The next time people ask "why so much paperwork, why so many regulations, why is it so complicated": this is why.
Don't blame the regulators (legal (state) and paralegal (ethics committees)), blame those who abused their power.
Don't blame the regulators (legal (state) and paralegal (ethics committees)), blame those who abused their power.
> Documents just released show the government in 1973 knew about the trials at Treloars and covered some costs.
There's no perfect system. When the regulator, or the regulator's boss, is in on it, or when the industry has captured the regulator (which invariably happens), all that paperwork, all those regulations, all that complication -- they do nothing to protect the victims.
Please don't do that. I said nothing of the sort. Plus what you did, besides being the "have you stopped beating your wife yet" sort of disgusting attack, is also whataboutism.
The thing about workplace safety is that a) employers don't relish their employees getting hurt or dying on the job, b) employers don't benefit when their employees get hurt or die on the job, so even if there were no regulations employers would still not go back to 120 years ago states of workplace safety, c) regulations here can help force employers to make better calculations regarding costs and benefits of improving workplace safety as it's on the improvement side that the costs mostly lie. So you see, there is not much benefit to the industry in capturing the regulator for the purpose of undoing workplace safety regulations.
Lots and lots of regulations are ok to exist only as long as they do something useful. If they are useless, piling more useless ones isn't better than the alternative.
On the real world, we tend to have plenty of the useless ones, and only a few of the very useful ones. When someone complain about the first set, people are quick to throw the second set at them like if it addressed the problem.
>This is why we can't have nice things.
When alternative approaches are suggested, they're met with a mindless regurgitation of emotionally charged rhetoric rather than careful thought and reason. Their narcissism allows them dismiss anyone that even slightly disagrees with their approach. Those broadcasting alternative points of view are demonized and viciously attacked with the same oppressive tactics employed by the Sturmabteilung. The only saving grace here is ignoring reality is very costly. Eventually the payments are going to come due and the Schadenfreude is going to be very satisfying.
We can and should continually improve the system of regulation we have in place.
We must not throw out the system completely, as that will likely result in a regression to previous behaviors and outcomes (which we've already determined were wrong).
Legal paperwork cannot prevent the government from choosing evil. In fact, it only serves to sanction it in most cases.
This is deeply mistaken attitude - paperwork allows your to prosecute the person in the government that signed off on this decision. Without paperwork, you wouldn’t be able to pin the decision on anyone
And it is entirely normal to have the next government prosecute corrupt officials from the previous one
Has this happened recently in the UK? Like, in the past 50 years, or in the past 100 years?
That person died and the all medical records (from that doctor) somehow went missing. fyi: This was during the 1980's in the UK.
Yes, as the saying goes, regulations and safety rules are often written in blood.
But that doesn't mean that all regulations are automatically good and proportionate. For example, many institutional review boards would have zero problem with researchers deliberately submitting security holes to the Linux kernel. Sure, you're experimenting on kernel maintainers without their consent, and sure, you might make hundreds of millions of people vulnerable. But it's not technically "human research", so the IRB may sign off.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/the-linux-foundations-demands-...
Meanwhile, if you're a psychiatrist working in a hospital, and if you want to (say) compare the results of your standard screening questionare against the results of your standard patient intake interview, you might think this is easy. Patients will usually do both anyways, so how hard can it be to design an ethical process to compare the two? Well, it's harder than you might expect:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/29/my-irb-nightmare/
I agree that we need to have rules and regulations about many things. But we should still discuss whether specific regulations accomplish the intended goal, and how big a cost those regulations impose on society.
It is perfectly possible for a large organization to design a software development process that makes it impossible to ever ship software. And similar pathologies often appear in any large organization, public or private. Designing good policies is hard but worth it.