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We Shouldn’t Be Surprised at the Theranos Fraud

nautil.us

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Re: We Shouldn’t Be Surprised at the Theranos Fraud

#151

Post by dralley »

transfire wrote: post #127

All the ballyhoo stunk to high heaven to me -- a case of "doth protest too much". So, my guess is the tech actually worked (even if not as perfect as originally hoped). And the company was destroyed by industry players via government regulation and a massive smear campaign -- and it worked like a charm. Ultimately they even murdered the lead scientist, faking his suicide, to ensure the truth is never known. The tech…

You sound like someone who immediately dismissed "all the ballyhoo" because it wasn't what you wanted to believe.

As someone who has followed the whole thing closely, Holmes and Balwani are snakes, and their fraud is undeniable. The tech is so "revolutionary" that they weren't even using it, they just hacked competitors machines to use smaller samples, accuracy rates be damned.

Re: We Shouldn’t Be Surprised at the Theranos Fraud

#152

Post by TillE »

sytelus wrote: post #128

The book Bad Blood is amazing and extremely gripping. The question, however, why Holmes did this is still open. The critical point to remember is that Holmes never sold her shares and in fact she kept accumulating more. She didn't need IQ of 150 to figure out that going live with erroneous medical devices would get her slammed with lawsuits from patients. If she just wanted to dup investors to become rich, she could…

You start out with an idea you hope you can make work, you fudge a little and naively promise the moon, and soon enough (after a few big investments) you're in so deep there's no way out. Maybe you realize pretty quickly that the technology is a dud, but there's no exit without humiliation so you just keep digging.

I don't think she's a sympathetic figure in any way, but it's easy to see how someone could wind up in that situation without having started out as a scammer.

Re: We Shouldn’t Be Surprised at the Theranos Fraud

#153

Post by cuddlypsycho »

Elizabeth Holmes did not happen in a vacuum of course. She is a by-product of a culture that idolizes youth, raw enthusiasm, and passion over experience and pragmatism.

Socially shaming and silencing her critics by branding them as old-fashioned, sexist and unsupportive of female CEOs in tech by the media did not help the situation either.

Re: We Shouldn’t Be Surprised at the Theranos Fraud

#154

Post by sametmax »

sytelus wrote: post #128

The book Bad Blood is amazing and extremely gripping. The question, however, why Holmes did this is still open. The critical point to remember is that Holmes never sold her shares and in fact she kept accumulating more. She didn't need IQ of 150 to figure out that going live with erroneous medical devices would get her slammed with lawsuits from patients. If she just wanted to dup investors to become rich, she could…

She probably believed in her project.

You can't know if you are going to succeed when you try to achieve a revolutionary feat. But you have to act like you are sure you will.

Imagine Jobs in an alternate universe, trying to get out the iPhone, but after years of failures and billions wasted, the world realize the product vision was unrealistic.

Basically him being the same asshole, but hitting a wall many predicted.

That would look the same as Theranos.

The difference is that Job didn't fail. But he couldn't know that before trying and commit many people and resource to it.

Imagine Elon failing as the Falcon X. Or worst, failing over and over until his company died because they lost control of one that went crashing into a school.

Imagine Zuckerberg called out about all the privacy issues on FB before it actually made benefit. I would have died.

When you try to achieve radical vision, you often either succeed as a hero or you fail as a vilain.

Re: We Shouldn’t Be Surprised at the Theranos Fraud

#155

Post by growlist »

jadedhacker wrote: post #103
kumarvvr wrote: post #26

The most amazing thing about this whole situation is that there were experts in the field who were shouting out about the impossibility of Holmes' claims right from the beginning. The media, though, never paid enough attention (or was possibly subverted by Theranos itself) to the naysayers. These incidents ought to remind us the exponentially important role media plays in our lives and how important it is that we com…

You won't get honest and really critical press without removing capitalist (i.e. non-democratic) ownership of the press. Making it so that the journalists own the company rather than some billionaire overlord would be a marked improvement.

I would add to that the need for more expert scientific input into journalism. Properly informed journalism on science issues seems like the exception rather than the norm. Even major news organisations seem to treat science like some mysterious cult at times. I can't help thinking that most journalists probably study social science etc. at undergrad level, leaving them ill equipped for gritty technical investigation, just as you might not expect to get the most well informed theatre criticism from a civil engineer..

Re: We Shouldn’t Be Surprised at the Theranos Fraud

#156

Post by Radim »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #120
mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt I am the first to call it that, but I haven’t seen it elsewhere that I am presently aware of. Having a taxonomy of this bad behavior, with useful names, does seem important, to make identifying it and discussing it more widespread. I imagine young founders not wishing to be like Holmes could benefit from a rubric of sorts that helps classify this behavior. And for bad-faith founders who do want to behave like…

Corey Pein’s recent book is a good take down of SV’s narcissistic mythology, and shows how it has some surprising and disturbing roots. There was also a thread here recently about how business culture values those who operate politically far more than it values those who are practical creators - how if you’re skilled at politics you can appear to achieve almost anything, even if you have no true useful skills. Holmes…

> If someone like Holmes can become a billionaire by peddling nothing except lies and hope, what’s the real value of the software and tech industries if you take away the hype and money machines that surround them?

"Real value" is a tricky concept. What is and isn't real? Clearly societies have evolved (and are still evolving) to incorporate "dreams, future potential and hype inertia" into the equation, so anecdotally and tautologically, there's some value in that. Future considerations affect today's reality, so they're "real" in every sense of the word.

We don't know what exactly it is that captures the human imagination—a combination of history, ancestral stories, greed, a tangled mess of primal urges—but peddling improbable futures is definitely a well-established evolutionary pattern.

Dreams and ideologies are the rudder that helps civilizations steer away from local minima, overcome adversity and plod through suffering.

My point is that Holmes is a somewhat extreme example because her confrontation with reality was so head-on, so clearly falsifiable. But if you take away the "hype and money machines" en-masse, I suspect you'll end up with something that isn't human. It's all a house of cards. And it's nonsensical to discuss money, economy and value without humans, these are purely social constructs.

Re: We Shouldn’t Be Surprised at the Theranos Fraud

#157

Post by dragonwriter »

growlist wrote: post #155
jadedhacker wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You won't get honest and really critical press without removing capitalist (i.e. non-democratic) ownership of the press. Making it so that the journalists own the company rather than some billionaire overlord would be a marked improvement.

I would add to that the need for more expert scientific input into journalism. Properly informed journalism on science issues seems like the exception rather than the norm. Even major news organisations seem to treat science like some mysterious cult at times. I can't help thinking that most journalists probably study social science etc. at undergrad level, leaving them ill equipped for gritty technical investigation…

> I can't help thinking that most journalists probably study social science etc. at undergrad level, leaving them ill equipped for gritty technical investigation

Social sciences are empirical sciences where knowledge of statistical controls and other tools needed to deal with the difficulty of laboratory research in the area of study are necessary as well as all those things necessary in any empirical science, so they don't have that effect.

OTOH, most journalists probably study journalism or other arts, not any kind of science, at the undergraduate level.

Re: We Shouldn’t Be Surprised at the Theranos Fraud

#158

Post by growlist »

TillE wrote: post #152
sytelus wrote: post #128

The book Bad Blood is amazing and extremely gripping. The question, however, why Holmes did this is still open. The critical point to remember is that Holmes never sold her shares and in fact she kept accumulating more. She didn't need IQ of 150 to figure out that going live with erroneous medical devices would get her slammed with lawsuits from patients. If she just wanted to dup investors to become rich, she could…

You start out with an idea you hope you can make work, you fudge a little and naively promise the moon, and soon enough (after a few big investments) you're in so deep there's no way out. Maybe you realize pretty quickly that the technology is a dud, but there's no exit without humiliation so you just keep digging. I don't think she's a sympathetic figure in any way, but it's easy to see how someone could wind up in…

This makes sense to me, as I've asked myself was she bad or deluded? But perhaps instead she started out with the best intentions, only to be forced into gambling with ever greater stakes as each attempt at changing the world fell flat.

Re: We Shouldn’t Be Surprised at the Theranos Fraud

#159

Post by mhneu »

tptacek wrote: post #83
cowpig wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He gets credit for not doing something extremely unethical that would have been quite risky, probably stupidly so (because it would bring him into the controversy)?

I don't know if he gets credit for it (I'm disinclined to give him credit for anything, ever), but since a reporter in his employ came pretty close to singlehandedly ruining that investment, he makes a really bad example of how Theranos investors subverted the media. As Carreyrou reports, Theranos definitely tried to pull strings with Murdoch, and apparently got nowhere with it. The WSJ timed the story to hit right b…

Carreyrou wrote a book. This story was going to get out anyway.

Murdoch is a very skilled propagandist. He knew that trying to suppress this story would have backfired on him. Especially because the machines don’t work and because Walgreens would have soon learned the truth.

Nothing hurts a propagandist more than being really caught in an obvious lie. To protect his ability to slant the WSJ, Murdoch couldn’t have gotten caught suppressing this story. And he would have gotten caught if he tried.

Re: We Shouldn’t Be Surprised at the Theranos Fraud

#160

Post by mhneu »

mseebach wrote: post #144
shub wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Refraining from being horrible is not the same thing as doing something good.

No, but refraining from taking an action that's well within your power to take, possibly with minimal consequences, and which you have a strong incentive to take, is sign of integrity. I don't know if that's "getting credit", but having integrity is clearly a good thing. On the other hand, it could simply be shrewd businessmanship. It's not like it was the reporting that made Theranos unviable. The tech would never w…

Murdoch had a short term incentive but a very large long term disincentive. If he tried to suppress this story he would have gotten caught because FDA and Walgreens care about facts. Not to mention that the story itself would drive readership.

Looks to me that Murdoch acted exactly according to his long term goals.

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