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?
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?