Hacker News Reader

Comment by colejohnson66 | Hacker News Reader

(see my edit about my wording re: getting married)

> The surprising thing is not that she was "allowed" to get married. Everyone is. The surprising thing is that someone was willing to marry her.

People marry serial killers more often that one would want to believe. Just do a search for “serial killers married in prison” and you’ll see “top-10” clickbait lists on almost every result. Some people are just crazy and idolize convicts. Someone marrying Holmes is nothing novel. Maybe they were attracted to her psychopathic personality? That happens sometimes.

View on HN

I think that the surprise here was more about the financials than the morals. Depending on state, after you marry you become liable for your partners debts, and the property you came into the marriage with may become common property that can be siezed to pay them.

So if she gets fined or successfully sued, the husband could find himself with a wife he can't see for 20 years and a big line of creditors taking all his assets and future earnings.

Is she really psychopathic ? Many CEO's and entrepreneurs don't care about ethics. There's something about that career that does that to people.

But that's quite different than being a psychopath like a serial killer is.

At the very least she's extremely manipulative. She faked her voice in public for years. That's next-level dedication.

Although, after reading Bad Blood, David Boies and his law firm came across as one of the scarier characters in the whole thing. Theranos' lawyers were completely willing to terrify and intimidate anyone who got in the way of their fraud.

> She faked her voice in public for years.

Maggie Thatcher did a similar thing, lowering her voice to make herself sound more authoritative. She managed to pull it off reasonably well I think. Possibly the fact that she was a bit older at the time helped.

I never understood why Elizabeth Holmes persisted though because, in her case, it mostly made her sound incredibly odd, and actually quite difficult and unpleasant to listen to. This may have been due to some sort of uncanny valley effect: the disconnect between Holmes' youthful and almost dainty appearance, and her weirdly boomy void giving her a sense of the unreal. The result to me was that it undermined her authority and credibility rather than enhancing them.

Still, as you say, next-level dedication.

It's actually very common for women professionals to use a lower register when speaking to colleagues. People take them more seriously; they notice. I have several friends who do this.

I read that book. I came across that Boies fellow at other times, too. SCO vs IBM. But also while reading Catch and Kill by Ronan Farrow (about Harvey Weinstein).

He appears to be of the 1% group.

> She faked her voice in public for years. That's next-level dedication.

She spoke at an artificially low pitch. This isn't exactly unheard of; almost all Japanese women speak at an artificially high pitch.

Psychopathy is not limited to serial killers. Psychopathy is prevalent in about 1 in 100. If 1/100 people were serial killers, we'd have a big problem on our hands.

In reality, psychopaths blend into society very well. You likely know a few and wouldn't even suspect them unless you know what to look for. They find their way into positions that are highly competitive, where their lack of empathy serves them well. Psychopaths are overrepresented as surgeons, lawyers, bankers, law enforcement (you'll find a lot of psychopaths behind bars, but you'll also find a lot keeping them there), politicians, and yes CEOs.

> There's something about that career that does that to people.

(Something about the people that the career enables and only sometimes makes visible)

Indeed, this is a great example of a fallacy like survivors bias, where you only hear about a tiny percentage of cases because of x, which makes for a poor representation of the entire population.

The vast majority of our interaction with CEO behaviour is via true crime stories and exceptional rare cases. I see Bill Gates and Steve Jobs as rare cases of an executives playing a huge role in their companies but I could list off countless billion dollar company CEOs people have ever heard of, let alone 99%+ companies are small/medium sized, many companies aren’t even public, countless play a much smaller and far more boring role, etc etc.

I imagine we do hear about more such cases because there simply are more of them compared to other groups we hear about.

There's been some notable studies by now that concluded the amount of psychopaths is way higher among CEO's than the average population and that it isn't that exceptionally rare among this subgroup as you said.

There's a mind bending TED Talk on this which really opened my mind on this topic: https://youtu.be/xYemnKEKx0c

I highly recommend checking it out. In my opinion it is one of the greatest talks of all time and it gave me goosebumps. But if you are really busy, a summary is that everyone has varying degrees of psychopathy that make a gray area in between extreme labels.

The Dropout podcast sheds a lot of light on the entire situation.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com