'You Can See Everything' Review: Nathan Fielder's Doc About Elizabeth Holmes • Hacker News Board

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

#131

Post by lelanthran » Mon, Sep 07, 2026, 2:21 PM UTC

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…

> Anything that turns your brain off, whether it's tugging your heartstrings, endorsing your ideology, whatever, scammers are ready to take advantage.

TheLastPsychiatrist used a good phrase to describe this: cognitive kill-switch. Anything that stops further examination or exploration of an assertion is a CKS. In Holmes' case, the CKS was "you're just sexist if you don't believe"...

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

#132

Post by philipallstar » Mon, Sep 07, 2026, 2:29 PM UTC

shermantanktop wrote: post #87

philipallstar wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 whit…

I don't think it's that simple. If Bernie Sanders were an unknown, but had stabbed Iryna Zarutska on video and walked off saying he got that white girl, I'm pretty sure he would've still gone to jail and been subject to the death penalty. It's more than high-status people generally don't do that sort of thing, because you probably didn't get where you were if you were that unintelligent, violent, and impulsive.

In fact, in that exact case the chap who did it was treated far too leniently by the justice system and they've un-"Progressived" the law in some ways to make it so he would never be able to do that again. Which is progress. Or at least the undoing of Progress.

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

#133

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Sep 07, 2026, 2:40 PM UTC

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.

[deleted]

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

#134

Post by saghm » Mon, Sep 07, 2026, 2:41 PM UTC

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.

"female led" is only a selling point if women are underrepresented as founders, so it still circles back to whether or not the industry already had a pattern of sexism that made having a prominent female founder an outlier in the first place. I'm sure plenty of people will disagree, but I think it pretty clearly did.

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

#135

Post by Ar-Curunir » Mon, Sep 07, 2026, 2:44 PM UTC

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.

They definitely do, just implicitly. In the past it was more explicitly stated.

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

#136

Post by Arodex » Mon, Sep 07, 2026, 2:50 PM UTC

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…

Weird to put together "female and young": females are discriminated against, but it is older people, not younger ones, that are discriminated too. This ain't Japan, were seniority is king. This is America, where you are in decline after 30.

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

#137

Post by postscapes1 » Mon, Sep 07, 2026, 2:50 PM UTC

Is she not in jail right now?

Also why in her right mind would she sign up to do this with Fielder?

My brain hurts from this project.

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

#138

Post by twoodfin » Mon, Sep 07, 2026, 2:51 PM UTC

embedding-shape wrote: post #104

sarchertech wrote: post #81

Earlier 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…

One of the best examples of this: Streaming video.

Literally a dream for decades, with billions of dollars spent on technology, marketing, infrastructure by huge incumbent players and startups alike.

Netflix didn’t innovate much on any of these angles, they “just” had the right business plan at the right moment.

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

#139

Post by kelseyfrog » Mon, Sep 07, 2026, 2:54 PM UTC

lelanthran wrote: post #130

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.

> 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'. The scam was sold on her gender ("successful female entrepreneur"), so unfortunately it's going to be part of the heuristic. Male-led scams aren't sold on the gender of the scammer; gender is completely ignored (No one describes those as "a successful male entrepreneur"). Unfort…

I'd hesitate to jump to the conclusion that Holmes had editorial control over the way journalists portrayed her. The idea that a 'young woman overcoming the odds' story sells more than 'young man overcoming the odds' doesn't take any leaps of faith to explain.

That doesn't mean that Holmes didn't benefit from such coverage, she obviously did, but to call it part of the scam as if it was under her control seems a bit far fetched.

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

#140

Post by satvikpendem » Mon, Sep 07, 2026, 2:57 PM UTC

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…

I just read this article about a Stephen Hawking biography that talks about how "Hawking’s overweening ambition and self-promotion, his repeated failure to acknowledge the work of others, his sexism and controlling behaviour were largely ignored because of his disability" so identity perception by the public does in fact contribute to how people think about their achievements.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2026/sep/07/hawking-by-gra...