Source: Guardians of Democracy
It’s certainly hard to get, isn’t it? In the context of our current crisis, perhaps the most outstanding example was President Trump’s carnival barker-like promotion of chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine as treatments for Covid-19[1]. From word that a study suggested it was effective, to White House sources suggesting Trump’s advisor Peter Navarro treated Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and Trump’s primary advisor with regards to the crisis, like an overly cautious nitwit that he was able to argue with on a level field, to the news that the medications were, in fact, dangerous when used improperly, and … not efficacious. It crossed the T on the message that getting trustable information from this Administration is a lost cause.
But a question little asked by the public is Where does bad information like Trump’s come from? Does it get pulled out of Trump’s ass by a troupe of men and women hired specifically for the task?
While that may seem quite likely, the answer is rather more mundane, and, unsurprisingly, related to that mixed blessing called the World Wide Web. The answer is the science pre-print servers. NewScientist (9 May 2020, paywall) has a useful description of them in the current context:
These are online repositories of preliminary findings that haven’t yet been independently reviewed. They were invented because of dissatisfaction with the conventional peer-review model, and to take advantage of new opportunities afforded by the internet.
For those somewhat-justified paranoiacs with an eye for ossified social structures, or power structures out to protect themselves, pre-print servers sound like a good thing, a way to get otherwise-suppressed information out where it can be evaluated. But I like this description of the actual results:
Preprint servers enable information to “flow directly from people who are making scientific claims to users who don’t have the savvy to evaluate those claims”, says Jonathan Kimmelman, a biomedical ethicist at McGill University in Canada.
And this is where the claims concerning chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine came from.
The much-touted antimalaria drug hydroxychloroquine is a good example of the system going badly wrong. A preprint about the drug’s efficacy against covid-19 in a small clinical trial appeared on 20 March (medRxiv, doi.org/dp7d). The trial was poorly conducted, says Alfred Kim at Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis, Missouri, who wrote a critique of it in the Annals of Internal Medicine (doi.org/ggq8b4). Among other issues, the trial had a sample size of just 20 people (see “How to sniff out the good science studies from the bad”).
A second preprint by different researchers detailing methodological flaws in the trial appeared three days later (Zenodo, doi.org/dtsn).
And if this is the study over which Fauci and Navarro argued, that argument shouldn’t have happened. Navarro should have seen the sample size and tossed the printout in the garbage can, and maybe assigned an intern to keep an eye on the medRxiv pre-print server for more studies on the two medicines. But whatever Navarro’s problem is, hubris or smarts, he didn’t.
Scientific studies are hard to do. To the layman – like me[2], but without the science groupie bug – it may seem like it should be commonsensical: give the sick people who have these symptoms a drug, if they get better, we win! More advanced thinkers will think about people who get better from strong immune systems and those who do not, and try to design the study accordingly. Even more advanced will consider nutrition. Even mooooore advanced: exercise. And, hey, what about prayer?
And then you start running into shit like the placebo and nocebo effects. If you’re thinking common-sense rules the day, read up on those known effects and try to repeat your statement. If you’re not laughing at yourself, you’re not paying attention. Scientific studies are hard. Gathering data, evaluating it, controlling for interfering factors, are the results significant, these are all hard, hard things to do. Let pride and self-confidence get in the way and they’re even harder.
Or, let’s take a different example against common-sense for you visual types. Bridges. Here’s a creek, let’s put together a couple two by fours, a sheet of plywood, maybe some rails for the unsteady, and we’re a success. Yes? How about that abyss over there? OK, a bit more complex, design-wise, right? Materials have strength limitations, so we add a few supports, maybe that new bridge near Stillwater, MN, is a good illustration. Still, the design is conceptually easy, all the hard stuff is managerial, yeah. Right?
The Tacoma Narrows Bridge. The fun begins at 1:20 or so.
Just a little wind and the laws of physics, which don’t care about common-sense, takes down a bridge. Whoda thunk? Not the common-sense yahoos who built this bridge.
Back to the President’s erstwhile favorite medicines. It turns out that Retraction Watch has been covering the issue of studies regarding Covid-19, most immediately those that have been retracted or have had concern expressed about them. and if you worry about the quality of information, you may want to bookmark that page for research purposes, although, of course, retractions can be slow, even untimely. Given how hard it is to do a good study, we can expect a lot of retractions, because, as NewScientist notes:
Since the pandemic began, thousands of studies related to it have been published. “The research community has mobilised in the face of the pandemic in an unprecedented way,” says John Inglis at academic publisher Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press in New York.
From a larger perspective, I have begun to see the incidents of the Administration pushing certain treatments as examples of magical thinking. This is a thought process which refuses to see critical objections and obstacles on its way to a preferred conclusion. It may employ uninvented or even impossible processes as a way to reach that conclusion, because, after all, That conclusion is needed for our greater purposes, and so it will be. Magical thinking is a process that should be abhorred by serious people.
Yesterday I wrote about how the United States may be coming to a fork in the road, a fork that we’ve been seeing for years, but haven’t really made a decision due to a lack of feedback concerning the results. The fork is implicit in the public controversies over whether anthropogenic climate change is happening, evolution, the Iraq War, vaccination … and pandemic preparations. I suggested that pity directed at the United States by other advanced nations, pity for our poor decisions since the fall of the Berlin Wall, may accomplish what all the enraged arguments have failed to do: pull us together, in the face of negative consequences, into concordance on the proper decisions regarding important public controversies.
In doing so, it will also begin marking positions which are evidence of people devoted to these damaging ideologies, theologies, and philosophies. I listed a few at the link, above, such as anti-vaxxers, and now I’d like to add magical thinking to the list. I realize this may offend a wide range of people, both in the business and religious fields, but magical thinking has led to so many poor outcomes that it really needs to be recognized as an intellectual fault signaling untrustworthy outcomes.
And tarred and feathered as such. You provide the rail.
1 President Trump’s ruminations on somehow ingesting ultraviolet light and injecting various disinfectants, such as bleach, on the other hand, I would classify as the meat and potatoes of bizarre side shows. Your mileage may vary.
2 I hold a Bachelor of Computer Science Degree the University of Minnesota – Twin Cities. One might consider computer science to be just barely within the domain of science, as it hardly ever indulges in studies of natural phenomena; more rigorous thinkers might suggest that computer scientists, without additional training, are crippled mathematicians. In case you are wondering, mathematicians are not necessarily scientists. They are something else entirely, and don’t ask me what. On second thought, mathematicians are hardy specialists in a field of logic dedicated to a logical system corresponding to fundamental reality. And, no, I’m not getting into the argument of whether mathematics is a subfield of logic, or vice versa. It seems clear to me that the proper position is the former, but I’m just a rank amateur who runs his fingers a lot.
