>For all those entrepreneurs are trying to "fake it until you make it" be aware that the SEC considers your strategy both fraudulent and they feel they have the jurisdiction to prosecute you.
Holmes was, in many ways, embodying that HN mentality, acting on the basis:
- that an entire industry has been doing it wrong
- that it can be fixed by a low-bureaucracy, Angel-funded startup
- that once you have enough success you can just rewrite the laws that were slowing you down
- that no one knows what they're doing anyway, major projects are 100% guesswork, and you should just "fake it till you make it"
- that any skill is just a matter of 10,000 hours of practice
- that you can outsmart an industry before even passing or placing out of sophomore level classes
- that any self-doubt must be Impostor Syndrome, and so it's not worth your time to even check if that doubt has a factual basis
Yes, I've posted this twice before but I'm citing it and admitting to it, and it got heavily upvoted both times (thanks to Algolia for making comments so easily searchable btw):
Please don't copy and paste content into Hacker News, regardless of how good you think your past comments were. The threads here are for conversation, not reciting from the record.
There is no "HN mentality", just a large statistical cloud that people see what what they want in. Most of that cloud has been the opposite of what you're suggesting. Commenters here have been not just skeptical but cynical and outraged by Theranos for years, to the point that it became tedious. It looks to me like you're engaging in a bit of revisionism for the purpose of posturing above the community. That is a popular sport but a distasteful one.
>Please don't copy and paste content into Hacker News, regardless of how good you think your past comments were. The threads here are for conversation, not reciting from the record.
Would you mind giving some guidance on what I should have done in the situation? I was doing the best I could against the constraints. The situation was that someone made point X, to which I have point Y as a reply. Both X and Y, in some form, have been posted numerous times.
Should I:
1) Not reply?
2) Reply, but make sure to reword Y each time?
3) Link to a previous version of Y?
4) Copy-paste a previous Y but not admit to it so it's not clear I did anything wrong?
I chose 5) copy-paste the best previous version of Y and be transparent that I"m doing so, and why I thought the circumstances merited it. You think that's the wrong choice. 4) and 3) don't seem much better based on what you've said.
I'm guessing you want 2), but IMO that's even worse because it disconnects the discussion from previous ones and forces us to retread the same ground more clumsily.
>There is no "HN mentality", just a large statistical cloud that people see what what they want in. Most of that cloud has been the opposite of what you're suggesting. Commenters here have been not just skeptical but cynical and outraged by Theranos for years,
That's kind of my point. The typical comment is outraged at Theranos. But the typical comment is also endorsing the very kind of behavior that avoids and ignores those very same warning signs. "Well sure, I consistently said over the years to 'never listen to the haters'. But I didn't mean when they were right, of course!"
"HN [most often] tells everyone that no one knows what they're doing either" is not revisionism. Revisionism would be claiming outrage that someone would press ahead when they didn't know what they were doing.
Writing a new comment would be fine! and linking to an old one would also be fine. I agree that what you did is better than #4 (and am grateful for that) but it's still not kosher. Think of how good conversation works. People can make the same points in different contexts without literally repeating past statements. Something about creating each statement in the moment—even though there are only so many ideas to go around—serves conversational flow.
I don't agree with you at all about what the typical HN commenter is endorsing; it seems to me you're adding a lot of interpretation to a lot of disparate information and constructing something of a straw man.
By the way, if anyone is interested, only a small minority (10% if that) of HN users are in Silicon Valley. And plenty of those identify more against it than with it.
People here gave me talking points based on what you are saying years ago when I expressed skepticism about Theranos. I worked in the diagnostic industry and know that 1. Many tests (that are in the comprehensive panel that is routinely ordered) cannot be done with a finger stick, they need venous blood. 2. This isn't like a social network you can start out of a dorm room, it is a 50+ billion dollar industry that is highly regulated and needs real science.
What if some 20 year old business major drop out said they are going to make chipsets double the speed of the old and lumbering tech companies like Intel? Everyone here would say no way and never think that would be disrupted so easily. So yes it is a case of people with HN mentality thinking that well taking blood via a venous draw and giving me my results a day later is cumbersome and stupid, and rife for disruption. Someone thinking outside the box despite me or that person knowing next to nothing about clinical lab tech can easily make it better than Roche, Quest, Lab Corp, Abbot etc. because they can move quicker, and disregard the old paradigms. With no consideration for the physical impossibility with known scientific knowledge!
So yeah please by all means look at how smug a lot of us were on earlier Theranos postings about the Steve Jobs of med tech. It is a valuable lesson to learn. Not everything is inconvenient for no reason, and not everything can be disrupted without some serious demonstrable tech.
I don't doubt that the comments you're referring to existed, but the HN community has been overwhelmingly skeptical about Theranos for years, to the point of cliché.
Yes you are right later on people had more skepticism especially after the FDA piled on. The argument I am making is the initial claims they had about testing a single drop of blood were pretty outrageous to anyone that even knows a little bit about how this stuff works. Look at some of the downvoted comments they said exactly this! There are things that can be said well we didn't know they were hiding this, and there are things that people should have listened to someone that has even elementary knowledge of how this stuff works. Look how many people dismissed the impossibility of this stuff with remarks on her connections and the might of SV....
I skimmed those threads and read them pretty differently. Even many of the pro-Theranos comments were careful to say things like "How can I know to trust their numbers?" and "the enormous change her company is saying is possible" (emphasis added). Those seem to me to have aged pretty well, and then there are the many skeptical ones, including from people like you who have direct experience in that field.
You can have all of those listed beliefs and still be honest about the actual state of your company, progress towards goals, etc. Doing so will probably beat those beliefs out of you, and you can come to an honest understanding of your limits.
Arrogant, presumptive behavior is annoying -- but I think it's important to keep a bright line between that and dishonesty, because one self corrects and the other doesn't. And, a pinch of presumption is necessary for exploration.
Then I'm confused: how can you a) hastily dismiss all self-doubt as Impostor Syndrome and b) believe "no one knows what they're doing either" while remaining able to accurately, honestly self-assess your skill, quality of work, and prospects for success?
Edit: If you have a good answer, then I would suggest we start posting that as the advice ("here's how you know if you're good enough") rather than immediately tell everyone they have they have Impostor Syndrome (as seems to be common practice).
To me, "zero self-doubt" and "nobody knows what they're doing" are predictive hypotheses that can be falsified by future experience, when you get beat. I guess if you're talking about a psychopathic condition where your self-doubt bit is hard-wired to 0, then yeah you're not going to be able to assess your progress.
Those folks exist, but I meet plenty of basically honest people who are arrogant before experience and humbled after. Far more than the raging narcissists who will do what Holmes is accused of, though those get attention.
As a recent dad, I think a lot about sending my guys into a world with 10B people in it, moving incredibly fast publicizing accomplishments (real and otherwise) in ways that make it seem like every niche is filled up. It's clear to me that irreverence for status quo and honesty with themselves are going to be equally important in them finding a niche for themselves.
What's the original referent of your impostor syndrome comment? As I see the term used, it generally means "I'm an impostor among this crowd of other people who do actually know what they're doing," not "I am unable to do this thing that nobody has ever done."
That is, if you believe that you can't learn kernel hacking, that's (potentially) impostor syndrome. Lots of people have in fact learned kernel hacking, you can learn it too. Your self-doubt about it is based on (falsely) thinking that you are individually incapable of doing a thing plenty of others have done. But if you believe you can't build a perpetual motion machine, that's just thermodynamics. Nobody has built a perpetual motion machine, and doubt about your ability to do so (which isn't really self-doubt) will be quickly confirmed by a survey of the literature.
>That is, if you believe that you can't learn kernel hacking, that's (potentially) impostor syndrome. Lots of people have in fact learned kernel hacking, you can learn it too.
No, the fact that others have learned it is not (strong) evidence that you can learn it too; you would need to know how similar you are to those people, and whether those dimensions are relevant.
IOW, exactly the diagnostic criteria I suggest we search for rather than immediately skip to "so what, other people thought that too".
>Your self-doubt about it is based on (falsely) thinking that you are individually incapable of doing a thing plenty of others have done.
That's generally not what is happening in practice. People don't de novo say "I can't ever do this". Rather, they attempt (or otherwise survey) it, find difficulties ("I can't consistently understand how the stack is doing that"), see others that have no similar difficulties ("what? It would have taken me a day to work through that and it comes naturally to you"), and on that basis conclude that they're unlikely to succeed as well.
"You have Impostor Syndrome" doesn't make any headway on the core problem.
> Then I'm confused: how can you a) hastily dismiss all self-doubt as Impostor Syndrome and b) believe "no one knows what they're doing either" while remaining able to accurately, honestly self-assess your skill, quality of work, and prospects for success?
IDK, I feel like that's a sweet spot most people hit at the end of a PhD. Enough confidence in yourself that you can expend lots of resources trying hard things.
Enough humility to recognize that you'll probably fail at most of those things.
And most importantly, the project management, risk management, and communication skills to hedge your big bets.
Enough experience working with top-tier people to know that all of these things are learnable skills that other successful folks are using (including fields medalists and including high-school dropouts).
Maybe there's a difference between the "informed arrogance" of a researcher working on an open problem in their field (or a serial entrepreneur trying to disrupt a huge industry) and the "uninformed arrogance" of a charlatan, hack, or (in this case) fraudster?
Theranos was more about using politically connected power-brokers to set up deals with kickbacks (their board/investors were government and military elites), less about "disrupting the industry with new ideas"
- that it can be fixed by a low-bureaucracy, Angel-funded startup
- that any skill is just a matter of 10,000 hours of practice
Some of these things are correct sometimes. Many industries have been doing things wrong for very long, and massively productive changes disrupted the industry. Who knew that boiling water would change the coal industry forever? Some guy came up with the pump idea and changed everything. The mine owner that invested in him made a lot of money. The industry changed. Things like that happen.
The problem lies in when you try to blindly apply these assumptions without anything to back it up. This is true of anything in life.
I get that we sometimes have gut feelings that we can't explain. We have to be honest with ourselves though. "Is it just that I don't want to face reality, or is there truly something that I can't put into words drawing me in this direction?"
what actual evidence do we have of her intelligence apart from starting theranos and doing the original research that led to starting theranos? honest question
I don't know, but suggesting that Marissa Mayer or Elizabeth Holmes are not among the most intelligent people ever roaming this planet quickly labels you as an insufferable misogynist here.
Is that the HN mentality? It might lean more that way now, I suppose, but I've always felt it was more in the "scratch your own itch" territory and less in the "complete industry outsider disrupts XYZ industry with revolutionary ideas" area
Maybe "that YC/startup news mentality" would be a better qualifier. The whole "better to beg for forgiveness than ask for permission" mentality. You can find some of that on HN but I hope we're a little more diverse than that.
I don't know if there's a single "HN mentality". This site is an ongoing uneasy truce between the entrepreneurs (who have more of the attitude the GP is complaining about) and the developers (who tend to be more cynical about these things and, if they care about startups at all instead of working a 9-to-5, are more likely to have the "scratch your own itch" mentality). There's a lot of back-and-forth between which viewpoint is ascendant in the comments, usually depending on how badly-behaved SV companies have been recently.
This feels more like an over-correction to the prevailing cultural wisdom that everyone needs a post-secondary education. Contrary thesis to the prevailing wisdom is where a lot of startup fortunes have been made.
Hopefully we're about to land in a cultural place where getting an education is seen as getting an education, rather than either a panacea for individual success or a complete waste of time/money for the docile masses.
I agree with every word, but at the same time I think a lot of people here on HN like to use hating on education as a humblebrag for how smart they are.
Holmes was, in many ways, embodying that HN mentality, acting on the basis:
- that an entire industry has been doing it wrong
- that it can be fixed by a low-bureaucracy, Angel-funded startup
- that once you have enough success you can just rewrite the laws that were slowing you down
- that no one knows what they're doing anyway, major projects are 100% guesswork, and you should just "fake it till you make it"
- that any skill is just a matter of 10,000 hours of practice
- that you can outsmart an industry before even passing or placing out of sophomore level classes
- that any self-doubt must be Impostor Syndrome, and so it's not worth your time to even check if that doubt has a factual basis
Yes, I've posted this twice before but I'm citing it and admitting to it, and it got heavily upvoted both times (thanks to Algolia for making comments so easily searchable btw):
https://qht.co/item?id=12071172