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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

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 come up with a framework to penalize misleading journalism, while at the same time, preserving the independence of media. Maybe that is the next social challenge for entrepreneurs in the coming decade.

starpilot 8y ago
> 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. Links? Wasn't Holmes incredibly secretive about everything? It's not like she was promising overunity or anything, just a "radically new approach" type thing.
- danieltillett 8y ago
  The reason why experts knew it was fraud right from the start is not even god can do the assays Holmes was claiming from a single drop of blood - the information is just not present and the variability is too high.
  - Kiro 8y ago
    Where can I read the statements of these expert? Can't find anything before 2015.
donbright 8y ago
The Wall Street Journal is the only reason the company was outed. This same journal was also one of her early boosters. We already have a framework that preserves independence of the media, the First Amendment. All of the NDAs and Boies style intimidation and legal abuse and harrasment of the whistleblowers and journalists was only stopped by the First Amendment. We already have a framework that punishes journalists - it's people like Peter Thiel suing them out of existence because he doesn't like what they say. It's big funders buying a newspaper and destroying it like the Denver Post. It's the government putting sources on trial and in prison like happened with the NSA stories. Journalists are murdered constantly for reporting stories. And the industry itself is dying because of changing business models. They dont need a framework to punish them any more.
- laughinghan 8y ago
  I am under the impression that it is rare for journalists in America to be murdered for their stories, is that not the case? None of your examples are journalists being penalized for lack of due diligence or for being misleading. I think your instinct to protect journalists given their importance and the threats they face is a healthy and important one, and I share it, but I don’t think they’re above reproach. Ensuring the independence and safety of journalists is of paramount importance; ensuring journalists are appropriately incentivized to report accurate stories with healthy skepticism is of secondary importance after that (since most will innately desire that anyway), but it is still also important.
  - lifeisstillgood 8y ago
    Imagine if the phrase was "Software developers are not murdered for missing estimates in this country". I am pretty sure I would hit my estimates even in London. Yes Journalists need high standards of professional integrity and the legal air cover to maintain that. But really the ultimate defence is us - to reject the mountains of crap out there and seek out and subscribe to the worthwhile news sources. As ever, it's down to us.
    - grigjd3 8y ago
      Why hold yourself responsible for your actions when you can just say everything is corrupt and imagine that is an excuse? ;)
    - nojvek 8y ago
      Can anyone give me a list of respectable independent media that I should be subscribing to? The economist comes to mind. Any others HN recommends?
      - oliveshell 8y ago
        For general news, I find NPR.org [1] to be pretty good. I can tell they make an effort to avoid bias and sensationalism. It’s not perfect, but I have yet to find another online source that I prefer. I also listen to my local station (WUNC) and if you’re in a decently populated area of the U.S., your local NPR affiliate is also likely high quality (plus it’s easy to listen online if you’re not into terrestrial radio.) [1]: https://npr.org https://npr.org
duxup 8y ago
"there were experts in the field who were shouting out about the impossibility of Holmes' claims right from the beginning" Were there? I'm not doubting your claim, just wondering if anyone really spoke up. Reading about the challenges they would have had to overcome to back up their claims, there were some serious fundamental problems, and those were challenges the industry had been wrangling with when it came to that type of automated testing for ages.... I always wondered how many of their competitors were thinking: "No way they overcame all that all at once.... straight up not possible."
- busterarm 8y ago
  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.
  - Kiro 8y ago
    A lot of "I remember" in this thread but where are the links?
    - aaron695 8y ago
      Comment from the oldest HN article I could find - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6349808 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.
SilasX 8y ago
Sure, there were skeptics. And there were also SV gurus shouting "Fake it till you make it!" "Impostor Syndrome!" "Ignore the haters!" When you immediately equate all self-doubt with Impostor Syndrome -- rather than develop actionable heuristics to detect when said doubt is justified -- don't feign surprise when some people take it seriously. Maybe they were just fooled by your confidence. ("You" in the general sense, not you personally.)
- mlthoughts2018 8y ago
  I don’t know. That thinking might paper over a middling start-up with a mix of sincerity and hype but just a poor product or unsuccessful funding rounds. Theranos, and other unicorn-scale hype, is a whole different thing. It doesn’t get this bad unless there is a seriously malevolent drive for the money, essentially saying that you deserve money just for an idea, just for being a made-up executive, regardless of all else, and you’re going to lie, cheat, intimidate, swindle, and unapologetically steamroll your way to the money no matter what. It’s a technology narcissism problem. Not mere overconfidence or being swept up in the hype while at least trying to genuinely build something even if it ends up not working.
  - phs318u 8y ago
    > It’s a technology narcissism problem. BINGO! What a great term. I've never heard it called that before (which now seems hard to believe), but have definitely seen it SO many times before (specifically in massive corporate IT programs - the domain I work in as an enterprise architect). Did you coin this phrase? I'm so using this! Thank you.
    - mlthoughts2018 8y ago
      I doubt I am the first to call it that, but I haven’t seen it elsewhere that I am presently aware of. Having a taxonomy of this bad behavior, with useful names, does seem important, to make identifying it and discussing it more widespread. I imagine young founders not wishing to be like Holmes could benefit from a rubric of sorts that helps classify this behavior. And for bad-faith founders who do want to behave like Holmes just without getting caught, talking more systematically about it would make it harder for them, limit their options. What would be really cool is a modern version of Moral Mazes directed at startups.
a_bonobo 8y ago
>The media, though, never paid enough attention (or was possibly subverted by Theranos itself) to the naysayers. Rupert Murdoch put 125 million dollars into Theranos, so the press itself was invested. This investment was only public after investors sued: https://www.smh.com.au/business/markets/rupert-murdoch-among-star-studded-investors-duped-by-theranos-20180505-p4zdj7.html https://www.smh.com.au/business/markets/rupert-murdoch-among...
- sohkamyung 8y ago
  But some credit is due to Rupert Murdoch: despite pressure from Elizabeth Holmes (and his investment in it), he decided to allow the reporter, John Carreyrou, to publish his critical pieces on Theranos in the WSJ [1]: Several people who have worked at Murdoch papers have told me that he isn’t above interceding in editorial matters, but in this case, despite his personal interest, he didn’t. A source who has known Murdoch for years explained it, “He’s a newsman — and a good story is a good story no matter what or who the story is about.” [1] http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/05/john-carreyrous-new-book-on-silicon-valley-bad-blood.html http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/05/john-carreyrous...
  - cowpig 8y ago
    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)?
    - 1024core 8y ago
      Since when has ethics ever stopped Rupert Murdoch?
    - monkeypizza 8y ago
      If you don't give him credit for that, what would you give him credit for? If he stopped Carreyrou, you'd obviously blame him. Therefore in order for your judgement to be meaningful, you have to admit that him allowing Carreyrou to go ahead and topple the house of cards was a good action. Otherwise no matter what he does you judge him negatively - and in that case, your decision is predetermined and not of informational value for anyone.
sdiq 8y ago
Sometime back, I remember reading about how impossible it was what they were proposing. Shocking that it had to take all these years and that huge amount for the truth to finally come out.
Rapzid 8y ago
Reminds me of the doomed OnLive. Anyone who knew anything about the internet and latency was speaking out about the impossibility of it ever being a suitable experience from a latency perspective. Concerns were just treated as alternative facts at the time.
- bangonkeyboard 8y ago
  What was impossible about OnLive? Using the app was an impressively responsive remote desktop experience, and cloud gaming is very much a viable reality as shown by PlayStation Now and GeForce NOW.
  - mplewis 8y ago
    I agree. From what I read about OnLive's failure, they had major problems with founder Steve Perlman, which spiraled into lack of direction, a pivot, and a crash. The tech worked pretty well when I tried it.
  - Rapzid 8y ago
    Getting a comparable user experience. The technology is impressive but the video quality, FPS, and latency are not. Most people are just surprised it even works as well as it does, but once the honeymoon period is over the issues start to become apparent. This is why you mostly hear stories like "Oh, I tried [service] out once and it was actually pretty good"; it's a novelty for most and not worth paying for.
- wsc981 8y ago
  I played a bit on OnLive, just to test it out and I thought the experience was decent enough on my (at the time) MacBook Air. Perhaps not good enough for twitch multiplayer gaming (I didn't try that), but I thought it was ok for the single player games that I tried.
lhorie 8y ago
> 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 outlets have inherent biases towards telling stories that are extraordinary or otherwise appealing. Ultimately, shouldn't everyone be applying critical thinking and the scientific method to come to their own conclusions about the world?
- lomnakkus 8y ago
  > 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 thinking and the scientific method to come to their own conclusions about the world? Of course, but there's limited time to investigate everything in ultimate skeptical detail, and so we rely on others we trust.
  - tankerslay 8y ago
    >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.
    - mhneu 8y ago
      Subscribe to nonprofit, or family-run, journalism that cares about the truth. ProPublica, Guardian, WaPo, now maybe LA Times, NYT (but avoid their bothsidesist politics coverage), Mother Jones, Talking Points Memo, New Yorker, etc. As long as truth seeking journalists are in control, all good - but carefully watch for ownership changes.
mplewis 8y ago
Here's a story about media manipulation from a reporter who Theranos tried to sell on the story: https://khn.org/news/reporters-notebook-the-tale-of-theranos-and-the-mysterious-fire-alarm/ https://khn.org/news/reporters-notebook-the-tale-of-theranos... I don't want to go full Elon "the media is incentivized to penalize me in particular" Musk, but the ethical thing this reporter did was to was cancel the Theranos feature. A less scrupulous reporter might have been happy to run with it.
- wodenokoto 8y ago
  If they can prick a reporter, why not prick a patient and have them come back for a later follow-up where they do the real test. That way the reporter and theranos both get their soundbite. I mean, it's not worse than setting off a fire alarm and cancel every body's blood test.
WalterBright 8y ago
> how important it is that we come up with a framework to penalize misleading journalism That would require the existence of a group of people empowered decide what is the truth and what is not. Such groups have a really, really bad history. No thanks. (The history of it is so bad that protection from such groups is enshrined in the Bill of Rights.)
- laughinghan 8y ago
  Woah, I think you’re reading too much into what GP is suggesting. I think all that GP is pointing out is that news sources that reported on Theranos’ claims credulously and without necessary skepticism have faced basically no criticism (this article doesn’t even bring it up), and therefore have virtually no disincentive from doing the exact same thing with the next Theranos. Fixing that doesn’t necessarily require an oppressive Orwellian governmental body to dictate truth and punish journalists who veer from the party line. It could be as simple as, after the fact now that we know how fraudulent it was, naming prominent journalists and outlets and pointing out red flags that they should have but failed to highlight, and other similar ways they should have expressed a healthy skepticism but didn’t.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
jl2718 8y ago
My question is: where is the due diligence from investors? Nobody even bothers anymore. I’ve begun to think they don’t even care, because they truly believe that money makes success, not people, and certainly not technology.
- timavr 8y ago
  Investors rarely do a crazy DD, especially technical DD. First, it is expensive and second which is most important, it takes time. When a company is fundraising and investor likes a pitch they prefer to move fast in fear of missing out. Generally, all the dead bodies are found during the first board meeting. It is not that much different from just buying stock. No one actually has an idea if any of public companies are cooking books etc. You just wake one day and it is a huge write down.
- edanm 8y ago
  That's absolutely wrong. Remember - the reason Theranos is news is exactly because this doesn't happen often, and one of the reasons this doesn't happen often is that investors are usually smarter about their investments.
jadedhacker 8y ago
You won't get honest and really critical press without removing capitalist (i.e. non-democratic) ownership of the press. Making it so that the journalists own the company rather than some billionaire overlord would be a marked improvement.
- growlist 8y ago
  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, just as you might not expect to get the most well informed theatre criticism from a civil engineer..
  - dragonwriter 8y ago
    > 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 they don't have that effect. OTOH, most journalists probably study journalism or other arts, not any kind of science, at the undergraduate level.
    - growlist 8y ago
      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.
jaypaulynice 8y ago
This happens pretty often actually. The same early investors own the media companies so they get to push stories to get companies huge valuations. The media is there to make money too! One thing America lacks is public radio/tv whose goal is to serve the public. People keep forgetting that the media is private. Whoever controls the media controls the people.
- saiya-jin 8y ago
  well that's not panacea neither, since budget comes from government/state, and so with change of government leading directors are often changed too for 'a more compatible view'. just look at post-soviet/eastern block media, we all have those (tv/radio) but nobody expects anymore true objectivity there.
wetpaws 8y ago
Everyone who would dare to criticize Holmes would go against modern empowerment narrative and claimed as misogynist, so I'm not surprised.
- ryandrake 8y ago
  You’re getting the usual downvotes for this, but there’s probably some truth here. Remember, the Theranos story started up right around when the whole “we need more women in tech” stuff started gaining steam. All the stories were coming out about how tech was run by men and full of bros. Lo and behold, here comes this young, seemimgly technical woman who dropped out of school and dressed/acted like the next Steve Jobs. It fit perfectly into the existing story! Like the X-Files poster, everyone Wanted To Believe! The Theranos story hit the tech press right in that blind spot, and people were willing to overlook their skepticism in order to believe that they were witnessing a real female Steve Jobs tech celebrity.
anoncoward111 8y ago
The real problem is that Walgreens didn't do enough due dilligence before signing a contract with Theranos, and that people didn't investigate where their blood was being analyzed
krylon 8y ago
> The media, though, never paid enough attention (or was possibly subverted by Theranos itself) to the naysayers. Part of the problem, I think, is that the public loves (and wants to believe) the narrative of the lone genius who solves a problem against all the odds, and against all the people who told them they could not do it.
- kumarvvr 8y ago
  This is where the problem is. Media should focus on facts. Not what the public loves.
edanm 8y ago
> 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 money in something with seemingly so little backing? > These incidents ought to remind us the exponentially important role media plays in our lives and how important it is that we come up with a framework to penalize misleading journalism, while at the same time, preserving the independence of media. I don't disagree with the sentiment about the media, but I think this is a singularly bad example - who cares what the public thought about Theranos - the public didn't lose money here.
- rjkennedy98 8y ago
  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.
  - twoodfin 8y ago
    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 IPO.
    - Ibai0tha 8y ago
      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.
madaxe_again 8y ago
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.
- notahacker 8y ago
  There might be numerous legitimate reasons to dislike Kissinger and Mattis going well beyond Theranos, but suggesting they're as culpable for being hired to promote something they didn't understand to the military as the person who conceived and masterminded the fraud is stretching it a little far. I imagine Kissinger and Mattis' reputation would have taken a bigger hit if it didn't already have much bigger black marks against it.
- icebraining 8y ago
  You're surprised that Kissinger has escaped consequences?
JustSomeNobody 8y ago
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.
JTbane 8y ago
FOMO is a hell of a drug.
specialist 8y ago
Being a whistleblower sucks. I was an election integrity activist. We were ridiculed, harassed, and in some cases jailed. Of course, we were (mostly) right. But there's never a nod or h/t to acknowledge the pain and sacrifice. And don't be fooled into thinking the sniffing salts are working. There's always another con, fraud, bubble. (In my case, all postal balloting, which is worse than the touchscreens.) I think whistleblowers should maybe just bet on the short. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Big_Short https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Big_Short https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Soros#1992_pound_short https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Soros#1992_pound_short
- craftyguy 8y ago
  > In my case, all postal balloting, which is worse than the touchscreens. Got any more info on this? I'm in a state where all voting is done through postal ballots.
  - specialist 8y ago
    Paper ballots are scanned upon receipt. So you might as well fax your ballot. They keep the paper for a while, sometimes used for manual recounts, under very narrow circumstances. Because there's no second chance, admins have to adjudicate for voter intent. So they modify the votes in the database. To protect the database, as part of the backup, the votes are tallied both at end and beginning of shift. That means a running vote count. Law is that votes can only be tabulated when the polls close. So admin's have the fiction of "summary reports" vs "tabulation". Yes, admins peek at early results. Another new threat to integrity is signature verification. But that's a whole topic onto itself. Happily... The biggest mitigation would be to switch from brittle FPTP to robust approval voting and proportional representation (as appropriate).
  - Frondo 8y ago
    I grew up in Oregon, which has been 100% vote-by-mail for years, and fraud is non-existent there. This is FUD, to dust off an old chestnut, at least as far as Oregon is concerned. Check it: https://www.google.com/search?newwindow=1&q=oregon+vote+by+mail+fraud https://www.google.com/search?newwindow=1&q=oregon+vote+by+m... In the 2016 election, a potential 54 cases of voter fraud. Here's the breakdown of the kind of fraud (which amounts to .002% of ballots -- one in 38,000): "Richardson said the suspicious ballots broke down into several categories: 46 voters appeared to vote in Oregon and another state; six individuals listed as deceased voted; and two voters registered in Oregon voted twice."
lisper 8y ago
There is a very powerful mythology surrounding the Independent American Inventor, a big part of which is that they overcome the mobs of naysayers shouting, "It can't be done!" by sheer force of personal will and brilliance. On this theory, the mere fact that there are people saying it can't be done tells you nothing (or, in fact, indicates that the target of the criticism is actually on to something really big!)
gwbas1c 8y ago
> 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. Ummm, have you heard about Bitcoin? Hacker News recently removed a well-written article where Bill Gates and Warren Buffet explain, in very clear terms, why it's a bubble. By the time I made it to the comments page, the page showed the article as flagged. (Basically, anyone who understands distributed systems knows Bitcoin won't scale. Anyone know understands economics knows that a deflationary currency won't work.) Look at Bitcoin for an example of where the experts are ignored.

starpilot 8y ago

> 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. Links? Wasn't Holmes incredibly secretive about everything? It's not like she was promising overunity or anything, just a "radically new approach" type thing.

danieltillett 8y ago
The reason why experts knew it was fraud right from the start is not even god can do the assays Holmes was claiming from a single drop of blood - the information is just not present and the variability is too high.
- Kiro 8y ago
  Where can I read the statements of these expert? Can't find anything before 2015.

donbright 8y ago

The Wall Street Journal is the only reason the company was outed. This same journal was also one of her early boosters. We already have a framework that preserves independence of the media, the First Amendment. All of the NDAs and Boies style intimidation and legal abuse and harrasment of the whistleblowers and journalists was only stopped by the First Amendment. We already have a framework that punishes journalists - it's people like Peter Thiel suing them out of existence because he doesn't like what they say. It's big funders buying a newspaper and destroying it like the Denver Post. It's the government putting sources on trial and in prison like happened with the NSA stories. Journalists are murdered constantly for reporting stories. And the industry itself is dying because of changing business models. They dont need a framework to punish them any more.

laughinghan 8y ago
I am under the impression that it is rare for journalists in America to be murdered for their stories, is that not the case? None of your examples are journalists being penalized for lack of due diligence or for being misleading. I think your instinct to protect journalists given their importance and the threats they face is a healthy and important one, and I share it, but I don’t think they’re above reproach. Ensuring the independence and safety of journalists is of paramount importance; ensuring journalists are appropriately incentivized to report accurate stories with healthy skepticism is of secondary importance after that (since most will innately desire that anyway), but it is still also important.
- lifeisstillgood 8y ago
  Imagine if the phrase was "Software developers are not murdered for missing estimates in this country". I am pretty sure I would hit my estimates even in London. Yes Journalists need high standards of professional integrity and the legal air cover to maintain that. But really the ultimate defence is us - to reject the mountains of crap out there and seek out and subscribe to the worthwhile news sources. As ever, it's down to us.
  - grigjd3 8y ago
    Why hold yourself responsible for your actions when you can just say everything is corrupt and imagine that is an excuse? ;)
  - nojvek 8y ago
    Can anyone give me a list of respectable independent media that I should be subscribing to? The economist comes to mind. Any others HN recommends?
    - oliveshell 8y ago
      For general news, I find NPR.org [1] to be pretty good. I can tell they make an effort to avoid bias and sensationalism. It’s not perfect, but I have yet to find another online source that I prefer. I also listen to my local station (WUNC) and if you’re in a decently populated area of the U.S., your local NPR affiliate is also likely high quality (plus it’s easy to listen online if you’re not into terrestrial radio.) [1]: https://npr.org https://npr.org

duxup 8y ago

"there were experts in the field who were shouting out about the impossibility of Holmes' claims right from the beginning" Were there? I'm not doubting your claim, just wondering if anyone really spoke up. Reading about the challenges they would have had to overcome to back up their claims, there were some serious fundamental problems, and those were challenges the industry had been wrangling with when it came to that type of automated testing for ages.... I always wondered how many of their competitors were thinking: "No way they overcame all that all at once.... straight up not possible."

busterarm 8y ago
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.
- Kiro 8y ago
  A lot of "I remember" in this thread but where are the links?
  - aaron695 8y ago
    Comment from the oldest HN article I could find - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6349808 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.

SilasX 8y ago

Sure, there were skeptics. And there were also SV gurus shouting "Fake it till you make it!" "Impostor Syndrome!" "Ignore the haters!" When you immediately equate all self-doubt with Impostor Syndrome -- rather than develop actionable heuristics to detect when said doubt is justified -- don't feign surprise when some people take it seriously. Maybe they were just fooled by your confidence. ("You" in the general sense, not you personally.)

mlthoughts2018 8y ago
I don’t know. That thinking might paper over a middling start-up with a mix of sincerity and hype but just a poor product or unsuccessful funding rounds. Theranos, and other unicorn-scale hype, is a whole different thing. It doesn’t get this bad unless there is a seriously malevolent drive for the money, essentially saying that you deserve money just for an idea, just for being a made-up executive, regardless of all else, and you’re going to lie, cheat, intimidate, swindle, and unapologetically steamroll your way to the money no matter what. It’s a technology narcissism problem. Not mere overconfidence or being swept up in the hype while at least trying to genuinely build something even if it ends up not working.
- phs318u 8y ago
  > It’s a technology narcissism problem. BINGO! What a great term. I've never heard it called that before (which now seems hard to believe), but have definitely seen it SO many times before (specifically in massive corporate IT programs - the domain I work in as an enterprise architect). Did you coin this phrase? I'm so using this! Thank you.
  - mlthoughts2018 8y ago
    I doubt I am the first to call it that, but I haven’t seen it elsewhere that I am presently aware of. Having a taxonomy of this bad behavior, with useful names, does seem important, to make identifying it and discussing it more widespread. I imagine young founders not wishing to be like Holmes could benefit from a rubric of sorts that helps classify this behavior. And for bad-faith founders who do want to behave like Holmes just without getting caught, talking more systematically about it would make it harder for them, limit their options. What would be really cool is a modern version of Moral Mazes directed at startups.

a_bonobo 8y ago

>The media, though, never paid enough attention (or was possibly subverted by Theranos itself) to the naysayers. Rupert Murdoch put 125 million dollars into Theranos, so the press itself was invested. This investment was only public after investors sued: https://www.smh.com.au/business/markets/rupert-murdoch-among-star-studded-investors-duped-by-theranos-20180505-p4zdj7.html https://www.smh.com.au/business/markets/rupert-murdoch-among...

sohkamyung 8y ago
But some credit is due to Rupert Murdoch: despite pressure from Elizabeth Holmes (and his investment in it), he decided to allow the reporter, John Carreyrou, to publish his critical pieces on Theranos in the WSJ [1]: Several people who have worked at Murdoch papers have told me that he isn’t above interceding in editorial matters, but in this case, despite his personal interest, he didn’t. A source who has known Murdoch for years explained it, “He’s a newsman — and a good story is a good story no matter what or who the story is about.” [1] http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/05/john-carreyrous-new-book-on-silicon-valley-bad-blood.html http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/05/john-carreyrous...
- cowpig 8y ago
  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)?
  - 1024core 8y ago
    Since when has ethics ever stopped Rupert Murdoch?
  - monkeypizza 8y ago
    If you don't give him credit for that, what would you give him credit for? If he stopped Carreyrou, you'd obviously blame him. Therefore in order for your judgement to be meaningful, you have to admit that him allowing Carreyrou to go ahead and topple the house of cards was a good action. Otherwise no matter what he does you judge him negatively - and in that case, your decision is predetermined and not of informational value for anyone.

sdiq 8y ago

Sometime back, I remember reading about how impossible it was what they were proposing. Shocking that it had to take all these years and that huge amount for the truth to finally come out.

Rapzid 8y ago

Reminds me of the doomed OnLive. Anyone who knew anything about the internet and latency was speaking out about the impossibility of it ever being a suitable experience from a latency perspective. Concerns were just treated as alternative facts at the time.

bangonkeyboard 8y ago
What was impossible about OnLive? Using the app was an impressively responsive remote desktop experience, and cloud gaming is very much a viable reality as shown by PlayStation Now and GeForce NOW.
- mplewis 8y ago
  I agree. From what I read about OnLive's failure, they had major problems with founder Steve Perlman, which spiraled into lack of direction, a pivot, and a crash. The tech worked pretty well when I tried it.
- Rapzid 8y ago
  Getting a comparable user experience. The technology is impressive but the video quality, FPS, and latency are not. Most people are just surprised it even works as well as it does, but once the honeymoon period is over the issues start to become apparent. This is why you mostly hear stories like "Oh, I tried [service] out once and it was actually pretty good"; it's a novelty for most and not worth paying for.
wsc981 8y ago
I played a bit on OnLive, just to test it out and I thought the experience was decent enough on my (at the time) MacBook Air. Perhaps not good enough for twitch multiplayer gaming (I didn't try that), but I thought it was ok for the single player games that I tried.

lhorie 8y ago

> 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 outlets have inherent biases towards telling stories that are extraordinary or otherwise appealing. Ultimately, shouldn't everyone be applying critical thinking and the scientific method to come to their own conclusions about the world?

lomnakkus 8y ago
> 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 thinking and the scientific method to come to their own conclusions about the world? Of course, but there's limited time to investigate everything in ultimate skeptical detail, and so we rely on others we trust.
- tankerslay 8y ago
  >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.
  - mhneu 8y ago
    Subscribe to nonprofit, or family-run, journalism that cares about the truth. ProPublica, Guardian, WaPo, now maybe LA Times, NYT (but avoid their bothsidesist politics coverage), Mother Jones, Talking Points Memo, New Yorker, etc. As long as truth seeking journalists are in control, all good - but carefully watch for ownership changes.

mplewis 8y ago

Here's a story about media manipulation from a reporter who Theranos tried to sell on the story: https://khn.org/news/reporters-notebook-the-tale-of-theranos-and-the-mysterious-fire-alarm/ https://khn.org/news/reporters-notebook-the-tale-of-theranos... I don't want to go full Elon "the media is incentivized to penalize me in particular" Musk, but the ethical thing this reporter did was to was cancel the Theranos feature. A less scrupulous reporter might have been happy to run with it.

wodenokoto 8y ago
If they can prick a reporter, why not prick a patient and have them come back for a later follow-up where they do the real test. That way the reporter and theranos both get their soundbite. I mean, it's not worse than setting off a fire alarm and cancel every body's blood test.

WalterBright 8y ago

> how important it is that we come up with a framework to penalize misleading journalism That would require the existence of a group of people empowered decide what is the truth and what is not. Such groups have a really, really bad history. No thanks. (The history of it is so bad that protection from such groups is enshrined in the Bill of Rights.)

laughinghan 8y ago
Woah, I think you’re reading too much into what GP is suggesting. I think all that GP is pointing out is that news sources that reported on Theranos’ claims credulously and without necessary skepticism have faced basically no criticism (this article doesn’t even bring it up), and therefore have virtually no disincentive from doing the exact same thing with the next Theranos. Fixing that doesn’t necessarily require an oppressive Orwellian governmental body to dictate truth and punish journalists who veer from the party line. It could be as simple as, after the fact now that we know how fraudulent it was, naming prominent journalists and outlets and pointing out red flags that they should have but failed to highlight, and other similar ways they should have expressed a healthy skepticism but didn’t.

deleted 8y ago

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jl2718 8y ago

My question is: where is the due diligence from investors? Nobody even bothers anymore. I’ve begun to think they don’t even care, because they truly believe that money makes success, not people, and certainly not technology.

timavr 8y ago
Investors rarely do a crazy DD, especially technical DD. First, it is expensive and second which is most important, it takes time. When a company is fundraising and investor likes a pitch they prefer to move fast in fear of missing out. Generally, all the dead bodies are found during the first board meeting. It is not that much different from just buying stock. No one actually has an idea if any of public companies are cooking books etc. You just wake one day and it is a huge write down.
edanm 8y ago
That's absolutely wrong. Remember - the reason Theranos is news is exactly because this doesn't happen often, and one of the reasons this doesn't happen often is that investors are usually smarter about their investments.

jadedhacker 8y ago

You won't get honest and really critical press without removing capitalist (i.e. non-democratic) ownership of the press. Making it so that the journalists own the company rather than some billionaire overlord would be a marked improvement.

growlist 8y ago
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, just as you might not expect to get the most well informed theatre criticism from a civil engineer..
- dragonwriter 8y ago
  > 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 they don't have that effect. OTOH, most journalists probably study journalism or other arts, not any kind of science, at the undergraduate level.
  - growlist 8y ago
    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.

jaypaulynice 8y ago

This happens pretty often actually. The same early investors own the media companies so they get to push stories to get companies huge valuations. The media is there to make money too! One thing America lacks is public radio/tv whose goal is to serve the public. People keep forgetting that the media is private. Whoever controls the media controls the people.

saiya-jin 8y ago
well that's not panacea neither, since budget comes from government/state, and so with change of government leading directors are often changed too for 'a more compatible view'. just look at post-soviet/eastern block media, we all have those (tv/radio) but nobody expects anymore true objectivity there.

wetpaws 8y ago

Everyone who would dare to criticize Holmes would go against modern empowerment narrative and claimed as misogynist, so I'm not surprised.

ryandrake 8y ago
You’re getting the usual downvotes for this, but there’s probably some truth here. Remember, the Theranos story started up right around when the whole “we need more women in tech” stuff started gaining steam. All the stories were coming out about how tech was run by men and full of bros. Lo and behold, here comes this young, seemimgly technical woman who dropped out of school and dressed/acted like the next Steve Jobs. It fit perfectly into the existing story! Like the X-Files poster, everyone Wanted To Believe! The Theranos story hit the tech press right in that blind spot, and people were willing to overlook their skepticism in order to believe that they were witnessing a real female Steve Jobs tech celebrity.

anoncoward111 8y ago

The real problem is that Walgreens didn't do enough due dilligence before signing a contract with Theranos, and that people didn't investigate where their blood was being analyzed

krylon 8y ago

> The media, though, never paid enough attention (or was possibly subverted by Theranos itself) to the naysayers. Part of the problem, I think, is that the public loves (and wants to believe) the narrative of the lone genius who solves a problem against all the odds, and against all the people who told them they could not do it.

kumarvvr 8y ago
This is where the problem is. Media should focus on facts. Not what the public loves.

edanm 8y ago

> 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 money in something with seemingly so little backing? > These incidents ought to remind us the exponentially important role media plays in our lives and how important it is that we come up with a framework to penalize misleading journalism, while at the same time, preserving the independence of media. I don't disagree with the sentiment about the media, but I think this is a singularly bad example - who cares what the public thought about Theranos - the public didn't lose money here.

rjkennedy98 8y ago
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.
- twoodfin 8y ago
  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 IPO.
  - Ibai0tha 8y ago
    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.

madaxe_again 8y ago

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.

notahacker 8y ago
There might be numerous legitimate reasons to dislike Kissinger and Mattis going well beyond Theranos, but suggesting they're as culpable for being hired to promote something they didn't understand to the military as the person who conceived and masterminded the fraud is stretching it a little far. I imagine Kissinger and Mattis' reputation would have taken a bigger hit if it didn't already have much bigger black marks against it.
icebraining 8y ago
You're surprised that Kissinger has escaped consequences?

JustSomeNobody 8y ago

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.

JTbane 8y ago

FOMO is a hell of a drug.

specialist 8y ago

Being a whistleblower sucks. I was an election integrity activist. We were ridiculed, harassed, and in some cases jailed. Of course, we were (mostly) right. But there's never a nod or h/t to acknowledge the pain and sacrifice. And don't be fooled into thinking the sniffing salts are working. There's always another con, fraud, bubble. (In my case, all postal balloting, which is worse than the touchscreens.) I think whistleblowers should maybe just bet on the short. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Big_Short https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Big_Short https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Soros#1992_pound_short https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Soros#1992_pound_short

craftyguy 8y ago
> In my case, all postal balloting, which is worse than the touchscreens. Got any more info on this? I'm in a state where all voting is done through postal ballots.
- specialist 8y ago
  Paper ballots are scanned upon receipt. So you might as well fax your ballot. They keep the paper for a while, sometimes used for manual recounts, under very narrow circumstances. Because there's no second chance, admins have to adjudicate for voter intent. So they modify the votes in the database. To protect the database, as part of the backup, the votes are tallied both at end and beginning of shift. That means a running vote count. Law is that votes can only be tabulated when the polls close. So admin's have the fiction of "summary reports" vs "tabulation". Yes, admins peek at early results. Another new threat to integrity is signature verification. But that's a whole topic onto itself. Happily... The biggest mitigation would be to switch from brittle FPTP to robust approval voting and proportional representation (as appropriate).
- Frondo 8y ago
  I grew up in Oregon, which has been 100% vote-by-mail for years, and fraud is non-existent there. This is FUD, to dust off an old chestnut, at least as far as Oregon is concerned. Check it: https://www.google.com/search?newwindow=1&q=oregon+vote+by+mail+fraud https://www.google.com/search?newwindow=1&q=oregon+vote+by+m... In the 2016 election, a potential 54 cases of voter fraud. Here's the breakdown of the kind of fraud (which amounts to .002% of ballots -- one in 38,000): "Richardson said the suspicious ballots broke down into several categories: 46 voters appeared to vote in Oregon and another state; six individuals listed as deceased voted; and two voters registered in Oregon voted twice."

lisper 8y ago

There is a very powerful mythology surrounding the Independent American Inventor, a big part of which is that they overcome the mobs of naysayers shouting, "It can't be done!" by sheer force of personal will and brilliance. On this theory, the mere fact that there are people saying it can't be done tells you nothing (or, in fact, indicates that the target of the criticism is actually on to something really big!)

gwbas1c 8y ago

> 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. Ummm, have you heard about Bitcoin? Hacker News recently removed a well-written article where Bill Gates and Warren Buffet explain, in very clear terms, why it's a bubble. By the time I made it to the comments page, the page showed the article as flagged. (Basically, anyone who understands distributed systems knows Bitcoin won't scale. Anyone know understands economics knows that a deflationary currency won't work.) Look at Bitcoin for an example of where the experts are ignored.