Yet another Hacker News

How the Elizabeth Holmes Doc 'You Can See Everything' Is Deceiving You

61 points MaysonL 3 hours ago 50 comments

sciencesama 1 hour ago | parent

you are either manipulated or you manipulate ! / influence !

nickstinemates 1 hour ago | parent

> But the thing that often gets lost in the retelling of her story is that Holmes was actually acquitted of all four charges related to defrauding patients. She’s in prison because a jury found that she knowingly misled investors who poured more than $700 million into the startup.

trying to minimize fraud? what a weird article.

add-sub-mul-div 1 hour ago | parent

This point is also clearly made in the film. Sounds like the article has nothing to say and just wants to leech off the success and attention of the doc.

jghn 1 hour ago | parent

Indeed. While she's not on the leaderboard of worst humans ever, she's still up there. Any whitewashing of her reputation is bogus.

siliconc0w 1 hour ago | parent

I mean in do you really have a lot of sympathy for the oligarchic tax advantaged zombie family hedge funds that made a bet and lost?

They didn't do their diligence and do kinda deserve to lose their money.

thereitgoes456 1 hour ago | parent

That’s true but not relevant. I have absolutely no sympathy for the rubes who thought FTX was a good place to put their money, but that doesn’t make the fraud any more OK.

hypersoar 1 hour ago | parent

Holmes and Theranos leadership did more than defraud investors. They knowingly ran unreliable tests on actual patients. People were told they were miscarrying when they weren't, or that they had HIV when they didn't. And they drove an employee, Ian Gibbons, to suicide, then threatened his widow with a lawsuit when she talked to reporters about it.

erulabs 52 minutes ago | parent

Important to note she was found not guilty of this charge.

hypersoar 44 minutes ago | parent

That is not because Theranos did not commit such fraud against patients; Balwani was convicted on those charges. It's just the prosecutors were unable to prove that Holmes was culpable.

erulabs 41 minutes ago | parent

You said

> Holmes ... did more than defraud investors.

Which was not proven in a court of law as judged by a jury of her peers.

hypersoar 37 minutes ago | parent

You...you literally elided over the exact phrase I included in anticipation of this objection.

erulabs 26 minutes ago | parent

You're conflating Holmes, Theranos and Balwani. Holmes was found not guilt of that which you accuse her of. That you also accuse others at the same time who where found guilty doesn't change that fact.

dylan604 52 minutes ago | parent

The people that invested their money did not make these decisions. The people running the fund did. You're victim blaming. Most people don't get a very wide choice where their money goes outside the couple of options the fund managers present. I'd also venture most people do not even look at what stocks are in the fund. They'll look at the past earnings and check the box.

phire 1 hour ago | parent

Also, just because the jury didn't think there was enough evidence to convict her of defrauding patients (beyond reasonable doubt), doesn't mean she was innocent.

erulabs 53 minutes ago | parent

It actually does. You can judge her, but she is not guilty. The more we as a society decide the justice system is just an arbitrary way of deciding who gets punished and not _the_ way of deciding if a person is or is not a criminal the more we slide towards oblivion.

If a person is found not guilty, they are not guilty. To argue otherwise is to undermine the core institution of western civilization.

robotresearcher 39 minutes ago | parent

The finding is ‘not guilty’, rather than innocent. It does not mean the accused is innocent. It means they could not be proven guilty.

erulabs 37 minutes ago | parent

Important to note that in the original conception of western civilization, no one is 'innocent'. This idea that you have some secret special power to sniff out a persons true heart from a distance, which is separate from a jury of a persons peers studying and debating the evidence, is at best misguided and arrogant, and at worst a pernicious threat.

malisper 56 minutes ago | parent

For context for others, Holmes was acquitted of defrauding patients. A juror stated that she was acquitted because Holmes didn't directly interact with the patients. On the other hand, she did directly interact with investors, so the evidence was much clearer.

Separately, Theranos' COO and Holmes' boyfriend at the time was convicted by a separate jury for defrauding patients. Theranos also settled multiple lawsuits for ~$50M and declared bankruptcy soon after.

potamic 30 minutes ago | parent

What gets lost more is that Balwani was convicted of defrauding patients, so it's not even like Theranos was absolved of those charges. The kicker is that the CEO and co-founder of a company that has been established to willfully defraud patients somehow managed to escape conviction.

samschooler 1 hour ago | parent

I don't think there is any magic sauce to this movie. I saw it yesterday, and do agree (spoilers ahead) there are three acts: deception, sympathetic, puppeteer. I feel though that this article treats the movie as if its some sort of hypnosis; it's not. Its a very well put together movie that makes you question everything thats happening. I and others came out of it largely questioning:

A. Is she truly the most manipulative person we've ever seen

B. Largely oblivious to what's happening around her

and not:

- Is she guilty

This movie I would say does not answer those questions, nor do I think seeks to.

sippingabonedry 1 hour ago | parent

Does the film address that thing she does with her voice?

samschooler 1 hour ago | parent

Not at all, though she does talk slightly less like that now.

cm2187 44 minutes ago | parent

I never understood why people care about that. Lots of corporate executives take courses on how to speak in public and change their behaviour on stage. Actors certainly do. As for Kamala Harris and her sudden southern accent in front of certain audiences...

wisty 54 minutes ago | parent

I haven't seen it, but my opinion is she likely was what lawyers call "reckless", as in she should have known but didn't care (blinded by the upside and a "we'll figure it once we scale" tech attitude that works a lot better for db performance than healthcare).

roncesvalles 20 minutes ago | parent

I think if you're stuck on that question, her manipulation poked through the silver screen and worked on you.

To me the subtext of the movie was that a sociopath's manipulation is so strong that even against the heavy counterforce of the filmmaker's bias, it makes it through. I agree with TFA's general premise that the film forces you to confront how easy it is to deceive you -- but it's not the filmmaker who's doing the deceiving. Sociopathic manipulation is about sparking doubt. Gaslighters don't need to prove anything, they just need to plant a "but what if" in some corner of your mind. The fact that the author felt compelled to write TFA at all is ironically a product of that manipulative power.

Another way to think of it is: the documentary makes you think whether, if you were in the room with her in the years that Theranos was operating, would you have fallen for it? If you feel the need to write apologia after watching a documentary that's basically a hit piece, you know the answer.

jiggawatts 1 hour ago | parent

As someone outside US politics and as someone who generally takes the position of an impartial observer it’s always fun to engage people in gentle debate to see if they understand why they feel the way that they vehemently[1] do about a person or topic.

A fun one to ask to rile up Fox News listeners is to ask them which specific law Hillary Clinton is guilty of breaking.

Trump just threatened to jail her, so this is still relevant!

That’s just a random example, there are many such biases people hold where they have a strong belief but no clue where they got that belief.

[1] A study showed that many antivaxers would cheerfully get their kid a shot if offered $50! That’s what their “conviction” is actually worth.

klodolph 1 hour ago | parent

Doesn’t this line of debate get kind of predictable?

trimethylpurine 1 hour ago | parent

If you intend to engage "for fun" then you must actually engage by hearing the other side and rebutting. Otherwise you're not engaging, you're just trying to shout your assumptions louder than your opponent.

Your comment doesn't seem to exhibit any understanding of the opposing arguments.

Just offering my take of your comment as an impartial observer.

ksymph 1 hour ago | parent

This article falls into the same trap, I dunno what to call them, artsy-upper-class-society-and-film reviewers often do; writing vague yet meaningful-sounding things about the obvious subtext of a movie as if it was a revelation, yet without any specific observations about it.

Yes, this is a documentary about a person. And how the documentary is presented will color your perspective of the person. This should (hopefully) be apparent to anyone who's watched a documentary about a person before.

But how does it do it? What tools does it use to that effect? I appreciate that this film remains relatively neutral/ambiguous, but what makes this unique from other documentaries that deal with ambiguous subject matter?

whilenot-dev 24 minutes ago | parent

> this film remains relatively neutral/ambiguous [...] with ambiguous subject matter?

There's a big difference in ambiguousness and ambivalence, especially in documentaries. "Ambiguousness" represents an uncertain logical conclusion, whereas "ambivalence" stands in for (the strength of) conflicting forces.

I'd wager that an ambiguous documentary would be close to being unwatchable, and I can't remember that I've seen any. Since I've yet to see You Can See Everything, unfortunately I can't comment about it in any way.

comradesmith 9 minutes ago | parent

Maybe just for not spoilers?

halyconWays 1 hour ago | parent

This reads like a high schooler discovering that film can manipulate you, but doesn't go any further than that.

"We like to believe that we form our opinions by gathering evidence, weighing facts, and arriving at reasonable conclusions. Be for real. No we do not."

She speaks for herself. The author then doesn't bring up a single fact, piece of evidence, or anything else besides just restating the pedestrian premise a few times. I don't share her inability to study a topic in-depth, come to a conclusion or challenge my previously held beliefs, and then pass judgment while attaching a calibrated degree of certainty to the soundness of my conviction.

greesil 1 hour ago | parent

You can just read Bad Blood, too, and skip the movie / hyperbole/ whatever

muglug 1 hour ago | parent

Everything you watch, documentary and narrative alike, attempts to shape your understanding of events through the director's lens.

spectraldrift 1 hour ago | parent

Bizzare take

SurfingAlpaca 1 hour ago | parent

I saw a video on YouTube a while ago about her. I think it was either by Internet historian or someone similar. Not sure if it’s worth going to theaters for this

slau 37 minutes ago | parent

“I watched an unrelated YouTube video therefore I’m not convinced this movie is good” sure is a paradoxical level of judging a book by its cover.

I assume what you meant is that having heard about the person the movie focuses on, you have no interest in seeing more about her. Having felt entirely apathetic about Holmes since the early days of the Theranos scam, I can’t say I disagree with you.

zetazzed 1 hour ago | parent

It’s such a good movie. Go with a friend and you can spend hours picking apart the layers.

nanolith 1 hour ago | parent

I saw the movie Friday night. It is a mind job. You'll walk away with more questions than answers.

Without spoiling the movie, it's possible for people to be multiple things at once. That doesn't excuse what Elizabeth Holmes did or explain what others in her circle may be guilty of. The movie is a wild ride.

charles_f 39 minutes ago | parent

> That doesn't excuse what Elizabeth Holmes did or explain what others in her circle may be guilty of.

Thanks!

Surely the documentaries are made in a way that's depicts that very accentued, manipulative, borderline psychopathic person. This is likely more than she was in real life. She might even have been motivated by genuine will to improve the diagnostics field. So yeah you might be "deceived" by these docudramas.

I fear that this kind of poetic write-up muddies the water into "oh, maybe things are more nuanced, and played on her weird personality and background to make things look worse, maybe it wasn't so bad".

People got misdiagnosed and suffered directly because of her. She's every bit guilty of that, as deserving of a harsh judgement as any person directly causing that kind of harm.

jdorfman 58 minutes ago | parent

No one including my wife was interested in seeing it so I went by myself. It was long, but interesting. The author hits the nail on the head:

“You sit there believing you’re watching a documentary about a woman who deceived the world, only to discover that you’re also watching a demonstration of how easy it is to deceive you.”

I couldn’t agree more.

miguelazo 44 minutes ago | parent

Has this person never seen Rashomon? Or any of the other films (even documentaries) that cleverly use different perspectives? Seems a bit breathless.

JMiao 39 minutes ago | parent

“Local woman discovers Nathan For You”

jamienk 35 minutes ago | parent

I'm not bragging: but I do not watch any (almost any) video of the news, so I never see Trump speak or see the Israeli military against the Palestinians or watch the footage of the trials, etc. I do read the news. I just sort of drifted into it when I was an early cord-cutter. I think around the yr 2000 there wasn't much video and I got used to it. I do find that I am much less overstimulated than my friends and family who watch a lot of news video.

Lacan described registers of experience: the Imaginary (visual, sexual, emotional, fantasy), Symbolic (language, associations), and Real (the unsymbolizable, "impossible"). Watching video is immersion in the Imaginary, you get roused, riled up, turned-on, activated, thoughts are connected by paranoia, magical thinking, and aggression. It makes HUGE difference to not not follow the news that way! Again, I'm not bragging, not proud of myself, not espousing a Mr Spock outlook. But it is hard to miss the difference.

coldfloor 16 minutes ago | parent

So many comments about Holmes, I think, are missing the point. This isn't about Holmes, and neither, IMO, is the article. Like all things Nathan Fielder does, this is a movie by Nathan for Nathan. Elizabeth Holmes is just used, in every sense of the word, as a prop.

The article was written by someone who's never seen any of Nathan's other work and is apparently blown away by his skill at and unquenchable fetish for using and deceiving people. Yeah, that's his whole thing. Congrats, you just watched a documentary about psychopaths.

ares623 15 minutes ago | parent

I hate these kinds of documentaries. Even after being caught and punished, these wannabe larger than life con artists still get an exit. If school shooters shouldn't be plastered all over the news, then why are these people.

meherabhossain 12 minutes ago | parent

This has a very interesting way of showing it to you, how easy it is to deceive us. What we see is what er believe in, but it can be very much easily used to exploit us.