I'd like to hear from critics of Bret that have actually watched his content, in particular the episode with Dr. Pierre Kory. Do you support YouTube's decision? What about YouTube taking down Dr. Kory's Senate testimony?
One person claiming that a drug has effectiveness based on their anecdotal experience just isn't the standard for medical evidence. If any of these people really wanted to change medical practice, they are aware of the actual standard and know what kind of studies, rigor and peer-review is necessary. Taking to youtube and twitter to claim it's a conspiracy but making no effort to actually do the work to prove your hypothesis, brings into question their motives: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlatan
Did you watch the episode with Dr. Kory and, if so, what are your objections on what was being said?
Note that as far as I can tell and remember, YouTube policy at that time was that content not in line with health authorities was not allowed, but since then Ivermectin was explicitly added (I might be wrong, that's just what I remember when I looked it up).
As I already stated, Bret and Heather both have PhD's in biology and the episode in question with Dr. Kory also featured Dr. Malone the inventor of mRNA vaccine technology. You are misrepresenting the content.
> You obviously haven't watched the episode nor are you familiar...
If you are going to be rude to someone like that, you should provide your own evidence. Provide us links to specific points in the talk that you feel makes this episode substantial. Or show some manners.
How was I rude? The assertion, "One person claiming that a drug has effectiveness based on their anecdotal experience" is absolutely false and not at all representative of their channel content. I think the burden of proof lies on the one making the false assertion. Also my comment was also after this topic was flagged and taken down. I find that extremely rude and intellectually dishonest.
> I think the burden of proof lies on the one making the false assertion.
In an open democratic society everyone is responsible for surfacing the truth as they see it. Then we all decide indepedently what is a true or false assertion based off the evidence given.
Your job here is much easier: cite anything. Their job is much harder: they have to make an assertion about the entire episode. You should try to provide something substantial. Instead, you've come off as a bully & rude, dismissed the reply out of hand & done nothing to say why. You refuse to be helpful because you've asserted that you're right & they're wrong and that's all there is to it. It should be easy for you to make a real claim, beyond 'you're wrong'.
There is seemingly a lot of evidence for Ivermectin. I agree with you that people making a claim should provide evidence for it - but people asking for evidence shouldn't just assume there is none. It's like if I said I don't trust the vaccines because I don't trust one guy's anecdote about using the vaccines and not getting sick. That's not what vaccine-advocates are basing their argument on.
Those are nicely displayed, but it's not clear to me that they meet the standard of evidence required. Many others have looked at these studies and come to more ambiguous conclusions:
"My current opinion is pretty much exactly that of the WHO guidance: I do not think that the current evidence is strong enough to say that ivermectin is a useful therapy for coronavirus patients. I know that there are quite a few studies out there in the literature, but they suffer from various combinations of small sample size, poor trial design, not enough data reported, and (in many cases) inconclusive statistics."
"The Kory et al. preprint ignores the basics – there are no criteria for inclusion, studies have different mixes of treatment and control and different standards for describing treatments compared with ivermectin and mixes of treatments including ivermectin. These factors alone make the value of their meta-analysis doubtful. However, their evidence base
is my major concern as it has been widely reported on social media without the wider (and more technical) context of how meta-analysis ought to be performed"
A random blog just isn't the standard for medical evidence. Aren't you aware of the actual standard and know what kind of studies, rigor and peer-review is necessary? You need multiple peer-reviewed randomized control trials, at least 30.
Let's put it this way - more people on this site know who Derek Lowe is (and respect his opinions) than every person combined that was involved in those 31 studies.
NOT HAPPY WITH YOUTUBE SPLITTING UP SOCIETY: I'm not happy that YouTube (having a strong network-effect monopoly on online video content) has decided to close the Overton window so much. People interested in the information will get it elsewhere. These kinds of policies have caused people who follow edgy content to find that content elsewhere, and those "elsewheres" can be very nasty and radicalizing places (such as BitChute). I wish YouTube kept people from getting radicalized, but they seem to push people away and into those radical corners...
SCIENTISTS ARE NOT BEST ADJUDICATORS, BETTER HYPOTHESIZERS: Bret and Heather are scientists and as such are not necessarily of the best mental positioning to adjudicate facts. How so? Scientists should form hypotheses and argue for them. Scientists must as a group take on and argue for multiple hypotheses, vigorously. The data will decide who wins. It is quite appropriate that Bret and Heather have taken up hypotheses in regards to Ivermectin and in regard to possible damage from the vaccines. That doesn't make these views "the final word" or even "stated as factual". I think Bret and Heather would agree and I think they try to make clear that their opinions are hypotheses.
As an example, Bret had a guest on who argued that the number of deaths associated with vaccinations was off the charts. Bret didn't agree but didn't counter-argue. The information was highly misleading. Last episode (on Odysee) they brought up a paper studying Israel where via vaccinations for every 3 people saved, 2 are lost. They weren't at all critical of the author's credentials, nor did they even seem to have read the paper yet, which was quite flawed. Mallen Baker's latest video goes into that a little bit. Mallen Baker is IMHO a very good adjudicator of facts.
I have a lot of respect for Bret and Heather and I think what they are doing is important. But it is also easy to be confused by them and to "follow" their beliefs as if they were clearly correct, when they are actually quite speculative beliefs.
All that being said, everyone communicates on social media now and scientists need to communicate just like the rest of us. If YouTube doesn't want to be the conduit for open communications, some other platform will be.
Like it or not, COVID is a politically charged topic (in the US). One side of the political spectrum vehemently opposed mask mandates, while the other said we should wear them. If the two major political parties can’t agree on something, it’s a political topic.
It’s sad that as millions of people were dying, the two parties couldn’t agree on the simplest of things, but it is what it is.
That is why it is better to access sites like HN through the RSS feed [1] and ignore the front page. The feed shows which articles are posted in order of appearance, without manipulation. It also enables you to choose which articles to read without being influenced by the placement on the front page or the number of upvotes it got.
It would seem that the creators actually relish this because it's a great attention grabbing tactic. It's the same thing as click bait headlines "one weird trick"... trying to goad the platforms into enforcing their policy so that you can jump up and down about how you're being "censored"... A certain kind of audience, prone to conspiratorial myth, will flock to these creators and the "controversy" like moths to the flame. https://twitter.com/NovelSci/status/1404819889454342159
The channel was half their income, and there's no reason to doubt their sincerity. Maybe the end result is what you say, but your comment was about their intentions.
Once again YT caves into the mob and cancel culture which has targeted an innocent victim.
If you read into the story of Bret Weinstein and evergreen state college you'll see that Bret is actually the target of racism, not the other way around.
I have watched Bret's content on YT and his content is always high quality and very well researched. He keeps an open mind to topics and thoroughly researches stuff before dismissing it.
This should not be flagged. Bret and Heather both have PhD's in biology and the episode in question with Dr. Kory also featured Dr. Malone the inventor of mRNA vaccine technology. This is science not politics.
Scientific conversation happens between people who are actually practicing in the field. Scientists on social media are just engaged in promotion.
When Neil Degrasse Tyson talks on YT, I consider that a combination of promotion and pedagogy. But that's not science. He's not engaging in scientific conversation with fellow colleagues. This is not an indictment on Dr. Tyson's expertise, but it is a criticism on confusing scientific discourse with mass media promotion.
Another difference I'd draw between any other scientific field is that astrophysics is largely orthogonal to matters of public health or finance. Likewise, a math crank is much less likely to cause damage than a doctor promoting a drug, or a finance expert promoting an investment.
Health and finance are very special fields, and they deserve to be treated so in the arena of mass media promotions.
This statement, "You shouldn't have the right to decide for me where science happens," is anti-scientific. I'm reminded of Carl Sagan's description in _The Demon-Haunted World_ of people who make profoundly unscientific statements using the words of science, because they want the authority and respect accorded those words, not realizing that the authority and respect comes from the methods of science, not just the words.
You don't "decide" "where" science happens. It's not a question of rights. It demonstrably does not happen at your will or on the basis of your decision. It happens the way science happens, because that's what science is.
A scientist eating a sandwich is not doing science. A scientist talking on YouTube is not doing science. A scientist doing science is doing science. That's not my decision, it's the definition of science.
Using the words "hypotheses" or "scientific discussion" doesn't make those things hypotheses or scientific discussion. The first takes place within the parameters of experimentation, and the latter in papers and journals.
Again, this is not a decision I've made, but the actual definition of the things. I can't call a lollipop a frog and then get mad when it doesn't jump, or someone licks it. It is what it is.
>Using the words "hypotheses" or "scientific discussion" doesn't make those things hypotheses or scientific discussion. The first takes place within the parameters of experimentation, and the latter in papers and journals.
As a scientist, I can definitively say this is false. Both these things happen over beers quite frequently.
To further
If science only happened in labs and journals, how did we ever get to the point where those things existed?
I mean, we're talking about medicine and vaccines, right? As a scientist, what kind of medicine are we talking about here? And what kind of vaccine research are we talking about here?
Is it not obvious that some kinds of scientific and medical practice must always be severely gated in all modern societies because of its extreme and intimate relationship to public health and trust? And when we're talking about medicine or vaccines, we are talking about human research subjects. What would amateur empiricism in medicine and vaccination even mean here?
When you talk about the foundations of early medical science, you're not referring to Gray's Anatomy dig-up-the-bodies-in-the-graveyard style of original human research, right? You surely don't have a modern vision of amateur medical research with human subjects, right? In the historical context that stuff is breathtaking and pioneering. In the modern context that would be breathtaking for another reason.
A hypotheses formed over beers but never tested outside the bar is like most other beer-centered conversation: of limited value.
Science communication, similarly, can start anywhere, but what you're describing has a very tenuous relationship with people talking on YouTube.
I'm all for people doing science having as much flexibility as they want, up to the point where what they're doing is no longer science. People forming ex post facto hypotheses based on carefully-chosen data, or bypassing any peer-review in favor of YouTube communication, that should raise serious alarms bells for anyone in the sciences.
Since we're talking about vaccines and medicine, what kind of science and what kind of scientists are we talking about here? What would amateur medical empiricism with human subjects look like? Every society has scientists and doctors, and every society must decide how to establish harmony with their professional medical groups.
Of course not! I would hope every student practices science as part of a general childhood education.
But when it comes to potentially life-saving medicines or therapies, the standard should be a bit more rigorous than sixth-grade classroom experiments.
> Scientific conversation happens between people who are actually practicing in the field. Scientists on social media are just engaged in promotion.
Science is a process that begins with discovery, and even people who do not actively “practice” science, never mind hold degrees, are involved with the “recon” work to encounter things worth studying.
I heard his name over the Evergreen thing but forgot it.
I listened to the episode "Doing science in an emergency" [0]. It's terrible. Lots of circular logic and self congratulation. It reminded me of reddit's "IAmVerySmart" sub.
I don't think anyone should be banned (he hasn't been), but this isn't a hill for anyone to die on. He seems to have fallen into a weird rabbit-hole where he fails to admit any possibility of error on his own part.
Ivermectin does seem to be a very poor candidate as a treatment for C19 [1]. People have been made very sick ODing on it. So maybe stop pushing it?
I downvoted you because it seems like your comment is largely composed of empty insults ("it's terrible", "reminded me of reddit's 'IAmVerySmart' sub", "weird rabbit-hole"). You don't give any examples for the specific criticism you make (circular logic). You say he fails to admit any possibility of error whereas I know that he readily admits the possibility of error.
There are also a few cases where your comment is misleading. You write that he isn't being banned, neglecting that his videos are being removed, his channel getting strikes, and his channel getting demonetized. YouTube is clearly censoring and suppressing his content and he is clearly on track to get banned. You say that some people have been made very sick ODing on Ivermectin, which is true, but only when they take massive amounts and is also true of the vast majority of drugs. Taking massive overdoses of anything is ill-advised. You write, again without explaining, that Ivermectin is a "very poor candidate as a treatment" - which is an odd claim to make given that Ivermectin is cheap, safe, and has at least some experimental data suggesting it may have uses. And, also, Ivermectin is being used in Latin America and India as a treatment currently. To sum that up as "a very poor candidate" strikes me as disingenuous.
Hope this help clarifies why at least one person is downvoting you.
The idea is to take Ivermectin as a prophylactic. Weinstein is not suggesting taking a massive overdose of Ivermectin. He makes this clarification repeatedly.
This is exactly the subject under discussion. I don't think it's anywhere near as clear as you make it out to be. There is insufficient evidence at this point to say definitively how useful Ivermectin is or isn't.
Isn't this exactly the point? There are millions of substances that haven't been disproven to work in some niche way against some disease. No one should recommend them or claim there is a conspiracy against them when they recommend them and get laughed at, demonitised etc.
Maybe low dose cyanide is the cure, but I won't recommend it till there IS evidence.
Ivermectin is not simply one of an innumerable number of things without evidence of efficacy against covid. There is evidence, including a number of published studies which have already been linked in this thread. The evidence is disputed in that some studies find smaller or no beneficial effects - but it is not correct to say that the use of Ivermectin is without supporting evidence.
Describing the function of Ivermectin as a prophylactic as working in some "niche way" is also incorrect. A prophylactic is the opposite of a niche - it would be broadly useful to pretty much everyone. Describing Ivermectin in this way continues a pattern in your comments of being misleading and unfair towards the claims which you are discussing.
This unfair pattern is continued when you suggest the use of Ivermectin is being "laughed at". Some researchers don't think Ivermectin is promising, but nobody who is actually reading the research thinks the claims are laughable. As I mentioned before, throughout large parts of the world Ivermectin is in use and there are a number of scholarly articles supporting its use.
Thanks for replying. I don't think we'll "agree" but I appreciate being heard out at least.
The most glaring example of his circular logic starts around 29min mark in the podcast I linked to (#83). He is discussing lab leak hypothesis and the logic is this:
* if we assume there was a lab leak, then that's good news: the means novel viruses in nature are much rarer than expected.
* based on that we should stop gain of function research because natural gain of function is much rarer than lab leaks from man made gain of function research
* since we now agree lab leaks are much more likely than natural novel viruses, it makes no sense to believe covid 19 was anything other than a lab leak.
He jumps from "IF it was a lab leak" to "the rot in our science society is so bad" in 1 sentence. His wife takes over and repeats the assumption that all science is totally corrupt (where did that come from?) and that we should believe its a lab leak because then we can just close all the labs and never have another zoonotic virus. Wtf, where did that come from?
See the problem?
I felt sorry for him over the Evergreen stuff. He was right to object. I don't think anyone should be banned from YouTube short of calls for violence (or CP). I also think YT have a terrible approach to the censorship they do (it's arbitrary, it's often wrong, it's unappealable etc).
Im just saying this isn't a hill worth dying on. He is not making much sense as far as I can see.
First, and most importantly, it seems that sometime over the past decade we transitioned from the belief that free and open discussion is more important than winning the argument. We now appear to rely on an entirely unnuanced framing where all discussions have maximum certainty, all harms are equal, and therefore silencing disagreement is always a valid and righteous (and even preferred) tactic.
Second, I listened to the first 10 minutes past the recommended point in the podcast, and heard the first two points made, but not the circular logic of the third point. It’s possible that occurs later, and I just haven’t listened far enough. As they have moved on to the “rot” portion, it seems that I should’ve heard the third point, but perhaps I’m just interpreting what they say more literally.
We can apparently agree that he should not be banned from YouTube. I personally am not very interested in Ivermectin or Brett Weinstein. I am most interested in reasonable views being suppressed by big tech companies who think they know best. I believe that is deeply pernicious, will continue to get worse, and given the extent to which these companies are entrenched in our lives - will be increasingly difficult to remove.
Maybe Ivermectin is useful, maybe not. We should be allowed to discuss the evidence without Google silencing us. That is the issue I'm most concerned with.
My focus on Weinstein and the supporting evidence for Ivermectin is to argue that these are not mad delusions getting censored. It's not a person selling snake oil. I wouldn't care if definite scams were suppressed. I think Weinstein is using real evidence and making a good faith argument and that kind of thing shouldn't be censored.
I don't understand what you mean by "this isn't a hill worth dying on". I'm not proposing that anyone kill themselves over this. There is no dying involved. I do think it is a bad practice on Google's part which is worth complaining about. I also think people should explore alternatives - I have been impressed by https://odysee.com/ for example. I also think it is important to acknowledge Google is suppressing free speech in a meaningful way. Censoring covid discussion is one example, Google's suppression of the Uyghur genocide is another.
There are certain topics which Youtube will not allow, they have various soft means of enforcing boundaries around those edges. One of those topics is analysis and discussion of Covid 19. They (Bret and Heather) have been very careful to stay within the stated rules, yet this still happened.
At some point, enough of us viewers will decide that it is worth overcoming the network effects, and get used to some new platforms for content sharing.
There are plenty of things you won't see anymore on YouTube. A year or two ago, videos focused on guns were removed. Even machine shop channels talking about the machining of parts had those videos removed.
Our ability to discuss things like adults is under threat.
> Our ability to discuss things like adults is under threat.
Our ability to discuss things like adults has been under threat for a shockingly long while now, and only been getting worse. This is partly due to such a large portion of society being unable to discuss things like adults without lapsing into political "Us vs Them"-ism nearly instantly.
On a related note; Why exactly is it that such a large portion of the discussion here tends toward actual adult conversation? Is it purely because of the specific type of crowd this platform attracts? Is there any lesson that could be learned by the larger platforms from this to improve their services in this regard?
>Why exactly is it that such a large portion of the discussion here tends toward actual adult conversation?
I attribute it to a few things that work in synergy
1. The voting model, and structure of the site work well for the crowd that gathers here. Keeping spam away is automated enough to keep the signal to noise high.
2. Dang keeps us from doing stupid things consistently enough that we collectively have learned good manners.
3. We've all seen how quickly things can get swamped, to make us really appreciative of what we've got here, and more careful about doing stupid things.
4. Upvoting, etc. are paced such that you don't get access to a bit of power until you understand it. It's subtle enough but very effective.
5. The management is not driven to push "engagement" or "stickiness" by the need to sell advertising.
If you took the codebase and started again, I'm not sure it would work more than 5% of the time.
Weinstein went (or revealed himself to be) pretty much crazy around the time Trump lost the elections. I'm having really hard time believing now that he's being "censored" because he's "talking about science". There are better reasons.
I guess I should be glad that Internet censorship went from “it will only be flat earth and Holocaust denial” to Hays Code so fast (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_Picture_Production_Code) that the problematic nature of this is impossible to deny.
There are a few folks with some pedigree desperate for attention on Social media. They refer obliquely without evidence to plausible methods or peddle 'click-bait' thoughts. Mr.Bret Weinstein and his brother Mr.Eric Weinstein, appear to belong to this category - they kind of support each other well. Mr.Eric Weinstein for example, dangles a few incomplete physics theories without any formal proof. This is in sharp contrast to true legends like Mr.Grigori Perelman who posted a complete proof of the Poincare conjecture on Arxiv and turned down the Fields Medel.
I don't understand why businesses insist on betraying the very values they were built on in the first place. YouTube has always been about helping people feel heard and giving them a voice through their platform. Decisions like this one simply prove that in a few years they'll likely be defined as a publisher and not a platform.
81 comments
[ 20.2 ms ] story [ 917 ms ] threadNote that as far as I can tell and remember, YouTube policy at that time was that content not in line with health authorities was not allowed, but since then Ivermectin was explicitly added (I might be wrong, that's just what I remember when I looked it up).
If you are going to be rude to someone like that, you should provide your own evidence. Provide us links to specific points in the talk that you feel makes this episode substantial. Or show some manners.
In an open democratic society everyone is responsible for surfacing the truth as they see it. Then we all decide indepedently what is a true or false assertion based off the evidence given.
Your job here is much easier: cite anything. Their job is much harder: they have to make an assertion about the entire episode. You should try to provide something substantial. Instead, you've come off as a bully & rude, dismissed the reply out of hand & done nothing to say why. You refuse to be helpful because you've asserted that you're right & they're wrong and that's all there is to it. It should be easy for you to make a real claim, beyond 'you're wrong'.
https://covid19criticalcare.com/ivermectin-in-covid-19/
How about 31 randomized control trials?
https://c19ivermectin.com/
A nice meta analysis page:
https://ivmmeta.com/
Ivermectin is not the only substance studied:
https://c19early.com/
"My current opinion is pretty much exactly that of the WHO guidance: I do not think that the current evidence is strong enough to say that ivermectin is a useful therapy for coronavirus patients. I know that there are quite a few studies out there in the literature, but they suffer from various combinations of small sample size, poor trial design, not enough data reported, and (in many cases) inconclusive statistics."
https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2021/06/07/iv...
"The Kory et al. preprint ignores the basics – there are no criteria for inclusion, studies have different mixes of treatment and control and different standards for describing treatments compared with ivermectin and mixes of treatments including ivermectin. These factors alone make the value of their meta-analysis doubtful. However, their evidence base is my major concern as it has been widely reported on social media without the wider (and more technical) context of how meta-analysis ought to be performed"
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Philip-Machanick/public...
Let's put it this way - more people on this site know who Derek Lowe is (and respect his opinions) than every person combined that was involved in those 31 studies.
SCIENTISTS ARE NOT BEST ADJUDICATORS, BETTER HYPOTHESIZERS: Bret and Heather are scientists and as such are not necessarily of the best mental positioning to adjudicate facts. How so? Scientists should form hypotheses and argue for them. Scientists must as a group take on and argue for multiple hypotheses, vigorously. The data will decide who wins. It is quite appropriate that Bret and Heather have taken up hypotheses in regards to Ivermectin and in regard to possible damage from the vaccines. That doesn't make these views "the final word" or even "stated as factual". I think Bret and Heather would agree and I think they try to make clear that their opinions are hypotheses.
As an example, Bret had a guest on who argued that the number of deaths associated with vaccinations was off the charts. Bret didn't agree but didn't counter-argue. The information was highly misleading. Last episode (on Odysee) they brought up a paper studying Israel where via vaccinations for every 3 people saved, 2 are lost. They weren't at all critical of the author's credentials, nor did they even seem to have read the paper yet, which was quite flawed. Mallen Baker's latest video goes into that a little bit. Mallen Baker is IMHO a very good adjudicator of facts.
I have a lot of respect for Bret and Heather and I think what they are doing is important. But it is also easy to be confused by them and to "follow" their beliefs as if they were clearly correct, when they are actually quite speculative beliefs.
All that being said, everyone communicates on social media now and scientists need to communicate just like the rest of us. If YouTube doesn't want to be the conduit for open communications, some other platform will be.
It’s sad that as millions of people were dying, the two parties couldn’t agree on the simplest of things, but it is what it is.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/rss
If you read into the story of Bret Weinstein and evergreen state college you'll see that Bret is actually the target of racism, not the other way around.
I have watched Bret's content on YT and his content is always high quality and very well researched. He keeps an open mind to topics and thoroughly researches stuff before dismissing it.
Once again YT is in the wrong here.
When Neil Degrasse Tyson talks on YT, I consider that a combination of promotion and pedagogy. But that's not science. He's not engaging in scientific conversation with fellow colleagues. This is not an indictment on Dr. Tyson's expertise, but it is a criticism on confusing scientific discourse with mass media promotion.
Another difference I'd draw between any other scientific field is that astrophysics is largely orthogonal to matters of public health or finance. Likewise, a math crank is much less likely to cause damage than a doctor promoting a drug, or a finance expert promoting an investment.
Health and finance are very special fields, and they deserve to be treated so in the arena of mass media promotions.
You don't "decide" "where" science happens. It's not a question of rights. It demonstrably does not happen at your will or on the basis of your decision. It happens the way science happens, because that's what science is.
A scientist eating a sandwich is not doing science. A scientist talking on YouTube is not doing science. A scientist doing science is doing science. That's not my decision, it's the definition of science.
Again, this is not a decision I've made, but the actual definition of the things. I can't call a lollipop a frog and then get mad when it doesn't jump, or someone licks it. It is what it is.
As a scientist, I can definitively say this is false. Both these things happen over beers quite frequently.
To further
If science only happened in labs and journals, how did we ever get to the point where those things existed?
Edit: to pre-empt the likely rebuttal
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Research_Conferences
Is it not obvious that some kinds of scientific and medical practice must always be severely gated in all modern societies because of its extreme and intimate relationship to public health and trust? And when we're talking about medicine or vaccines, we are talking about human research subjects. What would amateur empiricism in medicine and vaccination even mean here?
When you talk about the foundations of early medical science, you're not referring to Gray's Anatomy dig-up-the-bodies-in-the-graveyard style of original human research, right? You surely don't have a modern vision of amateur medical research with human subjects, right? In the historical context that stuff is breathtaking and pioneering. In the modern context that would be breathtaking for another reason.
Science communication, similarly, can start anywhere, but what you're describing has a very tenuous relationship with people talking on YouTube.
I'm all for people doing science having as much flexibility as they want, up to the point where what they're doing is no longer science. People forming ex post facto hypotheses based on carefully-chosen data, or bypassing any peer-review in favor of YouTube communication, that should raise serious alarms bells for anyone in the sciences.
But when it comes to potentially life-saving medicines or therapies, the standard should be a bit more rigorous than sixth-grade classroom experiments.
I mean, okay.
Science is a process that begins with discovery, and even people who do not actively “practice” science, never mind hold degrees, are involved with the “recon” work to encounter things worth studying.
Science is not a priesthood.
I listened to the episode "Doing science in an emergency" [0]. It's terrible. Lots of circular logic and self congratulation. It reminded me of reddit's "IAmVerySmart" sub.
I don't think anyone should be banned (he hasn't been), but this isn't a hill for anyone to die on. He seems to have fallen into a weird rabbit-hole where he fails to admit any possibility of error on his own part.
Ivermectin does seem to be a very poor candidate as a treatment for C19 [1]. People have been made very sick ODing on it. So maybe stop pushing it?
[0] https://podyssey.fm/podcast/itunes1471581521-Bret-Weinstein-...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_drug_repurposing_rese...
Edit: the irony of being down voted by his supporters without anyone engaging is not lost on me.
There are also a few cases where your comment is misleading. You write that he isn't being banned, neglecting that his videos are being removed, his channel getting strikes, and his channel getting demonetized. YouTube is clearly censoring and suppressing his content and he is clearly on track to get banned. You say that some people have been made very sick ODing on Ivermectin, which is true, but only when they take massive amounts and is also true of the vast majority of drugs. Taking massive overdoses of anything is ill-advised. You write, again without explaining, that Ivermectin is a "very poor candidate as a treatment" - which is an odd claim to make given that Ivermectin is cheap, safe, and has at least some experimental data suggesting it may have uses. And, also, Ivermectin is being used in Latin America and India as a treatment currently. To sum that up as "a very poor candidate" strikes me as disingenuous.
Hope this help clarifies why at least one person is downvoting you.
They linked to the Wikipedia page. Which appears to say that the effect found "in vitro" is unobtainable unless you take a massive OD.
Useful drugs have an OD amount that is greater than the effective dose.
https://xkcd.com/1217/
Supposedly larger scale tests are being done, so we'll see.
It's overdose or nothing.
Maybe low dose cyanide is the cure, but I won't recommend it till there IS evidence.
Is that just random, or are you specifically alluding to laetrile?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amygdalin
Describing the function of Ivermectin as a prophylactic as working in some "niche way" is also incorrect. A prophylactic is the opposite of a niche - it would be broadly useful to pretty much everyone. Describing Ivermectin in this way continues a pattern in your comments of being misleading and unfair towards the claims which you are discussing.
This unfair pattern is continued when you suggest the use of Ivermectin is being "laughed at". Some researchers don't think Ivermectin is promising, but nobody who is actually reading the research thinks the claims are laughable. As I mentioned before, throughout large parts of the world Ivermectin is in use and there are a number of scholarly articles supporting its use.
The most glaring example of his circular logic starts around 29min mark in the podcast I linked to (#83). He is discussing lab leak hypothesis and the logic is this:
* if we assume there was a lab leak, then that's good news: the means novel viruses in nature are much rarer than expected.
* based on that we should stop gain of function research because natural gain of function is much rarer than lab leaks from man made gain of function research
* since we now agree lab leaks are much more likely than natural novel viruses, it makes no sense to believe covid 19 was anything other than a lab leak.
He jumps from "IF it was a lab leak" to "the rot in our science society is so bad" in 1 sentence. His wife takes over and repeats the assumption that all science is totally corrupt (where did that come from?) and that we should believe its a lab leak because then we can just close all the labs and never have another zoonotic virus. Wtf, where did that come from?
See the problem?
I felt sorry for him over the Evergreen stuff. He was right to object. I don't think anyone should be banned from YouTube short of calls for violence (or CP). I also think YT have a terrible approach to the censorship they do (it's arbitrary, it's often wrong, it's unappealable etc).
Im just saying this isn't a hill worth dying on. He is not making much sense as far as I can see.
Fyi, I also replied on the other thread.
First, and most importantly, it seems that sometime over the past decade we transitioned from the belief that free and open discussion is more important than winning the argument. We now appear to rely on an entirely unnuanced framing where all discussions have maximum certainty, all harms are equal, and therefore silencing disagreement is always a valid and righteous (and even preferred) tactic.
Second, I listened to the first 10 minutes past the recommended point in the podcast, and heard the first two points made, but not the circular logic of the third point. It’s possible that occurs later, and I just haven’t listened far enough. As they have moved on to the “rot” portion, it seems that I should’ve heard the third point, but perhaps I’m just interpreting what they say more literally.
Maybe Ivermectin is useful, maybe not. We should be allowed to discuss the evidence without Google silencing us. That is the issue I'm most concerned with.
My focus on Weinstein and the supporting evidence for Ivermectin is to argue that these are not mad delusions getting censored. It's not a person selling snake oil. I wouldn't care if definite scams were suppressed. I think Weinstein is using real evidence and making a good faith argument and that kind of thing shouldn't be censored.
I don't understand what you mean by "this isn't a hill worth dying on". I'm not proposing that anyone kill themselves over this. There is no dying involved. I do think it is a bad practice on Google's part which is worth complaining about. I also think people should explore alternatives - I have been impressed by https://odysee.com/ for example. I also think it is important to acknowledge Google is suppressing free speech in a meaningful way. Censoring covid discussion is one example, Google's suppression of the Uyghur genocide is another.
At some point, enough of us viewers will decide that it is worth overcoming the network effects, and get used to some new platforms for content sharing.
There are plenty of things you won't see anymore on YouTube. A year or two ago, videos focused on guns were removed. Even machine shop channels talking about the machining of parts had those videos removed.
Our ability to discuss things like adults is under threat.
Our ability to discuss things like adults has been under threat for a shockingly long while now, and only been getting worse. This is partly due to such a large portion of society being unable to discuss things like adults without lapsing into political "Us vs Them"-ism nearly instantly.
On a related note; Why exactly is it that such a large portion of the discussion here tends toward actual adult conversation? Is it purely because of the specific type of crowd this platform attracts? Is there any lesson that could be learned by the larger platforms from this to improve their services in this regard?
I attribute it to a few things that work in synergy
1. The voting model, and structure of the site work well for the crowd that gathers here. Keeping spam away is automated enough to keep the signal to noise high.
2. Dang keeps us from doing stupid things consistently enough that we collectively have learned good manners.
3. We've all seen how quickly things can get swamped, to make us really appreciative of what we've got here, and more careful about doing stupid things.
4. Upvoting, etc. are paced such that you don't get access to a bit of power until you understand it. It's subtle enough but very effective.
5. The management is not driven to push "engagement" or "stickiness" by the need to sell advertising.
If you took the codebase and started again, I'm not sure it would work more than 5% of the time.