When it comes to evaluating COVID treatments, MDs are only human:
[...] We'd like to think people like doctors would carefully evaluate evidence before making treatment decisions, yet a correlation between voting patterns and ivermectin prescriptions suggests that they don't.
Of course, a correlation at that sort of population level leaves a lot of unanswered questions about what's going on. A study this week tries to fill in some of those blanks by performing controlled experiments with a set of MDs. The work clearly shows how ideology clouds professional judgments even when it comes to reading the results of a scientific study.
The work primarily focuses on a panel of about 600 critical care physicians—the people who are most likely to be the first source of treatment for those who develop severe COVID-19. It also involved a panel of 900 people who aren't involved in medicine to provide a comparison population. While some initial surveys were done earlier, most of the data comes from the spring of 2022, long after COVID-19 vaccines had established their effectiveness in limiting severe symptoms of the disease. By then, a couple of widely hyped "cures"—hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin—had been definitively ruled out as therapeutic.
All the participants were asked to self-rate on a seven-point scale, from very liberal to very conservative. For most studies, the answers from the liberal and conservative participants were evaluated in terms of how greatly they differed from those of the moderate participants.
When asked about the effectiveness of treatments, the non-MDs showed exactly the sort of behavior you'd expect from politically polarized subjects. Liberal participants were more likely than moderates to say vaccines worked and less likely to ascribe effectiveness to ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine. Conservatives showed the converse behavior, being enthusiastic about ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine and less likely to think vaccines worked. If you plot these results across a liberal-to-conservative axis, the result is a nearly straight line with a slope that represents the liberal-conservative difference of opinion.
For physicians, things were considerably different. Here, the lines were largely straight and flat from very liberal to moderates, indicating that these physicians all had similar opinions on the value of these three medicines. But then the graph changed moving from moderates to the conservative end of the spectrum. This indicates that, among experts, the political polarization is one-sided. In other words, the opinions of liberal MDs look like those of moderate MDs, while the opinions of conservative MDs are difficult to distinguish from those of non-experts.
(Score: 2) by pdfernhout on Monday February 13, @02:49PM (2 children)
https://www.forbes.com/sites/gregsatell/2014/02/19/why-experts-always-seem-to-get-it-wrong/ [forbes.com]
"One of the things that makes experts so convincing is that they exude confidence. They can talk calmly and knowledgeably about a subject, make reference to relevant facts and build a compelling logic for their case. A good expert is always impressive, but still usually wrong. In fact, in 20 year study of political experts, Philip Tetlock found that that their predictions were no better than flipping a coin. Further, he found that pundits who specialized in a particular field tended to perform worse than those whose knowledge was more general. In the contest between the hedgehog and the fox, the fox nearly always wins. This is so counterintuitive that it hardly seems possible, but it’s true. The reason lies in the confidence of the predictions. Specialists, with their deep knowledge of a particular subject, tend to not to incorporate information outside their domain, which makes for a cleaner, more definitive story line. Foxes, with their broad-based knowledge are less sure of themselves. They also tend to be right more often. Confusion, more often than not, trumps certainty."
The biggest challenge of the 21st century: the irony of technologies of abundance used by scarcity-minded people.
(Score: 5, Touché) by dg on Monday February 13, @02:58PM (1 child)
(Score: 5, Insightful) by DeathMonkey on Monday February 13, @04:43PM
Haha, yeah, and also seems to believe that "political pundits" independently research each topic in order to make predictions instead of already knowing what team they play for and working backwards to make an argument for why theirs' will win.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Monday February 13, @04:42PM (21 children)
It used to be said that if you're not liberal when you're young, you have no heart, and if you're not conservative when you're older, you have no brain. There was a time when the "bleeding heart liberals" were criticized for ineffectively throwing money at social problems, and these criticisms had considerable merit.
But now? What little conservatives still have in the way of good points is completely overwhelmed by greed, malice, and sheer stupidity. So much for brains. Yes, there is ample reason to be distrustful of the medical community. We in the US have been subjected to much Big Pharma price gouging, and the perverse incentives of the Fee For Service system that made health care like taking your car to dishonest mechanics who will invent and imagine all kinds of problems merely to run up your bill, too obviously for their own profit. Most recently, I've gone a few rounds with these tire shops that do vehicle inspections telling me that my tires are worn out and must be replaced, when there was clearly still a millimeter or two of rubber above the wear bar. Took my car to an inspection shop that wasn't also a tire shop, and they confirmed what I thought, that my tires were still good.
Though many doctors have abused the trust placed in them, in part for themselves falling for the trickery of Big Pharma, this does not mean that drugs, and vaccines in particular, do not work. Vaccines most certainly do work! Where the everloving F these ideas came from that horse paste or malaria drugs could be effective against COVID, I don't know. You really have to wonder how many doctors are frauds, are quacks who manage to memorize enough medical knowledge to squeak through medical school, but who never learned to think.
One other doctor I recall was this guy who seemed just a little off. Specialist in wound care. I decided, what the heck, I would see if he'd confirm my suspicions. I asked him for his opinion on politics. I expected him to beg off, saying he didn't discuss that with patients. But no! He came out as a big time conservative, claiming that the Democrats would ruin health care if they were elected. He also did not scruple to pad the bill. A lot. Suggested we take home for one more week a medical device we'd stopped using and didn't need any more, "just in case". Um, okay, doc. I had not yet seen the bills, so I didn't know how much that would cost, but I reasoned it couldn't be that much. Little did I then know! I did ask, and was told one of their stock assurances, that I was not to worry about it because insurance would cover it. But I insisted, telling them I asked how much it would cost. Then they said they didn't know. I tried one more time to get a price, and they said they'd have to wait for more info before they could figure that. Liars. A month later when I found out that one week of renting that device was 10 times the cost of manufacturing it, I was furious! $1100, when I was expecting that cost to be perhaps $15. You can rent a whole damned car for a week for less money than $1100, let alone a freaking vacuum pump! You wonder why I am no longer a conservative? Shit like that, that's why!
(Score: 5, Touché) by DeathMonkey on Monday February 13, @04:46PM
...conservatives didn't try to blame forest fires on Jewish Space lasers.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Opportunist on Monday February 13, @05:19PM (1 child)
Conservativism has changed big time in the past 50 years. 50 years ago, a conservative was someone who stood for traditional values, who wanted peace, but was prepared to fight for it if need be, no matter the hardship, because he did love his country and the values it stood for. Someone who wanted to be self-reliant, with a strong belief in personal freedom (with my freedom only ending at the beginning of yours), but accepting and fully supporting that personal freedom always entails personal responsibility. You fuck up, your problem, I fuck up, my problem. Proud of his achievements and very eager to achieve, very firm belief in the technological progress his country made, leading to more and more prosperity (for those that participated, everyone had that right and everyone was responsible for doing so if they wanted to have a share of the cake).
That was conservativism in the 60s and up until the 90s.
Something changed along the way, though. What we have today is some sort of "hippies gone conservative" if you ask me. What we got is self-righteous assholes who still thinks that they should be allowed to do whatever the fuck they want, but at the same time they want to dictate what you should do. It's no longer "my freedom extends to yours", it's "my freedom is mine, and you have none". It's exactly what the conservatives were accusing their political opposition of, that they try to tell people what they can and cannot do (and don't get me wrong, the left is doing EXACTLY the same, just the other way around. Whether you can't do or say something because it offends the fee-fees of some imaginary buddy or some imaginary group (or an existing group that actually doesn't give a flying fuck whether you do or say it) doesn't matter, ok?).
Handouts are still bad - Unless those handouts go to THEM. NO conservative of the 60s would have been found dead taking government handouts. Maybe, MAYBE, you could convince him that he somehow earned it, there were vets who'd rather live in the street than take government veteran aid because they said they can't fight anymore, so they don't deserve that. Today able bodied conservatives are SUING the state for imagined "rights" they should have. What kind of conservativism is that?
And where does this religious bullshit come from? Seriously, when did that become a big conservative issue? Yes, the US was always a pretty religious country, but that was never a political thing. Well, until about the 90s when it suddenly became the big conservative thing. How the fuck did this happen?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 13, @10:22PM
The "religious freedom" thing is the most repressive bullshit too, putting religious impositions on poor people. A kind of moral superiority - but obviously obviously false and hypocritical. See e.g. evangelical support for Trump.
(Score: 2) by isostatic on Monday February 13, @06:09PM
Back in the 80s the left would argue for more state provided safety nets, the right would argue for the freedom to choose.
Both sides lost.
https://www.newsweek.com/robert-reich-oligarchy-democracy-2020-1447978 [newsweek.com]
(Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Monday February 13, @06:38PM (14 children)
And how does that differ from all those other sides that have the same problems? I similarly doubt that you really felt differently about conservatives decades ago.
My take is that the real problem here is extreme demonization of out-groups. When the other side is perceived as doing all this bad stuff, then it rationalizes your side doing the same. It's a race to the bottom.
Better to understand what drives the opposition and deal with that in a way compatible with your interests. The problem often isn't their terribleness, but ongoing injustices or imbalances that give them plenty of allies. For a glaring example, there's a lot of hand-wringing out there about libertarians. But the critics fail to recognize both that there's a huge problem with government power and spending (annoyingly, these complaints go hand in hand with complaints about corruption, centralization of economic power, and other manifestations of excessive government power and spending), and that this huge problem in turn results in a relatively small number of libertarians getting a huge number of allies.
If they had instead solved the problem sufficiently well (it doesn't have to even be very good, people have a high tolerance for government spending - it has to be really bad for this sort of movement to get so influential), they wouldn't have to worry about libertarians in the first place. It'd be a small group with weird beliefs. Instead, we get all kinds of ridiculous characterizations of libertarians (like they don't really mean what they say or that they're just lumped in with general conservatives) that indicate that the critics aren't interested in solving anything or discussing in good faith.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 13, @10:33PM (1 child)
You'd think libertarians would take it upon themselves to distinguish themselves from the spendthift, power grabbing conservatives they seem indistinguishable from. Where is the bold Randian hero speaking truth to conservatives? All I see are rich cunts raising up the drawbridge after they "self-made" their million dollars.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday February 14, @01:35AM
How would that be possible when you choose not to distinguish them? The adage about leading a horse to water applies here.
(Score: 5, Touché) by Tork on Monday February 13, @10:48PM (11 children)
Quantity.
Slashdolt Logic: "25 year old jokes about sharks and lasers are +5, Funny." 💩
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday February 14, @01:37AM (10 children)
(Score: 2) by Tork on Tuesday February 14, @02:18AM (9 children)
If my criticism actually does something to motivate their actions then why doesn't criticism from their own camp temper this bullshit? It sure is awful convenient that your solution means I sit back and take it and they get to misbehave anyway... just possibly not as much after their first transgression.
Slashdolt Logic: "25 year old jokes about sharks and lasers are +5, Funny." 💩
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday February 14, @03:50AM (8 children)
FTFY. Let's look at how this innocuous sounding statement went so far off the rails. For example [soylentnews.org]:
Notice the argument goes from an argument from hypocrisy fallacy about imaginary hypocrisy no less to a conflation fallacy based on Tork's ignorance of how many people were killed by violence in the Benghazi attacks and the January 6 protests to a ridiculous assertion that there would have been much more widespread devastation and killing if the protesters had been "competent". As each claim was dealt with, you moved on to a new fallacy.
Here's my take. It is not our responsibility to take such delusions seriously - be it January 6 protestors whining without a shred of proof or people losing their shit now about a two year old protest that didn't result in anything significant.
(Score: 2) by Tork on Tuesday February 14, @04:13AM (7 children)
Back to the question you're dodging: This time you described the insurrectionists as "whining". Please explain how me shutting up and you minimizing their bad behavior actually move them in the direction of reduced extremism.
Slashdolt Logic: "25 year old jokes about sharks and lasers are +5, Funny." 💩
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday February 14, @05:04AM (6 children)
Except as we see in that thread, it was you that kept moving those goalposts - every single post you made in that chain.
Neither behavior does, but that's not the role of either. The protests getting arrested for the laws they actually broke did - past tense. They getting no respect for their actions did - past tense. The problem got solved.
You "shutting up" means you no longer engage in Orwellian two minute hates and spill a bit less irrationality on my internet. My "minimizing their bad behavior" means that I'm putting their actual behavior in a rational context and defending the unpopular against mob think.
(Score: 2) by Tork on Tuesday February 14, @05:43AM (5 children)
Frankly I think what happened is you jumped the gun defending them before really looking into what they did and you ended up cornering yourself. At least that's a good deal more palatable than the idea that you're capable of understanding just how horrific what that group tried to do but won't.
Slashdolt Logic: "25 year old jokes about sharks and lasers are +5, Funny." 💩
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday February 14, @01:02PM (4 children)
Read the thread. One side, your side introduces a new topic (starting with the January 6/Benghazi conflation) then I respond. The new ground is always introduced by you and goes all over the place.
How many people participated [newsweek.com] in the protest again? How many people have even been charged [justice.gov] with the nebulous crime of "seditious conspiracy"?
I see no better numbers out there. Wikipedia cites this article as well.
11 people charged with seditious conspiracy.
So we have allegedly a large protest with 1 in 10,000 people charged with seditious conspiracy. The number of people found to possess firearms [soylentnews.org] is even lower (3 people from that link - all outside the Capitol Building itself, I think it was a little more now).
You claim that my ground has narrowed over the last two years, but you haven't been paying attention to how pathetic your argument became in the meantime! I narrowed my arguments because yours became vastly narrower!
It's the same dishonest, weaselly shit that we had two years ago when I posted my journal above. A bunch of cowards, that would be you, Deathmonkey, and others keep wetting your pants about the alleged insurrection. And every time some minor court case goes in your favor, you've crowed about how that's supposed to be evidence. In the meantime, this alleged insurrection has now been reduced to 11 people, a handful of firearms violations, and a huge blob of charges that would be present in any violent protest or riot under similar circumstances. I find it bizarre how well my points [soylentnews.org] from a month after held up while this is the best you've come up with in two years.
Where is your evidence? Why are you crying about an alleged insurrection of 11 people rather than a serious topic?
(Score: 2) by Tork on Tuesday February 14, @05:15PM (3 children)
By your own admission you've gotten heaps of evidence from myself, Deathmonkey, and other 'cowards'. Your intent is to defend a large group of people, apparently at any cost. In your pursuit of that you have frivolously dismissed everything you've been shown. You're so quick and clumsy about it you even forgot I had given you evidence a couple of posts later and demanded I send you a link to that post. heh.
Oh, look. Freshly moved goal posts. YOU are talking about 11 people right now. Enjoy.
Slashdolt Logic: "25 year old jokes about sharks and lasers are +5, Funny." 💩
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday February 15, @12:05AM (2 children)
Two years of evidence that you couldn't find your own asses with both hands. For a glaring example, in this thread I linked to several places where I provide genuine evidence that shows it wasn't an insurrection. Meanwhile you've just talked about how awesome your evidence supposedly was. How hard really is it to say "This is an insurrection because ..." and just list a few serious points. Can't be that hard, right? Yet we get garbage like complaining that Republicans are treating that January 6 witch hunt differently than Benghazi, a serious attack with lots of firearms on a US diplomatic compound that killed a bunch of people (and likely resulted from Secretary of State Clinton and the Department of State ignoring the security concerns of the ambassador to Libya) or that empty assertion that if the protesters had been more competent, they would have bagged some congresscritters - with complete absence of evidence for the assertion.
At least, DeathMonkey and DannyB were willing to go to the courts first. And we do have a handful of convictions for seditious conspiracy, which is a weak evidence in support.
I think there are two factors here which remain ridiculous. This hyperventilating over this particular protest when we just got off of a year of protests, including some attacks on federal property like a court house. I didn't get worked up over any of those and I think it reasonable to expect you to act like grown ups and do the same.
Second, as I repeatedly have noted, it's a single protest. Nothing ever came of it except a bunch of arrests and convictions. This very protest destroyed the movement - a self-cured problem. I certainly have seen no significant protests or violence since. And frankly, I'm tired of these whiny demands that I take your fears seriously.
(Score: 2) by Tork on Wednesday February 15, @12:21AM (1 child)
Wasn't difficult at all, in fact I did it a few times. You hand-waved them away so quickly you don't even remember any of them. A better question would be- Why should I expend the energy again?
Slashdolt Logic: "25 year old jokes about sharks and lasers are +5, Funny." 💩
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday February 15, @01:44AM
Yes, I got the "I was awesome in some thread months ago" the first time you did that. You're not duplicating that alleged success here.
(Score: 3, Funny) by https on Tuesday February 14, @01:47AM (1 child)
The correct phrasing of this is, if you're not liberal when you're young, you have no heart, and if you're not conservative when you're older, you have no assets.
Offended and laughing about it.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Tuesday February 14, @04:07PM
Nopo, still no brain. Because you are choosing to believe the ridiculous lie that Republican's are fiscally responsible despite all the direct contradictory evidence.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Runaway1956 on Monday February 13, @05:20PM
Someone takes this seriously? An equally honest and accurate title would be, "liberal doctors embrace treatments due to ideology".
Apply the same observation to Doctor Fauci. Then apply the same observation to all those professionals who were invested in research into COVID before the outbreak. Then replace the word "ideology" with "profit", and reapply the observation to all the "heroes" of the COVID pandemic.
A lot of dirty crap has happened, before, during, and since the pandemic, and as far as I can see, it was all motivated by profit. But, ideology won't allow most people to see any of that.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 13, @07:02PM (3 children)
For example, even if it was storing energy and then releasing it, it was not obvious how that was happening based on known science.
And so real objective scientists might wish to turn the unknown bits into known science - maybe it'll become another type of battery.
But instead what happened was a more emotional less objective response. Many scientists didn't investigate in case their their reputation and career got damaged.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 13, @09:38PM (2 children)
Not true at all. It was studied very heavily and found to be such a small effect, if it existed at all, to be of no practical significance for energy generation. And it has never gone away. It has changed names a time or two, but I think history has shown that it has received the proportional level of attention and funding it has deserved. There are lots of small and interesting things to look at in chemistry and materials science, all of which might have potential to open new and interesting doors. What cold fusion needs is a compelling reason to divert resources to it, and it can't make that case over many other interesting things. If there existed compelling data to suggest new batteries or other power devices can be made, there would be money made available, particularly from the private sector.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 13, @10:36PM
From memory, it was always horrifically complex experiments with multiple inputs and outputs that mysteriously produced bubbles in a weird concoction of chemicals, electrodes and catalysts. Explain that! You can't!! The sYsTeM is RiGgED.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 15, @01:51AM
Small effects like explosions? https://www.wired.co.uk/article/cold-fusion-reactor [wired.co.uk]
(Score: 2, Flamebait) by Barenflimski on Monday February 13, @07:19PM (9 children)
This conflating "conservative thinkers" to "conservative political ideologies," which I believe we all read as "republicans like Jim Jordan," is a strawman.
Language itself confuses things, especially when you don't have the words to describe exactly what you are talking about. Calling the Republican party conservatives is a great example. The way I see it, the modern day Republicans hijacked the word conservative as the party changes. My guess is that in 30 years, it'll all flip flop.
I appreciate conservative doctors who aren't trying to throw every new treatment at me when all I need is a band-aid.
So far, not one of the conservative Doctors I've met has shown one inkling of anti-vaxxer, anti-science, or whatever this author is trying to pin on them.
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Monday February 13, @07:34PM
how many doctors did he visit before he found one who was slightly craycray?
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 2, Informative) by sjames on Monday February 13, @07:40PM (7 children)
There probably aren't that many doctors who are 'conservative' in the sense TFA means, but there must be some. Somebody's been prescribing the horse paste and chloroquine. Meanwhile, vaccination rates among medical professionals is less than you might expect of a group that supposedly believes in modern medicine.
(Score: 3, Touché) by DeathMonkey on Monday February 13, @08:26PM (5 children)
AMA survey shows over 96% of doctors fully vaccinated against COVID-19 [ama-assn.org]
(Score: 2) by sjames on Tuesday February 14, @12:03AM (4 children)
It's mostly other medical professionals who come up short for vaccination rate.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Tuesday February 14, @04:11PM (3 children)
Boy, you had that one locked and loaded!
Indicating, to me, that you are fully aware that you are engaged in a fallacious argument since you know we need to include the hirghschool dropout wiping ass at the old folks home to get the numbers you want.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Tuesday February 14, @08:32PM (2 children)
Actually, I was counting nurses in a hospital setting, and I saw the info in Medpage.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Tuesday February 14, @08:40PM (1 child)
In contrast, 88% of nurses and 96% of physicians in the US have already gotten vaccinated or plan to do so, according to surveys by the American Nurses Association and the American Medical Association. [theguardian.com]
I'm starting to think you may be dismissing evidence due to your ideology.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Tuesday February 14, @09:16PM
That seems about right. Perhaps we have different expectations. I would expect practically 100% vaccination in a hospital setting given easy access, better medical knowledge, and liklihood of exposure.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 13, @10:39PM
Made up bullshit is also suprizingly common in anonymous postings online. Not as rare as you might think...