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> But the more Holmes talks to Fielder, the more he teases out her unhinged rationale, which is: The device works fine! We just had to figure out that pesky che
by nl 29d ago
> But the more Holmes talks to Fielder, the more he teases out her unhinged rationale, which is: The device works fine! We just had to figure out that pesky chemistry stuff! The strange thing is that Holmes has such a corporate mindset that she treats the chemistry stuff…that hadn’t been invented yet…as just another glitchy small problem that could easily be solved
The difference between science and engineering right there...
- s_dev 29d agoYou mean marketing and engineering.
- TheOtherHobbes 29d agoManagement and engineering.
- runsfromfire 29d agoOwners and employees
- sam_lowry_ 29d agoCapitalists and workers?
- jodrellblank 29d agoWorker and parasite? https://youtube.com/watch?v=z2_dhUv_CrI https://youtube.com/watch?v=z2_dhUv_CrI (The Simpsons)
- philipallstar 29d agoCapitalists are the ones who allocate - and risk - money to attempt to solve problems like this.
- tclancy 29d agoYeah and we wish they would stop. Because solutions like this are something the system optimizes for.
- philipallstar 29d agoThen we wouldn't have anything that's hard to create and/or requires risk.
- jackb4040 29d ago[flagged]
- jodrellblank 29d agoImagine claiming undue credit for the works of Euler, Einstein, Michaelangelo, and hundreds of huge Cathedrals all over Europe, while disclaiming the constant bailouts from the taxpayer so that Capitalists never actually risk or lose money, and being blinkered to the fact that 'money' doesn't solve hard problems or do hard things, workers do. Manhattan project? Taxpayer funded. Concorde? Taxpayer funded. Walking on the Moon? Taxpayer funded. What are you talking about.
- philipallstar 29d ago> so that Capitalists never actually risk or lose money If you think capitalists never lose money then you're not on this planet. Obviously money is lost all the time. There are lots of investors, lots of companies, and few winners. This is mad. Of course bailouts happen, and they're done by the state. Capitalism would let them fail. > hundreds of huge Cathedrals all over Europe In this case the church was the capitalist. They risked the capital that paid for the cathedral. Although it was fairly low risk, as building a cathedral is pretty well understood. > Manhattan project? Taxpayer funded. Concorde? Taxpayer funded. Walking on the Moon? Taxpayer funded. What are you talking about. In this case the state is the capitalist, although it's taking the money by force rather than with a risk/reward voluntary investment. The worker isn't doing this by him/herself.
- NoboruWataya 29d agoShe had a science/engineering background, more than marketing. Engineers can be frauds too.
- qsera 29d agoMarketing by definition is fraudulent because it is all about creating a fake need.
- lelanthran 29d agoDidn't she fail out of science/engineering. Can I claim to have an medical background if I failed the first semester?
- dragochat 29d agoshe'd be the perfect CEO of a BigAI corpo - as opposed to betting on humans randomly discovering new chemistry in predictable ammount of time, betting on neural networks offering a brute-force way to (super)human congnition is actualy "saner" - I mean, we know from _evolution_ that in a universe with out _physics_ brute forcing the problem of building intelligence with neural-network like architecture "very likely works"... now this thought just made me have more sympathy for Sam Altman (there can actually be much worse ppl out there...)
- owebmaster 29d agoIf Sam Altman was actually named Elizabeth Altman the OpenAI CEO would be in jail.
- dragochat 29d agowas about to reply, but... this has more layers than a (rotten) onion - I'll just restrain myself form doing so :P
- rcxdude 29d agoThere are many issues with OpenAI but the two situations are pretty significantly different.
- derektank 29d agoPeople seem to forget that Sunny Balwani also went to prison over the Theranos fraud.
- epihelix 29d agoI don't want to necessarily claim that Altman is worse than Holmes, but I don't think the rank order is entirely clear either. An AI CEO was absolutely Holmes' calling. You can only imagine.
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- rcxdude 29d agoHow so? In my experience academics are far more likely to sweep big practical issues under the rug because they're primarily concerned with being something working one so they can write a paper, as opposed to making a product that has to work in practice. (It is surprisingly common to have delusions about the scale of engineering problems in management, which causes problems even when it doesn't explode into outright fraud. I've had management insist on pursuing a project that was already quite risky and difficult in its own right but which also needed a technology that just didn't exist yet to actually be usable by customers in the field: mostly on the back of some theoretical calculations by some acadamics that masked big underlying problems. The issue was pretty obvious but just subtle enough to be easy to convince yourself it wasn't that hard)
- nl 28d agoScience is discovery of new knowledge (that "pesky chemistry" which is literally don't know how to do). Engineering is applying that knowledge in a effective and efficient manner. Engineering is something that money and time can fix. There are less guarantees with science.
- rcxdude 28d agoEh, In my experience this is not a clean distinction. My work is generally described as engineering and it often involves discovering new things about the technology, with a similar level of uncertainty. (and it often needs to be a lot more rigorous than a lot of the papers I read in the same field).
- nl 28d agoOf course. It's the real world, there is no bright-line. But broadly if you are dealing with building something in a world with constraints (time, materials, money, speed, safety) then it's more engineering. If you are studying how things work to try to build something without these constraints without then it's applied science. If you are developing new theories then that is fundamental science. So yes, your criticism ("far more likely to sweep big practical issues under the rug because they're primarily concerned with being something working") is accurate but by design, not a weakness. > the applied scientist is by definition not interested in changing reality, only in studying, explaining, and predicting it. The engineer, on the other hand, accepts the explanations and predictions of the applied scientist, and then acts to change reality to achieve some goal https://ojs.library.queensu.ca/index.php/PCEEA/article/view/4002/4050 https://ojs.library.queensu.ca/index.php/PCEEA/article/view/...
- jiaosdjf 29d agoAnd yet somehow what she did still isn't as bad as what every private equity form on Wall Street gets away with daily. There's no excuse for defrauding investors, but at least the "aim" was to produce a product that, if it actually had worked, would have been medically revolutionary. I don't even believe that she went in on scam from the start, she must have at least genuinely believed, no matter how nonchalant, that there was going to be a product - otherwise how would she possibly expect to get away with it? Blackrock, Citadel, KKR etc - all they do is buy up actual businesses that provide actual products and services, by using the most predatory and immoral "leveraged buyout" technique and then stripping its assets and leasing them back like some demented parasitic worm
- cowsandmilk 29d agoShe gave people medical test results that were incorrect. Say what you want about PE, the medical diagnostics firms they own provide accurate test results to patients.
- shimman 29d agoWe have an entire insurance industry that makes money denying care to Americans while they die, or are those okay deaths since it's done under the confines of shareholder value?
- HDThoreaun 29d agoThose denials are literally the only thing in the entire system keeping costs down
- jiaosdjf 28d agoAmericans have the highest per capita healthcare spend for the lowest health metrics.
- HDThoreaun 28d ago
- fuzzfactor 29d agoOh I'm going to use this: "The chemistry works fine! We just had to figure out that pesky device stuff!"