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U.S. Files Criminal Charges Against Theranos’s Elizabeth Holmes, Ramesh Balwani

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Re: U.S. Files Criminal Charges Against Theranos’s Elizabeth Holmes, Ramesh Balwani

#461

Post by joering2 »

downandout wrote: post #353
mhneu wrote: post #238

Excellent news for American society. “The Chickenshit Club” by Eisinger recently explained why the lack of criminal charges had emboldened white collar crime. Basically, individuals need to have the risk of criminal charges if they do something very egregious - they need to have skin in the game. The US Justice Dept has in the past two decades largely only been fining corporations. And so companies estimate risk and…

For the record I have been predicting criminal charges in these threads for over a year now. You can’t make blatant misrepresentations that result in hundreds of millions of dollars being transferred to you without criminal charges eventually coming. I don’t think she did it out personal greed (except perhaps greed for publicity) - I think she believed she would probably make the tech work and just never got there. B…

Thanks for the overview I always enjoy reading your informative comments, and bookmarked you in the times of GDPR conversations.

It doesn't seem that Holmes boyfriend is ready to plea, but even with 10-12 years, with all their fame and connections and financials behind, what do you think is final reality? Some 3-6 years for good behavior??

Re: U.S. Files Criminal Charges Against Theranos’s Elizabeth Holmes, Ramesh Balwani

#462

Post by csomar »

dnautics wrote: post #456
csomar wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Few people have gotten away with fraud on the cash side in this industry though. Valeant Phamaceuticals. Shkreli I don't think Shkreli was defrauding regarding his pharmaceutical practices. (though he has security charges). He was using shady practices that were totally legal. Completely different game.

Also iirc the shkreli case is strange since no one actually suffered any damages.

According to him (in an interview) he only jacked the prices up for insurance companies.

Re: U.S. Files Criminal Charges Against Theranos’s Elizabeth Holmes, Ramesh Balwani

#463

Post by dreamcompiler »

gwern wrote: post #214
dralley wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's true, but Elizabeth owned more than 90% of the voting shares in the company. The board was basically a formality because they had no power to make decisions whatsoever.

But that's also a big part of the board's fault here! They aided and abetted that. I'm reading through _Bad Blood_ (coincidentally, before the indictment was announced), and one of Carreyou's running themes is how Holmes acquired all those shares: she wasn't the Theranos founder, she was a co -founder, in essence. The other guy (Shaunak Roy) left early on. The board approved selling his stake to her at a heavily disc…

> which made one of the directors unhappy and he tried to buy a fraction as he was contractually allowed to do

Point of interest: That director was Avie Tevanian, who designed Mach, NextStep, and OSX. Holmes wanted him on the board because of his connection to Jobs. He resigned from the Theranos board over this incident. (Carreyrou's book discusses this.)

Re: U.S. Files Criminal Charges Against Theranos’s Elizabeth Holmes, Ramesh Balwani

#464

Post by learc83 »

SilasX wrote: post #459
learc83 wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look at my comments on the April thread. I was incredibly sceptical about a 19 year old with no experience starting a biotech company. All of my comments had a large number of upvotes (for 2015), while many of the people disagreeing with me were downvoted into the negatives.

Yes, being skeptical about a 19 year old is easy. The hard part is to do it in a way consistent with the rhetoric about “fake it till you make it”/“it’ll all work out”/“all self doubt is impostor syndrome”.

It's not hard if you just don't tell people to fake it till they make it in the first place.

There's a sizeable contingent on HN that is sceptical of that mindset in general, which was my point.

Re: U.S. Files Criminal Charges Against Theranos’s Elizabeth Holmes, Ramesh Balwani

#465

Post by vanderZwan »

mdorazio wrote: post #453
dragonwriter wrote: post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, IIRC from reports years back, there is considerable evidence that this kind of fraud was not often not initiated by applicants but encouraged by lender agents, who were in turn encouraged by lender policies and incentive structure, which was set by lender executives. This isn't lack of diligence, this is setting a policy with reasonably foreseeable consequences.

Fortunately or unfortunately, "encouraged shady behavior" does not directly equate to "illegal". For example, if you encourage someone to steal a car tomorrow you're not doing anything illegal until they actually do it, they tell you they did it, and you fail to report it (accessory at that point). The actual crime part is on them. It's massively unethical and it feels like people should be in jail, but proving actua…

> Fortunately or unfortunately, "encouraged shady behavior" does not directly equate to "illegal".

If an expert tells you to break the law and insists it's fine, and you don't really know how all of this works, I don't think we can still call that merely "encouraging shady behavior".

Re: U.S. Files Criminal Charges Against Theranos’s Elizabeth Holmes, Ramesh Balwani

#466

Post by cheeko1234 »

Kluny wrote: post #347
pmiller2 wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would that argument go? Is it just that setting up social rules makes it easy to spot when people don’t follow them?

Yeah, exactly. Psychopaths don't empathize, so they don't understand why social conventions exist, so they sometimes get it wrong and something seems "off". When someone seems "off" you don't trust them.

Unfortunately, what you described applies to people on the spectrum too.

But I think the key is the difference between sociopaths and psychopaths. Sociopaths are usually really good at using their charisma to move up:

>Psychopaths are dangerous. They’re violent and cruel, and oftentimes downright sinister. They show no remorse for their actions, usually because of a lesion on a part of their brain responsible for fear and judgment, known as the amygdala. Psychopaths commit crimes in cold blood. They crave control and impulsivity, possess a predatory instinct, and attack proactively rather than as a reaction to confrontation: A 2002 study found that 93.3 percent of the psychopathic homicides were instrumental in nature (meaning they were more or less planned), compared with 48.4 percent of the homicides by people who weren’t psychopaths.

>Sociopaths are a different breed. They, too, may suffer from their mental illness as a result of lesioned brain regions. Upbringing may also play a larger role in a child becoming a sociopath versus those that are diagnosed as psychopaths, or the slide into dementia on the other end of the spectrum. Sociopathic behavior is manifested as conniving and deceitful, despite an outward appearance of trustworthiness or sincerity. Sociopaths are often pathological liars. They are manipulative and lack the ability to judge the morality of a situation, but not because they lack a moral compass; rather, their existing moral compass is greatly (yet not always dangerously) skewed. Pemment, for one, says this could point to both a social and neurological component.

source:reddit

Re: U.S. Files Criminal Charges Against Theranos’s Elizabeth Holmes, Ramesh Balwani

#467

Post by [deleted] »

eric-hu wrote: post #370
api wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The short answer is her Jobs-like "reality distortion field" -- she was exceedingly good at convincing ... Considering this and the lack of substance behind her claims, I would personally bet money that she is a clinical psychopath. The most disturbing thing I have ever observed about human beings is our tendency to follow psychopaths. Psychopaths seem to have this gravity around them and people just fall into line…

You make an interesting observation. I wonder if there are any doomsday stories of an AI that conquers humanity via psychopathic persuasion rather than conventional weapons.

[deleted]

Re: U.S. Files Criminal Charges Against Theranos’s Elizabeth Holmes, Ramesh Balwani

#468

Post by MarkMMullin »

downandout wrote: post #353
mhneu wrote: post #238

Excellent news for American society. “The Chickenshit Club” by Eisinger recently explained why the lack of criminal charges had emboldened white collar crime. Basically, individuals need to have the risk of criminal charges if they do something very egregious - they need to have skin in the game. The US Justice Dept has in the past two decades largely only been fining corporations. And so companies estimate risk and…

For the record I have been predicting criminal charges in these threads for over a year now. You can’t make blatant misrepresentations that result in hundreds of millions of dollars being transferred to you without criminal charges eventually coming. I don’t think she did it out personal greed (except perhaps greed for publicity) - I think she believed she would probably make the tech work and just never got there. B…

I agree with all but one of your points, the projection of her mindset. I've known many good technologists driving for the next big thing, hell I've done it more than once. Usually we're a bundle of quivering insecurities with an unhealthy focus on all the things that are failing in the approach and a level of fear approaching utter terror that the entire thing is going to end ignominiously. My take is that she may have had a vision, but no real understanding of the process to get there, hence 'she' never would have made the tech work and would have known that she could not anchor any of her claims to reality. That's pretty much deliberate fraud. The other alternative I see is she was pretty much brainwashed by her partner, which might be some defense.

Re: U.S. Files Criminal Charges Against Theranos’s Elizabeth Holmes, Ramesh Balwani

#469

Post by cat199 »

dralley wrote: post #210
cat199 wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But I do have to wonder whether the degree of attention from the DOJ has more to do with avenging the reputational and possibly financial losses of those same board members, than garden-variety "the DOJ prosecutes fraud". Or these two are convenient patsies.. Did they really lose money? Theranos had huge contracts for blood testing at major national pharmacy chains for a year or two, and if you follow the timeline,…

Read the book. The timeline is easily explainable without needing conspiracy theories.

What 'book'?

AFAIK not nearly all the information has been discovered or presented, and much of this never will.

How about the 'convenient' intervention of mattis into military trials of the technology? Just because it sounds like tinfoil hat doesn't mean it's not true (see also: snowden)

Re: U.S. Files Criminal Charges Against Theranos’s Elizabeth Holmes, Ramesh Balwani

#470

Post by wpietri »

chrisoverzero wrote: post #412
wpietri wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the patterns that interests me a lot is supernormal stimulus. An organism is evolved to deal with a stimulus in a certain range, and something comes along that is so far outside it that things break. The classic example is Niko Tinbergen, who created models of fish that were rounder and redder than the real fish, who would ignore other real fish and focus on the models. The human ability to refine things produ…

> […] "drinking the kool-aid". Which is a metaphor Jobs used for how he wanted people to react to the Mac […] Google is showing me nothing for this. Do you have a citation?

Quoted here: http://articles.latimes.com/2013/sep/01/business/la-fi-tn-ho...

Original source is listed as this book from Baylor University Press: http://www.baylorpress.com/Book/382/Appletopia.html

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