying that his theory is valid, mind you -- I don't know anything about it, nor am I myself qualified to judge that.
But he clearly is a qualified physicist.
There are so many intellectual red flags bundled into a person it beggars belief seeing so many people on HN being ensnared by such a totally obvious grifter.
He is, in fact, a trained mathematical physicist, with a PhD from Harvard, no less.
That doesn't make his theory right. But it does mean that the OP's selective quoting is somewhere between misleading and outright deceptive.
Does that make Eric's credibility relevant to the video in question though some sort of credibility transitivity?
edit: Richard Feynman wrote a book called "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!": Adventures of a Curious Character (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surely_You%27re_Joking,_Mr._Fe...!).
https://c19ivermectin.com/
The suppression of a cheap & effective C19 drug is a crime against humanity.
Open-Label studies on some poor country are not "quality evidence". (On the other hand I don't take that manufacturer's statement as a fair and honest assessment of the drug)
We do need serious studies on the repurposing of drugs, but people take it as their silver bullet.
A number of public and philanthropic groups write grants. I’ve written grants. And just because a commercial interest funds a study doesn’t mean it’s B.S.
I'm saying that commercial interest is commercial interest so why would it fund a study that isn't commercially viable?
Ivermectin isn't a money maker. It's a life saver. Vaccines and other new solutions are money makers and life savers (they hope)
I have no view on this drug. But this standard of evidence is useless.
Every substance-disease pair has positive testimony from doctors around the world. Ground tiger bones for cancer? Paprika for polio? Leeches for fever? tons of testimony. Totally worthless. What you need are quality studies.
If you watch it, I have a question for you.
Based on the info in the video, do you think Ivermectin has potential to treat covid? Yes or no?
https://youtu.be/4O7uy4tzI8A
Another question. Should videos like this be banned by YouTube?
This is an offshoot, but I wish this form of hyperbole would stop. “Crime against humanity” is a technical term. Watering it down to refer to everything one doesn’t like dilutes it. We have actual crimes against humanity that cannot find political ground, in part due to the term’s semantic satiation.
It’s not and there are.
It’s not part of a widespread or systematic policy directed against civilians by a political group of state. There were no associated crimes against peace or war crimes. Not a crime against humanity. If what you allege were happening, and were happening intentionally, it could be one among many crimes. But not this one.
Y'all are very opinionated on the 2nd or 3rd level information instead of the primary source.
Par for the course these days...
If you have a contrary read of the video, it would be better to share it rather than lamenting that the thousands reading this thread don't each spend time watching it in person.
The video itself appears (to me) to be between qualified people talking about medical information is a careful way like adults.
Maybe you should watch it? Just the first 15 mins?
I recommend people to watch it too.
Things are literally being proven true that were censored as "misinformation"(wrongthink) a month ago. Next up: election was actually a huge fraud.
And yes he is everything you are going to say he is but so is Rachel Maddow.
Supporting the establishment has its benefits as it always has for as long as humans have had socially stratified societies.
https://www.bitchute.com/video/qHjNQIynVb5O/
Whodathunkit?
You may hope we live in a happy world where everyone can evaluate information fairly and detect nonsense perfectly but I'm afraid we don't. Go and have a conversation with my aunt who thinks that the government (there's only one I guess) created Covid in order to kill all the old people and save money on state pensions. Guess where she learned that.
If it's more complicated then that, then you shouldn't be so confident you're the smart guy in the room.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/15291006124510...
I might have agreed with that a few years ago, but crank conspiracy theories have gotten mainstream traction like I have never seen previously.
"Prove" and "disprove" are never fully black and white. It isn't easy to disprove the theory that the Chinese engineered Covid (i.e SARS-CoV-2) and its spike protein RNA so they could insert arbitrary genetic code into non-Chinese people via the inevitable mRNA vaccine they knew would be created (which itself contains genetic code directly copied from the virus itself). Maybe they want to control our minds, or make us susceptible to some future engineered virus that will take out everyone on the planet that was vaccinated.
I can't disprove that. Maybe someone can.... but whoever they are, they will hardly be able to communicate this to average internet users and YouTube consumers being as it is extremely technical.
But I can make a rational, reasonable analysis of this, and conclude it is unlikely enough that getting a vaccine is a good idea.
And by the way, it's not a matter of determining that you are the "smart guy in the room," it's really more a matter of determining what is the general consensus of many smart people in the room. Obviously that is getting harder to do.
Have you never spoken to conspiracy theorists? Go and watch one of the Flat Earth documentaries. If Flat Earth is a crank conspiracy theory then it should be easy to disprove and the conspiracy would die out, right?
Youtube is a monopoly and needs to be regulated as such. The electric company can't cut off my power because I was using their electricity to discuss experimental medications, so why should Youtube be allowed to deny me access to the online public square for the same reason? If Youtube wants to be the thought police of their users, they need to first allow an alternative to survive.
And people say the US is the land of the "free." What a joke.
The notion that the state is is favorable to Youtube because it wants exert some kind of control over people is true; the nature of that control, however, is fundamentally oligarchical, rather than cultural or whatever is being implied here.
But you're making a very important hidden leap here: between people being allowed to have a channel on YouTube; and those channels being recommended by YouTube's algorithm.
Because it's the YouTube recommendation algorithm that determines whether you get an audience of millions. Without the algorithm, YouTube is just a video hosting platform with some not-very-good search-based discoverability, where you'd need to do your own off-platform SEO to get your videos seen.
Ignoring the discoverability you get through YouTube's algorithm, and assuming you only care about having a video at a URL you can link to from elsewhere, there's literally no benefit to using YouTube over one of those other video-hosts. They all give you a video at a URL.
In a world where YouTube was regulated as a utility, that would presumably involve the video-hosting infrastructure itself being content-neutral. But implicit to that would be a divorcing of the video-hosting component, from the discoverability component. YouTube the video host would be a utility, while YouTube the recommendation engine would be a separate company (not a utility), but only one of many able to run its own indexing and next-to-watch recommendations against the same store of content.
But again, that hidden leap. What's to say YouTube the recommendation engine, divorced from the video-hosting component, wouldn't still end up, through network effects, as the only site people care about? I would think it almost inevitable — especially starting from current conditions where everyone already knows about YouTube, and would still already know about YouTube (the index) after the split.
In such a world, the "public square" of video content — control over what video content most people happen to see by default — would still be controlled by the video-indexing company YouTube. Just like the "public square" of web content is controlled by the web-indexing company Google. Google never had to host the web, to end up with a degree of control over its public-visible curation.
In that world, does your demand for regulation still stand? If so, what does it mean? Would you demand the index itself to be regulated? Does that mean it would then be the government's job to define content moderation rules for YouTube's index? Would the government have to spend man-centuries or more on auditing for YouTube's approach to content moderation, to ensure they're following the rules as laid out? Or what?
1. the community
2. user friendly interface
3 faster video loads, better quality, smoother playback compared to competitors
Also your argument with electric company doesn't make sense, in this you could maybe compare it to an ISP, which I agree should be treated as an utility.
YouTube is just one of many services available. Your only argument about competitors is that not many creators are there, well, how do you think that will change? Are you expecting court to move some of YouTube users to Vimeo?
With around 75% market share. Yes, competitor Vimeo exists. Without the aid of the Internet, name a second alternative.
This doesn’t look like it’s a solid competitor to YouTube at all.
If we relabel YouTube as "short segment internet video entertainment" than we have things like Twitch, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat that all compete for our attention. I would even say that Netflix, Amazon Video, Apple TV+, Disney+, etc. all compete with YouTube. Of course, they are all unique, but that shouldn't be the bar of measuring "competition". When I used to run a university bar, I would say "we aren't competing with the other bars in town, we are competing with Netflix. How do we convince people to leave their rooms and walk across campus?"
That comment makes the issue sound a lot more slippery and ill-defined than it really is. If you're a small content creator, YouTube is your only option. It is actually quite simple; you don't have any plausible way to get people on your website, you won't get any views on Vimeo and you can't monetize it there, and Tiktok won't work unless you're running at most a few seconds. YouTube has a total sector monopoly on doing business with 3Blue1Brown.
Again, you mean “instantaneous access to millions of people who like to go to YouTube”. A website for $5/month opens you to more people than YouTube. If 3Blue1Brown has decided YouTube is best for them, then that’s great. But
> monopoly on “doing business with 3Blue1Brown.”
Sounds just as silly as Universal Pictures having a monopoly on movie series that involve bad acting and fast cars.
If it starts looking complicated, just take it back down to the specifics. If you are H3H3, you have no other options. You either do business with YouTube or do some other kind of business. That's the end of the story, and kind of weird, because there aren't any other absolute monopolies like that. For example, hosting a donate button is a practical alternative to Patreon.
The fact that YouTube is a many billion dollar business, and has no DIRECT competition should make it a target for anti-trust action.
Let’s take the argument away from food and move back to networks like YouTube. I’d argue that the best, most innovative thing YouTube accomplished is that they managed to solve a huge chicken or the egg problem. They managed to get enough of an audience to attract creators which has only attracted more of an audience.
How do we deal with companies like that in the context of speech? On one hand, they’re a private company and should have the right to exclude anyone they want for any reason. But what happens when they have so much attention that that exclusion deprives people of hearing right or wrong dissenting opinions?
I genuinely don’t know and my own opinion has swayed so much over the last few months that I’m either dumb or a hypocrite.
But I don't understand how large audience matters to anyone else than to the platform.
If you're just an user, there's nothing stopping you to use all of these services. In fact given the problem mentioned no one should stick to just one, because that leads to creating a monopoly.
If you're content creator, less of other creators means less competition, your videos are more likely to be featured etc.
If McDonald's mistreats you, and every other restaurant tastes like garbage to you: tough titty, but that doesn't provide grounds for the govt. to regulate McDonald's.
Which is irrelevant when discussing how we'd like to update the laws.
> Youtube is a monopoly and needs to be regulated as such.
I don't think this is the right argument against big tech in general. "They are more popular" when it comes to entertainment and when there are other ways to share content that people willingly refuse to use just doesn't demonstrate a clear abuse in my opinion.
The most convincing I have seen is when public officials are using them to communicate directly with their constituents (have you seen a government ad on BitChute, Parler, Minds or Gab?) and when they coordinate to ban competitors, collude directly with government officials (wink wink Fauci wink wink Zuckerberg) and when they suppress information and people that are not in line with the main institutional narratives.
And personally billionaires with a messianic complex just creeps me out.
Nah, Facebook just links you to like minded people. You have a problem facing the fact that it’s your grandpa who is a racist shit, that your brother is an incel, and that your sister thinks trans women shouldn’t be allowed to use women’s toilets. So you blame Facebook.
So you guys decide you want to blame Facebook and Twitter and YouTube. They’re “not doing enough”. Let them be and get your grandpa off them if you care so much.