It is a fine line. From practical experience: there is a class of inventors who have genuinely convinced themselves that their broken tech will work if only they get the bugs worked out, and this is always just over the horizon. They probably see themselves as doing you a favor by lying to you because you will reap the benefits after all, once the pay-day arrives.
I've seen lots of misery because of this, both with the inventors themselves, their families and employees. In one case a suicide.
It's very sad and one of the downsides of being in the business I'm in because I have come to recognize the signs of this particular ailment fairly quickly and it is a huge balancing act in both convincing my client not to invest while at the same time not pulling the rug out from under a quite possibly already unstable person.
Fraud can be intentional, or it can be the consequence of someone genuinely believing their own misguided version of reality, usually powered by some form of 'wouldn't it be great if' and associated lines of thinking.
Even so, Theranos - to me at least - seems to have crossed over into outright fraud from very early on in their lifetime. There were significant questions about the tech early on and without a good answer to those the project should have never moved as far as it did without some serious caveats about what they believed to be possible and total transparency about what had actually been achieved.
For a nice example of how gullible people are check out the Ilium thread on the homepage right now, it's a great example of how wishful thinking can cause investors to part with their money:
It depends on who the onlooker is, though. I'm always fascinated with flying car stories because I understand them: I can look at the Ilium story and know immediately things about it, for instance that it will not glide with weight distribution and wings as shown.
But if I looked at Theranos, I wouldn't have any idea what I'm looking at. We all have our own brain structures that set up our respective abilities to call BS: part of this is understanding the psychology, as you (jacquesm) do. This gives the background to not take claims at face value.
The other part of BS-calling is that structure of experience telling us things like 'center of mass for the object will be here' or 'adding 20 more people to this dev team will have this effect on their ability to coordinate development'. These are heuristics that might be more difficult to explain than to be directed by, but in practice they'll tend to function like iron laws: if an exception is ever found it's a huge deal. The trick is getting people to accept the iron law without the structure of experience to support it.
I've seen lots of misery because of this, both with the inventors themselves, their families and employees. In one case a suicide.
It's very sad and one of the downsides of being in the business I'm in because I have come to recognize the signs of this particular ailment fairly quickly and it is a huge balancing act in both convincing my client not to invest while at the same time not pulling the rug out from under a quite possibly already unstable person.
Fraud can be intentional, or it can be the consequence of someone genuinely believing their own misguided version of reality, usually powered by some form of 'wouldn't it be great if' and associated lines of thinking.
Even so, Theranos - to me at least - seems to have crossed over into outright fraud from very early on in their lifetime. There were significant questions about the tech early on and without a good answer to those the project should have never moved as far as it did without some serious caveats about what they believed to be possible and total transparency about what had actually been achieved.
For a nice example of how gullible people are check out the Ilium thread on the homepage right now, it's a great example of how wishful thinking can cause investors to part with their money:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14167870
uBeam is another, so far they produce roughly two ecstatic press releases per year but there is no product in sight.