That's what I expect a person who has never been on a jury would say.
Once upon a time, I sat on a jury. A man whose job was to clean the interior storage holds of massive ships was driving a work vehicle and hit by a truck full of joyriding kids on a highway surrounded by cane fields. The kids didn't see him, he didn't see them.
He filed a claim with his employer's insurance agency. His employer sided with the insurance agency and tried to offer him a pittance for pain, suffering, medical costs, and rehabilitation. The man had a high school education and worked hard for his employer for 3 decades, doing backbreaking work. To do this work, you had to put on a hazmat suit and climb up and down 100+ feet of ladder, lugging your cleaning equipment and cleaning lines with you, then stand around with your hands above your head spraying chemicals for hours to clean one of these vessels.
The injuries he suffered were debilitating. The insurance company set some private investigators out, looking for evidence that he was lying about his impairment. The best they could come up with was that he washed his car. They tried to make it seem like he was faking, but the timestamp evidence showed that it took the man over 2 hours to wash his car and that he had to take multiple breaks because of his pain. Their expert witness testified that he could have done the work of spraying the vessel. What he couldn't have done is make the climb. They had to fuse his vertebrae and put pins in his hip and knee.
His employer testified that they would have promoted him to foreman, but cross examination showed that a foreman was expected to examine the vessel, which was impossible for him because he couldn't safely make the climb, pain or not, and even if he could, he wouldn't have been able to safely board the ship.
He was making good money for someone without an education, $60K or so a year. At 50, he had expected to work for another 15 years. The insurance company decided that his pain, suffering, loss of wages, loss of benefits, and loss of employment was worth $180k. His insurance policy called for full compensation for lost wages.
We ruled in his favor for $1.3M, to be shared by the employer for being lying sacks of crap after 30 years of service, and his insurance company for not honoring their contract. THAT was equitable. Pain, suffering, lost wages, the bullshit he was put through during the legal process, and loss of ability to enjoy physical activity in the future. They all matter.
Tell me again how we were badly equipped to answer complicated questions.
Jury selection filters for people who vote, have long-term residence in a single location, have jobs that at least modestly allow jury service, and who actually show up to jury duty.
To make a sweeping generalization, those things all correlate with intelligence.
Anecdotally, the people I've met at jury selection in downtown Oakland, CA are not a representative sample of who you see outside the building.
Except it clearly didn’t work in this case since the jury reached a conclusion that is fundamentally at odds with the conclusion reached by experts worldwide.
I’m baffled by how this is discussed on here as “well, maybe the jury was right”. We know that the jury wasn’t right.
… and the IARC monograph on Roundup, in turn, has been dismissed universally by experts as both flawed and misleading. Amongst other things, they arbitrarily excluded high-quality studies that showed no evidence of carcinogenicity, and included at least one study claiming to show an effect but in reality failed to do so (it didn’t show dose dependence, which means the result is not statistically robust but rather a random fluke). The scientific consensus is completely on Monsanto’s side in this debate. Pretending otherwise is simply dishonest, there’s no other word for it.
If that is the case then it shouldn't be a problem to ask IARC to make a new monograph. That this doesn't happen tells me that the case isn't as simple here as you say.
What are the chances that 12 randomly selected members of the public are better at understanding biological mechanisms, judging statistical models and weighing evidence than people who have been studying these things for decades?
One group has an interest in making a living by working for multi-billion dollar corporations.
The other group is just the general public, who won't make a single penny from dedicating their lives to understanding the facts as they are presented.
The vast majority of experts in this field are not affiliated with Monsanto and don’t make a dime from it. They are the “general public”, except well informed, and have studied years to understand the relevant (complex) background to make an informed assessment. Non-experts may be dedicated but they simply don’t match years or even decades of rigorous studying on the subject.
This “all experts are in the pockets of big X corporation” is inaccurate and insulting. It’s just getting really tiring.
Yes, of course maybe all the experts are wrong, and the jury of lay people was right. But even if this unlikely case occurred here, do you really want to build legal cases and policy on such a fluke?
Once upon a time, I sat on a jury. A man whose job was to clean the interior storage holds of massive ships was driving a work vehicle and hit by a truck full of joyriding kids on a highway surrounded by cane fields. The kids didn't see him, he didn't see them.
He filed a claim with his employer's insurance agency. His employer sided with the insurance agency and tried to offer him a pittance for pain, suffering, medical costs, and rehabilitation. The man had a high school education and worked hard for his employer for 3 decades, doing backbreaking work. To do this work, you had to put on a hazmat suit and climb up and down 100+ feet of ladder, lugging your cleaning equipment and cleaning lines with you, then stand around with your hands above your head spraying chemicals for hours to clean one of these vessels.
The injuries he suffered were debilitating. The insurance company set some private investigators out, looking for evidence that he was lying about his impairment. The best they could come up with was that he washed his car. They tried to make it seem like he was faking, but the timestamp evidence showed that it took the man over 2 hours to wash his car and that he had to take multiple breaks because of his pain. Their expert witness testified that he could have done the work of spraying the vessel. What he couldn't have done is make the climb. They had to fuse his vertebrae and put pins in his hip and knee.
His employer testified that they would have promoted him to foreman, but cross examination showed that a foreman was expected to examine the vessel, which was impossible for him because he couldn't safely make the climb, pain or not, and even if he could, he wouldn't have been able to safely board the ship.
He was making good money for someone without an education, $60K or so a year. At 50, he had expected to work for another 15 years. The insurance company decided that his pain, suffering, loss of wages, loss of benefits, and loss of employment was worth $180k. His insurance policy called for full compensation for lost wages.
We ruled in his favor for $1.3M, to be shared by the employer for being lying sacks of crap after 30 years of service, and his insurance company for not honoring their contract. THAT was equitable. Pain, suffering, lost wages, the bullshit he was put through during the legal process, and loss of ability to enjoy physical activity in the future. They all matter.
Tell me again how we were badly equipped to answer complicated questions.