161–170 of 257 posts
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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)?
Would controlling the media to influence an investment you hold stock in be considered illegal? Similar to insider trading?
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A man like Murdoch cares whether a company he invested in is going to make him money. This means finding out how the company is actually doing, instead of simply trusting the documents presented to him. What better way to do this than to have a reporter snoop around? By letting reporters in his hire just do their jobs, Murdoch probably gets privileged access to a great deal of secrets and speculations. Carreyrou's re…
Also, Murdoch has a $5B investment in the WSJ. The value of that investment depends on the credibility of their business reporting. Spiking stories to protect a much smaller investment doesn't make a lot of sense.
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> Journalists might not know better. I don't understand why this would excuse anything. Journalism is almost literally their about to (get to) know better about things and explaining to the rest of us. At least, that's what it should be -- these days it seems to be mostly about generating clickbait. (Sorry if that's cynical -- I've just read Trust Me, I'm Lying.) > Ultimately, shouldn't everyone be applying critical…
>these days it seems to be mostly about generating clickbait. Yes it's a bastardization of their profession, but everyone needs to eat. Who knows if we'll ever get back to the quality of journalism in the Woodward/Bernstein era, when the large majority of middle-class Americans paid a monthly subscription to have professionally composed news delivered to their doorstep every morning.
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…
> come up with a framework to penalize misleading journalism, while at the same time, preserving the independence of media Why this obsession with penalizing people? Journalists might not know better. At some point one needs to take some responsibility in determining whether what they are consuming are actually reputable data sources or just cheap/free entertainment and hearsay, and one needs to realize that news out…
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> The media, though, never paid enough attention (or was possibly subverted by Theranos itself) to the naysayers. This is not the most amazing thing, at all. I'm not surprised that "the media" with their limited access, didn't get the full story. Rather, I'm more surprised about the informed investors, who invested a lot of money, and had access or at least the ability to push for it. How did they invest so much mone…
My brother who is a pre-med student was able to figure out that Theranos was full of it without any special access way before the media broke the story. When Stanford Professor John Ioannidis refuses to join your board because he refuses to give your product credibility that is a HUGE red flag.
This is a long way of saying that we may have created too many disincentives for large companies to IPO.
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Also, Murdoch has a $5B investment in the WSJ. The value of that investment depends on the credibility of their business reporting. Spiking stories to protect a much smaller investment doesn't make a lot of sense.
Exactly. His long term incentives were aligned with letting the story run.
As the rationalists say, if you can explain anything, you can explain nothing.
I'm not saying he did it for good reasons. I'm saying it's plain that nobody here knows why he did it, and lack of knowledge is lack of knowledge, not license to just fill in the blanks with whatever you like. (Our brains are very good at that, and the careful person must be in a constant fight against that tendency.)
But jerf, I already know he's a bad person.
You are justified in using past history to do a certain amount of broad concluding (nothing as specific as the 5+ hypotheses given), yes, but bear in mind you are not justified in "A: Murdoch is bad B: Here's a thing he did C: I bet he did B for a bad reason because A therefore D: Murdoch is even worse than I thought". You are "spending" confidence when you do this, not increasing it. (Another very common cognitive error. Not sure I've seen this on any fallacy lists. Probably needs to be, and given a name.)
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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…
Were his losses insured or recovered somehow after the collapse? Or was the investor money all gone by then?
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.…
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…
I know! Just read the history of cold fusion and perpetual motion machines:. The establishment and government didn't allow these either :-)