I wrote a paragraph on that in the post. I predicted a publication bias in favor of positive results, assuming the community is not biased on the particular issue of vaccines & autism. This prediction is probably wrong, but that hypothesis (lack of bias) is what I was testing.

I already responded to both those comments, so you already know I don't think those comments are any refutation at all.

Cup-holders are not a complex engineering problem (as the first comment said), and the preferences of the European and Asian markets are irrelevant for cars that are, please recall, built specifically to be sold in the United States. Nobody sells identical cars in Europe and in the United States. They often don't even sell the same models in the US.

The response (of the second comment) boils down to "you are silly if you think you know enough to criticize the work of people who make cup-holders for a living". If you accept that as a valid response, that could be used to shut down all critical activity. It's the same as responding to #BlackLives Matter by saying "You can't criticize the police for shooting people unless you're a policeman."

I didn't see that. If you check your source by reading the reviews on the page you linked to, you'll see that Medique 10133 Alcalak Sugar Free Tablets are not, in fact, sugar-free. The label on them says "May contain sucrose."

That doesn't look like a viable hypothesis because if it were true, such people would not be VCs at all.

That statement makes no sense and has no support. What, you're imagining that I said that VCs think all profitable things are already being done? That is not what I said. What I said, which is true, is that VCs don't jump into established markets that already have huge dominant players.

In real life the markets drive the price down to the cost of production only occasionally.

"Close to", not "to". The difference is enormous--it's the difference between free market theory and Marxism.

The theory of the free market is that markets do so; failure to do so is called a failure of the market. It is a theoretical term, so saying "theories are secondary" is nonsense.

Restated:

In real life the markets drive the price down close to the cost of production only occasionally.

Citation needed.

Where?

I fail to see how this is a market failure. At most this was a bad bet by VCs.

You are focusing on the actions of the VCs. That isn't the failure. The failure was by the big players already in the market.

I'm theorizing that the VCs believed that the fact that the big companies did not make any such product proved there was no profitable demand for it, because the market worked. These are not miracle high-tech underwear; they could have been developed years ago. The belief that the market works demands some explanation why they weren't.

Maybe. Without knowing the details it's hard to tell. And again, at most this was a bad decision by Tums. The market is selling the sugar-free Tums at the appropriate price, is it not?

$46 a bottle is "the appropriate price"? The phrase is meaningless if it means "whatever price the market is selling it at", so don't use the phrase as if it had a normative aspect. Of course people sell it at some price. The market failure is that competition has not driven the cost down close to the cost of production. "Market failure" doesn't always mean "a failure to sell a product". In this case it means failure of competition to lower costs.

My point is that the existing companies failed to provide a product that consumers wanted, and VCs relied on the "fact" that the market is efficient to "prove" that Thinx could not succeed, since it did not bring anything to the table that the big companies couldn't have done themselves..

Many diabetics think they can't. I've found their comments on the internet.