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Comment by pessimizer | Hacker News Reader

These people keep projecting their own attraction to certain people onto those people. She's not magical, you just love being in the presence of rich, pretty, young white ladies. Your desire is not one of her qualities (or her fault, really.) The most astounding thing about Theranos was how little work it took to pull the fraud, and how chintzy it was around the edges. If you had been born where she was, looked like she looked, and had powerful older men constantly blowing smoke up your ass and declaring you a wunderkind, it would be hard to resist scamming them.

The army of fawning reporters (and ex-generals and other officials) are the real problem. You're not giving us a peek behind Holmes's curtain, you were Holmes's curtain.

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Great point, but:

> it would be hard to resist scamming them

I don't think she even scammed them. She really believes she can do all the things. Her fraud was not a scam, it was just covering failures and fake it till you make it without discernment or introspection (doing it in a field where you really need to stop faking it sooner)

> just covering failures and fake it till you make it without discernment or introspection (doing it in a field where you really need to stop faking it sooner)

In a word: scamming.

Even her voice is fake.

Guess we'll have to keep sending people to prison until y'all get that your 'fake it till you make it' is in fact fraud, which most people understand as a kind of scam.

It's not fraud if you tell your investors (and when you have customers, your customers) how you're faking it.

"fake it till you make it" generally means "your product is egregiously incomplete for X reason(s)" and in many cases, the investors know this and willing to take the risk. It's on the investors to do due diligence and assess whether or not the risk is up to their level of appetite.

I do believe that holmes was doing this for the much of her run with Theranos. That is normal startup behavior, and not really unethical, and certainly not illegal, though it can be spectacularly misguided, as we saw. At the point where she started hiding what she was doing, it became "fake it till you make it" that is ALSO fraud.

So no. For chrissakes, Don't generally send people who "fake it till they make it" to prison.

Nah, I think you take it too far. In that world everybody will need to take a too cynical view and vet everything and everybody. That's dog eat dog. Ultimately Holmes cheated faking test results. That's not faking it it. It is fake. Put another way: how many times N can you BS people until you conclude for some N>0 that the person is BS? That N isn't high.

BSing things is not faking things, though. for example: you can "bullshit around" and claim that you're working on getting your falcon 9 second stage reusable, and it's totally okay if you don't deliver.

Telling the truth is not faking it.

She knowingly made false and fraudulent claims about what she was doing, how she was doing it. She knowingly gave false medical test results to people causing significant harm (not something that she has been penalized for). She destroyed the lives of anyone who reported negatively about her or theranos.

You can claim all you like that she thought she could do what she claimed that she was doing.

But that doesn't matter.

She knew for a fact that they were not doing what she was claiming, and she knowingly lied about that.

She is a fraudster. She is a criminal. That amount people bend over to support her - and other similar "founders" - is bizarre.

It does not matter if they thought what they was saying was possible, if they know for a fact that that is not what they are doing.

You're misreading my tone.

Im literally not disputing that she was a fraudster. And I'm not defending Holmes. All scams are frauds, not all frauds are scams. Being a scamster is a form of psychopathy that evinces a knowing willingness to hurt people in the name of self interest. Arguably my claim is scarier. Fraudsters like Holmes are scary because they don't think they are doing anything wrong. The fake it till you make it narrative even gives the perception of a long leash to commit pecadillos on the long road to success, in the context of the "make the world better" narrative of SV. There are more people out there like her, and it's harder to restrain them because they think they are doing something good and to boot they appear (maybe even are, if slightly) less psychopathic at a first glance.

Correct. When things are really stuck on stupid, there's usually two or three dynamics in play:

- lack of openness or fear of blowback from push back on the norms that squelches honesty.

- people in charge who are deluded

- people who use the norms to advance their own agenda usually without ever being explicit about it and purposely turn a blind eye to nonsense

Trump is an example. Nixon and the republican senate (ultimately) is a counter example.

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