COVID-19 Research Pop Quiz (And Then Some?)

The Education Wars Part III

My friend known as Dr. Ah Kahn Syed (a.k.a. arkmedic) created an illuminating quiz a few hours ago. Give it a whirl and see how you do.

Dr Ah Kahn Syed @arkmedic

A mini quiz on #COVID19 just for fun 1. People taking folic acid had the same protection from death from #covid19 as people taking #hydroxychloroquine in the Boulware study published in the @NEJM in June 2020

I got 6 out of 6 correct, but only after months of studying for the test. Probably not worth the A+ alone, but it's about the friends we made along the way, right?

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The Bigger Picture

Much of the reason that a pandemic could be stretched to "max pain" is that the firehose of information achieves the effect of miseducating the public. Even worse, those in charge of the firehose point the finger at people like me and tell the public that we're the disinformation warriors. I've been banned from Facebook for roughly 100 of the past 300 days for crimes that range from sharing information from a meeting I joined in with an Indian Council of Medical Research physician, to showing a packet of ivermectin (out of India), and to stating that it's okay for parents to defend their children with force. 

After the wickedly sophisticated disinformation campaigns run through Big Tech, Big Media, and government offices, those caught in the headlights aren't going to bother to find out that I was averaging on the order of 500% trading returns for several years prior to dropping everything to research and write about pandemic nonsense (I probably lost half my friends and left 7-digits on the table these past 18 months). I should have negotiated better with the Kremlin, I guess.

So, what, if anything, could short-circuit such diabolical propaganda machinery? How can the public get a glimpse of all the absurdity? How do you educate people who cannot fathom that they've been miseducated? Fighting them over social media all day ain't gonna do squat [except in true edge cases]. We need solutions to challenging social problems that take into account the realities of brainwashing, groupthink, proxy-trust, social pressure, and maybe also gamification principles.

One way to do it is with a completely unforgiving quiz site. What better way to show a mirror to a narcissist than to quantitatively test their expertise? I'm dead serious and I think I'm going to build it (or more likely pay somebody to build it).

The idea is to take submissions of questions from those who are experts in the material, so long as they are willing to write up an informative response with full citation. Then build a database that includes a lot of questions that would be revealing of some of the many absurdities:

• The 99.5% of deaths from COVID-19 patients were unvaccinated statistic came from,

  • A government database,

  • A hospital network,

  • A CDC official made it up with no source or citation, later saying it was just a guess.

• In the WHO trials testing hydroxychloroquine, the 9.6g and 10.4g cumulative doses were chosen because,

  • These were the dosages published by most hospital systems.

  • These were the dosages used by Dr. Didier Raoult and Dr. Zev Zelenko.

  • These were the dosages suggested by the pharmacokinetic studies published on the trial website.

  • It is entirely unclear why these dosages were selected since those designing the trials called the initially proposed 4.4g doses "undoubtedly high".

• The reproduction number, R, for a virus is

  • The same in all environments.

  • Depends on the mutation rate of the virus.

  • Dependent on so many variables that it can range widely in different environments.

Perhaps the quiz items could be tagged with metadata to make it possible to create randomized topic-specific quizzes. That way, instead of debating that know-it-all volunteer propagandist or misguided dentist-turned-epidemiologist in your friend network, you can kindly drop a quiz challenge on them. You don't even need to let them know that their name and score will be permanently recorded upon completion of the quiz (that'll be acknowledge just below the name-entry box at the outset of the quiz, possibly tied to their social media account to ensure no hiding their performance).

1. Thoughts and improvements on the idea are absolutely welcome and encouraged. No idea should be put into production without taking or resisting a sound beating.

2. If you have the coding skills to frame the coding project and put it into production, email me at mathew.crawford@protonmail.com. Please include a bid for the contract. Understand that my budget cannot be lavish (this substack thing is kind of working, but I'm trying to run it currently to break even while paying researchers and developers for all their help, and making donations to those brave enough to blow the whistle on medical corruption), which is to say that I expect somebody taking the job to be invested in the outcome. I'm happy for the site to be an advertisement of their capability if they want to tag it as such.