Earlier quoted context omitted.
You mean marketing and engineering.
She had a science/engineering background, more than marketing. Engineers can be frauds too.
Marketing by definition is fraudulent because it is all about creating a fake need.
'You Can See Everything' Review: Nathan Fielder's Doc About Elizabeth Holmes
101–110 of 320 posts
Re: 'You Can See Everything' Review: Nathan Fielder's Doc About Elizabeth Holmes
#102I 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…
The general scam of unrealistic promises then under-delivering is such a well worn trope that while gender surely played a part in it (as it is a big part of social perceptions in general) I hesitate to blame it here. I think for anyone who has been in tech for a while it doesn't take an imagination to picture a man doing pretty much the same thing
Yeah, the same is maybe more obvious outside of HN, but engineer/tech companies often play the same trope but on "brilliant and smart people but bit naive/rose-tinted views that couldn't unintentionally harm anyone even if they tried", like how media showcased Zuckerberg initially, before everyone realized his true colors.
Re: 'You Can See Everything' Review: Nathan Fielder's Doc About Elizabeth Holmes
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s only true in the public Zeitgeist, there is a huge preference among portions of the workforce for male leadership stated or unstated. This is not a good thing. I literally worked with a guy who was about to quit because a woman would boss him around and she was about 10,000 times as qualified as he was
then again, how good a manager would she have made if she was bossing around colleagues to the point of them quitting? Management is not just about qualification, it's also about the human aspect. I have seen enough toxic femineity at work to say it is actually a thing, on par with toxic masculinity.
Or perhaps this guy perceived normal, appropriate management that he would have been perfectly fine with had it come from a man as “bossy” when it came from a woman.
Re: 'You Can See Everything' Review: Nathan Fielder's Doc About Elizabeth Holmes
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 m…
> The basic idea was and is unworkable.
To be fair, lots of "basic ideas" are unworkable until someone bangs their head against it enough times and suddenly it is workable. Sometimes the environment or available technology just have to change/improve/scale a tiny bit more for something to go from unworkable to workable.
Still, what she did was obvious fraud straight up, not just "lets bang our head against this until it works".
Re: 'You Can See Everything' Review: Nathan Fielder's Doc About Elizabeth Holmes
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If Bernie Madoff could run as a republican senator, I'd given him decent odds to win. And yet somehow he - a man - is in jail. A jail built by men, condemned by a justice system designed by men to lock bad men up.
This is true, but I think my point still holds. If he were to get of jail, say by donating a substantial sum to Trump and then coincidentally getting a full pardon. And then he ran, I don't think that his infamy as a scammer would hurt him. If anything, that fame and name recognition would help. He could just lie and say he was framed and set up and yada yada and people would believe him.
True - I see what you mean. Well, I don't know if it's true, but I get the logic.
Re: 'You Can See Everything' Review: Nathan Fielder's Doc About Elizabeth Holmes
#106I 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…
Of all the ways Theranos was a scam, the gender thing was pretty much the last. She was wealthy, stacked the board with all the wrong sorts of people but the right sorts of people for corrupt contracts.
Re: 'You Can See Everything' Review: Nathan Fielder's Doc About Elizabeth Holmes
#107Re: 'You Can See Everything' Review: Nathan Fielder's Doc About Elizabeth Holmes
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
I regret engaging, comment removed.
EDIT: luckily I quoted the things I was replying to, because the above poster drastically edited his/her post, just resorting finally to namecalling. > Even this “trans women in sports” issue you brought up for no reason is deeply rooted misogyny in action. As soon as someone becomes a woman they are a second-class citizen. Claiming this does not make it so. I said nothing misogynistic. You can't just claim this any…
> No one cares about a woman entering a men's sporting contest, because a) she almost certainly will never get anywhere and b) if she did, it would be an amazing achievement, and would be men losing out, which very few people would care about.
No one cares about women entering a sporting contest in the men's category because there is no such thing. There are open categories, and there are restricted categories. The women's category is a restricted category, because 50% of the population deserve their own champions. Just like there are childrens' categories, categories for people who live in Gary, Indiana, and categories for people with different levels of paraplegia.
The fact that roughly half of people are men and half are women causes the open category to often be referred to as the "men's" category, but it is not. If a woman can and wants to compete in the "men's" category, she should. If this results in a crowding out of men in the rankings of some sport, they should feel free to start an actual restrictive men's category for that sport. Men's and women's bodies, socialization, and opportunities to practice are different. Men are 50% of the population and deserve their own champions.
edit: there's speculation about women eventually crowding out men in ultra-marathons. Then there would be a good reason for a men's category.
Re: 'You Can See Everything' Review: Nathan Fielder's Doc About Elizabeth Holmes
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
It sure did. And it backfired in a way that could make future female innovators guilty by association. I can see investors asking themselves "That girl looks sharp, but is she another Elizabeth Holmes?"
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.
https://xkcd.com/385/
This sort of thing is really hard to avoid. If you've ever spent time as somehow very different in a social setting, you can see this happening all the time. Even in positive ways.
Re: 'You Can See Everything' Review: Nathan Fielder's Doc About Elizabeth Holmes
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 m…
> The basic idea was and is unworkable. To be fair, lots of "basic ideas" are unworkable until someone bangs their head against it enough times and suddenly it is workable. Sometimes the environment or available technology just have to change/improve/scale a tiny bit more for something to go from unworkable to workable. Still, what she did was obvious fraud straight up, not just "lets bang our head against this until…
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