[SPOILER] Dark Savant graduates from blatant n00b to plain n00b

[Dark Savant]

Turn 35 (2600 BC) - Part 2 (C&D)

Elkad continues to put EP into me.  I need 1 EP to keep pace this turn.

11000 soldiers appeared this turn.

Points at interturn:

• Aretas - +6 points for an unknown 7-turn technology.  Aretas is apparently pursuing just the cheapest techs (he's score leader from having a lot of early tech), which means he isn't going to have either Animal Husbandry or especially Bronze Working anything remotely resembling quickly.
  
• Donovan Zoi - +6 points for a 10-turn technology (probably The Wheel).
  
• GermanJoey - +1 point for +1 pop in city #2 (6 pop total in 2 cities).
  
• plako - +1 point for +1 pop (5 pop total in 2 cities).
  
• Shallow Old Human Tourist - +1 point for +1 pop (5 pop total in 3 cities).
  

I should remember to go look at city names and naming schemes too when I play turn 36.

Points during turn:

• dtay - +1 point for planting city #3 (3 pop total in 3 cities).  I wouldn't drop to 1 pop in my capital for this long (it's been size 1 for 3 turns), unless I had only one developed food resource there.  I wonder what he knows that I don't?
  
• WilliamLP - +1 point for for planting city #2 (5 pop total).
  

[Dark Savant]

Ooh, Chase is offering is offering 5% off on all Paypal purchases with its Freedom credit card from April to June.

5% off all the collectible computer games I buy from eBay!  

I recently successfully sniped a copy of Infocom's Classic Mystery Trilogy on eBay.  Only went for about $150; I was expecting far more carnage on that because people went nuts on the other items that collector selling inventory had.

I don't have the Starcross saucer or the Suspended mask yet.  Yes, there are copies on eBay, but I don't care for unopened software unlike many other collectors.  Yes, $2000+ for an unopened Starcross saucer is actually reasonable.

This has been a Dark Savant Blog / postcount++ Post.

[Dark Savant]

Tiamat was originally the Babylonian goddess of the sea.  Whether she was a dragon or not is not entirely clear.

Somehow, in 1st Edition AD&D, Gary Gygax made her the queen of the chromatic dragons.



That was influential enough to kick off a wave of multiheaded Tiamats everywhere.

1. Probably the most-well known incarnation is the Final Fantasy I Fiend of Wind.
   
   It's not actually practical to cast BANE on her, in my experience.
   
   
2. She appears as the Caveman quest nemesis in Nethack.  It never says so in gameplay, but the game encyclopedia does.  Less well-known: The Dark One (Wizard quest nemesis) is actually Sauron.
   
   Tiamat used to appear in Angband, but she was removed from the game when a bunch of the other dragon uniques got upgrades.  I already have Angband covered; Glaurung has been a unique in that game from the earliest public version to the latest version I've played (v4.1.1).
   
   
3. The Tiamat Brood is one of the Zerg factions in the original Starcraft.
   
   
4. Like the other FF1 fiends, Tiamat reappears in Final Fantasy IX towards the end of the game.
   
   That was about the time when there were so many games now being produced, I mostly stopped playing console games.  (Originally, I'd play anything and everything I could get my hands on.)
   
   
5. Tiamat appears as a hybrid of the original and the modern version in Order of the Stick.
   
   

There's more, depending on how you answer questions like "are Takhisis and Tiamat the same being", but that's just off the top of my head.  

[Dark Savant]

I've come to the conclusion that I can't make long-term plans just yet.  Too much rides on where copper pops up on turn 39 for me to have any real plan for where to plant city #3, and because of that I can't even conclusively say I'll research The Wheel next.  I'll set aside all Wednesday evening for a planning thinkfest.

Once I have Bronze Working and three workers, the plan is to produce settlers for two more cities as fast as I can manage them.

[Dark Savant]

Turn 36 (2560 BC) - Part 1

Stupid bears.



Wandering Angus lost at ~25% odds.  Ah well, he did win against the odds last time, and I do have everything truly important scouted.  I'd love to build more scouts, but I won't be able to spare production on one for a while.

There's not much I can do until Bronze Working comes in other than finish that pasture and build a random mine because why not.  Let's look around.  Hey, what's this?



Donovan Zoi spent 60 hammers on a barracks in Thought Control, without even yet having a second city.  It's probably been there for a few turns; I hadn't thought to look because people usually don't construct buildings this early.

I'm not sure if this is an overreaction on defense because of my early incursion, or if he seeks to actively retaliate, but I think there's no way I don't research The Wheel next.

If he has a warrior rush incoming soon, I'll have trouble holding even that off if he stumbles into Tiamat.  That's not something I plan to worry much about, since I can't do anything if it's going to hit very soon.

[Dark Savant]

Turn 36 (2560 BC) - Part 2 (C&D)

Elkad stopped putting EP into me, so I ease off there.  Donovan Zoi and GermanJoey both continue to put all the EP into me they can; GermanJoey will get graphs on me next turn.

31000 soldiers appeared this turn.

Points at interturn:

• AdrienIer - +1 point for +1 pop (5 pop total in 2 cities).
  
• Boldly Going Nowhere - +1 point for +1 pop (6 pop in his only city).  He's Charismatic so he hasn't gone past the happy cap, but I wonder what tiles all those citizens are working.
  
• Commodore - +1 point for +1 pop (4 pop total in 2 cities, probably with 2 pop each).
  
• dtay - +1 point for +1 pop (4 pop total in 3 cities).  I presume that is in his capital.
  
• Gavagai - +1 point for +1 pop (5 pop total in 2 cities).
  
• GermanJoey - +1 point for +1 pop (7 pop total in 2 cities).  His size-5 capital is now at the happy cap.
  
• naufragar - +1 point for +1 pop (4 pop total in 3 cities).  Probably also in his capital.
  
• plako - +6 points for a 12-turn technology, probably Bronze Working.
  
• superdeath - +1 point for +1 pop (4 pop total in 2 cities).
  

Points during turn, so far:

• Dreylin - -1 pop for a 1-pop whip (4 pop total in 2 cities).  That's two whips in three turns, I wonder if he's whipping and overflowing into Stonehenge (he's Industrious).
  
• B4ndit - +1 point for planting city #2 (edit)
  

(I'll edit this post if anything else comes up during turn 36, but not on later turns.)

Rivals who do not yet have second cities:

• 2metraninja
  
• Aretas
  
• B4ndit (edit: planted this turn)
  
• Boldly Going Nowhere (growing tall)
  
• Donovan Zoi (might be attacking me on one city)
  

That includes two of my four contacts.  If Donovan Zoi's might-be-a-rush doesn't hit for at least several more turns, I should be in reasonable shape.

(Donovan Zoi probably can't be hitting me with metal units quite that quickly, since he can't have had both The Wheel and Bronze Working until turn 35 at the very earliest.  If copper is conveniently placed riverside for him, that's a problem.)

[RefSteel]

More off-topic stuff because I finally got around to reading ipecac's most-recent post:

They often are, not always, but often.

I'm sure they may often appear to be knee-jerk reactions, but remember that you're not a mind-reader.  As well, these biases are real, and affect everybody, regardless of what motivates someone to mention the fact.  Knowing about them and being reminded of them - whether by oneself or by others - is very helpful for figuring out what's actually going on and avoiding deceiving oneself.  Dismissing them as 'knee-jerk' isn't really helpful for anything:  The point isn't why someone says something (I made a similar mistake in trying to figure out "why" you were posting what you did earlier in this thread) but whether what they're saying has merit.

As I've pointed out multiple times, it's been tested on large populations, which swamps out any possible subgroup.

But you didn't suggest any possible subgroup that ought to be tested.  Also, you may be underestimating the amount of effort that goes into ensuring that this does not happen; it is a phenomenon of which scientists are aware.  Meanwhile, you have said that the reason you think there's any point in testing it is because of "before and after stories" ... which come from the same large, general population that is being tested.  The only way to include all these "before and after stories" is to test the general population, because the stories come from people from all walks of life - with the sometimes-when-they-manage-to-remember exception of people who have heard of the post-facto fallacy and therefore know better.

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.

Exactly the analogy I had in mind, rare allergies. All you can say is that it's difficult to test. Certainly, identifying a likely sub-population is near-impossible given that we don't know all that much about autism.

You seem to have missed a couple of points here:

1) I asked (you even quoted it) what possible subgroup you would test instead of the general population.  This is very important if you want your hypothesis to relate to testing a subgroup!

2) One thing about a rare allergy is that non-rare allergies also exist, as do other, different rare allergies.  An allergic reaction is a common way that the body breaks down in response to otherwise-harmless stuff in its environment, and it responds to different things in different people.  But we know that's not the case with autism:  That's why I pointed out that there is no evidence of any post-natal environmental factor that correlates with autism.  Also, as I should have added, there are no pre-natal risk factors for autism that are not also risk factors for other varieties of birth defects.

Which raises a question:  Do you acknowledge that Autism can arise as a birth defect?  There is a lot of evidence that it can and does.  But if so, you appear to be trying to say that autism - though normally, in the general population, resulting from birth defects - in some small, unknown subgroup is actually caused by one very specific environmental factor.  I don't see any known mechanism by which that factor could even possibly have that effect, and I don't see one being suggested, but that seems to be the claim.

Except it's not enough for the subgroup to be very small - so small that it can be overlooked in large studies that are specifically looking for associations between that specific malady and that specific environmental factor - because then there would have to be no other subgroup in which any other non-birth-defect-related environmental factor has a similar effect unless each group was also too small to be detected in various studies.  Also, the different subgroups' ... autism triggers? ... would have to be sufficiently unrelated to one another that a group of similar triggers wouldn't move the needle on a large study.  (Although if you're basing this on before-and-after stories, I guess you have to say that vaccines are somehow the only environmental factor that applies, or else wouldn't there be lots of other before-and-after stories about the other possible causes?)

The nice thing about allergies is that it is easy to do before-and-after tests on a specific patient repeatedly under controlled circumstances.

Er.  Actually, unless there have been some significant advances in the past few years, testing for allergies is often incredibly difficult - because patients are never in controlled circumstances, and rarely have just one allergy.  You can't control when a new weed will grow in a patient's backyard or when a coworker in the next cubicle will be given a big can of roasted peanuts as a holiday gift, and though packaged foods increasingly list common allergens, it's hard to know which of the innumerable ingredients come from where if you have to dig for rare ones, and [etc ad nauseum].  You can do before-and-after tests, but before-and-after tests are usually misleading; you have to do a lot of tests, eliminating a lot of potential allergens as well as you can, and then maybe you can narrow it down if it happens to be something over which you have control or can reasonably detect or infer.  Sometimes it's super easy:  Some reactions can be obvious and immediate.  But for many people, identifying their specific allergies is hard, and all they can say for sure is that they have allergies to something, and probably several things.  As I think Dark Savant was saying when this whole subthread started, science is complicated and messy.

But do you see the difference here?  With an allergy, we see a reaction that is normally caused by the body reacting to environmental factors.  We therefore can try to determine which environmental factors are triggering it, and we can try to reduce the severity of the adverse reaction, e.g. with antihistamines (or in the case of severe bee sting allergies, epinephrine injections).  With autism, we see a set of limitations and behaviors that are normally associated with the same stuff as various birth defects, and are developmental in nature.  We can look for environmental factors anyway, and we do, and we haven't found any.  But understand that you aren't proposing that a small subgroup is having an "autism reaction" to a different environmental factor than other people have; as far as we've been able to tell, there is no such thing as such a reaction to anything.  So you are saying that one specific arbitrary thing in a person's environment, through mysterious mechanisms not attempted to be described, causes - not a range of different reactions like allergies, and nothing localized or systemic - but this one specific type of developmental limitation, specifically in the brain, in some undefined, tiny subset of the population.  Do you see why this suggestion seems extraordinary, even before we find that the evidence in support of it is not only not extraordinary but non-existent?

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.

We can only say that the evidence does not suggest or refute it for the specific child.

For all useful intents and purposes though, the evidence absolutely refutes this claim.  If you your child tries to run into the street, and your spouse prevents this and lectures the child about traffic safety, and a few days later, the child comes down with pneumonia, you could say that the evidence "neither suggests nor refutes" the claim that your spouse's specific traffic lecture gave your specific child pneumonia, but the claim would be just as ridiculous as the one about vaccines and autism.

Or that the person is thinking about the matter, and sees a possible hypothesis that can be tested to overturn the existing paradigm.

Lots of giant breakthroughs come from someone first advancing a hypothesis regarded as generally insane or unlikely by everyone educated in the field.

Totally possible!  But you need a hypothesis first.  An untestable assertion about an individual instance is not a hypothesis.  A call to shrink the sample size of empirical testing without even specifying a subgroup to test is not a hypothesis.  You can have a notion about possible causes of autism, and you can try to frame a hypothesis from your notion, but a hypothesis must make specific, testable predictions in order to be a hypothesis at all.

I am willing to contemplate these 'crazy' ideas, especially when they are plausible- you yourself admit that the large studies of the general population can't rule out meaningful correlations within small sub-populations.

I'm not going to talk about this use of "you yourself" or "admit" because it's easier to just point out what I actually said:

It is true that "correlation between X and Y does not appear in the general population" does not by itself rule out "this specific instance of X might have contributed to this specific instance of Y," but there is no reason to believe that any vaccine has ever contributed to the development of Autism in anyone ever

I'm not going to try to stop you from contemplating ideas, crazy or not.  I think contemplating crazy ideas is fun and cool!  The idea that vaccines cause autism is utterly implausible, not only but partly because well-conducted studies have been done that for all intents and purposes do rule it out, partly (but again only in part) because these studies are not just checking for a correlation between X and Y; well-conducted studies anticipate and control for obfuscating factors, and if there is any reason to believe that any particular subset of the population might be worth looking at in particular, targeted studies can be done - though if the subgroup is small enough (never mind one person) this would be a useless exercise statistically.  You haven't proposed a specific subgroup though - apart from a subgroup of one, which you specifically said was not testable - which means that for all intents and purposes you're still talking about the general population, since you've made no attempt to distinguish it.

And again:  On this subject, there are numerous other reasons to infer that there is no link between any vaccine and autism - everything we know about vaccines, autism, and human development suggests that the hypothesis is wrong, whereas no evidence anywhere (anecdotal evidence isn't) supports the idea that there is or could be any link.
And by itself, this wouldn't matter - talking about it might be a waste of time, but that's about all.  But in this cae, the costs to any given child of not being vaccinated, and to the society at large if a significant number of children are not vaccinated, are enormous, and many people in fact avoid vaccinating their children exactly because they've been deceived into thinking there's a link.  Moreover, because anti-vaxxers have gotten a lot of media attention, a lot of resources have been wasted on studies like the ones I linked, instead of being used for actually-promising areas of autism research.  We know very little about autism beyond the fact that it isn't caused by environmental stuff - and retreading the debate over a preposterous claim invented by people trying to make a quick (large number of) buck(s) is part of the reason we don't know more than we do.

[Dark Savant]

I spent more time on OSG-32a than I thought I would (reporting at the level of detail I want takes much more time than actually playing), so I got thrown off my Civ 4 schedule -- no chance to report on last turn and play the current turn until this morning (I'm already second-to-last at best).

Turn 37 (2520 BC)

Donovan Zoi is scouting close to Glaurung.



Nothing suspicious about that, right? 

Not much else to report, seeing as how I'm currently not doing any scouting and Bronze Working won't arrive for 2 turns.

C&D

B4ndit planted city #2 last turn.

27000 soldiers appeared this turn.

Points at turn:

• Commodore: +1 point for +1 pop (4 pop total in 2 cities).
  
• Donovan Zoi: +1 point for +1 pop (3 pop in 1 city)
  
• Dreylin: +6 points for a 7-turn technology (I'm guessing Agriculture -- he's researching quickly for this point in the game); +1 point for +1 pop (5 pop total in 2 cities).
  
• dtay: +1 point for +1 pop (5 pop total in 3 cities).
  
• Elkad: +1 point for +1 pop (5 pop total in 2 cities).
  
• mackoti: +6 point for an 8-turn technology.  I'm guessing this is Pottery.
  
• naufragar: +1 point for +1 pop (5 pop total in 3 cities).
  
• pindicator: +2 points for +2 pop (5 pop total in 2 cities).
  
• plako: +1 point for +1 pop (6 pop total in 2 cities).
  
• Shallow Old Human Tourist: +6 points for an 8-turn technology.  I'm guessing their last two technologies are probably Fishing and The Wheel.
  

Points during turn:

• Mr. Cairo: -1 point for a 1-pop whip (4 pop total in 2 cities).
  
• Rusten: +1 point for planting city #3 (6 pop total in 3 cities).
  
• WilliamLP: -2 points for a 2-pop whip in his capital (3 pop total in 2 cities).
  

I'm trying not to be too worried that my opening is too slow, especially if I have to build any sort of early real military.  

[Dark Savant]

Just got a PM from Donovan Zoi that the turn split is active again.

This is exactly the turn on which I'm most vulnerable to a warrior rush at Tiamat.  That's not good news at all.  If he attacks either one turn earlier or one turn later, he probably can't capture the city.



I won't have time to look until later this evening.

[Dark Savant]

Okay, Donovan Zoi has a single Holkan, which probably has 3 XP.

I completely forgot he can build those with no metal at all.  

I'm not sure how to respond to this -- if I ever could at all with my original gameplan.  You need Bronze Working much earlier against such an opponent on a relatively congested map, and my original plan could never get it earlier than about now.

I have Bronze Working now, and revolted to Slavery.  The only thing I can think of is to build a settler ASAP and grab the copper that's to my northeast as soon as possible, and move all my existing warriors to Tiamat to try to pin down the holkan (with poor odds, but I'm not sure I have a better option).

I thought he'd have a bunch of warriors, and that I was short 2 flasks or 1 turn of being able to revolt to Slavery so I could whip a warrior and be safe, but two warriors will barely slow down a City Raider holkan.