Earlier quoted context omitted.
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/s…
I am reading a comment (1) by a person (2) who read an article on a newspaper website (3) discussing a book (4) written by someone about the life (5) of Stephen Hawking. What I read !== Stephen Hawking.
'You Can See Everything' Review: Nathan Fielder's Doc About Elizabeth Holmes
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Re: 'You Can See Everything' Review: Nathan Fielder's Doc About Elizabeth Holmes
#162> So he calls Amanda Seyfried, who sits and watches the scene we’ve just seen of Holmes sitting and watching Seyfried portray her.
This is so very Nathan Fielder. Perfect encapsulation of his unique brand of humor. Seyfried portrays Holmes, giving her interpretation of Holmes. Holmes watches the portrayal, giving her interpretation of Seyfried's interpretation. Seyfried watches Holmes' interpretation of Seyfried's interpretation of Holmes.
This vibe is basically the entire theme of The Rehearsal. It's an exercise in how many Matryoshka dolls we can un-nest in our meta exploration of the topic. Keep zooming out and re-view yourself in the scene you just played which is a super interesting way to discover things about yourself and others
Re: 'You Can See Everything' Review: Nathan Fielder's Doc About Elizabeth Holmes
#163Earlier 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.
> Which only proofs how deep sexism is rooted. Only if you're determined to look for it. No one promotes companies, or gives special grants, or runs special funding groups, or special networking breakfasts, for men. It's only for women. Women are currently viewed as intrinsically a good thing to run a company, and it's a problem if your company has fewer than 50% women. It's all about identity and not competence. She…
Why would anyone think that having significantly less than 50% women requires no investigation if they didn't think women are intrinsically bad for a company? The problem isn't a skew in favour of women. If you expect 50-50 and get 30-70, obviously that's something to look into, but you're complaining there aren't people trying to increase the skew further. It's like complaining about the lack of organisations explicitly calling to raise the growth in average temperature as a counterweight to all those who want to lower it, or about the lack of charities promoting deforestation.
Re: 'You Can See Everything' Review: Nathan Fielder's Doc About Elizabeth Holmes
#164> 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…
"The chemistry works fine! We just had to figure out that pesky device stuff!"
Re: 'You Can See Everything' Review: Nathan Fielder's Doc About Elizabeth Holmes
#165Re: 'You Can See Everything' Review: Nathan Fielder's Doc About Elizabeth Holmes
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
Scamming as a male can actually improve your reputation. Donald Trump is currently the president of the united states despite years of ripping people off. If Bernie Madoff could run as a republican senator, I'd given him decent odds to win.
> 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.
He died in 2021.
Curiously enough, unless something changed and nobody updated his Wikipedia page, his family didnt even collect his ashes.
Re: 'You Can See Everything' Review: Nathan Fielder's Doc About Elizabeth Holmes
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Prejudice means to form an opinion before the facts are in, but if the facts are there and support you, it is not prejudice.
Discrimination is fairly broad, but in this case can be summarized as preventing someone to get a job due to who they are as a person.
Having established what these words mean, I think it is difficult to entertain the idea that sexism played a role in women being underrepresented as founders in the 2020s. Also, as I have no data on this, I am not sure if the claim of underrepresentation is itself a prejudice or not.
How many women try and succeed? How many men try and succeed? I do not expect to have the percentage be vastly different in the last ten years.
Re: 'You Can See Everything' Review: Nathan Fielder's Doc About Elizabeth Holmes
#168I 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/s…
It is only in the last couple years that outright sexual abuse of employees and trainees has become something that could discredit a high profile scientist, and even those people are getting plenty of support in finding new places to do research thanks to the Epstein class.
Hawking was long dead before that, and many high profile scientists are guilty of what Hawking is guilty of.
Re: 'You Can See Everything' Review: Nathan Fielder's Doc About Elizabeth Holmes
#169I 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…
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?"
Sam Bankman Fried didn't hurt anybody else in his gender class, but somehow now all women have to carry the baggage of Elizabeth Holmes.