[stupac2]

A report on a study from China about ACE inhibitors: https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/ar...connection

This has been discussed on here previously, so I wanted to share. But I also liked this metaphor toward the end:

After you’ve worked in the biomedical field for a while, you get a lot more cautious about what you know – or you damn well should, anyway. Swinging from paper to paper in Pubmed like Tarzan with his vines in an old movie works in reality about as well as it does if you try the vine trick yourself. You’ll actually end up dangling in the tropical breeze, fifty feet over a pile of sharp rocks. As you listen to your liana unraveling. The drug literature, the biochemistry literature, the medical literature are full of quicksand and crocodiles (to stick with the Tarzan movie metaphors), and it’s a stewpot of some solid results mixed in with the true-but-unextrapolatable, the partly true, the true from a particular angle in favorable lighting, the pretty much false, and no small amount of flat-out gibberish. So confidently proclaiming that hydroxychloroquine opens the zinc channels while azithromycin ripsnipes the frannistan or whatever doesn’t count for much.

It doesn’t count for all that much even if everything you’re saying is reasonable. That ACE2 hypothesis was not crazy at all – perfectly reasonable, one of thousands and thousands of perfectly reasonable hypotheses. We mow those things down like wheat in this business; you get used to it. A good sign these days when you’re listening to someone talk about this epidemic is the number of times they say “We don’t know yet”. The more of those, the better. Confident predictions are grounds for suspicion –  under these conditions, the people who are the most confident are probably fools.

[stupac2]

A report on a study from China about ACE inhibitors: https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/ar...connection

This has been discussed on here previously, so I wanted to share. But I also liked this metaphor toward the end:

After you’ve worked in the biomedical field for a while, you get a lot more cautious about what you know – or you damn well should, anyway. Swinging from paper to paper in Pubmed like Tarzan with his vines in an old movie works in reality about as well as it does if you try the vine trick yourself. You’ll actually end up dangling in the tropical breeze, fifty feet over a pile of sharp rocks. As you listen to your liana unraveling. The drug literature, the biochemistry literature, the medical literature are full of quicksand and crocodiles (to stick with the Tarzan movie metaphors), and it’s a stewpot of some solid results mixed in with the true-but-unextrapolatable, the partly true, the true from a particular angle in favorable lighting, the pretty much false, and no small amount of flat-out gibberish. So confidently proclaiming that hydroxychloroquine opens the zinc channels while azithromycin ripsnipes the frannistan or whatever doesn’t count for much.

It doesn’t count for all that much even if everything you’re saying is reasonable. That ACE2 hypothesis was not crazy at all – perfectly reasonable, one of thousands and thousands of perfectly reasonable hypotheses. We mow those things down like wheat in this business; you get used to it. A good sign these days when you’re listening to someone talk about this epidemic is the number of times they say “We don’t know yet”. The more of those, the better. Confident predictions are grounds for suspicion –  under these conditions, the people who are the most confident are probably fools.