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I remember when interviews with Elizabeth Holmes really started to go awry. She would be asked very straightforward questions but respond with these bizarre mea

by bane 3y ago

I remember when interviews with Elizabeth Holmes really started to go awry. She would be asked very straightforward questions but respond with these bizarre meandering answers that never really got to the point. It was strikingly different from the way politicians don't respond, and after a few of these I started to think that something was up. However, a fair number of people I talked with back then thought she was absolutely brilliant and that her answers were the workings of a deeply complex mind. It's mean spirited, but the phrase "she's what stupid people think smart people sound like" struck me at the time. I think the same may be true here. This kind of behavior has been reinforced so much in their lives that in some cases they start to also get high on their own supply. But they to are profoundly stupid people, and start to think that how they interact with the world is what smart people "sound like" and it perpetuates into these spectacular fraudulent failures.

m_0x 3y ago
> a fair number of people I talked with back then thought she was absolutely brilliant and that her answers were the workings of a deeply complex mind. I bet it's because she spoke with confidence. Stupid people follow confidence disregarding everything else.
FireBeyond 3y ago
> However, a fair number of people I talked with back then thought she was absolutely brilliant and that her answers were the workings of a deeply complex mind. There are a subset of people, and Elizabeth herself who, to this day, believe we and the world were robbed of Theranos' revolutionary advances, because they "really, truly, were this close and would have done it by now", and think that that is the miscarriage of justice.
- SilasX 3y ago
  SBF likewise claimed he had investors lined up to save FTX and depositors, right when he was forced to declare bankruptcy. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/29/technology/sam-bankman-fried-ftx-bankruptcy.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/29/technology/sam-bankman-fr... Earlier comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33984977 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33984977
- justrealist 3y ago
  Well to be fair, there are some diseases and conditions that Theranos detected without issue. And actually it would be really helpful to have a in-home or in-store instant diagnosis for those. The failure was in trying to be the everything box and committing fraud to get there. I actually do think it would have been revolutionary and the failure of Theranos has set the field back.
  - FireBeyond 3y ago
    > Well to be fair, there are some diseases and conditions that Theranos detected without issue. With their own equipment? I don't believe so. Theranos as a company could reliably do this... they just did it with Siemens equipment with the labels removed. > I actually do think it would have been revolutionary It would be, were it possible. Not that we can't find things to be possible that were previously thought not to be, but this is pretty well established biology, and has been steadily researched for decades by both academia and industry (all of the big lab players would love it if they could do droplet analysis)... if there is an advance there, it's a pretty safe bet to say it was never coming from a 19 yo freshman chem eng dropout.
Verdex 3y ago
> It's mean spirited, but the phrase "she's what stupid people think smart people sound like" struck me at the time. The phrase is a 'poetic' comeback. It's successful in the sense that it's exactly what everyone wishes they could come up with when put on the spot, so it's easy to remember. Like you say, it is unfortunately rather mean spirited, and I say unfortunate because I suspect that it contains truth and usefulness. My running theory is that the structure of natural language and jargon is encoded such that it carries with it useful information. And this sort of makes sense. The problems we encounter in reality have a certain structure to them. And the natural progression of encoding is to make frequent things short and infrequent things long (thanks information theory). Over time communities shape language and jargon into the structural shape that is most useful to solve the problems they encounter. Primarily, I've started down this road to try and get my head wrapped around LLMs. Why are they useful at all? And how can something like prompt engineering even exist? The answer being (maybe) language structure sometimes matches problem structure. And prompts from people who "know" how to speak "right" carry additional structure that helps the LLM to provide better results. However, I think the same can be applied to "what stupid people think smart people sound like". If I'm right then there's a certain sense in which (for extremely well known problems) talking "correctly" helps you to be successful (although all things being equal actually knowing is going to be a better scenario). And if you abstract this, then there's a benefit to not knowing what the truth is (it frees up your time) but knowing what the sentence structure of "smart" approximately is (it allows you to pick winners to invest in). So perhaps we can de-meanify the phrase: "She's what non-experts think experts sound like." Or to maybe up the poetry: "Bach and pop use the same notes, but as the children mature so does their taste."
lamontcg 3y ago
> "she's what stupid people think smart people sound like" It is what people without any real depth of thought think that geniuses sound like. Stringing together a lot of occasionally insightful sentences without having any overarching and consistent point to the whole thing. And if you're conditioned by social media to have a low attention span and you have difficulty noticing how frequently the argument skips between tracks then it all sounds brilliant to you.

by bane 3y ago

m_0x 3y ago

> a fair number of people I talked with back then thought she was absolutely brilliant and that her answers were the workings of a deeply complex mind. I bet it's because she spoke with confidence. Stupid people follow confidence disregarding everything else.

FireBeyond 3y ago

> However, a fair number of people I talked with back then thought she was absolutely brilliant and that her answers were the workings of a deeply complex mind. There are a subset of people, and Elizabeth herself who, to this day, believe we and the world were robbed of Theranos' revolutionary advances, because they "really, truly, were this close and would have done it by now", and think that that is the miscarriage of justice.

SilasX 3y ago
SBF likewise claimed he had investors lined up to save FTX and depositors, right when he was forced to declare bankruptcy. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/29/technology/sam-bankman-fried-ftx-bankruptcy.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/29/technology/sam-bankman-fr... Earlier comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33984977 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33984977
justrealist 3y ago
Well to be fair, there are some diseases and conditions that Theranos detected without issue. And actually it would be really helpful to have a in-home or in-store instant diagnosis for those. The failure was in trying to be the everything box and committing fraud to get there. I actually do think it would have been revolutionary and the failure of Theranos has set the field back.
- FireBeyond 3y ago
  > Well to be fair, there are some diseases and conditions that Theranos detected without issue. With their own equipment? I don't believe so. Theranos as a company could reliably do this... they just did it with Siemens equipment with the labels removed. > I actually do think it would have been revolutionary It would be, were it possible. Not that we can't find things to be possible that were previously thought not to be, but this is pretty well established biology, and has been steadily researched for decades by both academia and industry (all of the big lab players would love it if they could do droplet analysis)... if there is an advance there, it's a pretty safe bet to say it was never coming from a 19 yo freshman chem eng dropout.

Verdex 3y ago

> It's mean spirited, but the phrase "she's what stupid people think smart people sound like" struck me at the time. The phrase is a 'poetic' comeback. It's successful in the sense that it's exactly what everyone wishes they could come up with when put on the spot, so it's easy to remember. Like you say, it is unfortunately rather mean spirited, and I say unfortunate because I suspect that it contains truth and usefulness. My running theory is that the structure of natural language and jargon is encoded such that it carries with it useful information. And this sort of makes sense. The problems we encounter in reality have a certain structure to them. And the natural progression of encoding is to make frequent things short and infrequent things long (thanks information theory). Over time communities shape language and jargon into the structural shape that is most useful to solve the problems they encounter. Primarily, I've started down this road to try and get my head wrapped around LLMs. Why are they useful at all? And how can something like prompt engineering even exist? The answer being (maybe) language structure sometimes matches problem structure. And prompts from people who "know" how to speak "right" carry additional structure that helps the LLM to provide better results. However, I think the same can be applied to "what stupid people think smart people sound like". If I'm right then there's a certain sense in which (for extremely well known problems) talking "correctly" helps you to be successful (although all things being equal actually knowing is going to be a better scenario). And if you abstract this, then there's a benefit to not knowing what the truth is (it frees up your time) but knowing what the sentence structure of "smart" approximately is (it allows you to pick winners to invest in). So perhaps we can de-meanify the phrase: "She's what non-experts think experts sound like." Or to maybe up the poetry: "Bach and pop use the same notes, but as the children mature so does their taste."

lamontcg 3y ago

> "she's what stupid people think smart people sound like" It is what people without any real depth of thought think that geniuses sound like. Stringing together a lot of occasionally insightful sentences without having any overarching and consistent point to the whole thing. And if you're conditioned by social media to have a low attention span and you have difficulty noticing how frequently the argument skips between tracks then it all sounds brilliant to you.