[danso]

Holmes and Madoff were frauds after sufficient evidence (including the consequences of their business practices) were made public and heavily scrutinized.

That said, I agree PG's essay isn't intended to be about people like Carreyrou, or the SEC investigators into Madoff, etc – I am confused about which real-life people of consequence he's actually thinking of, because it's strange to write an essay about such an abstract strawman.

But referring back to u/rjdagost's top comment, about totally disagreeing with the footnote that begins with "There are of course some people who are genuine frauds", and that PG's reasoning is unsound because Enron, Theranos, Madoff, etc. "were ALL widely celebrated by neutral third parties before being exposed as frauds"...people like Carreyrou were not seen as "neutral third parties". Again, with respect to Carreyrou, Draper and allies accused him of chasing a Pulitzer, i.e. advancing his career.

It's only through the passage of time and accumulation of evidence that people like Carreyrou are vindicated as being "neutral" or "objective". I guess this is a long way of saying that PG's essay feels like drawn out exercise of begging the question.

[philwelch]

> That said, I agree PG's essay isn't intended to be about people like Carreyrou, or the SEC investigators into Madoff, etc – I am confused about which real-life people of consequence he's actually thinking of, because it's strange to write an essay about such an abstract strawman.

The whole point of his essay is that haters are inconsequential and can safely be ignored. If you don't think these are real people who exist, spend more time on social media and they'll inevitably appear.

I think his essay is explicitly addressed less to those of us here in the peanut gallery and more to the people who accumulate haters.

[johnwheeler]

Sure maybe Carreyou wasn’t advancing his career. I should have said that was one possibility. It would be a noble pursuit because he did the world good.