<story><title>U.S. Files Criminal Charges Against Theranos’s Elizabeth Holmes, Ramesh Balwani</title><url>https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-files-criminal-charges-against-theranoss-elizabeth-holmes-ramesh-balwani-1529096005</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>api</author><text>&amp;gt; The short answer is her Jobs-like &amp;quot;reality distortion field&amp;quot; -- she was exceedingly good at convincing ...&lt;p&gt;Considering this and the lack of substance behind her claims, I would personally bet money that she is a clinical psychopath.&lt;p&gt;The most disturbing thing I have ever observed about human beings is our tendency to follow psychopaths. Psychopaths seem to have this gravity around them and people just fall into line. I&amp;#x27;ve observed some spectacular examples. A psychopath can say the most questionable or even absurd things and people will just believe, whereas people will be skeptical of even very sane things that come out of the mouths of non-psychopaths. It&amp;#x27;s as if clinical psychopaths have some special instinctive ability to generate body language, vocal cues, and linguistic patterns that manipulate others very effectively.&lt;p&gt;I am not claiming that everyone with a &amp;quot;reality distortion field&amp;quot; must be a psychopath, but I&amp;#x27;ve definitely observed a positive correlation.</text></item><item><author>atombender</author><text>This interview with John Carreyrou [1], the Wall Street Journal journalist who is largely responsible for exposing Theranos, goes into a lot of detail. It&amp;#x27;s long, so if you want a shorter answer, jump to the question &amp;quot;What technology did Theranos actually develop?&amp;quot;:&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;Basically there were three iterations of the technology. The first one used microfluidics, which are basically the repurposing of the micro-fabrication techniques that the computer chip industry pioneered to move tiny volumes of liquid. Theranos tried to work on that for several years before Holmes lost patience in late fall 2007 and abandoned it. At that point she pivoted to what was essentially a converted glue-dispensing robot. One of the engineers ordered a glue-dispensing robot from a company called Fisnar in New Jersey, studied its components and rebuilt a smaller version of it. It was a robotic arm on a gantry with three degrees of motion and a pipette stuck to its end, and it replicated what the scientist does at the bench. That ended up being called the Edison and it could do only one class of test, known as immunoassays. It was also error-prone. The third iteration of the technology was the miniLab, which Holmes wanted to be able to do more than just immunoassays. The miniLab didn’t invent any new techniques to test blood with. It miniaturized existing laboratory instruments and packed them into one box. By the time Theranos went live with its tests, the miniLab was a malfunctioning prototype.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;The interview also explains how Holmes was able to attract so many influential people on her board. The short answer is her Jobs-like &amp;quot;reality distortion field&amp;quot; -- she was exceedingly good at convincing non-scientists that their science worked.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;m.nautil.us&amp;#x2F;issue&amp;#x2F;60&amp;#x2F;searches&amp;#x2F;does-theranos-mark-the-peak-of-the-silicon-valley-bubble&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;m.nautil.us&amp;#x2F;issue&amp;#x2F;60&amp;#x2F;searches&amp;#x2F;does-theranos-mark-the-...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item><item><author>maxxxxx</author><text>Does anybody know if Theranos got started with at least an idea how to accomplish what they wanted to do? From what I have heard in interviews they started with the thought &amp;quot;Doing xxx would be super useful&amp;quot; but didn&amp;#x27;t have an approach for accomplishing this but instead took in money and tried to figure it out. It&amp;#x27;s like me saying &amp;quot;An antimatter drive would revolutionize space exploration&amp;quot; and starting to collect money but without even the faintest idea how to produce one.&lt;p&gt;Does anyone know? Did Holmes have any insight that caused her and the investors to believe she could do the blood tests?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>wpietri</author><text>One of the patterns that interests me a lot is supernormal stimulus. An organism is evolved to deal with a stimulus in a certain range, and something comes along that is so far outside it that things break.&lt;p&gt;The classic example is Niko Tinbergen, who created models of fish that were rounder and redder than the real fish, who would ignore other real fish and focus on the models. The human ability to refine things produces a lot of good examples. Like how refined sugar influences us so much that it ends up in most processed foods. Or how refining the coca leaf produces addicts.&lt;p&gt;My theory with sociopaths is that giving no fucks what others think allows them to be unnaturally confident. Since we often evaluate others by how confident they are, we are easily taken in by people with supernormal confidence. That gives us the reality distortion field (as social primates, our main reality is social) and &amp;quot;drinking the kool-aid&amp;quot;. Which is a metaphor Jobs used for how he wanted people to react to the Mac, but the metaphor is about a cult whose charismatic leaders led them to mass suicide. [1]&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Jonestown#Deaths_in_Jonestown&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Jonestown#Deaths_in_Jonestown&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>U.S. Files Criminal Charges Against Theranos’s Elizabeth Holmes, Ramesh Balwani</title><url>https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-files-criminal-charges-against-theranoss-elizabeth-holmes-ramesh-balwani-1529096005</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>api</author><text>&amp;gt; The short answer is her Jobs-like &amp;quot;reality distortion field&amp;quot; -- she was exceedingly good at convincing ...&lt;p&gt;Considering this and the lack of substance behind her claims, I would personally bet money that she is a clinical psychopath.&lt;p&gt;The most disturbing thing I have ever observed about human beings is our tendency to follow psychopaths. Psychopaths seem to have this gravity around them and people just fall into line. I&amp;#x27;ve observed some spectacular examples. A psychopath can say the most questionable or even absurd things and people will just believe, whereas people will be skeptical of even very sane things that come out of the mouths of non-psychopaths. It&amp;#x27;s as if clinical psychopaths have some special instinctive ability to generate body language, vocal cues, and linguistic patterns that manipulate others very effectively.&lt;p&gt;I am not claiming that everyone with a &amp;quot;reality distortion field&amp;quot; must be a psychopath, but I&amp;#x27;ve definitely observed a positive correlation.</text></item><item><author>atombender</author><text>This interview with John Carreyrou [1], the Wall Street Journal journalist who is largely responsible for exposing Theranos, goes into a lot of detail. It&amp;#x27;s long, so if you want a shorter answer, jump to the question &amp;quot;What technology did Theranos actually develop?&amp;quot;:&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;Basically there were three iterations of the technology. The first one used microfluidics, which are basically the repurposing of the micro-fabrication techniques that the computer chip industry pioneered to move tiny volumes of liquid. Theranos tried to work on that for several years before Holmes lost patience in late fall 2007 and abandoned it. At that point she pivoted to what was essentially a converted glue-dispensing robot. One of the engineers ordered a glue-dispensing robot from a company called Fisnar in New Jersey, studied its components and rebuilt a smaller version of it. It was a robotic arm on a gantry with three degrees of motion and a pipette stuck to its end, and it replicated what the scientist does at the bench. That ended up being called the Edison and it could do only one class of test, known as immunoassays. It was also error-prone. The third iteration of the technology was the miniLab, which Holmes wanted to be able to do more than just immunoassays. The miniLab didn’t invent any new techniques to test blood with. It miniaturized existing laboratory instruments and packed them into one box. By the time Theranos went live with its tests, the miniLab was a malfunctioning prototype.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;The interview also explains how Holmes was able to attract so many influential people on her board. The short answer is her Jobs-like &amp;quot;reality distortion field&amp;quot; -- she was exceedingly good at convincing non-scientists that their science worked.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;m.nautil.us&amp;#x2F;issue&amp;#x2F;60&amp;#x2F;searches&amp;#x2F;does-theranos-mark-the-peak-of-the-silicon-valley-bubble&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;m.nautil.us&amp;#x2F;issue&amp;#x2F;60&amp;#x2F;searches&amp;#x2F;does-theranos-mark-the-...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item><item><author>maxxxxx</author><text>Does anybody know if Theranos got started with at least an idea how to accomplish what they wanted to do? From what I have heard in interviews they started with the thought &amp;quot;Doing xxx would be super useful&amp;quot; but didn&amp;#x27;t have an approach for accomplishing this but instead took in money and tried to figure it out. It&amp;#x27;s like me saying &amp;quot;An antimatter drive would revolutionize space exploration&amp;quot; and starting to collect money but without even the faintest idea how to produce one.&lt;p&gt;Does anyone know? Did Holmes have any insight that caused her and the investors to believe she could do the blood tests?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>elgenie</author><text>A lot of communication is non-verbal. A person evaluating a statement in context and expecting to find some physical and culturally-instilled signs of self-doubt in their interlocutor may unconsciously be strongly pushed to conclude that the person is telling the truth when not finding those signs, even if the reason that those aspects of communication are absent is because the person is incapable of producing them.</text></comment>