The New York Times’ Elizabeth Holmes Profile Is Causing Drama in the Newsroom | Hacker News Reader

The New York Times’ Elizabeth Holmes Profile Is Causing Drama in the Newsroom

vanityfair.com

16 pointsjacooper5 comments

It was a super weird piece. I find it bizarre that defrauding investors is constantly mentioned as the crime we’re supposed to care about. While I understand that was the conviction, the real crime that people should be angry about is how far this got without anyone intervening.

This was a device that never worked, seemingly could never work, being used to test people and deliver medical findings that would impact their entire lives. At no point in the process did any investor or anyone in a leadership position say “let’s get this independently tested”. A person had invented a titanic shift in medical testing after two semesters of education on the topic.

She committed fraud and it’s weird to have a piece where we’re asked to feel bad for her right before she goes to jail. But the part I think that is missed is she never should have been able to get as far as she did. It’s a demonstration of a problem in tech that has plagued us for years which is we buy the hype and don’t fact check.

> "the part I think that is missed is she never should have been able to get as far as she did."

fake it 'til you make it, if they stopped people early then they would never get those companies like uber or airbnb or whatever disruptive companies probably even ones that ycombinator likes

Cause where would be we without them

the media has closed the loop they are writing about each other

About twenty years ago, The Washington Post had "media critic". One could occasionally read in his column what the New York Times had said about an article in The Washington Post. I'm not sure whether the recursion was ever carried farther than than. But it has been going on for a long time.

And if you count entertainment, it's worse. The space given to the show Succession this past week in the metropolitan papers probably would hold a small-town newspaper's weekday edition.

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