His review of John Carreyrou’s book is titled, “I couldn’t put down this thriller with a tragic ending.”
I get that the book’s a thriller, and I get that Gates couldn’t put it down, but why does he say it has a tragic ending? I’d say it has a funny beginning and a tragic middle, but the ending is happy, no? The bad guys don’t get punished, exactly, but at least they get found out and they stop making things worse.
If the founders of Theranos actually had some great ideas but then failed, then I could see the “tragic ending” thing. But given that it was 100% B.S. from the start, it seems that the only tragedy was that they wasted so much of people’s money for so many years, also I guess the tragedy of our economic/social/legal system that empowers liars to stay afloat for so long.
I’m bothered that Gates saw the story as having a tragic ending, because that makes me think that he has some sympathy for the perps. To me, it’s like reading about some people who stole some cars, drove drunk and got into crash after crash, and finally had their licenses and vehicles taken away. The tragedy is that it took so long to stop them. I feel no sadness that they finally got caught.
It reminds me of when that submarine movie Das Boot came out and I saw it with my father. It was an intense two hours, and when we walked out I asked my dad what he thought. He said, “At least it had a happy ending.” And he meant it! All the time I’d been watching this movie, rooting for the submarine crew, and my dad was sitting there wanting the rivets to pop and wanting the sub to get sunk.
I was read Bad Blood the way my dad watched Das Boot: I was waiting to see the bad guys go down, and the main frustration was (a) how long it took, and (b) that some of the villains escaped scot-free. But Gates . . . he was rooting for the guys in the sub. He wanted Theranos to succeed! Scary.
I would give Gates the benefit of the doubt of being an enthousiast on the interaction between technology and humankind as a whole. Theranos-style testing could have been a massive win for medicine, for the American healthcare disenfranchised, etc. That makes the failure of Teranos a tragedy for humankind? I think his last three paragraphs are a lot broader than focussing on whose tragic ending it was.
Oxford: ‘tragic’ – adjective – “causing or characterized by extreme distress or sorrow”
So it was tragic for the people who got false positives, tragic for the employees and even tragic for Holmes herself. Some of those tragedies we feel bad about, at least one we don’t.
Willem –
> I would give Gates the benefit of the doubt…
I agree. I think Andrew’s trading is pretty uncharitable.
> but I hope that people don’t use it as an excuse to write off the next young woman with a big idea. I also don’t want Bad Blood to scare people away from next-gen diagnostics. Theranos went to extraordinary lengths to get around quality standards. The industry is highly regulated, and new diagnostics undergo rigorous testing.
Perhaps a “tragic ending” in the sense it might lead people to write off the next young woman with a big idea or scare peope off from next-gen diagnostics, Tragic in the sense of leading people to think the industry isn’t highly-regulated and tragic that Holmes’ surrender to ambition will create obstacles for further progress.
As to whether Gates’ cheer-leading for the tech sector might be overly optimistic, or more self-serving than humanity-serving…seems worthy of debate.
Joshua,
I just copied literally that exact quote with the intention of pasting it in a comment before I saw you beat me to it.
I feel the same way watching anything where the main characters are bad guys. Which is a shame because I’m missing out on a lot of shows that other people say are good. But sitting in front of The Godfather, The Sopranos or Mr Robot, all I can think of is ‘I don’t care what happens to these people’.
Reading the review as a whole, I don’t get any sense that Gates wanted Holmes/Theranos to get away with a scam. The tragedy is that there was no improvement to any medical tech, just a giant waste. If they’d actually gotten it to work in the end he might consider that a happy ending even if they engaged in “fake it ’till you make it” before then (although he also recommends having tech experts on boards to prevent that sort of thing).
To be fair, it is a fairly classical form tragedy in that the protagonist is brought low by their own hubris. I think you are over-interpreting his comment as approval for the protagonist. Are you still upset about Clippy?
Only when a hero is brought down by hubris. It wouldn’t be tragic to see Oedipus exposed as someone who intentionally killed his father to sleep with his mother. It would be gross.
Perhaps Mr. Gates meant that the story of Elizabeth Holmes reminded him of a Greek tragedy where the protagonist’s flaws lead to the inevitable downfall while the audience experiences catharsis. Surely, we can understand how Gates would empathize with someone who started out thinking that they were about to make a huge and transformative advance in technology. Gates’ personal journey turned out well, but he might know that this was not guaranteed, and sometimes in life good intentions at the beginning lead via small deceptions into a huge falsehood. You don’t have to like the protagonist of a tragedy, nor do you have to wish for a different outcome. The unfolding of a tragedy can result in the victory of justice, but observers can still have an emotional tie to the downfallen and experience catharsis.
There was absolutely a great great idea that failed and part of the tragedy is that Carreyrou’s articles and book did not emphasize the technical failure, IMO. Microfluidics are a tremendous technology for home and remote diagnostics. The idea was to combine many microfluidic tests on a single disposable strip/card that could provide a full suite of lab tests from finger prick drops of blood rather than from vials of blood drawn by a technician. The failure was that they could not combine more than a handful of microfluidic tests in close proximity without interactions occurring that ruined the results.
Rad:
I bet lots of people have been working on and continue to work on this idea, just without the grift part. I agree that it would be interesting to hear about these technical challenges.
Willem, Wonks, Thom, Oncodoc:
I get your point that Gates wasn’t “rooting for” the Theranos people, exactly. But I don’t buy the “Greek tragedy” framing either. With Theranos, there was never any there there. The only skills the Theranos people had were the ability to con rich people, the willingness to brazenly lie, and the means and opportunity to intimidate whistleblowers. When I hear the phrase “Greek tragedy,” I think of the hero as having some heroic qualities, and the tragedy is that these are overcome by the hero’s flaws. I don’t see the heroic tragedies.
For example, Onodoc writes, “we can understand how Gates would empathize with someone who started out thinking that they were about to make a huge and transformative advance in technology.” But why would the Theranos people think that? They never were doing any technological advances at all.
Also, if you want to say it’s a tragic story, I’ll agree with that. It was tragic that zillions of dollars were wasted, that people wasted years of their careers on this, that sleazy lawyers got to do their sleazy lawyer thing, that whistleblowers were harassed, not to mention that legitimate blood testers were crowded out. But the ending of the story . . . that wasn’t the tragic part.
I continue to think that for Gates to say the ending was tragic implies that he saw promise in the beginning. And I don’t see any promise at all in the beginning: some bright young con artists found some promising marks??
I’m totally with your take on this, Andrew. If someone speaks lies in order to con money out of people, why does it matter if the lie they choose is about some “huge and transformative advance in technology”? It’s all made up with no truth in it.
Kind of shocking to me that otherwise thoughtful people seem to be giving credit to a bunch of con men because they based their con on medical technology lies instead of get-rich-quick lies or some other traditional con job.
+1
Andrew –
1) Gates thinks it’s tragic that someone who was driven by greed, ambition, and a willingness to defraud people and exploit employees, met her comeuppance.
2) Gates thinks it’s tragic that a bright young woman with an intriguing idea, that if it panned out would would significantly improve the delivery of healthcare to millions, turned out to be a fraud who harmed many people.
I think (2) is more likely.
This all doesn’t strike me as “tragic” but I don’t think it’s unreasonable if someone does.
Joshua:
Sure, but I don’t buy #2. Lots of people have had the idea of reducing the amount of blood needed for a blood sample. I guess these people mostly work at companies that build testing kits, and I suppose there are people in government and academia working on it too. So I don’t see the Theranos team as having any interesting ideas.
I’d almost like to say that the tragedy is that these talented people didn’t use their talents for good instead of evil—but it seems that their main talents were ability to persuade and a lack of scruple. These are talents that are typically used in bad ways! I mean, sure, there are exceptions: these skills could be used by the cops to design sting operations and catch crooks (it takes a thief to catch a thief, right?), but when a group of people whose talents are the ability and willingness to talk rich people out of their money, then it hardly seems like a tragedy when those people go on that career path. They were living their best life!
To get back to Gates, I’m not quite saying that he thinks it was a tragedy that the Theranos team got caught. I just think that when he was reading the book, he kind of naturally placed himself in the position of Holmes, a brash young tech entrepreneur. Just like when I was watching Das Boot, it was natural for me to put myself in the position of those 18-year-olds fighting a war they probably didn’t want to be in.
Just to pivot slightly, I’m also annoyed about how everyone fixates on Holmes. Balwani and Boies were just as bad, no? They were a team! Holmes played an important role, but it was a whole operation. She couldn’t’ve done it alone, any more than Redford could’ve done it without Newman in that movie.
Andrew –
OK. I”m closer to getting on your wavelength.
> Just to pivot slightly, I’m also annoyed about how everyone fixates on Holmes.
When I watched the doc (haven’t read the book), I was thoroughly disgusted with the whole “fake it till you make it” culture. And while the doc is just one view on the whole thing I don’t doubt in the least that there’s a pervasive culture among certain tech entrepreneurs that embraces that approach to attaining success and making obscene amounts of money. So yeah, for me while the Holmes aspect was compelling in a sensationalist kind of way, this whole issue is about something much bigger.
For me, the whole episode connects to how conflicted I feel walking around the streets of San Francisco and seeing kids in their twenties with ridiculous amounts of money for doing what, exactly?, walking next to large homeless encampments or riding through the Mission on the Google busses.
It’s not at all implausible that Gates has much more sympathy for that culture than I do. In fact, I guess it makes good sense to view his comments within the context of him being an influential figure in creating that culture.
Yep, Holmes needed to exist in a bonkers world to get as far as she did. Unfortunately, we live in that world.
Reminds me a bit of Belle Gibson in Australia. She was diagnosed with cancer, recovered, and attributed it to diet and exercise. She then makes money by telling other people how to improve their health with diet and excercie and gets a big publishing deal with Penguin. Her recipe app is available pre-installed on iPads.
Then it turns out the cancer bit is a lie and so the companies apolgise for being tricked and everyone moves on. But I’m not sure the actions of the publisher and Apple are particularly defensible even in a world where she was telling the truth.
Sheece. Just Googled that and it’s some story. And yah, looks like a much bigger issue than just Gibson. What a world.
“but it seems that their main talents were ability to persuade…These are talents that are typically used in bad ways! ”
This is amazing. I can’t believe you wrote it. You’re trying to persuade everyone of your ideas about statistics every single day. You ignore the fact that while Holmes was flogging her scam, Musk was persuading people to invest in Tesla and SpaceX, two companies that are driving a positive future for humanity. Every system has bad actors, as you point out so frequently regarding academia.
” just think that when he was reading the book, he kind of naturally placed himself in the position of Holmes, a brash young tech entrepreneur.”
Good for him! The modern system of entrepreneurial markets is the most effective system for human benefit ever devised. Between China and India alone, the embrace of this system has lifted literally billions of people out of destitute poverty in only a few decades. Gates recognizes that these kinds of scams give people an excuse to attack the system and thus threaten the well being of humanity.
Anon:
What I wrote was, “their main talents were ability to persuade and a lack of scruple.” Persuasion can be fine. Persuasion + lack of scruple is not so great. I don’t like that in academia either!
There’s lots of people who think that Tesla/SpaceX are closer to be being Theranos than to be being not-Theranos. Personally, I find the arguments that Tesla’s self-driving stuff is full-on Theranos-class problematic convincing*, and my personal opinion is that putting humans in space is stupid. Opinions vary, of course, but given that said opinions exist, I think you need a better example of an “anti-Theranos”.
*: It’s also been said that Tesla makes more money from selling environmental tax credits than from selling cars. Dunno about the “more” bit, but they sell lots of tax credits.
https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a32346670/other-automakers-paid-tesla-record-354-million/
Agreed. Venality, cupidity and stupidity are not tragic flaws, as I was taught the concept.
I’m not sure that the building blocks to Microsoft’s success, its BASIC interpreter and its DOS, represented technological advances (over Dartmouth BASIC and CP/M); though, as far as I know, Gates never sold them as such?
Microsoft has always been good at taking technology from elsewhere and making a business out of it.
Mendel:
By “technological advances,” I just mean something that worked at all and was in some way better than what came before. “Better” can just be how things are packaged and sold. Sure, Microsoft was notorious for its vaporware and for selling ideas that were developed elsewhere, but they did build some software that worked, too.
Yes, and in that sense, Microsoft is not a tragedy.
It might have become one, had they not managed to produce the software that Bill Gates sold.
The Theranos story can be read as an attempt to sell a technological advance and make it happen, where that advance is based on using existing technology in a novel way, and it didn’t pan out.
When Bill Gates sold DOS to IBM, Microsoft didn’t have any experience creating operating systems. They bought an OS that was similar to what they needed and hired its programmer to adapt it to IBM’s PC. That gamble could have gone tragically wrong and left Microsoft in breach of contract, appearing like a fraud selling expertise they did not have.
You sell something that you don’t yet have, hoping you can make it work by the deadline, is the modus operandi of many software businesses. It’s tragic when they can’t make it work.
(And I hope it’s not how the medical devices business works.)
DOS wasn’t in any way, shape, or form an improvement over existing operating systems for small computers at the time.
What MicroSoft got right was their contract with IBM in which they retained rights to the software.
Sure, Gates licensed BASIC and DOS. But MS built a true modern (preemptive multitasking, memory protected) fully international OS from scratch* ten full years before Apple got around to porting a Unix clone. (MS certainly does have a long and continuing track record of acquiring technology. But they do do some original work, too. Really. They do.)
Still, I can’t really fault anyone for having a deep, visceral hatred for companies started by dropouts from that small liberal arts school up the creek.
*: Yes, it was from scratch. IBM’s OS/2 predated NT, and NT included a compatibility module for text-based OS/2 apps. But the NT OS itself and the windowing system were done by MS.
Windows NT inherited a fair bit of its architecture from the VAX/VMS minicomputer operating system. My memory of my prior life in that field has grown hazy but if I’m not mistaken they basically hired one of the VAX/VMS architects away from Digital Equipment and had him recreate the VAX/VMS architecture “from scratch” for the Intel platform.
Loosely speaking, Win-NT was to VAX/VMS as R is to S. Except not Free, of course.
This is an old argument. I don’t buy it, since NT was a new implementation for a different platform, written in a different language, supported a new/different API (that already existed in a 16-bit version), and presumed Unicode. Sure, Dave Cutler did both, and took his ideas with him from DEC, and you can list up a bunch of similarities. But it still remains a new OS for a new/different platform in a different language. (The different platform bit is, I submit, big. VAX/VMS (when Cutler was at DEC) was a very different mindset from the peecee when Cutler was at MS.)
By 1990, there were a lot of modern OSes out there, a big Comp. Sci. literature on OSes, OS courses were standard in Comp. Sci education, and the stuff was all well known. Multics, ITS, SAIL were all ancient history by that time, and they all did much of that stuff.
Here’s a page that makes your argument strongly, and it doesn’t fly; for exactly that reason. It completely ignores the point that what OSes do was well defined by that point. Many of the “similarities” it lists are stuff that predates even the VAX. The big new word at the time was “threads” and (as the article points out) NT did that first. Anyway, it wasn’t a VAX vs. NT game, it was VAX and NT being two players in an intellectual space in which everyone learned from everyone else.
https://www.itprotoday.com/compute-engines/windows-nt-and-vms-rest-story
Apple’s eventual UNIX based OS (MacOS X) was more or less a rebranding of NeXT (founded 1985 and bought by Apple in 1997), and Apple had A/UX launched in 1988 and discontinued in 1995.
Microsoft did their thing, but basically everyone was doing a “better OS” project, including Linus Torvalds obviously (first release of Linux kernel 1991). Microsoft’s main asset was that they had an enormous cash cow to fund it, and an enormous proprietary market corner to shove the developers around to supporting it.
BeOS was super exciting and by far one of the best pieces of technology from that era, but couldn’t compete with either the established markets (Windows / Mac) or the Free/free (as in Speech/beer) of Red Hat and Debian etc.
VMS isn’t a portable operating system. Too much of it is written in machine-specific assembly. I recall there being an open-source project to rewrite VMS entirely in high-level (or at least C) languages, but I don’t think it went anywhere.
Another possible explanation: Gates, even if he knows the more “technical” meaning of the word “tragedy” was just using it in a colloquial sense to mean “sad” or “bad”. Certainly, there’s much that is both sad and bad about the Theranos story and how it ended for the investors and potential patients.
That said, I can also appreciate being frustrated when people who know better still resort to sloppy colloquial use of terms. For example, I’m beginning to see more and more otherwise smart people use the “word” “irregardless”, even in published papers. That’s not a word! Just say “regardless” or “irrespective”!
Gec:
Sure, but that gets to my original point, which was that the book’s ending was happy, not sad. The bad guys got caught! OK, the sleazy lawyer got off the hook, and that was sad. But even on a colloquial level, to say the book had a sad (or tragic) ending seems off to me. The ending was the happiest part of the book.
Fair enough, I guess calling the *ending* “tragic” is pretty dang sloppy. I guess if you think the “end” is “it was all a fraud”, that is at least sad/bad if not particularly tragic. But if you think of the “end” as “they got caught”, that’s certainly a good thing.
Though, strictly speaking, we haven’t gotten to the “end” yet anyway. Holmes is on trial as we speak! Maybe there’s tragedy yet to come…
Actually, “irregardless” is a word. Just look in your favorite dictionary.
I wanted the ending where I could walk into Walgreens, pay $10, prick my finger, and get tested for 100 things, without going thru the huge hassle of regular medical providers. I did get that, and maybe that is what disappointed Gates also.
Depends on what you believe. I, for one, don’t believe that just because some authority capitulates to common misusage of words / phrases by defining them as “non-standard” or similar makes them proper in any sense of the term. It’s kind of like sarcastic inversions…you know what people dub to be sarcastic inversions (in at least many cases anyways)? Phrases that people mess up long enough that we need a term for it so we don’t all look like fools! Which, of course, we are.
This begs the question of whether irregardless of your feelings, most people could care less, its like, totally cool, the new hotness, lit even ;-)
The point is generally, primarily to convey meaning. At some point the rules become secondary.
You know what someone means by irregardless, of course. The meaning is conveyed. What is the harm?
There’s a logical reason why those types of “errors” repeat over time. It’s not like there’s some over-ruling logic that means standard usage is somehow optimal. Particular definitions of “standard” are often essentially arbitrary, an artifact of history not some manifestation of an objective version of “correct.” Why do people have such a hard time using “data” as plural? Often the rules are clumsy or unwieldy or trip the tongue.
Sometimes as a result languages change over time based on how they get used. No matter how much old men yell at cloud, it won’t change that.
I’ve always considered “irregardless” to be a perfectly cromulent word. I’ve used it to embiggen many conversations.
Silly question: Why do we care what Bill Gates has to say about a book re: Theranos, or any book for that matter?
I recall (looked up and confirmed) Gates – just like Zuckerberg – dropped out Harvard, having mostly taken computer science courses while a stutent (not that there’s anything wring with it!) I sincerely doubt Gates (or Zuck) seriously studied Greek tragedies. Let’s leave aside Gates’ association with Jeffrey Epstein.
That a person is laser-focused, is a phenomenal programmer and a legendary businessman does not imply that he appreciates history or has the intellectual capacity to work through ethical dilemmas.
Nevertheless, I can appreciate following Gates’ blog-musings in order to expose his non-business vacuity.
I learned about Greek Tragedy in high school. My high school was a public school in a rust belt city. Gates came from a well off family and went to an elite prep school whose current tuition is $38,000. I bet Sophocles was mentioned.
I don’t know Gates. I don’t know his soul. I do see a lot of picking apart of one word someone says in order to calumnize them on the internet. There are lots of reasons be critical of Gates. His choice of one word is not one of those reasons.
In any event, to me, one true tragic figure in the Theranos affair is George P Shultz, who had a stellar reputation as an academic, business leader, secretary of state under Reagan, etc…. He bought hook, line and sinker into the Theranos bull, joined the board, and shilled for Holmes. Even after his own grandson, who was employed at Theranos, became one of the whistleblowers, he refused to believe the whole thing was a sham.
Oncodoc:
I don’t know about “calumnize”—I went to a public high school in a comfortable suburb and they never taught me this word—but my comment is not about “one word.” My comment was about a blog post he wrote. It seems fair enough to write a blog post reacting to someone else’s blog post! If Gates had replaced the word “tragic” with “sad,” I’d’ve had the same reactions.
Usage of “calumnize” was a favorite of William Safire, if memory serves right – author of the “On Language” column in the NY Times magazine, among other things.
I guess I remember Carreyrou’s book slightly differently than you did. (And I read it almost two years ago, so I may be more than a little hazy on details.) There is loads of evidence that she and Sunny covered up embarrassing failures, often fraudulently. But the notion that it was a scam from the get-go is not part of my recollection. Indeed, a more modest version was almost surely workable, although it is unclear that it could commercially replace the conventional method because it ran so few tests. And I think the difference in Gates’ take and your is whether it *started* as a scam or *became* a scam. If the former, you’re obviously correct. if the latter, though, the tragedy is in the the redirection of marketing skills to scamming. (And that she was a ermarkable marketer is undeniable.) So that’s the Greek tragedy here. She had amazing marketing skills and an idea that might have worked… and when it didn’t, the marketing skills were all she had left, and she used them for ill.
Oedipus ignored his fate and ended up with his eyes plucked out for killing his father and sleeping with his mother. Those are bad things to do! But his comeuppance doesn’t mean Oedipus Rex has a happy ending. (Loved the Das Boot story, though.)
I have Bad Blood on Kindle so I pulled it up to review. In the spirit of the blog I will gently suggest that you may be remembering a binary that isn’t in the narrative. I would say there *wasn’t* evidence that something less than what Theranos promised *wouldn’t* have worked — not evidence that Option 2 *could* have worked. The owners kept everyone focused on instant tests of small blood samples under Option 1 so no one tested the alternatives.
I accept that. I don’t think it fundamentally ruins my point that there is little positive evidence that it was conceived as a scam from the beginning. And of course unless one has access to Elizabeth Holmes state of mind in the relevant period (and who would want that, except as a bad Black Mirror episode) we will never know.
The prosecutors are betting otherwise.
Are they? All they have to prove it that *became* fraudulent, not that it *started* fraudulently.
Oh, I see your point. From the very “beginning”? Perhaps not. Who knows.
Gates is right, scams like this are tragic. In addition to the points he made, they cast a dark shadow on legitimate companies and legitimate investing activity, which is highly beneficial to society. No one and I’m sure least of all Bill Gates is upset that Holmes got busted – they’re upset she did this in the first place.
I think it’s worth noting that Theranos had already set up “clinics” inside several Walgreens before any evidence that its method even worked as represented by the company. Nor did the method have any regulatory approval. A similar arrangement either had been arranged (or was going to be) with Safeway. Testing was actually done on patients in several of the Walgreens Arizona retail locations. This certainly should be viewed as criminal behavior and certainly not as a “tragic” situation for the company. Let’s not forget the consequences to the unsuspecting patients that were actually “tested.”
One word: “supplements”.
I think Gates might be the one on the left in this picture: https://twitter.com/doratki/status/1435621048473456643?s=20
I agree that Andrew’s interpretation that Gates identified with the protagonist is the most likely. A) People do this all the time and it’s natural, so it’s not a priori unlikely. B) Gates called the ending of the *book* tragic, not the ending of the Theranos saga. It’s clear fairly early in the book that Theranos is a fraud and the ending (the part Gates called tragic) really comprises the personal downfalls of the fraudsters.
Z:
I have to admit I was rooting for the John Cusack character in the Grifters and was sad at the ending when . . . ok, no spoilers here! And I was rooting for the guys in the sub in Das Boot. So, yeah, I understand. For some reason when reading Bad Blood I was rooting for the cops, not the robbers. I don’t have a great theory as to when we root for one side and when we root for the other.
Yeah, I don’t have a comprehensive theory either (though I’m sure people have written about this), and I also did not identify with Holmes here. That Bad Blood was written by one of the cops probably plays a role. Also, I think that some people in the tech industry find Holmes’s persona embodying an extremely driven and ambitious business leader to actually be charming in the way that we find grifters (like Leo in Wolf of Wall Street, who I didn’t root for but was stressed out when the walls closed in) charming. Also, part of her appeal to lots of people seems to be that she gave popular TED talks, which for you, well…
I think he just thinks it’s sad that the technology didn’t pan out. I saw a similar sentiment from John Carmack https://twitter.com/id_aa_carmack/status/1089921927894962181?s=21.
Some people just don’t seem to realize that Theranos was a scam. It’s like saying it’s too bad that Madoff’s fund ended up being a ponzi because it’s returns were really great otherwise. No, the great returns were exactly *because* it was a ponzi. Part of how the scammer works is by making the victim focus on the upside like this, so that they forget the fact that there no “there there” in the first place, as you say.
Aaron:
Yeah, it’s kind of an insult to all the people who do legit research in the area.
The real crazy thing that Gates said was this: “Health technology requires a different approach than other kinds of technology, because human lives are on the line.”
So, with other technologies, it is okay to fake it until you make it. Of course, he thinks that. That’s how Silicon Valley works. Promise investors some incredible tech and keep the funding flowing, buy out upstart competitors until you get enough market share to force everyone to buy your tech. They way Silicon Valley has shaped our economy has had terrible repercussions, but no one died, so I guess it is okay.
Look up stories of people evacuating Hurricane Ida. Google and Apple maps directed them all to the same road (I-10) where there was no gas and they drove 1 mph in 90 °F heat. Meanwhile there was plenty of gas and they could travel 60 mph by going a few miles off the highway.
It is only a matter of time before there is an edge case where listening to these algorithms kills a bunch of people.
I think Madoff got decent returns before he started scamming people (which is how he was then able to attract so many customers). But he couldn’t scale that up, and certainly couldn’t guarantee consistency over the long term.
I don’t think he ever outperformed the market. He just started during a bull market.
I don’t even get the whole point of it even if it had worked. Who cares if you have to give 4 normal sized vials of blood instead of 1 small vial…it takes like 1 minute extra.
Andrew, you have this weird bias where when a rich person or an economist says something, you interpret it in the least charitable way possible, way less charitably then if a regular person said it. You then pyschoanyalyze them at length under this (flawed) assumption.
Today, the charitable (and correct) interpretation is that Gates thinks the end is tragic because it turned out to be based on bullshit. From the perspective of a person living through it, Theranos was exciting, then suspicious, then an outright fraud. He is ordering the sequence based on what we knew at the time, not what we know now.
The other day, the charitable (and correct) interpretation of the 100% vaccine guy is that he was talking about threats to the vaccinated (the target of his tweet), not threats to the unvaccinated. Obviously he doesn’t need to make a case against compulsory vaccination to the unvaccinated! And under this interpretation, what he said is obviously correct (but trivial and nearly tautological).
So stop psychoanalyzing people under an assumption that they meant something that they obviously did not (under a reasonable and charitable interpretation).
Stella:
“Psychoanalyze.” You keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means. Don’t forget, I’m a Freud expert!
I’m just responding to what people write! Gates wrote that Bad Blood had a sad ending. To me, the book had a sad beginning and middle but a happy ending. The “based on bullshit” thing of Theranos was there from the beginning, and to me the only sad part was that the Theranos team (including their sleazy lawyers) were able to keep the B.S. afloat for so long. You write that, from the perspective of a person living through it, Theranos was exciting at first. Maybe for some people, but not for people who were informed. I discuss that in my linked review of Carreyrou’s book: “What’s amazing here is how long it took for all this to happen. Theranos faked a test in 2006, causing one of its chief executives to leave—but it wasn’t until nearly ten years later that this all caught up to them.”
Anyway, if you and Gates feel like the book had a tragic ending, that’s fine. Different people can have different reactions. I had sympathy for the submarine crew in Das Boot; that doesn’t make me a Nazi sympathizer! Or, hmmm, I guess it does, but only for that one movie.
Regarding Robert Murphy (“the 100% vaccine guy”), again, I’m just responding to what he wrote. He’s the one who said “anybody else,” not me. I think if somebody wanted to psychoanalyze the guy, you’d ask him about his relationship to his mother or something like that, they wouldn’t respond to his literal words. What was interesting to me in that post was not the fact that this dude on the internet said something stupid, but rather the dynamics of the exchange on twitter, that people pointed out his mistakes to him but he didn’t really engage. In contrast, in this blog comments discussion, we might disagree with each other but we’re engaging with each other’s arguments.
Doesn’t everybody root for the murderous scammer Tom Ripley?
Late to the discussion, I know, but I think it is useful to look beyond the principals. A lot of people worked at and with Theranos, and many of them got burned in some way — including customers. Some of these people really had no way of knowing better.
I am fine with calling the Madoff scam a “tragedy” so long as we focus on the various innocent people who lost their money.
Madoff and Holmes are not tragic heroes, agreed. But if we step back I think we can fairly describe the situations they created as tragic.
I read the tragedy as referring to patients who were misled by inaccurate results. One of the lawsuits is from a woman whose doctor adjusted her medications after a Theranos test showed that she wasn’t pregnant. Turns out she was. I think these false-negative events were covered in the book. Isn’t that a plausible interpretation of Gates’s comment?
That is a charitable reading. Gates says “tragic end” not “tragic results”. Plus he says, “Health technology requires a different approach than other kinds of technology, because human lives are on the line.” This implies that he thinks that Holmes’ approach would have been just fine for other technologies. I’m not sure Gates deserves the charitable reading here. It does sound like he thinks it’s a shame that Theranos didn’t succeed which is weird because Theranos was a total scam.
Gates: “Mr. Kurtz has done more harm than good to the Company. He did not see the time was not ripe for vigorous action. Cautiously, cautiously—that’s my principle. We must be cautious yet. The district is closed to us for a time. Deplorable!”
Gelman: “You should have heard him say, “My ivory.” Oh, yes, I heard him. “My Intended, my ivory, my station, my river, my—” everything belonged to him. It made me hold my breath in expectation of hearing the wilderness burst into a prodigious peal of laughter that would shake the fixed stars in their places. Everything belonged to him—but that was a trifle. The thing was to know what he belonged to, how many powers of darkness claimed him for their own.”