I'm with you on this. I've put a nontrivial amount of effort into commenting (including reading a lot of source material and watching video clips), and there has been some interesting discussion, but I'm not convinced it's been worth it.

My suggestion is to be more selective about sources, and perhaps to have an explicit policy. Individual papers tend not to be good sources, as people just use them as weapons to prop up their opinion. Mainstream media pieces aren't either, as they lack intellectual depth. I suggest blog posts by experts (David Gorski, Derek Lowe), pieces by top science journalists (Helen Branswell, Kai Kupferschmidt, Jon Cohen). Note I am not saying only mainstream views should be represented, quite the contrary. If and when Alina Chan posts something long form on lab leak (likely, as she's working on a book), that's a great candidate for spurring intellectually curious discussion.

Here's an observation. I've seen at least three "pro-Ivermectin" posts on the front page in the last six days. Does it seem like that's been balanced with any posts discussing its inefficacy (which is apparently the medical community's dominant view)?

I also remember today's Ivermectin post being flagged. Does that mean the moderators then chose to unflag it (despite the fact there'd already been at least two earlier "pro-Ivermectin" posts throughout the week)? According to the Hacker News FAQ, moderators "sometimes turn flags off when they are unfair."

     https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

Maybe the question we should be asking is: what made the moderators consider the flagging of this post unfair?

It doesn't seem to me that the dominant view here is that Ivermectin is ineffective, just that it has not yet been proven to be effective, for a certain definition of "proven". With time and stronger studies, that may well be proven, or not.

Seconded.

The whole Ivermectin saga does not deserve the attention that it is getting, those that are relentlessly pushing it are causing people not to get vaccinated and that in turn will prolong the epidemic and lead to people getting ill and some fraction of those will die.

I've read up on this thing as much as I could and it's quite simple: there is at this point in time zero hard evidence that it works in humans short of using it in dosage that is well outside the range that we have data on. It's just the HCQ story warmed over.

> are causing people not to get vaccinated and that in turn will prolong the epidemic

Can you make an argument that people going for natural immunity and relying on currently used COVID treatment protocols in case they decide it is needed will prolong the epidemic more than if they took the vaccine?

Maybe it will do the opposite, as 1) natural immunity may be stronger, last longer 2) some number of non-vaccinated people getting sick, getting isolated and taking effective treatment may on the whole infect less people than if that same number of people gets vaccinated and then interacts with other people and potentially spread the infection more because they don't get strong symptoms.

I'm not saying that you are incorrect, just that the argument that getting vaccinated solves the epidemic quicker isn't clear.

Modulo a few hundred thousand deaths those mechanisms have the same outcome. If you're ok with that by all means, go push herd immunity through infection.

There are effective treatments available now, it is not clear that well-treated infections would lead to more deaths than vaccinations.

I've addressed that here and here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27563873

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27564376

This community is not equipped to have this discussion, as evidenced by the discussion.

Seeing HN used to promote garbage is going to cause good people to leave, and that in turn is going to accelerate the degree to which garbage will end up on the homepage and so on. This is a downward spiral.

This is not the way to handle this. There are better ways to handle this.

You seem to be on a tear today. FYI, I added my flag here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27577500

As well as adding a flag to one of the comments in that discussion that attacked you. I don't leave a lot of flags on HN. For various reasons, I'm pretty conservative in my use of flags.

I'm surprised to see this particular piece where I am currently commenting got so many upvotes and so many comments. I asked about the mechanism of how this drug works and got some meaningful engagement and also some really worthless engagement, in my opinion.* And then I lost interest. I couldn't readily see a meaningful connection.

But you are basically talking about censorship. Censorship grows interest in the forbidden topic. I wholly disagree with your position here.

If this is the garbage you claim it is -- and it may well be, I just don't know the topic well enough to affirmatively agree with you -- then there are vastly better ways to kill it without harming freedom of speech.

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27562715