Comment by Aurornis
10 hours ago
> To even suggest that Elizabeth Holmes didn't really harm anyone because she in prison for investor fraud, and then have the nerve to call that distinction "nuance", is absurd.
I have been blown away by all of the efforts to rehabilitate Holme’s reputation and erase any of her wrongdoings.
I’m sure some of it is coming from directly seeded or funded efforts from Holmes doing PR work, but I think most of it across social media is actually organic. Elizabeth Holmes was so clearly caught out committing fraud that it’s triggering contrarian reactions among people who think they’re the ones who can see the real story behind every media narrative. Unlike other unpopular figures like Zuckerberg or Musk, most people had never heard of Elizabeth Holmes or Theranos until her fraud was revealed and became a major news story. When the media introduces a figure as a bad person, some people are so hardwired to be contrarian that they must take the opposite position.
The other difficulty with this story is that many people still don’t understand what she did wrong. This is common all over social media and even on Hacker News in this thread. I see a lot of arguments that she was only doing “fake it till you make it” like every other startup from people who don’t understand what that phrases means (it means you present yourself as a bigger, more established company to overcome resistance to being a small startup, not that you literally fake that your product works). I responded to another comment from someone who thought that because all blood tests have error rates, Theranos having problems was no different than any other blood testing company, which is a false equivalence that doesn’t even begin to compute if you know anything about the fraud they were doing.
Then there are layers of other social issues being injected into the controversy. I knew someone in person who grew suspicious that the only reason Elizabeth Holmes was prosecuted was because of her gender. They lived in a social media bubble where all CEOs were evil criminals doing frauds all the time and therefore the only reason Holmes could be singled out and treated differently was due to her gender. This led to a wild argument that going after her was unfair, actually, even acknowledging that she did the fraud. That was a conversation I exited from because there’s no overcoming that type of belief with logic.
The most interesting conspiracy theories I continue to see are the belief that Theranos technology actually was working and she was on the way to solving it all, but that the industry didn’t want to be disrupted and therefore they had her taken out. This one doesn’t even hold up to minimal research but it persists among those with deep conspiracy theory tendencies.
It’s wild to observe how often this plays out. Something about this cases triggers a lot of people’s desires to doubt and defend, and there’s a large audience for content that takes Holme’s side no matter how illogical or contrary to the facts.
> I see a lot of arguments that she was only doing “fake it till you make it” like every other startup from people who don’t understand what that phrases means (it means you present yourself as a bigger, more established company to overcome resistance to being a small startup, not that you literally fake that your product works)
Not disagreeing with the rest of your comment, but regarding this tangent: haven't there been a ton of (say) "AI" companies that quietly used humans in the background and gave the impression AI was doing the work, because their vision was that that was the future?
Not that I think that would excuse this case in any way regardless - just mentioning because of the drawn comparison.
A couple, yes, but I wouldn’t say it’s a ton of companies.
These stories were popular during the period when people didn’t understand how AI worked or what was possible. It was feasible to produce fake demos that relied on humans doing the work because few people understood how AI worked. If your demo took an input and produced an output 1 to 12 hours later with variable delay nobody questioned it because they didn’t know what AI looked like. They thought maybe that’s how long the computers had to think or that there was a single computer working through a backlog.
Now everyone has used ChatGPT and understands that actual AI doesn’t work like that, and if the task actually took 12 hours of crunching on tokens the bill would be an eye watering large number. So you can’t get away with faking your AI responses with a few humans doing the work.
There were also follow on stories where writers got confused about hybrid systems that had humans doing review and RLHF, thinking that any involvement of a human in the loop was equivalent of faking AI by having humans do the work. Most of the stories I saw toward the end of this trend were this style.
> They lived in a social media bubble where all CEOs were evil criminals doing frauds all the time and therefore the only reason Holmes could be singled out and treated differently was due to her gender.
They’re also unfamiliar with FDA-regulated spaces where it’s not unheard of for VPs and C-suite types to receive fines and jail time and bans from the industry.