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Comment by jka | Hacker News Reader

Thank you. I certainly get the sense from the article and your comments that you are well-informed.

My suggestion is really one around building trust - it'd help to have others in the same scientific field confirm and/or question the approach.

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This is exactly what I want to do. I want to collaborate with those in the position to go looking for one of these attenuated viruses.

It looks like you need to find someone who can help make your post feel more professional - perhaps Ask HN for help or just directly email one of the clued up people here that are open to cold emails (patio11?).

I almost didn’t read it because the title sounds too generically woowoo, and the domain you are using seemed unprofessional. Then on reading the article, you didn’t give your background, an irrelevant picture of a painting opens the article, and the sidebar of your article topics are all over the shop. Sorry for being so negative: it is much easier to find reasons why something doesn’t feel right, and I’m not a fantastic marketer so I can’t offer you fixes I could predict would help.

It seems like a really good idea (are there others that have suggested it?), but I suspect it needs to be more convincing with a bit of repackaging if you want to push it.

Maybe add comments to those 2 papers with an “elevator pitch” or a request for other relevant info, and link to an improved post, and it should bubble up and find the right people to evaluate it.

Edit: also perhaps get your idea onto the various Covid daily link sites: good ideas should bubble up. Use Twitter to relevant people. Pass the idea to this guy who writes fantastically and has audience: https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-act-today-or-peop...

Good luck, we need some!

The site is my personal blog. I thought about writing a more technical level paper, but what I wanted to accomplish is to get this idea in front of a non-scientific audience who can think outside the box (like many of those on HN).

A standard scientific paper will sink without a trace -scientists are just too conservative to take something like this seriously. I hate to say it, but the people who will make something like this a reality are the tech billionaires of this world.

The tech billionaires of this world will not fund anything based on a layman's explanation. They want to fund ideas based on reliable research. The Gates Foundation is staffed with tons of specialists for this reason.

I think that if you really believe your idea has some merit, you should still write a paper. After that you can blog about it for any audience out there and maybe write a follow-up. You're a professional, you know how it works.

I most likely will write such a paper, but the first thing is to get those that can make this happen interested. They are not going to be reading a scientific paper.

> It looks like you need to find someone who can help make your post feel more professional - perhaps Ask HN for help or just directly email one of the clued up people here that are open to cold emails (patio11?).

It would probably have the opposite effect. This way it looks like a probably serious scientist wrote an idea that is probably worth considering on his personal website / blog.

If you give the site the "Hacker News treatment", I suspect that it will immediately look like "somebody with funding is trying to sell me on an idea for some reason". This stuff might work for naive consumers, but naive consumers don't matter here. I am sure that this post is already being shared among experts, and they are the ones who need to decide if this idea has merit or not. Throwing marketing bs at them will probably just hurt the cause.

This seems like a pretty good idea (good enough that certainly there must already be people working on it) so it seems like if you could find and contact them, maybe you could contribute to their efforts?

It just seems more practical than hail-mary posting on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22810639

Well I hope other are working on it, but I haven’t found much evidence of this so far. HN has a pretty diverse audience including a lot of scientists like me.

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