Anders: Naturally, I think your reference to Modern Epidemiology 3rd ed. as mentioning "Sheps only briefly to dismiss her ideas about effect measures" is offensively misleading or at best incomplete. Throughout the book we mentioned many things only briefly because there was so much to cover and our space was severely limited by the publisher; instead we were trying to serve readers by working in at least brief citations to what (up to 2007) had been commonly overlooked ideas.
As for your paper, here's some details I noted immediately at the start of its appendix (of course because they concern the dismissive citation to ME3):
1) Second sentence of the Appendix: The citation of the quote [38] should be specifically to Ch. 2 of ME3 (Rothman Greenland Poole Lash) and better still would be [38, p. 9]. This is not only to help readers locate the quote and put it in context but also because that chapter was perhaps the only contentious one (mildly so at that but tortured by editing back and forth among 4 authors not quite in agreement about every detail). In particular I agree that the quoted sentence should have been more clearly confined to outcomes that involve terminal events corresponding to absorbing states (like death, organ removal, etc.) vs. continuation at risk for the event, which are quite asymmetric logically and physically.
2) Sheps and the 1989 paper I sent you (Khoury MJ, Flanders WD, Greenland S, Adams MJ. On the measurement of susceptibility in epidemiologic studies. Am J Epidemiol 1989;129:183–190)
are cited on Ch. 4 p. 65 of ME3 where it explains how Sheps relative difference equals the proportion susceptible P(C) under a nonidentified independence assumption which fails (for example) under biologic models leading to the accelerated-failure-time (AFT) survival model used in g-estimation. Which raises the question: How does that substance translate into the framework of your new paper and what it is arguing?
Thank you so much for engaging with this. I deeply appreciate that your efforts in reading and evaluating the arguments in the manuscript.
(1)
First of all, I want to take personal responsibility for the video. I wrote the script, and hired an animator from fiverr.com to animate and produce it. After we got the first version for approval, my coauthors pointed out that this section may be seen as needlessly antagonistic towards Modern Epidemiology. However, at that stage, asking for alterations would be expensive, since this would be a change to the script that I had written myself and therefore not covered by the revision policy. I was able to convince the coauthors, under some doubt, to make the video available anyways.
My intention behind this section of the video, was twofold:
(1) Reviewers of our paper had pointed to that paragraph in Modern Epidemiology specifically, which had made it necessary to engage with it explicitly in the manuscript.
(2) Including the paragraph in the video in this way, was intended as a storytelling device, to illustrate resistance to these ideas in the academic community. This resistance to the idea is a very central aspect of my experience with working on this and earlier manuscript. There are probably better examples of resistance to the idea than the paragraph in Modern Epidemiology. However, they all suffer from the same problem: It would be necessary to call out individuals in order to give a concrete example.
I will acknowledge that the paragraph from Modern Epidemiology may not have been intended as a complete dismissal of the idea, and I understand that the video may be understood as offensive in suggesting this. For that, I apologize. I take full responsibility for it, and I will discuss with coauthors what steps we can take.
(2) I will try to read the 1989 paper as soon as possible. In general, our models are intended specifically for binary outcomes, and there are significant challenges for generalizing this kind of reasoning to time-to-event outcomes.
Anders: Naturally, I think your reference to Modern Epidemiology 3rd ed. as mentioning "Sheps only briefly to dismiss her ideas about effect measures" is offensively misleading or at best incomplete. Throughout the book we mentioned many things only briefly because there was so much to cover and our space was severely limited by the publisher; instead we were trying to serve readers by working in at least brief citations to what (up to 2007) had been commonly overlooked ideas.
As for your paper, here's some details I noted immediately at the start of its appendix (of course because they concern the dismissive citation to ME3):
1) Second sentence of the Appendix: The citation of the quote [38] should be specifically to Ch. 2 of ME3 (Rothman Greenland Poole Lash) and better still would be [38, p. 9]. This is not only to help readers locate the quote and put it in context but also because that chapter was perhaps the only contentious one (mildly so at that but tortured by editing back and forth among 4 authors not quite in agreement about every detail). In particular I agree that the quoted sentence should have been more clearly confined to outcomes that involve terminal events corresponding to absorbing states (like death, organ removal, etc.) vs. continuation at risk for the event, which are quite asymmetric logically and physically.
2) Sheps and the 1989 paper I sent you (Khoury MJ, Flanders WD, Greenland S, Adams MJ. On the measurement of susceptibility in epidemiologic studies. Am J Epidemiol 1989;129:183–190)
are cited on Ch. 4 p. 65 of ME3 where it explains how Sheps relative difference equals the proportion susceptible P(C) under a nonidentified independence assumption which fails (for example) under biologic models leading to the accelerated-failure-time (AFT) survival model used in g-estimation. Which raises the question: How does that substance translate into the framework of your new paper and what it is arguing?
Dear Sander,
Thank you so much for engaging with this. I deeply appreciate that your efforts in reading and evaluating the arguments in the manuscript.
(1)
First of all, I want to take personal responsibility for the video. I wrote the script, and hired an animator from fiverr.com to animate and produce it. After we got the first version for approval, my coauthors pointed out that this section may be seen as needlessly antagonistic towards Modern Epidemiology. However, at that stage, asking for alterations would be expensive, since this would be a change to the script that I had written myself and therefore not covered by the revision policy. I was able to convince the coauthors, under some doubt, to make the video available anyways.
My intention behind this section of the video, was twofold:
(1) Reviewers of our paper had pointed to that paragraph in Modern Epidemiology specifically, which had made it necessary to engage with it explicitly in the manuscript.
(2) Including the paragraph in the video in this way, was intended as a storytelling device, to illustrate resistance to these ideas in the academic community. This resistance to the idea is a very central aspect of my experience with working on this and earlier manuscript. There are probably better examples of resistance to the idea than the paragraph in Modern Epidemiology. However, they all suffer from the same problem: It would be necessary to call out individuals in order to give a concrete example.
I will acknowledge that the paragraph from Modern Epidemiology may not have been intended as a complete dismissal of the idea, and I understand that the video may be understood as offensive in suggesting this. For that, I apologize. I take full responsibility for it, and I will discuss with coauthors what steps we can take.
(2) I will try to read the 1989 paper as soon as possible. In general, our models are intended specifically for binary outcomes, and there are significant challenges for generalizing this kind of reasoning to time-to-event outcomes.