This same journal was also one of her early boosters.
We already have a framework that preserves independence of the media, the First Amendment. All of the NDAs and Boies style intimidation and legal abuse and harrasment of the whistleblowers and journalists was only stopped by the First Amendment.
We already have a framework that punishes journalists - it's people like Peter Thiel suing them out of existence because he doesn't like what they say. It's big funders buying a newspaper and destroying it like the Denver Post. It's the government putting sources on trial and in prison like happened with the NSA stories. Journalists are murdered constantly for reporting stories. And the industry itself is dying because of changing business models. They dont need a framework to punish them any more.
None of your examples are journalists being penalized for lack of due diligence or for being misleading. I think your instinct to protect journalists given their importance and the threats they face is a healthy and important one, and I share it, but I don’t think they’re above reproach. Ensuring the independence and safety of journalists is of paramount importance; ensuring journalists are appropriately incentivized to report accurate stories with healthy skepticism is of secondary importance after that (since most will innately desire that anyway), but it is still also important.
Rolling Stone after the lacrosse rape case is one example. But more importantly, I think the point above is that journalism is in a vulnerable position where the carrot is more appropriate than the stick. Laws are crude tools for the most part, with lots of potential for collateral damage. It's like chemotherapy: you just hope the treatment kills the good cells slower than the bad.
Punishing bad journalism will have a chilling effect on all journalism, bad or good. It'll increase the costs of doing business by increasing liability insurance premiums. If the industry were thriving, maybe that would be acceptable overhead. But it's not thriving. It's teetering on the edge of collapse. So maybe we should find ways to identify and reward good journalism. Cultivate the flowers in the garden so they overshadow the weeds, rather than dousing the whole shebang in herbicide and hoping you kill what you intend to.
Great-grandparent didn't suggest that laws are the only possible option to penalize misleading journalism, you're jumping to conclusions. Elsewhere in this thread, I even suggest:
> [Disincentivizing misleading journalism] doesn’t necessarily require an oppressive Orwellian governmental body to dictate truth and punish journalists who veer from the party line. It could be as simple as, after the fact now that we know how fraudulent it was, naming prominent journalists and outlets and pointing out red flags that they should have but failed to highlight, and other similar ways they should have expressed a healthy skepticism but didn’t.
Yes Journalists need high standards of professional integrity and the legal air cover to maintain that.
But really the ultimate defence is us - to reject the mountains of crap out there and seek out and subscribe to the worthwhile news sources.
As ever, it's down to us.
I don't see how that obviates the need for journalists to be properly incentivized to report accurately and with healthy skepticism.
The economist comes to mind. Any others HN recommends?
I also listen to my local station (WUNC) and if you’re in a decently populated area of the U.S., your local NPR affiliate is also likely high quality (plus it’s easy to listen online if you’re not into terrestrial radio.)
[1]: https://npr.org
I'd characterize it as, "journalists" using their platform to go after specific people they don't like. Thiel helping one of their victims who couldn't afford to mount a case without running the risk of ruining themselves if they lost. Seems to me like a really noble thing to do.
And yet Breitbart is still up. So this idea that it's just about enforcing the law rings a bit hollow.
No. The company was outed by people long before the wsj. The wsjalong with the rest of the media was the one that built theranos up because they wanted to push the feminism agenda.
The wsj stepped in and took the credit after the exposure/pressure on social media was going to break the story wide open.
It's similar to the nytimes taking credit and getting the pulitzer prize for breaking the weinstein story which they kept quiet for more than a decade. But once social media was exposing the story, the nytimes decided to release the story they kept quiet for so long.
It's like an arsonist who helped set a house on fire dousing the house with a glass of water after the firefighters put out the fire and pretending that they saved the house.
And lets not forget that if you criticized theranos or holmes, most of the media/journalists ( including those working for the wsj ) would attack you for being a sexist or a bigot.
This is not the most amazing thing, at all. I'm not surprised that "the media" with their limited access, didn't get the full story.
Rather, I'm more surprised about the informed investors, who invested a lot of money, and had access or at least the ability to push for it. How did they invest so much money in something with seemingly so little backing?
> These incidents ought to remind us the exponentially important role media plays in our lives and how important it is that we come up with a framework to penalize misleading journalism, while at the same time, preserving the independence of media.
I don't disagree with the sentiment about the media, but I think this is a singularly bad example - who cares what the public thought about Theranos - the public didn't lose money here.
I beg to differ. Straight from the article:
> Some patients were rushed to a hospital on the basis of erroneous readings, only to be sent home when their blood was properly analyzed by the hospital. Even worse, Theranos was using brutal intimidation tactics against its own employees to stop the truth from coming out.
I don't know about your location but American citizens pay quite a premium for hospital care. Imagine the potential for crippling debt all because of a test result which should have been known to produce false positives.
That's definitely the public losing money here.
When Stanford Professor John Ioannidis refuses to join your board because he refuses to give your product credibility that is a HUGE red flag.
This is a long way of saying that we may have created too many disincentives for large companies to IPO.
If you invest 100M you might as well throw another 10k at a prediction market if you're confident in yours and there are naysayers who would bet against you.
Rupert Murdoch put 125 million dollars into Theranos, so the press itself was invested.
This investment was only public after investors sued: https://www.smh.com.au/business/markets/rupert-murdoch-among...
Several people who have worked at Murdoch papers have told me that he isn’t above interceding in editorial matters, but in this case, despite his personal interest, he didn’t. A source who has known Murdoch for years explained it, “He’s a newsman — and a good story is a good story no matter what or who the story is about.”
[1] http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/05/john-carreyrous...
As Carreyrou reports, Theranos definitely tried to pull strings with Murdoch, and apparently got nowhere with it. The WSJ timed the story to hit right before Holmes was set to appear at a major WSJ business conference.
Murdoch is a very skilled propagandist. He knew that trying to suppress this story would have backfired on him. Especially because the machines don’t work and because Walgreens would have soon learned the truth.
Nothing hurts a propagandist more than being really caught in an obvious lie. To protect his ability to slant the WSJ, Murdoch couldn’t have gotten caught suppressing this story. And he would have gotten caught if he tried.
Once the fraud was exposed and the company began winding down, spending would quickly slow down and that might have put investors in a better position to recover something, versus loosing everything.
On the other hand, it could simply be shrewd businessmanship. It's not like it was the reporting that made Theranos unviable. The tech would never work, it's just a question of time before the walls come crashing down. It's probably illegal for Murdoch to sit on this information while trying to sell his investment on to someone else (at the very least, inviting some nasty lawsuits).
Murdoch might very well have thought "Oh well, the investment is gone, I'll be damned if it isn't my newspaper to be the one to break this juicy news".
Looks to me that Murdoch acted exactly according to his long term goals.
Those guys were journos, not proprietors, but I'm pretty sure that if you could prove that a proprietor put heavy manners on the journos to do that, they would certainly be up for a criminal conspiracy charge, at least in Britain. Of course, that is typically a pretty big 'if'.
I seriously doubt he allowed Carreyrou to continue for the sake of good journalism.
By letting reporters in his hire just do their jobs, Murdoch probably gets privileged access to a great deal of secrets and speculations. Carreyrou's reporting could very well have persuaded Murdoch not to make further investments in Theranos, thereby saving him billions.
As the rationalists say, if you can explain anything, you can explain nothing.
I'm not saying he did it for good reasons. I'm saying it's plain that nobody here knows why he did it, and lack of knowledge is lack of knowledge, not license to just fill in the blanks with whatever you like. (Our brains are very good at that, and the careful person must be in a constant fight against that tendency.)
But jerf, I already know he's a bad person.
You are justified in using past history to do a certain amount of broad concluding (nothing as specific as the 5+ hypotheses given), yes, but bear in mind you are not justified in "A: Murdoch is bad B: Here's a thing he did C: I bet he did B for a bad reason because A therefore D: Murdoch is even worse than I thought". You are "spending" confidence when you do this, not increasing it. (Another very common cognitive error. Not sure I've seen this on any fallacy lists. Probably needs to be, and given a name.)
I was an election integrity activist. We were ridiculed, harassed, and in some cases jailed.
Of course, we were (mostly) right. But there's never a nod or h/t to acknowledge the pain and sacrifice.
And don't be fooled into thinking the sniffing salts are working. There's always another con, fraud, bubble. (In my case, all postal balloting, which is worse than the touchscreens.)
I think whistleblowers should maybe just bet on the short. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Big_Short https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Soros#1992_pound_short
Got any more info on this? I'm in a state where all voting is done through postal ballots.
Because there's no second chance, admins have to adjudicate for voter intent. So they modify the votes in the database.
To protect the database, as part of the backup, the votes are tallied both at end and beginning of shift. That means a running vote count. Law is that votes can only be tabulated when the polls close. So admin's have the fiction of "summary reports" vs "tabulation".
Yes, admins peek at early results.
Another new threat to integrity is signature verification. But that's a whole topic onto itself.
Happily...
The biggest mitigation would be to switch from brittle FPTP to robust approval voting and proportional representation (as appropriate).
This is FUD, to dust off an old chestnut, at least as far as Oregon is concerned.
Check it: https://www.google.com/search?newwindow=1&q=oregon+vote+by+m...
In the 2016 election, a potential 54 cases of voter fraud. Here's the breakdown of the kind of fraud (which amounts to .002% of ballots -- one in 38,000):
"Richardson said the suspicious ballots broke down into several categories: 46 voters appeared to vote in Oregon and another state; six individuals listed as deceased voted; and two voters registered in Oregon voted twice."
You’ve attended the canvassing board meetings?
You’ve audited an election?
You vetted the certification of the hardware, software, rules, procedures used by your jurisdiction?
You’ve collaborated with the nationwide network of admins, vendors, academics, and activists on these issues?
Can you refute anything I’ve stated?
Do you even know how your ballot is processed?
Did I say anything about fraud?
FUD indeed.
FWIW, you perfectly illustrate the challenges whistleblowers endure, so thanks for that.
It's on par with "you've inspected the rain clouds, you've watched the rain fall into the Bull run watershed, you've inspected the reservoirs, the pipes, done salinity and chlorination tests on your tap water?"
Voter fraud in Oregon is virtually non-existent, and all you can do is raise the spectre of I don't even know what. It'd be silly if it weren't so insulting, what you're suggesting.
have you ever audited an election... rolling eyes
Oh. You weren't asking.
You're mocking the notion that such a thing is knowable, that there's an objective reality.
I know. Facts, data, experience, critical analysis are all so unkewl. My bad.
Would you please (re-)read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and post civilly and substantively, or not at all?
I don't want to go full Elon "the media is incentivized to penalize me in particular" Musk, but the ethical thing this reporter did was to was cancel the Theranos feature. A less scrupulous reporter might have been happy to run with it.
I mean, it's not worse than setting off a fire alarm and cancel every body's blood test.
That would require the existence of a group of people empowered decide what is the truth and what is not. Such groups have a really, really bad history. No thanks.
(The history of it is so bad that protection from such groups is enshrined in the Bill of Rights.)
Fixing that doesn’t necessarily require an oppressive Orwellian governmental body to dictate truth and punish journalists who veer from the party line. It could be as simple as, after the fact now that we know how fraudulent it was, naming prominent journalists and outlets and pointing out red flags that they should have but failed to highlight, and other similar ways they should have expressed a healthy skepticism but didn’t.
Why this obsession with penalizing people? Journalists might not know better. At some point one needs to take some responsibility in determining whether what they are consuming are actually reputable data sources or just cheap/free entertainment and hearsay, and one needs to realize that news outlets have inherent biases towards telling stories that are extraordinary or otherwise appealing.
Ultimately, shouldn't everyone be applying critical thinking and the scientific method to come to their own conclusions about the world?
I don't understand why this would excuse anything. Journalism is almost literally their about to (get to) know better about things and explaining to the rest of us.
At least, that's what it should be -- these days it seems to be mostly about generating clickbait. (Sorry if that's cynical -- I've just read Trust Me, I'm Lying.)
> Ultimately, shouldn't everyone be applying critical thinking and the scientific method to come to their own conclusions about the world?
Of course, but there's limited time to investigate everything in ultimate skeptical detail, and so we rely on others we trust.
Yes it's a bastardization of their profession, but everyone needs to eat.
Who knows if we'll ever get back to the quality of journalism in the Woodward/Bernstein era, when the large majority of middle-class Americans paid a monthly subscription to have professionally composed news delivered to their doorstep every morning.
I don't see it as an excuse, just as an observation of reality. Journalists can be misled by their sources. They may misinterpret data or make mistakes. They can have ulterior motives, or they may see the world through different glasses than you/me (e.g. conservative/liberal oriented news outlets). They may be pressured by deadlines to put out subpar quality material. There's noise amplification and echo chambers due to the role of social media. There are many reasons average journalism today might not be up to some standards.
The way I tend to think of it is: trust but verify. Some things matter directly to my personal life and it's in my personal interest to verify that I have the correct information about them. Why then, should I trust the (possibly exaggerated) interpretation from some WSJ journalist on some recent research paper rather than doing my own homework?
News about Theranos at this point, for example, is not one of those things that directly affect me or my family, and the accuracy and outrage of this story is of only mild entertainment value to me. Recognizing that, I can choose to consume news about it with the implicit understanding that I'm probably getting sensationalized editorials with no more value to me than a random hollywood movie, and not some data source that I should be investigating.
When you immediately equate all self-doubt with Impostor Syndrome -- rather than develop actionable heuristics to detect when said doubt is justified -- don't feign surprise when some people take it seriously. Maybe they were just fooled by your confidence.
("You" in the general sense, not you personally.)
Theranos, and other unicorn-scale hype, is a whole different thing. It doesn’t get this bad unless there is a seriously malevolent drive for the money, essentially saying that you deserve money just for an idea, just for being a made-up executive, regardless of all else, and you’re going to lie, cheat, intimidate, swindle, and unapologetically steamroll your way to the money no matter what.
It’s a technology narcissism problem.
Not mere overconfidence or being swept up in the hype while at least trying to genuinely build something even if it ends up not working.
BINGO! What a great term. I've never heard it called that before (which now seems hard to believe), but have definitely seen it SO many times before (specifically in massive corporate IT programs - the domain I work in as an enterprise architect). Did you coin this phrase? I'm so using this! Thank you.
I imagine young founders not wishing to be like Holmes could benefit from a rubric of sorts that helps classify this behavior. And for bad-faith founders who do want to behave like Holmes just without getting caught, talking more systematically about it would make it harder for them, limit their options.
What would be really cool is a modern version of Moral Mazes directed at startups.
There was also a thread here recently about how business culture values those who operate politically far more than it values those who are practical creators - how if you’re skilled at politics you can appear to achieve almost anything, even if you have no true useful skills.
Holmes was a kooky idiot scientifically, but a combination of huckster hubris, nrcissistic self-absorption, and political genius - greased by a comfortable upper class background - created a lucrative illusion of Cool Stuff In Progress.
She crashed and burned because there was absolutely no substance there. But if there had been some substance - not much, but just enough - she’d still be riding the PR wave and raking in the investor cash.
If someone like Holmes can become a billionaire by peddling nothing except lies and hope, what’s the real value of the software and tech industries if you take away the hype and money machines that surround them?
"Real value" is a tricky concept. What is and isn't real? Clearly societies have evolved (and are still evolving) to incorporate "dreams, future potential and hype inertia" into the equation, so anecdotally and tautologically, there's some value in that. Future considerations affect today's reality, so they're "real" in every sense of the word.
We don't know what exactly it is that captures the human imagination—a combination of history, ancestral stories, greed, a tangled mess of primal urges—but peddling improbable futures is definitely a well-established evolutionary pattern.
Dreams and ideologies are the rudder that helps civilizations steer away from local minima, overcome adversity and plod through suffering.
My point is that Holmes is a somewhat extreme example because her confrontation with reality was so head-on, so clearly falsifiable. But if you take away the "hype and money machines" en-masse, I suspect you'll end up with something that isn't human. It's all a house of cards. And it's nonsensical to discuss money, economy and value without humans, these are purely social constructs.
I think it was trying to say that if someone like Holmes (& board members) get rich this way (and it takes such effort to catch what they’re doing and bring actual consequences), then it in turn greatly devalues software labor.
Think of it this way: if people think this is a good strategy because it does work for various start-ups and even in this extreme case Holmes made over a billion dollars and it’s yet unclear what punishment, if any, it will be — why would start-ups care about actually building something, actually having engineers who produce things. This company made vast sums of money while not doing any of that.
It basically encourages a template for trying to print money with secretive refusal to explain the methods, and engineering hype. Which in turn makes being good at engineering worth far less to these people.
The more this looks like a viable option, the less valuable engineering skill is.
My point is that hype and chasing (improbable, stupid, exploitative) dreams are a spectrum, not a binary. Calls for appreciating "real value" (WTH is that? who defines?) and "removing hype" bring painful memories — it's not just a philosophical point for me, coming from the Eastern block. These feedback cycles are shorter than you think.
The objective function of what we should optimize for is unknown, but I'm sure 100% "honest engineering labour" and "good at engineering" and 0% hype would be a terrible, short-sighted, deadly idea. We need dreams and inertia to escape local minima, we need the collective goal correction.
That's the silver lining in this Holmes case too: the public debate brings about such correction. I voice the dangers of over-correction.
First, it is expensive and second which is most important, it takes time.
When a company is fundraising and investor likes a pitch they prefer to move fast in fear of missing out.
Generally, all the dead bodies are found during the first board meeting.
It is not that much different from just buying stock. No one actually has an idea if any of public companies are cooking books etc. You just wake one day and it is a huge write down.
Remember - the reason Theranos is news is exactly because this doesn't happen often, and one of the reasons this doesn't happen often is that investors are usually smarter about their investments.
This is why you mostly hear stories like "Oh, I tried [service] out once and it was actually pretty good"; it's a novelty for most and not worth paying for.
just look at post-soviet/eastern block media, we all have those (tv/radio) but nobody expects anymore true objectivity there.
Ummm, have you heard about Bitcoin? Hacker News recently removed a well-written article where Bill Gates and Warren Buffet explain, in very clear terms, why it's a bubble.
By the time I made it to the comments page, the page showed the article as flagged.
(Basically, anyone who understands distributed systems knows Bitcoin won't scale. Anyone know understands economics knows that a deflationary currency won't work.)
Look at Bitcoin for an example of where the experts are ignored.
Part of the problem, I think, is that the public loves (and wants to believe) the narrative of the lone genius who solves a problem against all the odds, and against all the people who told them they could not do it.
Links? Wasn't Holmes incredibly secretive about everything? It's not like she was promising overunity or anything, just a "radically new approach" type thing.
Holmes, while equally culpable, appears to be taking the entire fall.
I wonder what she’s getting in return - a cabinet position in a few years once the dust has settled, I’m wagering.
Social sciences are empirical sciences where knowledge of statistical controls and other tools needed to deal with the difficulty of laboratory research in the area of study are necessary as well as all those things necessary in any empirical science, so they don't have that effect.
OTOH, most journalists probably study journalism or other arts, not any kind of science, at the undergraduate level.
Were there? I'm not doubting your claim, just wondering if anyone really spoke up.
Reading about the challenges they would have had to overcome to back up their claims, there were some serious fundamental problems, and those were challenges the industry had been wrangling with when it came to that type of automated testing for ages.... I always wondered how many of their competitors were thinking:
"No way they overcame all that all at once.... straight up not possible."
Theranos' response included an all-company meeting where they chanted "Fuck you, Carreyrou"[1] (John Carreyrou, the WSJ reporter who wrote the critical articles), and developeing a video game for employees that involved shooting him[2].
Notice that second article is only a couple months old and reports that some people there still believe the problem was not Theranos' lack of ability to do what it claimed, but that the media reported Theranos couldn't do what it claimed.
This playbook of "the problem isn't that our company is in trouble, it's that the media reported truthfully on our trouble" is still being used today by other darlings of Silicon Valley and HN.
[1] https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/09/elizabeth-holmes-the...
[2] http://www.businessinsider.com/theranos-employees-made-space...
Theranos in particular as if they had what they claimed, the media could poop on them forever and once they put out the product it would have changed the medical industry regardless of the media... but nope.
I can't recall of hearing of Theranos before then though, but I'm not in the valley.
Geoff Baird plays in my regular poker game. He's probably one of the smartest people I know and has been regularly denouncing Theranos' methods for several years.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6349808
NO one refuted it.
The issue is not that smart people didn't know, it's so many people can't see the obvious.
Assuming the comment is ordered correctly it's the masses with the problem. Valid concerns were raised, no one could defend them, but the comment was left at the bottom.
HN, like the media has flaws that don't allow it to correct at even a snails pace.
But if you're smart it's not hard to see the truth, hard part is making money, it was fake from the beginning but who would have thought it'd take so many years to fail in RL. Knowing when to bet against it is the hard part.
IE. Magic Leap will fail, who knows when though.
Been saying this since the beginning and just want to go on record with this again now in case this comes up 5 years from now like Theranos did.
The media, though, never paid enough attention (or was possibly subverted by Theranos itself) to the naysayers.
These incidents ought to remind us the exponentially important role media plays in our lives and how important it is that we come up with a framework to penalize misleading journalism, while at the same time, preserving the independence of media.
Maybe that is the next social challenge for entrepreneurs in the coming decade.