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- Hacker News
- > But the more Holmes talks to Fielder, the more he teases out her unhinged rationale, which is: The device works fine! We just had to figure out that pesky chemistry stuff! The strange thing is that Holmes has such a corporate mindset that she treats the chemistry stuff…that hadn’t been invented yet…as just another glitchy small problem that could easily be solved
The difference between science and engineering right there...
by nl - Oh I'm going to use this:
"The chemistry works fine! We just had to figure out that pesky device stuff!"
by fuzzfactor - And yet somehow what she did still isn't as bad as what every private equity form on Wall Street gets away with daily.
There's no excuse for defrauding investors, but at least the "aim" was to produce a product that, if it actually had worked, would have been medically revolutionary. I don't even believe that she went in on scam from the start, she must have at least genuinely believed, no matter how nonchalant, that there was going to be a product - otherwise how would she possibly expect to get away with it?
Blackrock, Citadel, KKR etc - all they do is buy up actual businesses that provide actual products and services, by using the most predatory and immoral "leveraged buyout" technique and then stripping its assets and leasing them back like some demented parasitic worm
by jiaosdjf - How so? In my experience academics are far more likely to sweep big practical issues under the rug because they're primarily concerned with being something working one so they can write a paper, as opposed to making a product that has to work in practice.
(It is surprisingly common to have delusions about the scale of engineering problems in management, which causes problems even when it doesn't explode into outright fraud. I've had management insist on pursuing a project that was already quite risky and difficult in its own right but which also needed a technology that just didn't exist yet to actually be usable by customers in the field: mostly on the back of some theoretical calculations by some acadamics that masked big underlying problems. The issue was pretty obvious but just subtle enough to be easy to convince yourself it wasn't that hard)
by rcxdude - You mean marketing and engineering.by s_dev
- she'd be the perfect CEO of a BigAI corpo - as opposed to betting on humans randomly discovering new chemistry in predictable ammount of time, betting on neural networks offering a brute-force way to (super)human congnition is actualy "saner" - I mean, we know from _evolution_ that in a universe with out _physics_ brute forcing the problem of building intelligence with neural-network like architecture "very likely works"...
now this thought just made me have more sympathy for Sam Altman (there can actually be much worse ppl out there...)
by dragochat - Who’s “Bobby” mentioned in the article? Did the writer just mix up Billy Evans with Bobby?by saimiam
- It does seem that way, half-way through they switch from "Billy" to "Bobby"by petesergeant
- Article has been corrected to Billy everywhere Bobby previously was.
Previously: https://archive.ph/sSnek
Corrected: https://archive.ph/k3Hnl
by js2 - There was some major tension in the trailer - I can't believe that's actually Elizabeth Holmes, but seeing her I can see how she managed to win over so many - she is very intense.by ddmf
- Love everything Nathan Fielder does. The trailer is awesome.by seabombs
- It's like a horror movie trailer, only scarier.by drcongo
- I watched the entire trailer fully believing that Nathan Fielder had managed to find the most unhinged uncanny look-alike actress to play Elizabeth Holmes.
This trailer was so good that I would have been fully prepared to watch a 2 hour dramatised mockumentary about Theranos.
Finding out that this was really Elizabeth Holmes was a huge shock
by jiaosdjf - After the complete mind melting of 2 seasons of "the rehearsal", this was my exact path tooby bizzleDawg
- Although I’m fully expecting actor shenanigans in the full documentary, I think the section in the trailer might actually be her for realby dwroberts
- wait, it was actually her? I thought it was also some uncanny valley magicby sevenseacat
- Same exact thought when this trailer came across my feed. "Oh, who did A24 get to play Holmes, she looks familiar somehow." hahahaby wavemode
- 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...
by sschueller - 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 because it was "shaped" exactly like what people were looking for, like what they were told the future of STEM was supposed to look like.
by xyzelement - It sure did. And it backfired in a way that could make future female innovators guilty by association. I can see investors asking themselves "That girl looks sharp, but is she another Elizabeth Holmes?"by glimshe