Then you immediately roll a 3 ;)

Ah well. At least you died knowing that your odds were marginally better to win big.

It's a thought problem. What information you get out of it is more important than what your individual answer is.

What I was angling for wasn't calculating the two extreme outcomes such that they have an equal value; my point was deciding should you play the game at all. If you're crunching the numbers to try to arrive at a conclusion that logically involves the least risk/most payout, you're kind of missing the point.

Yeah, I wasn't trying to say vaccines specifically are. I was just talking about the hypothetical case.

Again, smoking isn't really a communicable disease. I could see being in favor of prohibiting smoking IN PUBLIC just for second-hand smoke reasons, sure. If people want to give themselves cancer in the comfort of their own homes...good on them, I guess?

Idealistically, I am against government interference as well. But there are certain circumstances such as vaccination that really require the compliance of everyone able to do so. I don't like making exceptions either, but you have to.

Would you also be one of the people complaining about the government infringing your rights if you got infected with ebola and they quarantined you? They're infringing on my right to go outside and run around in a crowd of healthy people!

What schools are letting them enroll without their shots?

That's the problem right there.

Call it Mississatheism: The belief that no Mississippi atheists exist ;)

It's not a false dichotomy, it's a historical observation. Civilization started with people gathering into cities.

To reference a common /. idiom, your "right" to not get vaccinated for no valid medical reason ends with my right to not be pointlessly at risk of contracting diseases we could (and did, for a long time) prevent.

I did feel pretty conflicted when people were complaining about being quarantined during the Ebola in the U.S. thing.

My idealistic side said, yeah, technically that's a violation of their rights.
My pragmatic side said, damn straight, that's what ya gotta do to solve the situation.

Well, I could say "if you see one, instantly call the SWAT team to come out with flamethrowers to remove the risk" but I doubt you'd like that answer.

I'd also bet that that would put a lid on the problem pretty damn fast.

Pregnancy is not a communicable disease.

While logical, it doesn't really help much when you're risking your own child.

(hopefully that's what you were hinting at)
(and the fact that the autism "risking" part has been conclusively disproved)

I don't think humans are wired to intuit high-risk, high-reward probability spaces very well. There's the lottery, and then this vaccination thing, too (ignoring a few pertinent facets of it, obviously).

Imagine the following game: you roll 2d10 to determine what happens to you. On a roll of...

2-5) You are instantly murdered.
6-95) You receive $100 and are free to go.
96-100) You receive a million bucks and are free to go.

Do you play the game?

"Did you ever flashy-thing me, man?"
"No."
"Man, I ain't messin' with you! You ever flashy-thinged me, K?"
"No."

Or they just learn that not getting reelected is the price of getting into office in the first place because people have a variety of different issues that are "okay, you're out of here" offenses. In which case they just accomplish everything they want to in that one term and say fuck campaigning for reelection.

Say what you will about our election system, but the possibility of getting reelected keeps a lot of politicians from doing crazy stuff their first term. If everybody only had one term, the volume of crazy would rise dramatically because they have no reason to keep the voters mollified short of a recall.

I like the theory of "then vote their sorry asses out" but have come to the conclusion that the reason we still have a lot of these problems is that they really can't be solved without large, damaging changes to the entire system (we're basically trying to legislate to force people to stop being assholes).