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U.S. Files Criminal Charges Against Theranos’s Elizabeth Holmes, Ramesh Balwani

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Re: U.S. Files Criminal Charges Against Theranos’s Elizabeth Holmes, Ramesh Balwani

#171

Post by trhway »

gamblor956 wrote: post #10
maxxxxx wrote: post #6

Does anybody know if Theranos got started with at least an idea how to accomplish what they wanted to do? From what I have heard in interviews they started with the thought "Doing xxx would be super useful" but didn't have an approach for accomplishing this but instead took in money and tried to figure it out. It's like me saying "An antimatter drive would revolutionize space exploration" and starting to collect mone…

They had a good idea of what they wanted to do (blood tests using very thin needles) but never successfully figured out how to accomplish that with the level of accuracy required. Most Medical professionals believe that what they wanted to do was simply impossible from a biological perspective due to the natural variations of blood content. It would have been like trying to determine traffic on a freeway by taking a…

>determine traffic on a freeway by taking a brief glance through a tiny slit in a piece of paper.

taking 10 such brief glances may allow for some good enough probabilistic estimate though. Upon hearing first time about Theranos in 2013 i thought that they would do something like it, i.e. statistical approach based on some data mining as they would collect large number of samples, etc. - a typical SV tech based approach. One look at Holmes' black turtleneck photo and Glassdoors reviews mostly talking about Ballwani, and i remember immediately thinking - any even minimally advanced R&D is just not possible there.

Re: U.S. Files Criminal Charges Against Theranos’s Elizabeth Holmes, Ramesh Balwani

#172

Post by icelancer »

atombender wrote: post #93
maxxxxx wrote: post #6

Does anybody know if Theranos got started with at least an idea how to accomplish what they wanted to do? From what I have heard in interviews they started with the thought "Doing xxx would be super useful" but didn't have an approach for accomplishing this but instead took in money and tried to figure it out. It's like me saying "An antimatter drive would revolutionize space exploration" and starting to collect mone…

This interview with John Carreyrou [1], the Wall Street Journal journalist who is largely responsible for exposing Theranos, goes into a lot of detail. It's long, so if you want a shorter answer, jump to the question "What technology did Theranos actually develop?": Basically there were three iterations of the technology. The first one used microfluidics, which are basically the repurposing of the micro-fabrication t…

>> The short answer is her Jobs-like "reality distortion field" -- she was exceedingly good at convincing non-scientists that their science worked.

This confuses a lot of people (not saying you are one of them), but this is really common in intelligent non-experts. People vastly overestimate how intelligent they are when they place value on their intelligence; in other words, they like thinking they are smart.

When they prize their own intelligence, they have false confidence about areas they have zero expertise in, purely because they feel they can figure it out.

So all it takes is someone with sociopathic tendencies and who has extreme confidence with a good CV, and bam, they're willing to go to the mat for that person. Holmes is one example but certainly not the only one.

Re: U.S. Files Criminal Charges Against Theranos’s Elizabeth Holmes, Ramesh Balwani

#173

Post by meowface »

konschubert wrote: post #162
meowface wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>They knew it didn't work, but kept selling it anyway, which is where it went from just faking it to outright fraud. I'm playing Devil's advocate and not justifying or defending their fraud and the physical harm they caused, but if we were to look at Holmes' intentions, I'm suspecting it was something like "we just need to do this for a few months/years until our technology works", rather than "let's just run this sc…

No, it's just that annoying mentality of "fake it till you make it".

I guess we might find out during the trial.

Re: U.S. Files Criminal Charges Against Theranos’s Elizabeth Holmes, Ramesh Balwani

#175

Post by jessaustin »

mchannon wrote: post #134
jessaustin wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a lot of sympathy for you, because I know that decent people are railroaded by federal prosecutors every day. That's not what's going on here. Prosecutors are attacking wealthy interests, not just defending them. (Since this is primarily a dispute among investors, wealthy interests are in opposition. Prosecutors have to choose a side, and they always choose the one farther up the pyramid.) It's actually pretty…

Sympathy is better than the other thing. The fact is that we don't know what actually happened, only what the government and media want us to know, even if it isn't so. They look guilty as hell, but so do innocent people. Trial by jury is better than trial by media, so I'll take the high road and reserve my judgment until then.

At least in this case the media has changed its mind, which seems rare? I remember when Therano-doubters were written off as sexists rather than skeptics. If they had a working product and a mere investor disagreement, I'd be as suspicious of the Feds as I usually am. In this case there is no sign of a functioning anything, and apparently they've broken rules about medical safety.

Anyway, trial by jury is not great. If one can avoid it by appealing to the media, one definitely should do that.

Re: U.S. Files Criminal Charges Against Theranos’s Elizabeth Holmes, Ramesh Balwani

#176

Post by teraflop »

comex wrote: post #136
epistasis wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure if there were "experts" of the same caliber calling the iPhone impossible. In fact, I don't recall anybody saying it was impossible, but would like to find out more. I remember a ton of doubt, after launch, that it would be successful, but those people weren't really experts.

Here’s one example. Apparently RIM’s employees collectively thought it was impossible (to achieve the stated battery life); I think they count as experts: > RIM had a complete internal panic when Apple unveiled the iPhone in 2007, a former employee revealed this weekend. The BlackBerry maker is now known to have held multiple all-hands meetings on January 10 that year, a day after the iPhone was on stage, and to have…

The comments summarized in that article seem to no longer be available, but I have a hard time believing the summary is accurate. When the iPhone was released, there were already PDAs on the market with screens the same size or bigger.

Re: U.S. Files Criminal Charges Against Theranos’s Elizabeth Holmes, Ramesh Balwani

#177

Post by paulie_a »

konschubert wrote: post #162
meowface wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>They knew it didn't work, but kept selling it anyway, which is where it went from just faking it to outright fraud. I'm playing Devil's advocate and not justifying or defending their fraud and the physical harm they caused, but if we were to look at Holmes' intentions, I'm suspecting it was something like "we just need to do this for a few months/years until our technology works", rather than "let's just run this sc…

No, it's just that annoying mentality of "fake it till you make it".

Fake it until you make it is just a nice way of saying fraud. People that do that are being deceitful and should be publicly shamed and face criminal prosecution in some cases. They are scam artists, not honest entrepreneurs.

Re: U.S. Files Criminal Charges Against Theranos’s Elizabeth Holmes, Ramesh Balwani

#178

Post by Chris_Chambers »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #17
jaredhansen wrote: post #13

While Theranos was flying high, much was made of the company's connections to DC power elite - Kissenger on the board, etc.[1]. And the implication usually seemed to be that the deep bench of Serious And Important And Powerful People allowed the company to get away with things that otherwise would not have been possible. I think it's worth pausing to consider: when's the last time you heard of a startup CEO/CTO team…

> I do have to wonder whether the degree of attention from the DOJ has more to do with avenging the reputational and possibly financial losses of those same board members The response to evidence against a conspiracy theory is not to flip the conspiracy theory. If you defraud investors out of billions of dollars and lie to Medicare and Streisand effect the Wall Street Journal when it investigates you, you're going to…

The response to interesting speculation is not to use an impotent pejorative term to dismiss it followed by painfully boring 2D checkers-tier speculation.

Re: U.S. Files Criminal Charges Against Theranos’s Elizabeth Holmes, Ramesh Balwani

#179

Post by vlozko »

marme wrote: post #154
maxxxxx wrote: post #6

Does anybody know if Theranos got started with at least an idea how to accomplish what they wanted to do? From what I have heard in interviews they started with the thought "Doing xxx would be super useful" but didn't have an approach for accomplishing this but instead took in money and tried to figure it out. It's like me saying "An antimatter drive would revolutionize space exploration" and starting to collect mone…

It was all ideas and plans. They built machines that performed significantly worse than standard tests. Their idea was one machine to run virtually all blood tests with a few drops of blood, their final machine only ran a handful of tests and was so inaccurate that only reason the FDA did not shut them down instantly is they used a loophole to claim it was not a testing machine but just in house lab equipment to assi…

I’ve heard about her not blinking. Also, she forces her voice to be at a lower octave than what her speaking voice normally is.

Re: U.S. Files Criminal Charges Against Theranos’s Elizabeth Holmes, Ramesh Balwani

#180

Post by majos »

trhway wrote: post #171
gamblor956 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They had a good idea of what they wanted to do (blood tests using very thin needles) but never successfully figured out how to accomplish that with the level of accuracy required. Most Medical professionals believe that what they wanted to do was simply impossible from a biological perspective due to the natural variations of blood content. It would have been like trying to determine traffic on a freeway by taking a…

>determine traffic on a freeway by taking a brief glance through a tiny slit in a piece of paper. taking 10 such brief glances may allow for some good enough probabilistic estimate though. Upon hearing first time about Theranos in 2013 i thought that they would do something like it, i.e. statistical approach based on some data mining as they would collect large number of samples, etc. - a typical SV tech based approa…

What's so bad about the black turtleneck?
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