[ddod]

It's odd how vilified Holmes has become, and how gleeful people--even in these comments--are at her lengthy prison sentence for a nonviolent crime.

She faked it until she (didn't) make it--a strategy praised in other startup narratives. Most of that faking involved secretly running blood tests on traditional test equipment instead of her in-development devices.

I believe there were a handful of tests done on their development devices that returned questionable results for actual patients, which I'm hoping is where all the angry people are focused. But to that point, how accurate and responsible are traditional testing facilities? I personally have had my bloodwork mixed up with someone else's, causing quite a lot of anxiety and extra work from me to sort out.

There are countless instances of labs forging results[0][1], making mistakes[2], and issues with equipment[3] (citations are just the most easily at hand).

Some of the stories cited resulted in criminal convictions, like 3 years for someone who faked thousands of drug-test results leading to false convictions. Compared to what Holmes did, it's hard to see how 11 years (and our society's complete fascination and vilification of her) is appropriate.

[0] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/epic-drug-lab-scandal-r...

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/dec/13/scath...

[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-63795285

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_of_Heilbronn

[olliej]

Um, they hounded at least one person to suicide, and produced erroneous results for people with life threatening conditions. I'm not sure how you get to "non violent" from there, but you do you.

[ddod]

"Nonviolent" does have a pretty straightforward definition that I think you can differentiate from your examples if you were inclined to judge impartially.

When you're predisposed to an opinion, it's easy to come up with justifications. Often those result in misreading/misinterpreting information and then spreading that misinformation for more folks to use as justification.

I don't want to draft a speculative narrative about someone else's life (or its sad end) but I will say that your first allegation sounds like a misinterpretation of the events, at least from reading the Wikipedia article about who you're referring to.

[adventured]

A decade is very reasonable for intentionally, knowingly committing hundreds of millions of dollars worth of fraud and attempting to sustain it across many years of time.

She's little more than a highly skilled, pathological con-artist that worked over a very affluent system (Silicon Valley primarily).

It's not odd how vilified she has become. She appears to be severely deranged, has shown zero remorse for the crimes she committed, and has tried every trick in the bag to try to get out of taking responsibility legally for what she did.

> She faked it until she (didn't) make it--a strategy praised in other startup narratives.

That is not what she did. Holmes committed outright financial fraud by lying to - intentionally misleading - the investors and employees in just about the most epic way you could. She attempted to cover it up repeatedly, keeping the extent of their failures even from the board members whenever possible.

And last but not least, it's the highly regulated healthcare field (everyone here grasps the difference), not a little text search engine (eg Excite was a famous example of faking it until you make it during the dotcom bubble, they bid on a Netscape search deal, for promotion of their service, before they had the money to pay for it, on the basis that they could raise the money if they had the deal; however it's not usually a crime to commit to buy something before you have the money to do so).

[gizajob]

It's one thing "faking it until you make it" where consumer trinkets and timewasterish websites are concerned, it's a whole other matter where people's health and lives are at risk. That isn't an arena for faking it.

[ddod]

The first things I think of with "fake it til you make it" are Tesla FSD[0] and Reddit[1]. To this day, if you visit Reddit while logged out it makes the claim that it's a place for "empathy"[2].

Reddit is a hotbed of harassment, targeted abuse, political extremism, celebration of violence, and encouragement of health disorders. Depending on Tesla's self driving technology has gotten people killed. Let me know if you want any citations for those claims but I think you probably know examples of what I'm referring to in each case.

I would posit that people's health and lives are more at risk in both examples, but nobody is being imprisoned for it. Both companies are well aware of the risks but choose to profit off it rather than take responsibility.

[0] https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2022-12-08/tesla-laws...

[1] https://www.inc.com/karl-and-bill/best-advice-fake-it-until-...

[2] https://i.imgur.com/y1Sicxl.png

[paulryanrogers]

Give it time. Tesla may be heading to court over FSD and social media is getting a whipping in congressional hearings.

[gizajob]

You can at least buy a Tesla and browse Reddit though…