Well, he also decided it was appropriate to insult the physical appearance of grad students on twitter who disagreed with him. He definitely didn't come out of covid looking fully dispassionate.
> He definitely didn't come out of covid looking fully dispassionate.
No one did.
That said, despite the serious amount of professional scrutiny and and public harassment he was subject to, I think he made valuable contributions to the conversation around COVID-19 public policy.
I have no idea what incident you are talking about but, from the context, I have no doubt that it is something inconsequential that social media made a big deal about just to have some reason to be outraged at Ioannidis, with whom they were already outraged.
The linked article is 6,848 words, not counting the embedded tweets. Given the low-level content in the first couple paragraphs, and the constant quoting of tweets, I have no reason to read it. Social media is uniformly bullshit and I'm not in the habit of wasting my time with it.
If you would like to send me a link, or other reference, to the "peer reviewed article" in which "the commenting on personal appearance took place" please feel welcome to do so.
From the Supporting Information:
[Correction added on 5 January 2022 after first online publication: Information including ad hominem comments directed by the author at people critiquing his work was removed by the author from the appendix in Supporting Information during copy editing between Accepted Article and Version of Record versions of this article. For more information about Wiley policy on changes to Accepted Articles please refer to https://authorservices.wiley.com/ethics-guidelines/index.htm...
From what I can gather from the published journal article it appears that if these paragraphs of ad hominems were in it they did not survive the review process: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/eci.13554
Unfortunately I don't know how to find the pre-publication submission.
@anonymouskimmer: I just held my nose and did as you advised, search the article on "sciencebasedmedicine.org" for the phrase you quoted.
I think this is what UncleMeat refers to as "insulting the physical appearance" of grad students who disagreed with him on twitter:
At that time, the name of the Twitter account owner was not obviously visible (the photo showed an unrecognizable figure with big glasses and a cat), but Meyerowitz-Katz seemed to use the Twitter account prolifically to promote his own work and criticize work contradicting his work. The identity of the Health Nerd Twitter account has become transparent now, since the owner has added a photo of him (wearing a T-shirt that writes “Trust me, I am an epidemiologist”).
In summary, what Ioannidis said was that the twitter account showed an image of someone with big glasses and a cat, and that the owner posted a photo of himself wearing a t-shirt with a slogan.
I would like to say that I struggle to find how that is insulting, but in truth I don't struggle at all. That's all happening on twitter where anything anyone says is insulting to someone. I mean, if he had said something along the lines of "what stupid glasses" or "what stupid t-shirt", yeah, that would have been insulting in the real world. But "an unrecognizable figure with big glasses and a cat)" is an insult- how? To whom? The unrecognisable figure? The cat?
So it's just as I said above, as expected. That whole thing was something inconsequential that social media made a huge todo about because it's social media and people are on it when they have nothing to do. I'm on it right now, I guess, and I actually do have things to do, so ttyl.
To clarify, I didn't say you said I should be outraged. I said that social media made a big deal of something in order for them (its users) to be outraged. That's what social media is all about, yes?
Passion is fine and great in all endeavors. Not being able to acknowledge when you are wrong in small or large is the problem. And it's a problem for both passionate and dispassionate people.
One of the earlier researchers on psychopaths was Hervey M. Cleckley. In his book on the topic The Mask of Sanity one of his vignettes of, I believe, "incomplete manifestation of psychopathology" was of a psychologist who gave public lectures on psychopaths, without apparently recognizing that he was almost one of them.
To sum up the parallel, there are two kinds of people who tend to talk the most about any social or personal ill: those who are worried about the ill, and those who are distracting from the fact that they themselves embody it. (Technically this probably overlaps a bit, as ex-alcoholics are often worried about alcoholism, for example.)
No one did.
That said, despite the serious amount of professional scrutiny and and public harassment he was subject to, I think he made valuable contributions to the conversation around COVID-19 public policy.