I think you missed the point. The idea here is that there were people that said before any results were in that hydroxychloroquine was not gonna work, operating with a heuristic that almost always works. And in this case they were correct, which the article doesn't seem to disagree with. The point is that at some point the heuristic will fail, not that it did in the case of hydroxychloroquine.
But it's worth pointing out that (i) the medical profession, who are the appropriate people to be evaluating HCQ, didn't rely on their heuristic but did the test and (ii) if you as a layman abandon the heuristic that you shouldn't be receptive to the advice of conspiracy theorists and alternative therapists protesting the medical profession because they might be right about something, following that advice isn't largely cost-free unlike the other examples Scott Alexander set up, and is in fact more likely to harm you than the heuristic
I remember hearing hydroxychloroquine conspiracy theories well into the election of November 2020. In particular, when Trump revealed his positive diagnosis, plenty of people were talking about Hydroxychloroquine at that point.
That crap was disproved 5 months earlier, and plenty of people still didn't get the news.
The article ignores useful treatments like Dexamethasone and monoclonal antibodies.
The correct skeptic was pro dexamethasone anti Hydroxychloroquine.
Seeing things from only an anti-htdroxychloroquine perspective is 100% misleading. There were working drugs that saved many lives during the stupid Hydroxychloroquine hype.
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What timeframe are we talking about here? What else was known and tested? There is a political group who kept pushing HCQ for months, and then mislead the public again with Ivermectin a few months later.
Ivermectin was entirely a 2021 phenomenon as well. Not only did we know that Dexamethasone + Monoclonal antibodies worked, we also had 3 competing vaccines and the "Pfizer anti-viral pill". Why the hell were people talking about the snake-oil Ivermectin?
But we weren't "heuristic following skeptics" with regard to the pandemic.
The RECOVERY trial basically tried everything that had a chance of working. Hydroxychloroquine was part of the tests and did very poorly.
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After the RECOVERY trial in June 2020, it was no longer about "what worked", the question was "what works better?". By the time Ivermectin became a discussion point in 2021, it wasn't good enough to just "work", you had to prove that it was at least as good as Dexamethasone + Monoclonal antibodies.
Its not about being a "heuristic following skeptic". Its about knowledge of treatments that do work and the tests they underwent to prove their efficacy.
The correct answer for Ivermectin was "Hey, we have this test with Dexamethasone + Monoclonal antibodies that showed efficacy over 3000 people. Where is the evidence for Ivermectin?"
Oh, you don't have evidence yet? How about we wait until you have evidence before you claim that IVM is more useful than the current Dexamethasone + Monoclonal antibodies cocktail?
"Extraordinary claims without evidence or rationale are bogus" as a heuristic seems pretty good to me?
When presented with a problem and infinite solutions, you need to start narrowing down which paths to investigate somehow. Come back with evidence and the conversation goes further.
