Omura’s Wager
Article
Omura’s Wager is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between November 24, 2021 and February 01, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as “calls it Omura’s Wager”; “He calls his style of reasoning Omura’s Wager, by reference to Pascal’s Wager”. It most often appears alongside Alexandros Marinos, COVID, hydroxychloroquine.
Metadata
- Category: Concepts
- Mention count: 2
- Issue count: 2
- First seen: November 24, 2021
- Last seen: February 01, 2023
Appears In
Related Pages
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- Alexandros Marinos (2 shared issues)
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- COVID (2 shared issues)
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- hydroxychloroquine (2 shared issues)
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- ivermectin (2 shared issues)
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- ivermectin (2 shared issues)
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- ivmmeta (2 shared issues)
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- ivmmeta.com (2 shared issues)
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- Pascalian medicine (2 shared issues)
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- Pascal’s Wager (2 shared issues)
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- 2006 Ioannidis paper (1 shared issues)
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- ACTIV-6 (1 shared issues)
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- Alexandros (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
(Alexandros Marinos has also been thinking about this, and calls it Omura’s Wager)
Inline links: Omura’s Wager
Alexandros has previously stressed that he doesn’t mean to express certainty that ivermectin works. He calls his style of reasoning Omura’s Wager, by reference to Pascal’s Wager. If you use ivermectin, and it doesn’t work, then you’ve wasted your time and maybe gotten a few minor side effects. If you don’t use ivermectin, and it does work, then you’ve missed out on a potentially life-saving medication. Therefore (he concludes) given even a little remaining uncertainty about whether ivermectin works, you should use it.
This isn’t how mainstream medicine thinks about this in any other context, and if true it’s much more interesting than a debate around one particular repurposed dewormer. I try to respond in Pascalian Medicine. But since then, there’s been more evidence that ivermectin at the doses used in COVID studies might be harmful. Both the I-TECH study and Dr. Bitterman’s analysis found more severe side effects in ivermectin groups compared to placebo. Not only does this challenge ivermectin in particular, but using it as a test case calls Omura’s Wager into question more generally.