Since it's not clear which vaccines you are avoiding, it's hard to pinpoint the source. But in most cases of vaccine refuse, the lack of illnesses is "security by the numbers." If 99% of the people you interact with are vaccinated against X, they are quite likely not carriers of X and thus you are incredibly likely to never, ever get infected by X. When the number of non-vaccinated people start to rise, this will change. Dramatically.

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Geek of all trades, master of none: the motto for my blog mostlymaths.net

Oh, found the details. Well, flu shots are probably completely unnecessary, except for the small amount of people very susceptible to flu complications (like my grandfather was, for instance.)

But the trend lately is for a lot of parents to dismiss the standard "children vaccines" we get even before realising. Or tetanus vaccine "when needed." I've seen this first hand, and this will (sooner or later) lead to a bump in illnesses that felt "long gone." Actually the number of cases for whooping cough, measles and the like are raising steadily, year by year.

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Geek of all trades, master of none: the motto for my blog mostlymaths.net

So are illnesses which are the side effects of vaccines. No, don't ask for references. You can find them if you want, but I have too many things to do and am not inclined to do the work for you.

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Still officially AGA 5d but I play so irregularly these days that I am probably only 3d or 4d over the board (but hopefully still 5d in terms of knowledge, theory and the ability to contribute).

The thing is, I know. No need to look for it again. It's just a pendulum swing, and when 50k or 100k people die all of sudden from some long-gone illness the pendulum will swing again.

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Geek of all trades, master of none: the motto for my blog mostlymaths.net

Perhaps I shall offer a criticism myself, if only to prevent the thread from turning into an argument about vaccines.

There is no mathematical argument to refute. The so-called "equation for intelligence" is actually just an old thermodynamics equation for entropic force. It accurately predicts certain important physical processes. TED Video Guy (TVG) did not come up with this equation. In fact, we might even say that all the interesting claims made by TVG are really hand-waving arguments.

What TVG does is essentially this: He takes a system (like the three discs of different sizes, the smallest of which is in a tube). He defines some state/control variables that determine the transition to future states. Changing the control variables moves the large disc. He then lets these state/control variables be relabeled as variables in the thermodynamics equation and uses it to generate the value of the control variable (move the largest disk) in the next state.

When he does this, the large disc is moved to hit the medium disc until it dislodges the smallest disc from the tube. He says that the discs represent a monkey, a tool, and a piece of food in a tight space. But there is no math that says this is what it is supposed to represent. Indeed, he doesn't even mathematically prove that this equation will necessarily generate such behavior. The computer simulations all use very specific parameter values. It is unclear how robust they are to changes in those values. Essentially, in academic terms, all he did, even in the published paper, was tell a few fascinating anecdotes.

The only scientifically valid conclusion we can draw from TVG's original paper is that this equation can be used to generate behavior for three different situations that is usually achieved with three separate algorithms.

TVG only jumps into the realm of pseudoscience hokum typical of many TED talks when he starts claiming that he has found any scientifically valid evidence that this equation has anything to do with intelligence. That's wonderful for a cocktail party, which perhaps describes the prevailing mood at these TED talks, but not appropriate for a serious conversation about science.

I found the talk inspiring and entertaining. The concept of intelligence being something like the desire to have as many options as possible in the future was new to me.

Astonishing that nobody here wants to discuss the relation to Go. It applies quite nicely, doesn't it?

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Stay out of my territory! (W. White, aka Heisenberg)