(March 27th, 2018, 14:41)Dark Savant Wrote: I never got a chance to sim this to be sure, but isn't all I need one road? If I build a road and mine on the copper with an archer sitting on top of it, and plant a city on the riverside tile to its south, the river should supply copper to my capital, right?
Or I could plant directly on the copper, and build and guard one road to the river -- I'm less sure trade routes work that way (I'd have simmed it to be sure).
I *think* but am not sure that you need Sailing to have trade connections on rivers outside your borders. But I might be wrong, or you might have simmed that in time to get Sailing before it became relevant, so let's assume it's possible.
I'm definitely confident that by the time you got three archers, a settler, and have started walking (if he didn't attack), that he would have at least two Holkans in your territory, maybe three. That gets to be enough that you probably can't cover anything important with a single unit. Which means you need to add in another couple archers (got to cover copper + city + city), which might give him time to bring up another Holkan...
I'm sure eventually you'd have gotten copper connected, at which point axes beat Holkans, but I'm also sure it's at least 20 turns before you regain control of your territory. That's enough delay at this stage of the game that you'd have both been out of the running, just waiting for a third party to sweep in with Knights.
(March 24th, 2018, 22:11)RefSteel Wrote: Spoiling the off-topic stuff in the hope that the game will become fun enough again that you'll appreciate ease of scrolling past things that have nothing to do with the game.
Ipecac, "no [post-natal] environmental causes are [known risk factors]" was my apparently-mistaken understanding of the situation. Saying that it "reeks of ... overhyping" doesn't really help anything. Pointing out that it's mistaken is helpful though, which is what Bacchus did!
It is actually frankly disturbing that you, despite being well-read on the topic, are unaware that post-natal environmental risk factors are quite likely. As before, I attribute it to your sources, well-intentioned against the threat of 'anti-vaxxers destroying herd immunity', making the blanket overstatement.
Quote:The quote you included from the article is taken out of context, and consequently may convey a mistaken impression. From earlier in the same section, for instance: "Of note, additional community and research attention regarding vaccines and autism has focused on measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine, which never contained thimerosal and so is outside the scope of this review." The specific cases referred to by "these studies" are those specifically testing thimerosal only; all the other studies of which I'm aware (i.e. the ones "beyond the scope of this reveiw") have supported the hypothesis that non-thimerosal vaccines also are not associated with ASD.
A fair correction, I had missed out that earlier bit.
Quote:So let's put it this way:
The most important thing is that autism can be caused by post-birth environmental stimuli. What seemed ridiculous from the start is the claim that it isn't, taken together with the statements that autism is complex, the definition keeps changing and we don't actually know what's the mechanism or the cause.
It really smelled wrong, despite having basically only skimmed a little material on the topic intuitively I knew there's something very wrong and I'm glad that Bacchus linked that paper.
Quote:1) As far as I can tell, there is no evidence of any vaccine being a risk factor for ASD, in spite of numerous attempts to find a link.
2) Those attempts have not covered every possible subgroup of vaccines and vaccine co-agents, and therefore have not completely ruled out every possible case for every subgroup of the population; doing that would presumably be difficult if not impossible. (This may have been your original point?)
3) Just to be sure I don't misunderstand: Do you think that any actual parent should ever consider not having a child vaccinated on the basis of the idea, "What if there is a risk of the child getting autism?"
If your answer to 3 is "No, there's no evidence at all that there is any such risk," I think we basically agree. If your answer to 3 is "Yes," then under what circumstances do you think it would be worth considering that course on that basis?
1) has to be limited with 'for the large populations tested'
2) is my original point
3) is a definite, especially with diseases that are much milder. Take mumps, as compared to polio or rubella, for instance. Even something like Hepatitis A might be fine since the mortality risk seems to only be high beyond age 50 or so. Influenza and varicella are other viable vaccines to omit.
Yes, there is a recommended vaccine for chickenpox, and we all survived without it. Vaccines aren't all equally necessary.
(March 26th, 2018, 08:30)BRickAstley Wrote: I'm very interested in this topic, seeing as i'm in the middle of 3 generations of people with diagnosed ASD: my father, brother, and son (And with hindsight, maybe myself on the very light end of the spectrum). Through our varied first few years of upbringing, the circumstantial evidence says to me that vaccines are not a cause of autism, but could very likely increase severity in symptoms if given in the wrong window.
I think that's another viable hypothesis, but they may not get around to testing it for fear of people rejecting vaccinations.
(March 28th, 2018, 00:02)ipecac Wrote: Yes, there is a recommended vaccine for chickenpox, and we all survived without it. Vaccines aren't all equally necessary
Well, of course we did. Dead people don't post on RB. Speaking of statistical fallacies...
It may not be a guaranteed death sentence...but it's still riskier than a lot of things we want to stop. It used to cause about 100 deaths a year and ~20,000 hospitalizations (source: https://academic.oup.com/jid/article/182/2/383/2190935 )
Plus, of course, sentencing a kid to a week of maddening itching instead of 5 minutes of fear of needles.
I mean, I can't argue with 'aren't all equally necessary', there are certainly deadlier diseases and I'm glad they developed the smallpox and polio vaccines first. But all you're presenting is 'haven't disproven a small, subtle connection yet'. Why worry more about vaccines than, say, quinoa? My ancestors never ate quinoa, and I'm sure there hasn't been a full body of research on quinoa and autism
(March 28th, 2018, 00:02)ipecac Wrote: It is actually frankly disturbing that you, despite being well-read on the topic, are unaware that post-natal environmental risk factors are quite likely.
As mentioned, my information on the subject was mostly out of date. Also note the past tense: I'm not unaware of this anymore! I do feel I overstated my position and implied more complete/recent knowledge than I had, mostly I think because of my emotional response to the aggressive tone and lack of content in your replies (for instance, "It is actually frankly disturbing" adds nothing but ad-hominem) I tried to moderate that response, but it leaked out anyway.
Quote:It really smelled wrong, despite having basically only skimmed a little material on the topic intuitively I knew there's something very wrong and I'm glad that Bacchus linked that paper.
For example, this. Each time I thought about it, I felt like I had to be overstating it, but I didn't try to find better information when I could have done so. I'm really glad Bacchus corrected me and linked some better information on the subject as well!
Quote:
Quote:1) As far as I can tell, there is no evidence of any vaccine being a risk factor for ASD, in spite of numerous attempts to find a link.
1) has to be limited with 'for the large populations tested'
There's no evidence of vaccines being a risk factor outside of those large populations either, though. Not every group and not every vaccine has been tested, but of the many tests that have been tried, none has found a link.
Quote:
Quote:2) Those attempts have not covered every possible subgroup of vaccines and vaccine co-agents, and therefore have not completely ruled out every possible case for every subgroup of the population; doing that would presumably be difficult if not impossible. (This may have been your original point?)
2) is my original point
Okay, good, then I think we're on the same page there!
Quote:
Quote:3) Just to be sure I don't misunderstand: Do you think that any actual parent should ever consider not having a child vaccinated on the basis of the idea, "What if there is a risk of the child getting autism?"
3) is a definite, especially with diseases that are much milder. Take mumps, as compared to polio or rubella, for instance. Even something like Hepatitis A might be fine since the mortality risk seems to only be high beyond age 50 or so. Influenza and varicella are other viable vaccines to omit.
So I'm trying to understand this. It can't be that you're saying that, on the basis of zero evidence, "it might be fine" to refrain from giving a child a Hepatitis A vaccine since "the mortality risk [of Hepatitis A] seems to only be high beyond age 50 or so"? How high a mortality risk do you need? (Influenza, and varicella are also deadly diseases for a non-zero portion of the population) I assume therefore that you mean there are some parents - surely not all the members of the general public, since the large tests of the general public have indeed shown that there is not even the slightest correlation between vaccination and autistic symptoms - who are different, who are members of a group for which you think a link might exist. So which group? If there is a specific group for which there's reason to think there might be a problem, and it's large enough to test with a meaningful sample size, then maybe another study would be useful to support or debunk the hypothesis. Until you identify such a group though, there is no hypothesis: You are effectively talking about the general public, and at that point, the large body of evidence that already exists is against you.
So let's look at:
(March 28th, 2018, 00:17)ipecac Wrote:
(March 26th, 2018, 08:30)BRickAstley Wrote: I'm very interested in this topic, seeing as i'm in the middle of 3 generations of people with diagnosed ASD: my father, brother, and son (And with hindsight, maybe myself on the very light end of the spectrum). Through our varied first few years of upbringing, the circumstantial evidence says to me that vaccines are not a cause of autism, but could very likely increase severity in symptoms if given in the wrong window.
I think that's another viable hypothesis, but they may not get around to testing it for fear of people rejecting vaccinations.
That's a possible starting point for a hypothesis: This could in principle be tested in different windows ... although ... it kind of already has. Increased severity of symptoms from "on the spectrum like everybody else" to "on the spectrum with severe enough symptoms that we call it autism" is the same thing as "Autism." And that's been tested, and no window has been found in which vaccination correlates with autism - that is, in other words, there seems to be no correlation between vaccination and increased symptoms of autism.
You could try a hypothesis that asks a question like "Does vaccination increase risk for people already considered at-risk for autism for other reasons?" - my guess is that this has already been examined and the answer shown to be no, but I don't know any studies of this specifically off the top of my head, so it's possibly still out there to be researched. Or if you define levels of severity in some useful way, you could try to test a hypothesis that would predict something like vaccinated children being less likely to test as "borderline autistic" and more likely to test as "super extremely autistic" or something, though you'd have to define the terms a lot better than that for the question to even mean anything for predictive purposes.
But, ipecac, you are still not a mind reader. And in particular, what you describe is the opposite of a reason any given permutation of the autism/vaccination myth would not be gotten around to. It is exactly fear of people irrationally rejecting vaccinations that drives these studies to keep on getting done, over and over again, in slightly different forms with each new permutation of the myth, because so many people keep insisting that there must be some connection in spite of no supporting evidence, and in spite of the still-growing mountains of evidence that there's no connection at all. Yet more studies of increasingly-limited permutations of the same myth make no sense from the perspective of someone trying to learn about Autism risk factors. It's a much better idea to examine correlations that have been shown to exist: Stuff like what types of air pollution create risks, and at what periods of development, and at what levels of exposure (to take one example that's been studied, but really not enough).
The reason these studies of vaccinations and autism keep getting done is exactly because public health organizations are afraid of people rejecting vaccinations and therefore keep trying to fight the innumerable permutations of this myth that keeps rearing its various heads and making their job of protecting the public health that much more difficult. They're doing it wrong, of course: You can't kill a hydra by cutting off its heads. But they aren't responsible for educating the public in critical thinking skills (including, but in no way limited to, recognizing the post-facto fallacy, confirmation bias, and anecdotal or "circumstantial" evidence) and that's about the only way to stop a hydra like this. And so they keep doing what they can do: Study after study that addresses whatever issues have lately been raised in the public sphere, regardless of their scientific merits.
On civ stuff:
(March 27th, 2018, 21:52)ipecac Wrote: Often it's better to just abandon cities prevent the attacker from getting exp.
Yup, especially when the odds are as bad as were expected here. People will even delete pillaging units and the like just to deny opponents free XP. And in this case, the warrior didn't have to be deleted, but could have been moved out and saved for future defenses or zerg attacks or Million Warrior Defense tactics or the like.
Also, on Glaurung's defense: I wouldn't have moved the Worker into the path of the W2 Holkan, I'd have moved it into the capital like you did.
...but I'd have moved the warrior out of the capital into the forest through which the Holk had to move. The Holkan would have had odds on the warrior, but couldn't have taken the city since he couldn't attack the Worker on the same turn. Compared to moving the Worker into the forest, likewise guaranteeing the city lives, you're probably one Warrior down, but his Holkan's probably hurt, and you're one Worker up and he's one Worker down. That's not an easy tactic to see though, and I don't fault you at all for missing it. I think you defended creditably, and Donovan needed a lot of luck to get back in the game at your expense like this. And yeah, like Mardoc said, this isn't all that unbalancing; it basically just catches him up to the pack. It'll still be a major upset if he wins.
EDIT: Also, Good luck in PB39! I won't see you thread for a long time there though, sadly; I promised JR4 I'd dedlurk him again (though with much less time investment this time through).
Quote:There's no evidence of vaccines being a risk factor outside of those large populations either, though. Not every group and not every vaccine has been tested, but of the many tests that have been tried, none has found a link.
There's barely been any testing, I'd imagine. Most testing is of large populations, followed by a smooth discrediting of all the anti-vaxxers' concerns.
Quote: So I'm trying to understand this. It can't be that you're saying that, on the basis of zero evidence, "it might be fine" to refrain from giving a child a Hepatitis A vaccine since "the mortality risk [of Hepatitis A] seems to only be high beyond age 50 or so"? How high a mortality risk do you need? (Influenza, and varicella are also deadly diseases for a non-zero portion of the population)
You asked, " Do you think that any actual parent should ever consider not having a child vaccinated on the basis of the idea, "What if there is a risk of the child getting autism?""
So I think that the actual parents should decide on what threshold of risk they're willing to accept. It's not zero evidence, since the mortality rates are not at all high for children.
Quote:I assume therefore that you mean there are some parents - surely not all the members of the general public, since the large tests of the general public have indeed shown that there is not even the slightest correlation between vaccination and autistic symptoms - who are different, who are members of a group for which you think a link might exist. So which group? If there is a specific group for which there's reason to think there might be a problem, and it's large enough to test with a meaningful sample size, then maybe another study would be useful to support or debunk the hypothesis. Until you identify such a group though, there is no hypothesis: You are effectively talking about the general public, and at that point, the large body of evidence that already exists is against you.
My original point has been that 'my child's autism was caused by a vaccine he was given' and 'vaccination has not been implicated in the general population with autism' can both be true. Harping on the general population studies doesn't refute it.
Quote: That's a possible starting point for a hypothesis: This could in principle be tested in different windows ... although ... it kind of already has. Increased severity of symptoms from "on the spectrum like everybody else" to "on the spectrum with severe enough symptoms that we call it autism" is the same thing as "Autism." And that's been tested, and no window has been found in which vaccination correlates with autism - that is, in other words, there seems to be no correlation between vaccination and increased symptoms of autism.
I took Brick to be saying that increased severity meant something like from mildly autistic to severely autistic. I don't think that's ever been done.
Quote:You could try a hypothesis that asks a question like "Does vaccination increase risk for people already considered at-risk for autism for other reasons?" - my guess is that this has already been examined
My guess is that you are wrong, this has not been tested, not least because we don't know much about the precise risk factors of autism at all.
Quote: But, ipecac, you are still not a mind reader. And in particular, what you describe is the opposite of a reason any given permutation of the autism/vaccination myth would not be gotten around to. It is exactly fear of people irrationally rejecting vaccinations that drives these studies to keep on getting done, over and over again, in slightly different forms with each new permutation of the myth, because so many people keep insisting that there must be some connection in spite of no supporting evidence, and in spite of the still-growing mountains of evidence that there's no connection at all. Yet more studies of increasingly-limited permutations of the same myth make no sense from the perspective of someone trying to learn about Autism risk factors. It's a much better idea to examine correlations that have been shown to exist: Stuff like what types of air pollution create risks, and at what periods of development, and at what levels of exposure (to take one example that's been studied, but really not enough).
Your insistence that there is no supporting evidence is tired, how many times must it be pointed out to you about the changes that parents have seen.
What I have seen is people trumpeting the general population studies as if they're the last words on the matter, and also repeating extremely unlikely things about autism like you did.
(March 28th, 2018, 00:02)ipecac Wrote: Yes, there is a recommended vaccine for chickenpox, and we all survived without it. Vaccines aren't all equally necessary
Well, of course we did. Dead people don't post on RB. Speaking of statistical fallacies...
Speaking of rhetoric...
Quote:It may not be a guaranteed death sentence...but it's still riskier than a lot of things we want to stop. It used to cause about 100 deaths a year and ~20,000 hospitalizations (source: https://academic.oup.com/jid/article/182/2/383/2190935 )
The point is that in life, parents take certain risks with their children. Eg if parents are fine with taking kids on a car journey (and death in car accidents are much higher than 100 deaths a year), the risk of mortality from chicken pox is comparatively nothing.
Quote:Plus, of course, sentencing a kid to a week of maddening itching instead of 5 minutes of fear of needles.
The consideration for such concerned parents, if they have such a concern with this specific vaccine, would be 'a lifetime of autism vs a week of maddening itching', to which again the resulting conclusion is obvious.
Quote:But all you're presenting is 'haven't disproven a small, subtle connection yet'.
What I have essentially said at the beginning is that some parents' claims aren't disproven.
(March 30th, 2018, 03:58)ipecac Wrote: What I have essentially said at the beginning is that some parents' claims aren't disproven.
To be precise, some parents' claims aren't disproven despite the supposed implication of general population studies waved about. After many posts, this modest but controversial claim still remains true.
The most that has been said is that they aren't proven, which is certainly through. Yet my original point remains, and a supplementary point that 'the general population studies don't prove as much as they are touted to do' is still true.
(March 27th, 2018, 14:41)Dark Savant Wrote: I never got a chance to sim this to be sure, but isn't all I need one road? If I build a road and mine on the copper with an archer sitting on top of it, and plant a city on the riverside tile to its south, the river should supply copper to my capital, right?
Or I could plant directly on the copper, and build and guard one road to the river -- I'm less sure trade routes work that way (I'd have simmed it to be sure).
I *think* but am not sure that you need Sailing to have trade connections on rivers outside your borders. But I might be wrong, or you might have simmed that in time to get Sailing before it became relevant, so let's assume it's possible.
Okay, I actually just tested this. Even though it doesn't matter now.
It turns out that if the river is the edge of your territory, it does count for trade purposes, so one road is all I need to supply copper to my capital.
(March 27th, 2018, 15:30)Mardoc Wrote: I'm definitely confident that by the time you got three archers, a settler, and have started walking (if he didn't attack), that he would have at least two Holkans in your territory, maybe three. That gets to be enough that you probably can't cover anything important with a single unit. Which means you need to add in another couple archers (got to cover copper + city + city), which might give him time to bring up another Holkan...
I'd try to kill one of the holkans, and I'd have significantly better odds for that than I did on that single roll I allowed and Donovan Zoi took. And if I planted right on the copper, DZ is unlikely to kill even one archer with two holkans, perhaps even three -- he'd be trying to kill a Shock archer in a city on a hill. All I'd need then is one road on the nearby river. He'd need to come up with a 4th holkan somehow to make supplying copper difficult.
I would have been able to get a settler and 1-2 archers there faster than he could get a second holkan in the area.
I'd be crippled, but I already was (except in the unlikely event I could somehow get out enough axes in time to take his capital) -- but I'd survive much, much longer.
So it's definitely a good move to try the 36% roll.
(March 28th, 2018, 00:02)ipecac Wrote: Yes, there is a recommended vaccine for chickenpox, and we all survived without it. Vaccines aren't all equally necessary
Well, of course we did. Dead people don't post on RB. Speaking of statistical fallacies...
It may not be a guaranteed death sentence...but it's still riskier than a lot of things we want to stop. It used to cause about 100 deaths a year and ~20,000 hospitalizations (source: https://academic.oup.com/jid/article/182/2/383/2190935 )
Plus, of course, sentencing a kid to a week of maddening itching instead of 5 minutes of fear of needles.
This one's actually an unclear (at best) argument for unrelated reasons.
You can easily prove that riding bicycles results in hundreds of fatalities per year, just in the US -- almost entirely from collisions with motor vehicles. (The few remaining fatalities are mostly covered by "wear a helmet, you idiot".) You can also prove, with somewhat more difficulty, that the health benefits of additional exercise, and even environmental benefits from bicycling instead of driving a car, outweigh that.
The thing is, your immune system may need exercise, too, per the hygiene hypothesis. Pre-teenage chicken pox is one major way your immune system would get such exercise. (The hypothesis suggests your immune system should be challenged when you're young -- most people reading this are already too old to benefit, sorry!)
There isn't exactly abundant strong evidence for the hygiene hypothesis, but among the immunologists I knew personally, it was regarded more likely than not to be true. Actually proving or disproving it is one of those experiments that would take decades and many billions of dollars to do. (There are a lot of those in biomedical science -- there is no remotely practical way to actually fund them all.)
Chicken pox becomes a lot nastier once you reach about high school age; that's actually when I'd vaccinate any kids.
