Comment by kerkeslager 6 days ago
> And your contribution is to stop people from helping them
No. In the vast majority of cases, answering this question as intended isn't helping them, it's actively harming them.
> because of something about what now
You're responding to a post which explains this. If you understood the post, faking confusion is dishonest. If you didn't understand the post, you weren't qualified to disagree with it.
> This removes so much agency from the people involved.
No. Filling people's minds with garbage non-information does not empower them. Knowledge is power. Random bullshit ideas isn't.
> If I were dying of cancer and asked for "out there" solutions,
OP isn't dying of cancer, and as far as I can tell, their friend who is dying of cancer did not ask for solutions of any kind.
You're trying to appeal to empathy here, but as far as I can tell, the person you're asking me to empathize with doesn't exist. There is no person dying of cancer asking for Hacker News' unqualified medical advice that I'm aware of.
The vast majority of people do not share the "move fast and break things" mentality--this is actually one of the main reasons people dislike corporate culture. This is especially true with medicine. Leave the poor cancer patient alone.
> Gimme everything you got at all levels of certainty, and let me decide what I want to try and not try. If I decide I don't want to try anything, or none of the suggestions have enough evidence to be worth trying and I'd rather travel around the world and skydive with my wife the last few months, that's ok too!
Agency isn't that easy. There are myriads of advertisers and propagandists out there trying to spin a narrative, and a lot of the hare-brained ideas out there exist because someone is trying to manipulate you--to buy a product, vote for a person, etc. These people are good at what they do, and even if you catch on to a few of them and dodge their bad ideas, a lot of them are going to worm into your brain and get you to do something they want you to do. Let me reitrate: what they want you to do, not what you, at a fundamental level, want to do. That's not agency, that's you being manipulated.
There is not a shortage of information, there is a shortage of effective filters of information that separate out the truth. Humans simply are not capable of sifting through all the garbage ideas out there, and that includes you (and me!). If you open yourself up to the full stream of garbage ideas, that doesn't give you agency, that gives your agency away to the advertiser or propagandist who happens to trigger your biases most effectively. You're not doing what you want, you're doing what they've manipulated you to want.
> But none of us can pretend to know what they're actually going through, we can only offer what it asked and let them decide.
Believe it or not, OP is not the only person to have a friend dying of cancer.
A friend of mine in college was diagnosed with lymphoma late in his sophomore year and died about a year after graduation. In his last years he became increasingly hostile to the well-intentioned people who kept offering genuinely stupid ideas for how he could cure his cancer. It isn't fun for cancer patients to have to politely listen to this particularly unhealthy way of coping with their death while they are trying to cope with their own death.
Reading other accounts of people with cancer, this is a pretty common complaint.
> Knowledge is power. Random bullshit ideas isn't.
Every proven idea started as a random bullshit idea. No one in this thread is presenting their ideas as definitive solutions as far as I see, everyone is being pretty good about providing their confidence levels and sources.
> what they want you to do, not what you, at a fundamental level, want to do
This is a whole philosophical rabbit hole about advertising and free will in general, it's not specific to OP's case so I don't really want to get into it, that discussion is better had on Reddit or some other HN thread.
As for the rest, I think this other commenter said it better than I can: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42657251
> Every proven idea started as a random bullshit idea.
No, actually, almost no proven ideas start this way. Ideas which ultimately solve problems in a complex field, generally require a great deal of expertise to discover. Penicillin was discovered by doctors, insulin was discovered by doctors.
We all love the myth of an outsider who revolutionizes a field they were excluded from, but the reality is that someone like Florence Nightingale was excluded from medicine because of her gender, not because of her lack of subject expertise. The people who make groundbreaking discoveries in a field are almost universally experts in that field.
Sure, maybe in some new field that's in its infancy, a random person has a chance of discovering something useful, but oncology isn't that--we've got centuries of study of cancers.
Really? Let's look:
> No one in this thread is presenting their ideas as definitive solutions as far as I see, everyone is being pretty good about providing their confidence levels and sources.
Really? Let's take a look:
1. "Meanwhile, it is proven that the Zika virus does kill GBM cells in humans. This is what causes microcephaly in newborns. Inoculating the Zika virus in a controlled environment yields zero risk, and has no side effects." Poster gives sources, but the sources don't say what he claims they say, because you know, randos of the internet aren't actually capable of reading medical studies.
2. "To give you the short version of the story about how it works for HER: taking bloodroot causes the cancer to shrink too small to take a biopsy, but not go into remission, and when she stops taking it per the doctors advice, it gets very large and they start talking about surgery." Seems pretty confident that there's a causal relationship between the remission and his mom poisoning herself. Luckily another poster posted this: https://jakeseliger.com/2024/07/29/more-isnt-always-better-d...
3. "Have you looked into ivermectin and fenbendazole?" Later, when criticized, user posts: "The linked study claims it has potential." User provides two linked studies. Both links DO NOT claim it has potential, because, you know, randos on the internet are not capable of reading medical studies.
Let me be clear: the confidence level of a non-oncologist in an oncological solution is worth about as much as what I flushed down the toilet this morning. These aren't confidence levels, they're arrogance levels of people thinking they know things they don't. And contrary to your claim, there are a lot of pretty "confident" people posting here about things they should have a great deal less confidence about.
> As for the rest, I think this other commenter said it better than I can:
> I'm not sure why all the hate.
The hate has been thoroughly explained, but your linked poster isn't any more capable of reading Hacker News posts than they are of reading medical journals, apparently.
This removes so much agency from the people involved. If I were dying of cancer and asked for "out there" solutions, I wouldn't want people hand-wringing about whether it's morally ok to share unconfirmed theories.
Gimme everything you got at all levels of certainty, and let me decide what I want to try and not try. If I decide I don't want to try anything, or none of the suggestions have enough evidence to be worth trying and I'd rather travel around the world and skydive with my wife the last few months, that's ok too!
But none of us can pretend to know what they're actually going through, we can only offer what it asked and let them decide.