Not only wants but also something that the average person would believe. Sure experts in the field knew all those tests with a drop of blood is BS but how many laymen would know that?
Holmes is obviously exceptionally bright; it’s just too bad that she used her intelligence for such nefarious purposes. She’s like Madoff.
This is the one complaint about Elizabeth Holmes that I don’t agree with, and have never quite understood. She affects a “presentation” voice when she speaks publicly. And…so?
A lot of people do that. I’m a man, and I have a fairly deep voice, but I still often almost unconsciously drop half an octave or so when I engage in public speaking.
The difference between Elizabeth Holmes’ natural speaking voice and her affected public speaking voice is more pronounced than mine. But she’s also a woman who was competing in what is still a male-dominated industry. I’m not well-versed enough in the social science research to say with certainty that having a deeper voice makes someone seem more authoritative and trustworthy, but there’s certainly a widespread perception that there is a widespread perception of that.
I don’t think the fact that she affects a public speaking voice that differs from her natural speaking voice is “effectively lying about who she is”. It’s literally Public Speaking 101.
Perception is reality. Even if what you’re saying is 100% correct, what matters is if the jury thinks, “She fakes her voice. She’s a faker. I bet she’s faking her testimony.”
As I pointed out upthread, it’s even worse than that. Not only were they using industry standard machines to run industry standard tests, they weren’t collecting enough blood to properly perform those tests to industry standards. Theranos and Elizabeth Holmes weren’t just lying about who was performing the tests and where and how they were being performed. They were lying about the results themselves. They were garbage results from specimens that should have been rejected as insufficient, that were being reported as high-confidence results. We will likely never know how many patients had their conditions misdiagnosed, or had serious conditions that went entirely undiagnosed, or were needlessly treated for non-existent conditions, based on those garbage results.
I haven’t seen anything to demonstrate this. She reportedly was an average student in high school and didn’t distinguish herself at Stanford. She has great people skills, but I wouldn’t say “exceptionally bright.”
Yeah, all good points. Some of the testimony from the trial covered the cherry-picking of data where the techs would throw out the “outlier” data points from any tests. But with no definitions or guidelines on what constituted an outlier, it effectively meant any data that would cause a test to fail the quality checks.
Is she? I see the claim that she is really intelligent repeated frequently but with little actual evidence to support it. She is certainly charismatic, well spoken, and dedicated to promoting the technology but she didn’t seem to understand what the people knowledgable about microfluidics were telling her about the essential viability of the technology, and these are not problems that are complicated to understand. Her model for entrepreneurial success was to ape the manner and style of Steve Jobs but without understanding that what made Apple products successful wasn’t magic artifacts farted out by basement wizards on demand but previously developed technologies which Apple mostly licensed or acquired that were stitched together in a stylish way, and what made Apple successful was actually a combination of marketing that made their products seem really innovative without having to actually exaggerate their capabilities, and the powerful logistical and manufacturing supply chains that allowed them to produce such high quality products at a (somewhat) affordable price point (although always positioned toward the luxury end of the market). Jobs was pretty much the archetype of an asshole visionary, but he also hired and listened to people who offered critical feedback because he didn’t want a repeat of the Apple Newton debacle that preceded his return to the company.
Holmes assumed that if she got the promotional part right, the technology would somehow take care of it self, which is at best magical optimism and given that it involved the health and well-being of end users, dangerously obtuse. A truly intelligent person would have listened to the cautions being advanced toward her concept by experts and at least addressed them but Holmes’ approach was just to dismiss them entirely as lacking in her unique creative vision. Holmes’ talents is in selling her confidence in bullshit, which takes some social intelligence but not much knowledge or ability to understand how technology actually works.
A lot of women learn to speak in a deeper voice and particularly without the falsetto and upswing that sounds youthful and inconfident. Many actresses and public speakers actually get vocal training to develop such a voice, and it does serve them well in terms of how they are perceived even though they are using the same words. But Elizabeth Holmes voice was just…weird, like she learned it from imitating Bullwinkle. Some people do have odd vocal inflections or manners of speech, especially if they are not neurotypical, and I wonder if Holmes wasn’t trying to give the impression of genius by deliberately adopting odd vocal and facial patterns.
I think the reality is that Elizabeth Holmes is a pretty average intellect but learned how to manipulate people through selling her confidence and ideas of remarkable technology while skimming over any details, and the tech press in particular ate up the notion of a women technology billionaire entrepreneur because it was a great story even if the underlying technology smelled like rotting fish. Those two complementary ambitions collided to make a such remarkable deception possible, and while Elizabeth Holmes should be held to full account for her responsibility in it, this is scarcely a unique situation.
Stranger
I’ve heard clips of her regular speaking voice and it was not particularly high-pitched. It’s a mid-range woman’s voice. That contralto she uses … I understand dropping your voice half an octave but what she did was off-putting.
That doesn’t compute. Average HS students cannot get into Stanford. It is super-competitive. Doesn’t mean she is notably bright. Some people are really good at getting good grades without being exceptionally smart. But she had to have been an above average student on paper in HS to have gotten into Stanford in the first place.
Is she?
Maybe it’s that whatever her glamour is, it doesn’t work on me. (Not saying I’m immune to all glamour, just hers specifically. I don’t find her charismatic. But I can well imagine a specific type of rich man of a certain age falling for it.) To me she comes across as someone who believes she’s exceptional and believes that she’s entitled to be treated as exceptional, but is really just above average. Not one of the bright minds of her generation - just solidly above average.
But the idea - simple easy blood test that can be done in your kitchen while you drink your morning coffee or at the drug store while you’re next-door getting groceries? That’s a really seductive idea even while it’s obvious that it isn’t going to work.
I’m guessing the opposite. I cannot overstate how charismatic she appears in tapes. I think an attractive, insanely charismatic woman, speaking in a authoritative voice, is going to present very well to a jury.
[snip]
If she takes the stand attempting to convince the jury of “intimate partner abuse” by Balwani, I think she’d be better served using her Rocky the Flying Squirrel on Helium voice.
Will she? It seems to me that real equality has upsides and downsides. Women should be the heroes in movies, and the villains, should be the billionaires and the failures. They’ll be on Wheaties boxes and get CTE. Not everyone can be a perfect, successful role model. That Holmes got the opportunity to commit this fraud is a milestone, of a sort.
“That blood test never works.”
“This time, for sure!”
It’s not that she’s a villain that risks setting back feminism. It’s her planned defense to blame Sunny Balwani for everything because she’s just a poor woman with no agency of her own.
Note: I say this with incomplete knowledge of her relationship with Balwani. Who knows, maybe testimony will reveal that she truly was in an abusive relationship, in which case I’ll reassess my opinion of her. But what I’ve seen so far doesn’t point in that direction.
I know. Dan White said his murders were the fault of eating Twinkies. This trial shows that desperate criminal defendants can be any gender. Is that not progress?
Like the infamous McDonald’s hot coffee, that is a gross misstatement of the case.
In short, Twinkies weren’t the cause, they were the symptom.
I’m with amarinth. I don’t find her charismatic at all. The weird voice didn’t help. Pushed her all the way over into the weird column for me. Bad Blood was the first place I saw/heard her.
As for everyone wanting a pinprick blood test, I just had blood drawn (three vials) a week ago for my annual tests. I was joking with the phlebotomist that I didn’t mind the draws at all – I was much more apprehensive about the BP test I was having after I left her. Those dang cuffs hurt.
I’ve been a blood donor all my adult life, though…even a number of aphersis donations…so, I’m pretty inured to people sticking needles in my arm.
This. “Oh poor me, this man manipulated me” is a pretty anti-feminist defense. And by a number of reports, she was the dominant player in that partnership. Apparently a ton of their private texts have been released, and she doesn’t sound like the victim of abuse.
The jury has seven men and five women. And strictly speaking, there are zero “old white men” on it.
“The jury now ranges in age from 19 to about 60 years old. Of the 12 jurors, six are white, four are Hispanic, and two are Asian. There are also two jurors who said that English was not their first language, with one saying that she had to use a translation device on her phone to understand some of the words in the questionnaire.”
I suspect that having a substantial number of women on the jury will not be a plus for Holmes.
I came in this morning to say the exact same thing/