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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

#171

Post by buvanshak »

psergeant wrote: post #148
jcranmer wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Substitute Elon Musk and Tesla (particularly back in 2017) with Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos back in 2014, before the big exposés started coming out. From the perspective of the lay investor, what distinguishes the two cases? This goes to answer both your comment and (at present) the top comment of this post, which asks why people ignore a chorus of naysayers saying that what's being done is impossible. The entire m…

> From the perspective of the lay investor, what distinguishes the two cases? You can buy a Tesla car today, strip it down, and confirm it works and isn’t a giant Potemkin village?

>You can buy a Tesla car today, strip it down, and confirm it works and isn’t a giant Potemkin village?

What about "Full self driving hardware"? I am pretty sure you are not going to find it there.

And people have bought them thinking that it (full self driving functionality) is just one update away...

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

#172

Post by aaron695 »

Kiro wrote: post #115
busterarm wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember there were immediately after the 2014 TED talk. Heck, I watched that talk and immediately thought it was a complete fraud. Turns out that's like 7 years into this company being around and a year after they'd been full-on defrauding investors. I can't recall of hearing of Theranos before then though, but I'm not in the valley.

A lot of "I remember" in this thread but where are the links?

Comment from the oldest HN article I could find -

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6349808

NO one refuted it.

The issue is not that smart people didn't know, it's so many people can't see the obvious.

Assuming the comment is ordered correctly it's the masses with the problem. Valid concerns were raised, no one could defend them, but the comment was left at the bottom.

HN, like the media has flaws that don't allow it to correct at even a snails pace.

But if you're smart it's not hard to see the truth, hard part is making money, it was fake from the beginning but who would have thought it'd take so many years to fail in RL. Knowing when to bet against it is the hard part.

IE. Magic Leap will fail, who knows when though.

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

#173

Post by icebraining »

madaxe_again wrote: post #135
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…

What I find truly amazing is that both Kissinger and Mattis were board members, and were party to this grand pump-and-dump, and seem to have escaped any consequence or notice. Holmes, while equally culpable, appears to be taking the entire fall. I wonder what she’s getting in return - a cabinet position in a few years once the dust has settled, I’m wagering.

You're surprised that Kissinger has escaped consequences?

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

#174

Post by Ibai0tha »

twoodfin wrote: post #165
rjkennedy98 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's unfortunate that your brother and others couldn't publicly trade on this knowledge. That simultaneously would have made a ton of money and disseminated through the market the valuable information that folks were betting megabucks that Theranos was full of it, limiting their fraudulent climb into the stratosphere. This is a long way of saying that we may have created too many disincentives for large companies to…

Or prediction markets that investors could use as a second opinion to get a corrective input on their own views.

If you invest 100M you might as well throw another 10k at a prediction market if you're confident in yours and there are naysayers who would bet against you.

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

#175

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

Gatsky wrote: post #41

Something went wrong with the personal development of Elizabeth Holmes. How she could have such an astounding deficit of basic integrity is baffling. There must be some mental illness there. She’s a fascinating character, a biotech Wizard of Oz, who thought that if she wore turtlenecks and gave TED talks, the rest of it would fall into place. Cargo Cult Entrepreneurship fails miserably it would seem.

>> There must be some mental illness there.

Or maybe it's just that a billion dollars can make a lot of people re-consider their values.

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

#176

Post by growlist »

ousta wrote: post #137

Im gonna be downvoted for this but whatever. This would never have happened if Holmes was a man. America is so obsessed by its desire to empower minorities and woman especially that they will allow them to take risks or do things that no man on earth would be allowed to do hence playing with lives and healthcare at silicon valley scale and with billionare investors. The media is of course the first one to blame for t…

From a certain feminist perspective this behaviour would be seen as reassuring in that it demonstrates women are just as capable of bad behaviour as men, and thus are equal.

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

#177

Post by mxwsn »

sametmax wrote: post #154
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.…

While there is some unknowable risk, Theranos was in a completely different realm in terms of the mismatch between her technological aspirations and the feasibility of current technology. From the interview, Holmes appears to lack the knowledge and even the curiosity to understand the existing technology, making her company essentially a blind bet. This is enormously more irresponsible than the technological bets that FB, Apple, Uber, etc make.

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

#178

Post by MarkMMullin »

rotskoff wrote: post #6

While Theranos relied heavily on excessive optimism about technology's potential to solve a major problem, it also relied heavily on outright fraud. It's true that they had assembled a board of non-experts that were duped by unrealistic promises, but when the investors were lied to (as is being alleged in court) it seems difficult to say this is a symptom of some sort of cultural problem among investors.

It's a cultural problem that has arisen across much of tech and is embedded within it - if you're going to have a science based business, then science says that while you may have picked your initial hypothesis because you love and believe in it, the only thing that matters after that first step is measurable and provable results. I see this a lot in the machine learning space "We've got this great ML solution all ready to go.... annnd we don't even know what linear regression is" Start your journey on a dream, but navigate by facts, you must.

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

#179

Post by growlist »

dragonwriter wrote: post #157
growlist wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 the…

I take your point and my choice of words could have been better, though I'd note that valid methodologies in social science are far from limited to quantitative, which is what you seem to be suggesting, and plenty of students can get through a social science degree relying almost entirely on qualitative methodology.

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

#180

Post by JustSomeNobody »

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…

That was the case with the housing bubble, the tech bubble, etc. Everyone always gets wrapped up in the free money, that they just don't care. The media does, I think, pay attention, but they are in it for money too, so if the positive story is going to get more clicks, they run with that.
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