[deadite]

The gist of it is that there was a flippant, reactionary tone to anyone criticizing Theranos, that attempted to brush off valid criticism with "you don't like her because she's a woman" or "you want to see the company fail because it's run by a woman". No, actually, I just want to see some data, regardless of who is in charge. Save the "women run the show in SV" rhetoric and flashy cover page photography for Vogue. This is strictly a business analysis. If we can't have a civil discussion about these things without being accused of being sexist, or envious, or whatever other pejorative people use to redirect criticism or probing questions, then we might as well not have a discussion at all because we all know how these things go. The comments write themselves.

Having said that, it's tiresome to have the same pile-on garbage of negative comments every time a PG article is posted. The last 4-5 of his articles invite so much backlash and scathing kneejerk rhetoric, I wonder why these people use HN forums at all.

[dang]

> there was a flippant, reactionary tone to anyone criticizing Theranos

That's inaccurate. No doubt some responses were like that; "anyone" is an extreme exaggeration.

The internet hivemind (which is all of us) leaps from a few data points to anyone, always, everytime, etc., surprisingly seamlessly. Truth be told, one can even substitute "single" for "few" in the previous sentence without too much loss of fidelity—but perhaps it's cynical to insist on it.

This is largely just how human memory works, but I pay close attention to it because it deeply affects this community's perception of itself, and that is a big problem because such false feelings of generality skew sharply negative.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

p.s. I completely agree that we need to have substantive discussion about these things.

[lvs]

Holmes was a domain expert, wasn't she? I guess con artists also happen to be domain experts sometimes. Oh no, is it possible your precious founder is confusing chance with wisdom or luck with skill?

[dang]

I don't know if she was or not, nor if that idea would particularly count as crazy. It's a little silly to misread pg as saying that every such idea must be true. Also, why be so mean? It only makes things worse.

[lvs]

Are you sure that a community idolizing the utterances of a winning gambler isn't what makes everything worse?

[dang]

There are many things making things worse, and one does not rule out another, so that question is a bit of a distraction. I'd like to know what you think you gain by being so mean. Surely that's not the kind of person you want to be?

The idea that this community "idolizes" PG is trivially disproven by glancing through any recent thread on his writings, including this one.

[lvs]

There is some irony in invoking ad hominem arguments while claiming my critique is a distraction. I'm simply acting as an arbiter of which intellectual sausage makes the world worse, just as you are. We have different opinions about which wurst is worse. If your view of reality is that these people don't idolize a gambler masquerading as a philosopher, then I'd absolutely love to agree with you if I could.