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Johnson and Johnson sues researchers who linked talc to cancer

reuters.com

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Re: Johnson and Johnson sues researchers who linked talc to cancer

#241

Post by AnthonyMouse »

sokoloff wrote: post #133
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The unfairness isn't in what happens after they do something wrong, it's in how they structure their operations to begin with. The point of limited liability is so that grandpa can invest in an index fund even if he doesn't understand the inner workings of consumer products manufacturing without having to worry that one of the 500 companies in the index will hire a bad manager and have it wipe out not just that inves…

This doesn’t work for a particularly useful type of limited liability company: index funds (and mutual funds in general). Today’s grandpa might be living off the retirement income from his S&P fund investments which should (IMO) have the same level of limited liability to him as grandpa would have if he invested in a tiny slice of each of 500 different companies directly. > We don't expect a business to be a generic…

Well sure, but those don't have to be a C Corp or an LLC. They could be something else which is restricted to being an investment fund and which isn't allowed to engage in ordinary business activity or own more than e.g. 10% of any given ordinary business.

Re: Johnson and Johnson sues researchers who linked talc to cancer

#242

Post by shkkmo »

HDThoreaun wrote: post #228
iancarroll wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a pretty well-documented strategy that has been done several times: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_two-step_bankruptcy Not sure why you are treating it as an absurd concept.

The texas two step is not used to skirt liabilities. Its point is to consolidate all the cases in one court to reduce lawyer headaches and ensure each claimant is paid fairly.

It absolutely is used to reduce payouts. The fact that it limits the potential for very large punitive jury judgments is an argument made by supporters of the texas two step.

It's basically a way of forcing everyone suing you into something akin to a class action, but one where you lose most of the legal rights you would have in a class actions.

Re: Johnson and Johnson sues researchers who linked talc to cancer

#243

Post by thomastjeffery »

HDThoreaun wrote: post #230
FireBeyond wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They still are. Just indirectly. They set the amount that they were willing to fund the subsidiary to the tune of. Must be nice, being able to say "Well, we'll give LTL $X and that can be used for settlements" while still throwing off nearly $X a year in profits, and 25% of X in shareholder dividends alone. Why should a company be allowed to set and determine how much liability it needs to pay?

This is the opposite of what happened. The court rejected their first two step attempt for not having a high enough payout and forced the subsidiary to have a 61.5 billion dollar payout maximum.

That's not what opposite means. What's you just described is the same exact thing with extra steps.

Sure, it's a higher number than J&J asked for, but it's still a number!

Re: Johnson and Johnson sues researchers who linked talc to cancer

#244

Post by thomastjeffery »

Vaslo wrote: post #199
fn-mote wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We need a Journal of Medicore Results, or a Journal of Tried it and it Didn't Work. Publication in this journal would be used as evidence against lawsuits. Cigarette companies paid for studies designed to produce no conclusive evidence. I don't see this as a route to progress. What if all you did wrong was follow the wrong process? The bacteria grows better at 10C than 30C. This journal would be full of results by…

Former chemist here. I disagree - you try many many reactions that fail. It would be good to just see what was tried so you can 1) see what was tried so you can change the conditions and try again or 2) avoid an approach altogether. I joke in many of the forums here about making The journal of Failed Chemistry. But I am very serious about saving time so 10 different PhD candidates don’t waste the same time I did.

Better yet, your documented "failure" may be an unknown path to "success" in someone else's research context.

This would basically be the same as caching the results of a brute-force attack; except instead of trying to break the entropy of encryption, we are trying to unravel the entropy of chemistry and physics.

Re: Johnson and Johnson sues researchers who linked talc to cancer

#245

Post by SkeuomorphicBee »

codelord wrote: post #103

As someone who did a PhD and published and read many papers (in ML) I believe vast majority of papers in ML are misleading. If in fact every paper that claims a better performance over state of the art was true we would have solved AI by now. You see all sorts of problems when you dig deeper into the technical details of peer reviewed publications (even in top tier conferences) including misleading baselines, statist…

> I hope this is not as bad in medicine and health related research.

I have friends and family working with medicine and health related research, and I don't think it is bad. In fact I'm a bit amazed at how good the Medicine academia is at science, and as comparison how bad computer-science (CSc) is at science.

With very few exceptions, CSc papers don't have any actual science, they don't have a hypothesis and a method to test it, instead most papers in CSc can be summarized as "I did this new thing and I find it cool", the peers simply don't expect you to do actual science. In comparison, in Medicine papers you are expected to follow the scientific method to a T, they have a hypothesis and test it (often heavily relying on statistics), and yes some Medicine papers are bad (with bad methodology, bad sampling, or bad statistics like p-hacking) but even the bad ones try (and fail) to follow the scientific method (or at least pretend to try in case of malicious papers), because the standard is that high.

Re: Johnson and Johnson sues researchers who linked talc to cancer

#246

Post by kevinventullo »

Hikikomori wrote: post #231
scotty79 wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Owners. Behind all of the corporate management theatre are always some owners that will squeeze everyone in any way possible to protect their money.

Like pension funds?

Good point, we should never hold public companies accountable for anything because it will hurt grandpa’s pension. Think of all those poor retirees! We’re not monsters.

Re: Johnson and Johnson sues researchers who linked talc to cancer

#247

Post by scott_w »

UncleMeat wrote: post #227
scott_w wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The corporate lawyers aren’t the ones allowing this, the lawmakers are. Your follow up points don’t address my point at all.

I don't believe for even one second that this process is designed and executed for the legitimate protection of the aggrieved.

Why it was designed an executed does nothing to refute my point.

Re: Johnson and Johnson sues researchers who linked talc to cancer

#248

Post by kevinventullo »

haswell wrote: post #215
tempest_ wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reads like a "too big to fail" argument. It works for the banking industry I guess so why not here too.

It’s unrelated in structured and substance to “too big to fail”. Too big to fail implies catastrophic harm worse than the (unpalatable) steps necessary to prop something up. This argument is really exploring the line between “company did something harmful” and “company did something so harmful they should no longer exist”. I’m not arguing for either, but TBTF is unrelated.

I’m not sure I agree that the current argument is about whether the company did something so harmful they should no longer exist, but I agree that whatever it is, it is not the same as TBTF.

Re: Johnson and Johnson sues researchers who linked talc to cancer

#249

Post by skyyler »

rightbyte wrote: post #82
jrflowers wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the same way. Seatbelts are made of nylon and I don’t really want to think about the mechanism which nylon makes a car move.

Nylon does not make a car move?

They were saying that talc doesn't cause weight loss, just in a very oblique and condescending way.

Re: Johnson and Johnson sues researchers who linked talc to cancer

#250

Post by thomastjeffery »

codelord wrote: post #103

As someone who did a PhD and published and read many papers (in ML) I believe vast majority of papers in ML are misleading. If in fact every paper that claims a better performance over state of the art was true we would have solved AI by now. You see all sorts of problems when you dig deeper into the technical details of peer reviewed publications (even in top tier conferences) including misleading baselines, statist…

> If in fact every paper that claims a better performance over state of the art was true we would have solved AI by now.

"Better" is not a single axis. By your logic, all I need to do is jump higher and higher, and sooner or later I will be able to fly!

You aren't alone in this line of thinking. This fallacy has been written all over "AI" since we started calling it "AI"! That was the biggest mistake of all: by calling any arbitrary project "an Artificial Intelligence", we declare it an instance of the end goal! Now it just needs to be a "better", never "different".

And that's what it means for a company to fail: it doesn't just need to be better, it needs to be different. If we don't allow failure to happen, we can never explore "different".

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