How the Elizabeth Holmes documentary “You Can See Everything” is deceiving
readtheprofile.com138 points by MaysonL 7 hours ago
138 points by MaysonL 7 hours ago
I just watched this movie tonight and it's one of those where I feel like everyone else saw a different film. For me it was too little butter spread over too much bread. All the interesting parts of the Holmes/Theranos story have been explored, so all that's left is her personal life with her new partner who's also a weirdo.
At best I can say that it makes you think about things like deceit and honesty/accuracy in media, but it definitely didn't blow my mind like it apparently did for this author. After 3 hours I was just exhausted from watching these peoples' tortuous attempts to avoid giving a direct answer to any question.
> After 3 hours I was just exhausted from watching these peoples' tortuous attempts to avoid giving a direct answer to any question.
I’ve been around a lot of bullshitters my whole life, and my immediate reaction is to go “this person is full of shit, not worthy of my attention, kthxbye”
But I’ve noticed that most people when faced with the same person can’t help but try and figure out what makes them tick, or their redeeming qualities, or if even anything can be redeemed. It seems to be a social equivalent of “nerd sniping”; most people just have a very hard time declaring “this person is worth 0 additional seconds of my time” and actually following through.
See also ppl in toxic relationships, who will complain to their friends incessantly about how bad the other person is and how they know they need to get out of it, only to rarely get out of it.
> most people just have a very hard time declaring “this person is worth 0 additional seconds of my time” and actually following through.
I think that's what "setting boundaries" is about: Standing your own ground, and decide: "Not worth my time and energy.", yet still believe in the good in people. I think even bad people have something good in them. It's just not healthy to figure it out for me, once the manipulative (or bad) habits have surfaced.
I think its because the constant bullshitting is behaviour that is so foreign to us, we feel a curiosity about it, a need to understand it.
> or their redeeming qualities
I can't stand this. Most people who suck aren't an onion. They just suck. Or there is a nice layer under that, and then beneath that a core of suck.
Reminder to everyone that an onion is an onion all the way to the core. Every layer is more eye sting for the peeler.
> But I’ve noticed that most people when faced with the same person can’t help but try and figure out what makes them tick, or their redeeming qualities, or if even anything can be redeemed. It seems to be a social equivalent of “nerd sniping”; most people just have a very hard time declaring “this person is worth 0 additional seconds of my time” and actually following through.
I don't think I've ever seen anyone put this into words.
Thank you. A very compelling thought.
I've only met one constant bullshitter in my life and unfortunately I worked with him so couldn't just leave. The thing that blew my mind was that nobody else seemed to care, at all. I get that it takes a significant amount of social capital to call out a bullshitter, especially at work... but still.. you don't have to believe them. Very weird.
When you're working with a bullshitter and can't just leave, what use is there in performative caring? Your coworkers may have still cared, privately, but actively complaining about it, presuming boss man doesn't care anyway, is just pissing into the wind. You may as well accept that he's a bullshitter and get over it. Some people are like that and it doesn't help you to spend your time seething over it.
If you can get him fired then go for it. Otherwise, you're only harming yourself by letting yourself dwell on it. As for believing him; when my coworker starts rambling about the time the Navy seals came to him for help, I just say "wow man, crazy". I don't believe him, but neither do I confront it. Why bother? I'm not being paid to call out his dumb lies. This is probably what your other coworkers were thinking.
> most people just have a very hard time declaring “this person is worth 0 additional seconds of my time”
You have to admit that shutting people out is still a defense mechanism that can backfire.
You're not immune from a skilled sociopath for doing this. They know what you're doing. The moment you turn your back is when they know they can blindside you.
It's the moment they start talking behind your back, shutting you out of conversations, undermining your work, etc. You're a lot more vulnerable when you're out of the loop. You can't assume you're stronger or smarter for trying to take the "high road". There is no high road with these people. They'll ruin everything in any way possible. They have their bases covered.
German nerd here. I know next to nothing about "the interesting parts of the Holmes/Theranos story", is there a documentary on the facts instead of the villain somewhere?
I don't know of any worthy documentary, but I have read the book "Bad Blood" [0], which I thought was thorough, well written and, to me, an excellent read.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_Blood:_Secrets_and_Lies_in...
“Bad Blood” by the journalist who broke the story while Theranos was peaking
I don't think there is any magic sauce to this movie. I saw it yesterday, and do agree (spoilers ahead) there are three acts: deception, sympathetic, puppeteer. I feel though that this article treats the movie as if its some sort of hypnosis; it's not. Its a very well put together movie that makes you question everything thats happening. I and others came out of it largely questioning:
A. Is she truly the most manipulative person we've ever seen
B. Largely oblivious to what's happening around her
and not:
- Is she guilty
This movie I would say does not answer those questions, nor do I think seeks to.
Does the film address that thing she does with her voice?
[flagged]
> As for Kamala Harris and her sudden southern accent in front of certain audiences...
I grew up in one place with a very marked accent, and moved later in life to a place with another distinct, very different accent. My accent shifts within minutes of talking with people from either place. Sometimes I'm in a room with people from both places, and my accent changes depending on who's in my field of view. This doesn't take any effort; in fact, I need to make an effort to avoid it.
This is how accents work. Our brain adapts very quickly to try to fit in.
(I grew up in Buenos Aires and now I live in Madrid)
To pile on, there used to by a comedy interview show in Japan. They would bring on a celebrity and have them call their mother and buzz them if they fell back into their local accent. Every star got buzzed.
The point being people have different ways of speaking to different people.
Maybe another example is Hawaiians talking to each other vs to tourists
It's one of those cases where cringe becomes creepy. When someone is putting on a really transparent performance, and to the rest of us it broadcasts their insecurity, and they ought to know that but don't - it's eerie, it's mired in an uncanny valley. Too much to be a joke but not enough to plausibly work. When I see her back in the day with the turtleneck and the affected voice, it gives me the willies.
That said no it is not particularly important. But striking and memorable. The voice is the most striking part but I don't think it would land with me if not for also the turtleneck and the other Jobs knockoff stuff.
I don't have an issue with a different accent, but vocal fry sounds just outright weird to me. Maybe because I'm not a native speaker, but it's giving me snobbish, crow-like vibes. I don't like it, and I don't really understand why people aim for it. A deep voice is not vocal fry. Sam Elliot has a nice deep voice. Toni Braxton has a nice deep voice. Vocal fry is none of that. It's the tramp stamp of voice.
Vocal fry being the tramp stamp of voice is such a perfect way of putting it!
Yes, to me that is catering to your audience. It also seems to overlap with coming back from your London trip with a British accent.
For her voice register change, where's the line or the gray area? It's a very personal human thing. I find her to be oriented around how she presents herself and how she is perceived. Then she uses her impressive talents to guide and manipulate.
I find her unnerving but also a great example of how the eyes are really part of the brain.
[edit: a lot, same general idea but composed bester[
I agree. I dont get why people get outraged over it either. Yes, having deeper voice makes people take you more seriously. Works with students, bosses, colleagues.
Using deeper voice as a result is like putting on suit and making your hair - adjusting yourself to societal biases.
The issue with Holmes is not voice or cloth or whatever. It is fraud, lies and lack of care about harm she caused.
Because she faked her deeper voice and choosing to do that constantly is very creepy and weird.
It goes back to the parent poster’s question of whether or not she was doing it to manipulate people or if she genuinely looked up to Steve Jobs enough to want to emulate him down to his pitch.
I dont buy either framing. There is nothing better about immitating Jobs.
And using deeper voice is no worsr then putting on cloth to impress. Or using makeup to impress.
If people are irrationally taking deeper voices more serious, using deeper voice is not some kind of evil manipulation. People with higher pitch are not unserious, only treated that way a bit more.
Your deeper voice is not making you more valid or serious in any way. Yes, it is advantage. It is ok to mimic it to get equal advantage.
everyone has a bit of a social chameleon thing going on, but when a person is nothing but facade to the point of others being totally unable to pinpoint their actual psyche it's a flashing warning sign for a lot of people that they're a sociopath or at the very least have a lot of tendencies towards that behavior.
let's flip it on its' head; she's now seeking sympathy and understanding from the public and her voice softened: Does that aid perception of truth and honesty? It doesn't for me.
No its a textbook sociopathy with all bells and whistles it brings along.
Btw rather hardcore sociopathy is the norm amongt elites who worked their own way to some small pyramid of power and/or wealth, normal balanced happy folks give up that endless chase long before since true achievements in life are hardly up there. But you can't explain this to them, you get blank stare at best or get ridiculed more probably (tried a few times, sobering experiences).
Its rather exceptional when above is not valid, and certainly shouldnt be shocking when revealed. Take top 10 companies, CEOs and whole C suite are all that, they select for their own 'kin'. Take top 100 and still most would fall there firmly, they just know how to do self PR better.
> As for Kamala Harris and her sudden southern accent in front of certain audiences...
Care to finish that thought?
Best take of the movie here. When the whole crew met with them before production, Nathan's idea to say "fuck it, let's just see how they do business" was the right call and might show she actually may not have known as much as you'd think, but it's fully intentional to the point of complete insanity.
I haven't seen it, but my opinion is she likely was what lawyers call "reckless", as in she should have known but didn't care (blinded by the upside and a "we'll figure it once we scale" tech attitude that works a lot better for db performance than healthcare).
I've worked for someone very like her.
It's worse than reckless. They make not-knowing part of their operating model.
And they make sure nobody else with power and influence does too much knowing either. Silos, stay in your lane, don't ask questions about how your department's KPIs mesh with the next one over, or what conclusions might be inferred.
When a lawyer says "reckless" it's an extremely strong word. It doesn't mean "negligent", IANAL (and it depends on the state etc) but it's more like if you knowingly run over a pedestrian in your way, and you aren't trying to hurt them but don't care if they get hurt. And often criminal law will treat it as just a little less bad than intent.
How does this work though. At the end of the day, you can’t as a CEO say “I didn’t know” when your whole operating model is a scam.
Yes. So many of her replies to Nathan's questions were "I don't know" or "I don't remember" or "I don't understand" for questions that were very straightforward.
At her level of responsibility she'd better know. Whatever the case, she's either deceitful or incompetent. Neither answer is flattering or acceptable.
It's manufactured incompetence. You can see it a lot in companies who use a lot of subcontractors.
Deceitful vs delusional or incompetent matters for your legal defense, your parole hearing etc
> At the end of the day, you can’t as a CEO say “I didn’t know” when your whole operating model is a scam.
There's always the chance one could have ridden fake-it-till-you-make-it long enough for the engineers to solve the underlying issues...
While far from a complete technical breakdown, Hank Green's recent video on Theranos is a good starting point. These are not serious people. The special sauce has never been the self promotion.
It is one thing to fake and misrepresent the completeness of a video game, but it is entirely another to provide false or unverified medical results to patients.
I think if you're stuck on that question, her manipulation poked through the silver screen and worked on you.
To me the subtext of the movie was that a sociopath's manipulation is so strong that even against the heavy counterforce of the filmmaker's bias, it makes it through. I agree with TFA's general premise that the film forces you to confront how easy it is to deceive you -- but it's not the filmmaker who's doing the deceiving. Sociopathic manipulation is about sparking doubt. Gaslighters don't need to prove anything, they just need to plant a "but what if" in some corner of your mind. The fact that the author felt compelled to write TFA at all is ironically a product of that manipulative power.
Another way to think of it is: the documentary makes you think whether, if you were in the room with her in the years that Theranos was operating, would you have fallen for it? If you feel the need to write apologia after watching a documentary that's basically a hit piece, you know the answer.
No one including my wife was interested in seeing it so I went by myself. It was long, but interesting. The author hits the nail on the head:
“You sit there believing you’re watching a documentary about a woman who deceived the world, only to discover that you’re also watching a demonstration of how easy it is to deceive you.”
I couldn’t agree more.
What was deceitful about it?
I had the same question for the author of the article, but it's understandable that people are going to be cagey answering this question because they may not want to give away spoilers.
To a documentary?
If anything that's the part that convinces me it's more than just a documentary, the fact that people apparently don't want to spoil what happens.
> To a documentary?
Well, yes. We know the plot, but we don't know in what light the movie casts here, and how they do it.
It won't deceive me, I went to one of Canada's top business schools and got really good grades.
This article falls into the same trap, I dunno what to call them, artsy-upper-class-society-and-film reviewers often do; writing vague yet meaningful-sounding things about the obvious subtext of a movie as if it was a revelation, yet without any specific observations about it.
Yes, this is a documentary about a person. And how the documentary is presented will color your perspective of the person. This should (hopefully) be apparent to anyone who's watched a documentary about a person before.
But how does it do it? What tools does it use to that effect? I appreciate that this film remains relatively neutral/ambiguous, but what makes this unique from other documentaries that deal with ambiguous subject matter?
> this film remains relatively neutral/ambiguous [...] with ambiguous subject matter?
There's a big difference in ambiguousness and ambivalence, especially in documentaries. "Ambiguousness" represents an uncertain logical conclusion, whereas "ambivalence" stands in for (the strength of) conflicting forces.
I'd wager that an ambiguous documentary would be close to being unwatchable, and I can't remember that I've seen any. Since I've yet to see You Can See Everything, unfortunately I can't comment about it in any way.
> But how does it do it? What tools does it use to that effect? I appreciate that this film remains relatively neutral/ambiguous, but what makes this unique from other documentaries that deal with ambiguous subject matter?
If you’re that interested in getting these answers, you probably should watch the film
The article makes it clear that most people didn’t get out of the movie what the author got out of it
Maybe just for not spoilers?
If you’re watching this film, you likely already know who Elizabeth Holmes is. There isn’t going to be any Sixth Sense style plot twists.
Without having watched the film, I'm sure they can make it look like Sunny Balwani was the guy in charge, or something like that. I don't even know the whole story of Theranos and never followed it with much interest - startup scams are a dime-a-dozen. HP's acquisition of Autonomy always struck me as such a tale: CFO takes the fall for CEO and CTO for a $11 b acquisition that a few years later was worth a tenth because of accounting fraud and when he gets out the CEO gives him a sinecure; then the week of CEO and CTO acquittal the latter gets killed in a bicycling accident and the former dies when a tornado sinks his yacht.
Sam Bankman-Fried and Elizabeth Holmes are interesting characters, true, but there's so much nuts in tech, it's just fertile ground for stories.
besides the topic that is being explored is deception so its expected the documentary Will use a rethorical or film technique that has some connection to that theme of deception?
I saw the movie Friday night. It is a mind job. You'll walk away with more questions than answers.
Without spoiling the movie, it's possible for people to be multiple things at once. That doesn't excuse what Elizabeth Holmes did or explain what others in her circle may be guilty of. The movie is a wild ride.
> That doesn't excuse what Elizabeth Holmes did or explain what others in her circle may be guilty of.
Thanks!
Surely the documentaries are made in a way that's depicts that very accentued, manipulative, borderline psychopathic person. This is likely more than she was in real life. She might even have been motivated by genuine will to improve the diagnostics field. So yeah you might be "deceived" by these docudramas.
I fear that this kind of poetic write-up muddies the water into "oh, maybe things are more nuanced, and played on her weird personality and background to make things look worse, maybe it wasn't so bad".
People got misdiagnosed and suffered directly because of her. She's every bit guilty of that, as deserving of a harsh judgement as any person directly causing that kind of harm.
Maybe it's just because I've been around a bunch of people in startup circles, seaking angel and vc, etc and myself raised and had exits and been deposed in highly contentious situations.
Holmes doesn't talk like any innocent person has ever talked. Period. Not even like a naive rube either.
She explicitly initiated this whole thing as a narrative exercise and she just had to stick to the script for what, 45 days? While letting herself feel the genuine self pity all these types of people feel when they are experiencing the consequences for their actions instead of being able to foist them onto someone else?
Her only path forward is to FULLY commit to the bit as a way of deceiving the credulous, even a moment of cynicism and the whole thing falls apart.
Now, did she in fact succeed in that or was it a choice to show no cracks in the facade because it made a more engaging movie?
News flash, I love his media but Nathan Fielder is a monster as well he's my favorite monster but let's not pretend. We can just hold both things to be true instead of engaging in cognitive dissonance.
Other than the children (and that one flatulent horse) everyone involved in this is a monster, and the only way to hide that fact is to ensure the ending is ambiguous, otherwise it just feels like non-transcendent tabloid pap profiting off of bad behavior.
There is goodness, and people attempting to increase goodness and it looks and talks nothing like any of these people.
if I'm being honest with myself, I doubt I will ever watch this movie - I was very interested in theranos when it looked like a real technology, but once it turned out it was just another scam in an industry rife with them the whole thing just felt boring and grubby. the review, on the other hand, was a superb piece of writing, and I'm glad to have read it.
I'm surprised anyone would even assume there is a chance a Nathan Fielder "documentary" might not be deceiving. Has it gotten so bad that people consider this real reporting now?
Maybe this question is related to polls showing a significant percentage of Americans considering the likes of Colbert, Stewart, and John Oliver trustworthy news reporters btw.
It is fascinating to see so many comments defending Holmes. Are these even real people?
Everything you watch, documentary and narrative alike, attempts to shape your understanding of events through the director's lens.
>An entire theater full of grown adults was falling for it. At one point, people were shouting so loudly at the screen that I couldn’t hear the dialogue. I heard a woman yell, “Criminal!” — and it wasn’t directed at Elizabeth Holmes. I’ve never experienced anything like that in a movie theater. It was emotion, and it was visceral.
Is this a parody lol?
Maybe when I read about "cinemas are a bad experience nowadays" on american sites (reddit, HN) they mean this but I always felt that they are deceiving me.
Maybe I'm just too Asian-European because I never experienced that in any European or Far East Asian cinemas.
No one did anything like that in the theater I saw it in and I have a hard time believing this happened. As if she was some major figure that the avg person was familiar enough with to form an emotional opinion on. I've had to explain who she was to everyone I know and they were all kind of like "oh yeah, I remember hearing something about that."
Saw it on Friday in Berkeley, and: yes, there was absolutely audience participation, and there were moments where I had to restrain myself from joining in.
I really want to see the movie, sadly it is not yet know when the film is gonna release in German theaters. Actually, I am seriously considering starting my own film distribution and acquiring the rights to this film and a couple others. I would do straight to theater release, ov-only, no subtitles, no fluff.
It’s such a good movie. Go with a friend and you can spend hours picking apart the layers.
For building startup, you need a story on the person who is going on the front. Example he/she from top university, worked in a big company. That is sufficient to build something with zero revenue and sell it for billions.
This article is a bit too desperate to connect the subject matter to the medium.
So many comments about Holmes, I think, are missing the point. This isn't about Holmes, and neither, IMO, is the article. Like all things Nathan Fielder does, this is a movie by Nathan for Nathan. Elizabeth Holmes is just used, in every sense of the word, as a prop.
The article was written by someone who's never seen any of Nathan's other work and is apparently blown away by his skill at and unquenchable fetish for using and deceiving people. Yeah, that's his whole thing. Congrats, you just watched a documentary about psychopaths.
I don't think this is anything like Nathan's normal stuff. He didn't manipulate at all. He just hung around and asked really direct and obvious questions and you watched her and her husband squirm and lie.
The thing where he said he'd gone through a break-up seemed like it could have been misleading (I don't actually know about his personal life)
sounds like the Primetime movie. good film. surely has little to do with real life.
This has a very interesting way of showing it to you, how easy it is to deceive us. What we see is what er believe in, but it can be very much easily used to exploit us.
I really wanted her to spoil this movie somewhere in this article.
You can just read Bad Blood, too, and skip the movie / hyperbole/ whatever
They're incredibly different things telling different stories. One doesn't replace the other.
This reads like a high schooler discovering that film can manipulate you, but doesn't go any further than that.
"We like to believe that we form our opinions by gathering evidence, weighing facts, and arriving at reasonable conclusions. Be for real. No we do not."
She speaks for herself. The author then doesn't bring up a single fact, piece of evidence, or anything else besides just restating the pedestrian premise a few times. I don't share her inability to study a topic in-depth, come to a conclusion or challenge my previously held beliefs, and then pass judgment while attaching a calibrated degree of certainty to the soundness of my conviction.
“Local woman discovers Nathan For You”
Holmes isn't disliked for lying to investors, she's disliked for lying to patients, endangering lives.
Checked her Twitter account yesterday (managed by her husband)
She is MAGA. That's enought to know about the topic.
The media and seemingly random persons like this stanning her is extremely weird.
Her X account, and how it came to be in the hands of her husband is actually a pretty major plot point in the documentary
Stanning?
Edit: looked it up. Who is stanning her? The person who wrote the article or Nathan?
It's a rational play for her to be MAGA. Trump has pardoned much worse criminals simply for sucking up to him.
It’s rational to lack principles?
Like having kids while facing jailtime, it can be read as a ploy to evade responsibility. Rational has a secondary, economics meaning, i.e. selfish, utility-maximizing - whatever furthers the individual's interests.
Disagree. He has indeed pardoned many criminals, but none who was even remotely as bad as she is.
[flagged]
Because most of the world is
Most of the things that get posted here are deceiving. It's just that people care to deconstruct why it's deceiving when it aligns with their biases.
This article makes a valid point and the author is much more perceptive than the average person for noticing it.
I know people who I thought were independent thinkers basically repeat media narratives whilst claiming that "I looked at all the facts and came up with my own opinion." But it was very clear that they had not looked at all the facts and only consumed news from specific mainstream media sources.
One case I remember very clearly concerns Trump Derangement Syndome; what was surprising was that when I asked this person I know "Why do you say Trump is misogynistic?" they pointed out the incident from 2016 elections when Trump made that dirty comment about "Grab them by the ..." But the irony is that the person I was taking to had said worse, mysogynistic jokes in the past! And they definitely don't consider themselves a mysogynist... And I don't either. Sometimes people say things for shock value but they don't believe them. It matters a lot if something is a one-off or if it's a pattern. You can't say someone's is anything based on something they said a couple of times; someone who is truly a mysogynist or a racist or an elitist or whatever would keep coming back to the same ideas over and over. If someone says something or does something a bit offputting once a year, it's kind of insane to assign a label to the person based on it... As if that one thing they almost never say is part of their identity.
The media and films are are really good at selectively showing us a few pieces out of context and convincing us that it's a pattern of behavior and fully characterizes the person. Just pick the 10 worst things a person said in the course of a year in their worst days and you can make them look like the devil.
Off topic, but as I was reading it I went through the Canon experiment- there where it says:
> each photographer was given a different description of [the same person]: a millionaire, a convict, a fisherman, an alcoholic, a psychic, and a lifesaver.
Well I looked at the pics and thought "yeah, wow, the millionaire, the convict (so obvious!), the fisherman, the alcoholic" it's really impressive! And only immediately after I saw that each picture had the caption with the supposed character and they were all scrambled- what I thought was obviously a sagacious millionaire was in fact the convict, the slightly deranged looking guy was the fisherman, the millionaire was in fact the alcoholic... Lol.
Has this person never seen Rashomon? Or any of the other films (even documentaries) that cleverly use different perspectives? Seems a bit breathless.
I hate these kinds of documentaries. Even after being caught and punished, these wannabe larger than life con artists still get an exit. If school shooters shouldn't be plastered all over the news, then why are these people.
Come on, just go watch the movie like everybody else, she needs your financial support
> But the thing that often gets lost in the retelling of her story is that Holmes was actually acquitted of all four charges related to defrauding patients. She’s in prison because a jury found that she knowingly misled investors who poured more than $700 million into the startup.
trying to minimize fraud? what a weird article.
For context for others, Holmes was acquitted of defrauding patients. A juror stated that she was acquitted because Holmes didn't directly interact with the patients. On the other hand, she did directly interact with investors, so the evidence was much clearer.
Separately, Theranos' COO and Holmes' boyfriend at the time was convicted by a separate jury for defrauding patients. Theranos also settled multiple lawsuits for ~$50M and declared bankruptcy soon after.
Acquitted on a legal technicality, then, not in the court of accountability and consequences.
Also, just because the jury didn't think there was enough evidence to convict her of defrauding patients (beyond reasonable doubt), doesn't mean she was innocent.
It actually does. You can judge her, but she is not guilty. The more we as a society decide the justice system is just an arbitrary way of deciding who gets punished and not _the_ way of deciding if a person is or is not a criminal the more we slide towards oblivion.
If a person is found not guilty, they are not guilty. To argue otherwise is to undermine the core institution of western civilization.
Important to note that western civilization is fundamentally ok with the knowledge that the statement issued by a jury or judge does not actually define whether a person is morally, factually or colloquially “innocent”. Disputes may be addressed c/o OJ Simpson and the Central Park 5.
The finding is ‘not guilty’, rather than innocent. It does not mean the accused is innocent. It means they could not be proven guilty.
Important to note that in the original conception of western civilization, no one is 'innocent'. This idea that you have some secret special power to sniff out a persons true heart from a distance, which is separate from a jury of a persons peers studying and debating the evidence, is at best misguided and arrogant, and at worst a pernicious threat.
Don’t overcomplicate it. People are discussing their opinions of truth, using relevant terms.
there is no way to argue that without also believing that the millions of people the state has tossed into prison are all guilty, which is really not something that I can do.
I mostly agree with the idea, but to accept this as an absolute implies our justice system is infallible
Indeed. While she's not on the leaderboard of worst humans ever, she's still up there. Any whitewashing of her reputation is bogus.
What gets lost more is that Balwani was convicted of defrauding patients, so it's not even like Theranos was absolved of those charges. The kicker is that the CEO and co-founder of a company that has been established to willfully defraud patients somehow managed to escape conviction.
This point is also clearly made in the film. Sounds like the article has nothing to say and just wants to leech off the success and attention of the doc.
I mean in do you really have a lot of sympathy for the oligarchic tax advantaged zombie family hedge funds that made a bet and lost?
They didn't do their diligence and do kinda deserve to lose their money.
Holmes and Theranos leadership did more than defraud investors. They knowingly ran unreliable tests on actual patients. People were told they were miscarrying when they weren't, or that they had HIV when they didn't. And they drove an employee, Ian Gibbons, to suicide, then threatened his widow with a lawsuit when she talked to reporters about it.
Important to note she was found not guilty of this charge.
That is not because Theranos did not commit such fraud against patients; Balwani was convicted on those charges. It's just the prosecutors were unable to prove that Holmes was culpable.
You said
> Holmes ... did more than defraud investors.
Which was not proven in a court of law as judged by a jury of her peers.
You...you literally elided over the exact phrase I included in anticipation of this objection.
You're conflating Holmes, Theranos and Balwani. Holmes was found not guilt of that which you accuse her of. That you also accuse others at the same time who where found guilty doesn't change that fact.
You're conflating - 'Do we understand that Holmes did these things?' - with 'Were those specific charges brought against her and were they successfully prosecuted?'.
Reading John Carreyrou's book, it's pretty clear she was guilty of (lots of bad) things beyond the lone 'defrauding investor' charge that was successfully carried.
That’s true but not relevant. I have absolutely no sympathy for the rubes who thought FTX was a good place to put their money, but that doesn’t make the fraud any more OK.
The people that invested their money did not make these decisions. The people running the fund did. You're victim blaming. Most people don't get a very wide choice where their money goes outside the couple of options the fund managers present. I'd also venture most people do not even look at what stocks are in the fund. They'll look at the past earnings and check the box.
[dead]
[flagged]
Doesn’t this line of debate get kind of predictable?
It does, but that's an interesting psychological effect all by itself, where if someone keeps hearing the same -- valid! -- point over and over again, they start to discount its value.
Richard Feynman called it "normalization of deviance", but there's other names for it as well depending on the details.
I'm sure everyone has heard some variation of this before, especially in the work place.
I once got angrily shouted at by a customer because I turned up as a consultant and apparently I told them exactly what the last five consultants had said!
Well, yes, of course. It's the solution to their problem.
I regularly face variants of this at work.
"Yeah, yeah, backups are important, stop talking about it already."
"Yes, but they're still not happening and they still remain the top priority and it is madness to start a project to reformat the SAN array until backups are working!"
"That's what you said last week! You always say that!"
Etc...
There's a point where people lean into it and become purposefully contrary, making their refusal to change their opinion a permanent part of their identity as a person.
If you intend to engage "for fun" then you must actually engage by hearing the other side and rebutting. Otherwise you're not engaging, you're just trying to shout your assumptions louder than your opponent.
Your comment doesn't seem to exhibit any understanding of the opposing arguments.
Just offering my take of your comment as an impartial observer.
[flagged]
Please don't post low-effort dismissals like this on HN. A comment with just two words and not even a period is not a thoughtful contribution, and the guidelines make it clear we're trying for something much better here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
[flagged]
[flagged]
“I watched an unrelated YouTube video therefore I’m not convinced this movie is good” sure is a paradoxical level of judging a book by its cover.
I assume what you meant is that having heard about the person the movie focuses on, you have no interest in seeing more about her. Having felt entirely apathetic about Holmes since the early days of the Theranos scam, I can’t say I disagree with you.
Ye but I was saying more along the lines of I’ve already been spoiled on the plotline of what happened to Holmes. Idk if seeing the movie will be any different. Might be who knows
I ship Nathan and Holmes
I'm not bragging: but I do not watch any (almost any) video of the news, so I never see Trump speak or see the Israeli military against the Palestinians or watch the footage of the trials, etc. I do read the news. I just sort of drifted into it when I was an early cord-cutter. I think around the yr 2000 there wasn't much video and I got used to it. I do find that I am much less overstimulated than my friends and family who watch a lot of news video.
Lacan described registers of experience: the Imaginary (visual, sexual, emotional, fantasy), Symbolic (language, associations), and Real (the unsymbolizable, "impossible"). Watching video is immersion in the Imaginary, you get roused, riled up, turned-on, activated, thoughts are connected by paranoia, magical thinking, and aggression. It makes HUGE difference to not not follow the news that way! Again, I'm not bragging, not proud of myself, not espousing a Mr Spock outlook. But it is hard to miss the difference.