Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ... Considering this and the lack of substance behind her claims, I would personally bet money that she is a clinical psychopath. The most disturbing thing I have ever observed about human beings is our tendency to follow psychopaths. Psychopaths seem to have this gravity around them and people just fall into line…
The classic example is Niko Tinbergen, who created models of fish that were rounder and redder than the real fish, who would ignore other real fish and focus on the models. The human ability to refine things produces a lot of good examples. Like how refined sugar influences us so much that it ends up in most processed foods. Or how refining the coca leaf produces addicts.
My theory with sociopaths is that giving no fucks what others think allows them to be unnaturally confident. Since we often evaluate others by how confident they are, we are easily taken in by people with supernormal confidence. That gives us the reality distortion field (as social primates, our main reality is social) and "drinking the kool-aid". Which is a metaphor Jobs used for how he wanted people to react to the Mac, but the metaphor is about a cult whose charismatic leaders led them to mass suicide. [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonestown#Deaths_in_Jonestown