Antigonus still exiting, still pursued by a bear! Thanks for the update, Dark Savant!
Stuff about real-life controversy spoiled for length and being way off-topic.
No, those are the opposite of knee-jerk reactions, and they are not done to avoid considering the possibility: Those are among the things that people who want to base our opinions on evidence have to remind ourselves constantly in order to avoid natural knee-jerk reactions like (in these cases) mistaking correlation for causation or assuming that a temporal relationship between two events represents a causal one. Everybody has those knee-jerk reactions. They are exploitable by marketers of junk products and other charlatans, and they prevent people from forming correct conclusions about the world around them. So we try to catch them and stop ourselves when we notice we're making them, to prevent them from deceiving us, and point them out when others are making them or relying on them, for similar reasons.
You can get your hypotheses from anywhere. Then you test them. The hypothesis you described, following up from anecdotes such as you describe, have been tested to death and back again. There is zero evidence even of correlation, never mind causation.
Not only can they be proposed, they have been and are. Endlessly. And no evidence has been found linking any of them to autism. All the evidence I can find suggests the Autism is a "birth defect," like spina bifida or a cleft palate. The environmental factors in pregnancy associated with the development of Autism are likewise associated with other birth defects. You seem to be implying that I'm drawing an arbitrary imaginary line at the moment of birth, but (again) everything is more complicated than that. The actual risk factors for autism involve pre-natal developmental intrinsically: A mother drinking large quantities of alcohol during pregnancy is more likely to have an autistic child than one who does not (all else being equal) for instance. This does not mean that a mother, by drinking a glass of wine just before giving birth, could "cause" or even meaningfully affect her child's chance of having autism; that would be ridiculous to assert (like the thing about vaccines). By the time a child is born, its brain has developed to the point where it is no longer at risk for autism, or it's too late (given current medical technology) for it to make those developments. Although, as Dark Savant pointed out, it's true the child might never be diagnosed with autism if it dies before it reaches the developmental stages where it could be noticed....
What population would you test it against? I want to be clear here: Let us suppose you have a rare allergy that causes you to break out in hives when exposed to something normally non-allergenic that we'll call X. If your allergy is rare enough, then testing across the general population might not show any important correlation between X and hives. But since you've noticed the pattern with yourself, you suspect you have an X allergy. You can usefully test this by eliminating other likely allergens from your environment and testing to see if exposure to X still has the expected effect, and if periods of non-exposure to X are Hives-free. Your allergy is in principle discoverable - and though your particular allergy is rare, allergies in general are common, and known to be triggered by a variety of different environmental things.
Autism isn't like that. There is nothing that can be introduced to a child's environment, by the time the child is born, that has been found to have any impact on the likelihood that a child will have autism.
You can argue about 'causes of autism' as a loose or informal way of talking about preventable risk factors, but not about something that "caused autism" - that's a very significant difference. There is no such thing as "the cause." There are risk factors which we know correlate somewhat with autism, including alcoholism during pregnancy, parental age, and birth weight, but no one would say a child got autism because it was under-weight at birth: No one proposes injecting a fetus with something to make it fatter in the hope that this will prevent birth defects. Not only would the risks (not relating to autism) be very high, but it's effectively certain that low birth weight and autism (and other birth defects) have common causes/risk factors (e.g. premature birth*) and do not directly cause one another.
Similarly, no one would say the father "caused" his kid to have autism by having one at an advanced age, nor that the the mother "gave her child autism" by drinking too much, even though the correlations are significant for these factors, and especially the latter represents a preventable risk. And similarly, no one would refuse to vaccinate a child, accepting all the risks of disease, in the hope of avoiding autism, in light of the fact that there is no reason to suspect a causal relationship - there isn't even any correlation.
Here are a few references. If you want someone to refute your claim that your specific child's autism could have been caused by a vaccine, we can only say that for all useful intents and purposes, the evidence refutes this. There is no reason to expect that a vaccine would or even could cause what appears to be a congenital defect, no evidence to suggest that either the general public or any subset thereof is susceptible to somehow becoming more autistic (or less so) by receiving a vaccine, and every indication that autism is not something you can "be given" or "catch" - it's a question of how your brain develops, and the relevant brain development has all occurred by the time you are born. (How long before you're born? It seems to be variable...*)
I obviously didn't communicate this successfully: You are not an ignoramus, and I do not and did not intend to imply that you are. I do not intend "ignorance" as an insult: We are all ignorant about lots of different things, even in areas of which we have made an intense study; even the best players on this site are ignorant of some things about Civ4! None of us is omniscient. But ignorance in a given area is curable by learning stuff about it! So I'm trying to teach anyone who feels like reading my ridiculously long posts some things I have learned about autism. So with that in mind, here's an attempt to explain what I was saying more clearly:
One reason a person might suppose that autism might be caused by a vaccine is because they are ignorant of the evidence to the contrary; again, this does not make them "an ignorant person," it just means there's some stuff about this subject of which they're not aware. Another reason a person might make the same supposition is because they have fallen victim to the post-hoc fallacy, to which all of us are susceptible. One good defense against it is to watch out for it and be skeptical of conclusions based on it. Yet another reason might be the attitude I described, which I hope and assume does not describe you in particular. There are various other reasons a person might choose to ignore the evidence, such as being a troll who wants to maximize the number of posts in Dark Savant's spoiler thread. I don't actually know or pretend to know the reason you in particular are posting; I'm just describing the only possibilities I can see. Regardless, I want to say: The stuff you're posting is incorrect, but being mistaken is not intrinsically a bad thing, and doesn't reflect badly on anybody; it's just an opportunity to learn. Lots and lots and lots of people believe that vaccines cause autism. They are completely wrong, and endanger their children and the society in which they live, but that's almost never their fault; they just don't know the facts. It would be pretty great if they did!
Relatedly: In theory, another reason for making that supposition might be that the person making it is privy to exciting new research that overturns all the previous, extensive research in the field! That would be super exciting if the new research proved true! Unfortunately, in cases like this, it almost never is; this is one of those extraordinary claims that require extraordinary evidence. But occasionally, in any field, there's a giant breakthrough!
* - Okay, so on premature birth: I was under the impression that Roe/Wade de-facto just said "third trimester abortions are not okay; earlier is fine," but I'm not intimately familiar with the decision. If it has to do with our ability to keep the baby alive, then it's relevant to this too: It turns out that we are really, really good at keeping really, really sick people alive - including babies that are born very prematurely - sometimes for months or even years. But the more prematurely the baby leaves the womb, the greater the risk of birth defects, and the more severe those defects tend to be. At present there's nothing we can do about this, no matter what instruments we use, except to just keep the child alive as long as we can and hope the dice roll our way. The baby's chance is much, much better if it manages to stay in the womb.
Fortunately, no such law is contemplated, so no such lawsuit will take place. The bit about surviving outside the womb is purely theoretical: The argument Dark Savant is addressing is whether the right to abortion should be dependant on whether we could keep the child alive outside the womb, which (as mentioned above) is difficult to assess because it's really a complicated roll of the dice at every stage. Under no circumstance would Roe/Wade dictate actually removing the child from the womb for incubation, though I guess I could imagine a dystopic fictional world in which "abortion risks" are removed that way to prevent mothers from getting abortions illegally....
Stuff about real-life controversy spoiled for length and being way off-topic.
(March 13th, 2018, 04:47)ipecac Wrote: This is a classic kneejerk reaction when distasteful conclusions are suggested: proclaim that 'correlation doesn't mean causation', 'ex post facto fallacy' and the like to avoid considering the possibility.
No, those are the opposite of knee-jerk reactions, and they are not done to avoid considering the possibility: Those are among the things that people who want to base our opinions on evidence have to remind ourselves constantly in order to avoid natural knee-jerk reactions like (in these cases) mistaking correlation for causation or assuming that a temporal relationship between two events represents a causal one. Everybody has those knee-jerk reactions. They are exploitable by marketers of junk products and other charlatans, and they prevent people from forming correct conclusions about the world around them. So we try to catch them and stop ourselves when we notice we're making them, to prevent them from deceiving us, and point them out when others are making them or relying on them, for similar reasons.
(March 13th, 2018, 05:09)ipecac Wrote: As I have said, the prevalence of stories suggest the plausibility; I said nothing about proof. Anecdotes are often excellent leads to follow up.
You can get your hypotheses from anywhere. Then you test them. The hypothesis you described, following up from anecdotes such as you describe, have been tested to death and back again. There is zero evidence even of correlation, never mind causation.
Quote:Somehow (or so we are to understand) environmental factors during pregnancy is associated with autism, but once after birth nothing of the sort can be proposed to similarly adversely affect the child.
Not only can they be proposed, they have been and are. Endlessly. And no evidence has been found linking any of them to autism. All the evidence I can find suggests the Autism is a "birth defect," like spina bifida or a cleft palate. The environmental factors in pregnancy associated with the development of Autism are likewise associated with other birth defects. You seem to be implying that I'm drawing an arbitrary imaginary line at the moment of birth, but (again) everything is more complicated than that. The actual risk factors for autism involve pre-natal developmental intrinsically: A mother drinking large quantities of alcohol during pregnancy is more likely to have an autistic child than one who does not (all else being equal) for instance. This does not mean that a mother, by drinking a glass of wine just before giving birth, could "cause" or even meaningfully affect her child's chance of having autism; that would be ridiculous to assert (like the thing about vaccines). By the time a child is born, its brain has developed to the point where it is no longer at risk for autism, or it's too late (given current medical technology) for it to make those developments. Although, as Dark Savant pointed out, it's true the child might never be diagnosed with autism if it dies before it reaches the developmental stages where it could be noticed....
Quote:Again, these are findings across the general population. You're not actually contradicting what I've said in the earlier post.
What population would you test it against? I want to be clear here: Let us suppose you have a rare allergy that causes you to break out in hives when exposed to something normally non-allergenic that we'll call X. If your allergy is rare enough, then testing across the general population might not show any important correlation between X and hives. But since you've noticed the pattern with yourself, you suspect you have an X allergy. You can usefully test this by eliminating other likely allergens from your environment and testing to see if exposure to X still has the expected effect, and if periods of non-exposure to X are Hives-free. Your allergy is in principle discoverable - and though your particular allergy is rare, allergies in general are common, and known to be triggered by a variety of different environmental things.
Autism isn't like that. There is nothing that can be introduced to a child's environment, by the time the child is born, that has been found to have any impact on the likelihood that a child will have autism.
Quote:People, including yourself, will still talk about 'causes of autism' because that's how we use language.
You can argue about 'causes of autism' as a loose or informal way of talking about preventable risk factors, but not about something that "caused autism" - that's a very significant difference. There is no such thing as "the cause." There are risk factors which we know correlate somewhat with autism, including alcoholism during pregnancy, parental age, and birth weight, but no one would say a child got autism because it was under-weight at birth: No one proposes injecting a fetus with something to make it fatter in the hope that this will prevent birth defects. Not only would the risks (not relating to autism) be very high, but it's effectively certain that low birth weight and autism (and other birth defects) have common causes/risk factors (e.g. premature birth*) and do not directly cause one another.
Similarly, no one would say the father "caused" his kid to have autism by having one at an advanced age, nor that the the mother "gave her child autism" by drinking too much, even though the correlations are significant for these factors, and especially the latter represents a preventable risk. And similarly, no one would refuse to vaccinate a child, accepting all the risks of disease, in the hope of avoiding autism, in light of the fact that there is no reason to suspect a causal relationship - there isn't even any correlation.
(March 13th, 2018, 09:38)ipecac Wrote: What evidence? There hasn't been any evidence here refuting my point.
Here are a few references. If you want someone to refute your claim that your specific child's autism could have been caused by a vaccine, we can only say that for all useful intents and purposes, the evidence refutes this. There is no reason to expect that a vaccine would or even could cause what appears to be a congenital defect, no evidence to suggest that either the general public or any subset thereof is susceptible to somehow becoming more autistic (or less so) by receiving a vaccine, and every indication that autism is not something you can "be given" or "catch" - it's a question of how your brain develops, and the relevant brain development has all occurred by the time you are born. (How long before you're born? It seems to be variable...*)
Quote:What I have seen in the discussion in this threat is the assumption that seriously considering the controversial claim implies ignorance, the post hoc fallacy, or the attitude of "Science has been wrong about many things, therefore it is plausible that science is wrong about this thing I want it to be wrong about in spite of literally all the evidence being against me."
I obviously didn't communicate this successfully: You are not an ignoramus, and I do not and did not intend to imply that you are. I do not intend "ignorance" as an insult: We are all ignorant about lots of different things, even in areas of which we have made an intense study; even the best players on this site are ignorant of some things about Civ4! None of us is omniscient. But ignorance in a given area is curable by learning stuff about it! So I'm trying to teach anyone who feels like reading my ridiculously long posts some things I have learned about autism. So with that in mind, here's an attempt to explain what I was saying more clearly:
One reason a person might suppose that autism might be caused by a vaccine is because they are ignorant of the evidence to the contrary; again, this does not make them "an ignorant person," it just means there's some stuff about this subject of which they're not aware. Another reason a person might make the same supposition is because they have fallen victim to the post-hoc fallacy, to which all of us are susceptible. One good defense against it is to watch out for it and be skeptical of conclusions based on it. Yet another reason might be the attitude I described, which I hope and assume does not describe you in particular. There are various other reasons a person might choose to ignore the evidence, such as being a troll who wants to maximize the number of posts in Dark Savant's spoiler thread. I don't actually know or pretend to know the reason you in particular are posting; I'm just describing the only possibilities I can see. Regardless, I want to say: The stuff you're posting is incorrect, but being mistaken is not intrinsically a bad thing, and doesn't reflect badly on anybody; it's just an opportunity to learn. Lots and lots and lots of people believe that vaccines cause autism. They are completely wrong, and endanger their children and the society in which they live, but that's almost never their fault; they just don't know the facts. It would be pretty great if they did!
Relatedly: In theory, another reason for making that supposition might be that the person making it is privy to exciting new research that overturns all the previous, extensive research in the field! That would be super exciting if the new research proved true! Unfortunately, in cases like this, it almost never is; this is one of those extraordinary claims that require extraordinary evidence. But occasionally, in any field, there's a giant breakthrough!
* - Okay, so on premature birth: I was under the impression that Roe/Wade de-facto just said "third trimester abortions are not okay; earlier is fine," but I'm not intimately familiar with the decision. If it has to do with our ability to keep the baby alive, then it's relevant to this too: It turns out that we are really, really good at keeping really, really sick people alive - including babies that are born very prematurely - sometimes for months or even years. But the more prematurely the baby leaves the womb, the greater the risk of birth defects, and the more severe those defects tend to be. At present there's nothing we can do about this, no matter what instruments we use, except to just keep the child alive as long as we can and hope the dice roll our way. The baby's chance is much, much better if it manages to stay in the womb.
(March 13th, 2018, 09:41)ipecac Wrote: We can expect that when the advances in incubation technology are made, someone will file a lawsuit over 'it's not right to invade my body to extract and place my fetus in an incubator', and there'll be a new ruling.
Fortunately, no such law is contemplated, so no such lawsuit will take place. The bit about surviving outside the womb is purely theoretical: The argument Dark Savant is addressing is whether the right to abortion should be dependant on whether we could keep the child alive outside the womb, which (as mentioned above) is difficult to assess because it's really a complicated roll of the dice at every stage. Under no circumstance would Roe/Wade dictate actually removing the child from the womb for incubation, though I guess I could imagine a dystopic fictional world in which "abortion risks" are removed that way to prevent mothers from getting abortions illegally....
![[Image: t030-dense-trees-near-germanjoey.jpg?raw=1]](https://www.dropbox.com/s/3krjxex2cvwem7q/t030-dense-trees-near-germanjoey.jpg?raw=1)
![[Image: t030-magical-blue-circles.jpg?raw=1]](https://www.dropbox.com/s/spqr9aznwa5ahj5/t030-magical-blue-circles.jpg?raw=1)
![[Image: t030-lots-of-food-no-one-else.jpg?raw=1]](https://www.dropbox.com/s/i7wegushh2zvor3/t030-lots-of-food-no-one-else.jpg?raw=1)
Well, Antigonus has a roughly 75% chance to survive that bear [...] ~5%+ chance it just won't attack.
![[Image: t031-germanjoey-second-city.jpg?raw=1]](https://www.dropbox.com/s/5y0lgrvje1lqrmm/t031-germanjoey-second-city.jpg?raw=1)
![[Image: t031-that-bear-is-still-there.jpg?raw=1]](https://www.dropbox.com/s/dosozqqp94xf2gj/t031-that-bear-is-still-there.jpg?raw=1)
![[Image: t031-another-neighbor-sighted.jpg?raw=1]](https://www.dropbox.com/s/ia8e1bdl3yka42l/t031-another-neighbor-sighted.jpg?raw=1)
Whoa, someone 
