171–180 of 321 posts
For those who are experts on body language, non-verbal communication, psychological communication tricks, etc -- what on earth are we seeing in that trailer?
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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…
She was sold as a successful Stanford dropout, a genius who had a simple idea and assembled a very powerful group of people to push the idea and a ton of funding. Nobody is saying we shouldn't trust Stanford dropouts anymore.
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…
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
Heck, Henry kissinger was on her board.
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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...
> Sometimes I think if Charles Manson started a startup We like to think we live in a meritocracy, but the fact so much of success is based on personality, manipulating people, being charming and persuasive, tapping into others' insecurities and ambitions. Elizabeth Holmes is a symptom of the same basic human dysfunction that brought us Charles Manson and Donald Trump. Relevant musical interlude: https://www.youtube.…
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Then you are sexist and racist, nothing to be proud of!
funny that no one said that to the parent comment that blindly speculated that holmes caused more sexism simply for being a woman yet bring up the ruling class and that gets called out for sexism despite the endless string of fraud cases covered by those demographics
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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…
Uh, let me tell you that that behavior is ignored in high profile scientists regardless of disability. 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 man…
That is, don't assume that bad behavior is because of someone's membership in a particular demographic, when it could just be a general instance of people being assholes.
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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.
or perhaps she was just a toxic colleague, with tons of experience in a narrow field that he did not have and making colleagues leave was just her thing. Vote me down all you want, women are just as capable as men in every way, including the wrong, toxic ones
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…
They wisely decided she was full of shit, and didn't invest.
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"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.
Sexism is defined as prejudice or discrimination based on sex. 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 sexi…
I'm also not sure why you're bringing up "in the 2020s" as a counterargument against the idea that Theranos was not an outlier at the time it operated when it shut down in 2018.
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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.
Musk as well among others.
Whatever you think of Musk there's a significant amount of "actually exists and works" that's on a different planet vs Theranos