Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

'You Can See Everything' Review: Nathan Fielder's Doc About Elizabeth Holmes

variety.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 320 posts

Re: 'You Can See Everything' Review: Nathan Fielder's Doc About Elizabeth Holmes

#81

Post by sarchertech »

tantalor wrote: post #76
sschueller wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet people who met her were stupid enough to think she is some kind of genius and gave her millions of dollars. Sometimes I think if Charles Manson started a startup instead of killing people he would have had millions in investments and be praised as some sort of wunder kind...

Hot take: She is a genius. Just not the kind of genius that can invent new products or lead a successful company. If she had partnered with a competent engineer and CEO, Theranos might still be in business. The company wasn't doomed from the start. It began with a real vision.

Yeah but the “vision” was just the ideas of a kid with 2 semesters of college classes under her belt saying “what if”. It was never going to work. She had tons of competent engineers working for her. The basic idea was and is unworkable.

If she had come up with an actual good idea with only 2 semesters of experience then sure you could say she was a genius. Even if she couldn’t successfully build a company. But the most you say is that she is a really good conman.

Re: 'You Can See Everything' Review: Nathan Fielder's Doc About Elizabeth Holmes

#82

Post by the_other »

OroPla wrote: post #40
FranzFerdiNaN wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plenty of male-led businesses also turned out to be scams, and yet no one goes 'that guy looks sharp, but he is male so seems suspicious'. Which only proofs how deep sexism is rooted.

It's just pattern recognition at work. None of the male-led scams have "being male" as a talking point trying to sell the scam, so it's about as notable as a scam founder wearing black shoes. But now "female led" has entered the conversation as something to recognize a scam by. Whenever it comes up again this memory will lit up and make people wary.

> But now "female led" has entered the conversation as something to recognize a scam by.

Only by sexists.

Re: 'You Can See Everything' Review: Nathan Fielder's Doc About Elizabeth Holmes

#83

Post by catchnear4321 »

amiga386 wrote: post #80
catchnear4321 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The patterns did not form themselves. It’s rarely “just pattern recognition at work.”

Scammers/predators/grifters/sociopaths will adopt any disguise and say whatever needs to be said that gets the mark to fall for it. Are priests the pinnacle of trust in your society? You now get a lot of scammers pretending to be (or actually becoming) priests. Are sagely tech leaders announcing the latest new thing on their thought-leadership blogs the way to get investment money? You now have 99% of LinkedIn's memb…

Appreciate you taking the time to engage, unlike those that eye rolled and down voted. (They don’t like admitting their participation in pattern formation it would seem.)

Re: 'You Can See Everything' Review: Nathan Fielder's Doc About Elizabeth Holmes

#86

Post by ungovernableCat »

dragochat wrote: post #16
nl wrote: post #4

> But the more Holmes talks to Fielder, the more he teases out her unhinged rationale, which is: The device works fine! We just had to figure out that pesky chemistry stuff! The strange thing is that Holmes has such a corporate mindset that she treats the chemistry stuff…that hadn’t been invented yet…as just another glitchy small problem that could easily be solved The difference between science and engineering right…

she'd be the perfect CEO of a BigAI corpo - as opposed to betting on humans randomly discovering new chemistry in predictable ammount of time, betting on neural networks offering a brute-force way to (super)human congnition is actualy "saner" - I mean, we know from _evolution_ that in a universe with out _physics_ brute forcing the problem of building intelligence with neural-network like architecture "very likely wo…

Elizabeth: my company will enable a full quick and cheap blood test from just a finger prick

Amodei: AI will cure cancer

Elizabeth wasn’t ambitious and visionary enough for the current era.

Re: 'You Can See Everything' Review: Nathan Fielder's Doc About Elizabeth Holmes

#87

Post by shermantanktop »

philipallstar wrote: post #63
Aaargh20318 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because Madoff scammed rich people. You can get away with a lot if you scam the poor. Not so much when you target the wealthy.

That makes no sense within the topic of conversation.

Here’s how I think it makes sense: accountability for unethical behavior arrives via more or less direct routes depending on who you are.

The more you look like a high-status leader, the longer it will take, and the more likely it arrives as a fine or a suspended sentence followed by an eventual redemption story published in the New Yorker or equivalent.

But targeting other high-status people ejects you from the white glove treatment.

Re: 'You Can See Everything' Review: Nathan Fielder's Doc About Elizabeth Holmes

#88

Post by olalonde »

xyzelement wrote: post #13

I have a distinctive memory about Theranos from business school - so circa 2013 a few years before it blew up. Some professor was going on and on about Holmes for being a young, female, founder. It stood out at the moment as weird because the praise was separate from success or outcomes or like brilliant science. It was all about the identity: gender and age. I wonder if the reason the scam went so far as it did beca…

Reminiscent of what happened with Jason Arday[0].

[0] https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2026/08/04/the-bizarre-tale-o...

Re: 'You Can See Everything' Review: Nathan Fielder's Doc About Elizabeth Holmes

#89

Post by NoboruWataya »

s_dev wrote: post #6
nl wrote: post #4

> But the more Holmes talks to Fielder, the more he teases out her unhinged rationale, which is: The device works fine! We just had to figure out that pesky chemistry stuff! The strange thing is that Holmes has such a corporate mindset that she treats the chemistry stuff…that hadn’t been invented yet…as just another glitchy small problem that could easily be solved The difference between science and engineering right…

You mean marketing and engineering.

She had a science/engineering background, more than marketing. Engineers can be frauds too.

Re: 'You Can See Everything' Review: Nathan Fielder's Doc About Elizabeth Holmes

#90

Post by jackb4040 »

philipallstar wrote: post #59
tclancy wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah and we wish they would stop. Because solutions like this are something the system optimizes for.

Then we wouldn't have anything that's hard to create and/or requires risk.

[flagged]
Post reply on HN