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Comment by IG_Semmelweiss | Hacker News Reader

Fascinating that the only communications with Tyler Schultz, which was the main insider confronting the fraud, had all of ~4 exchanges with her. All in the same day.

Truly brave of him to go against the golden geese, despite turning his own family- and even former attorney generals & military officers- against him.

Its all on 4/11/2014.

Also interesting to see how Sunny & Holmes always thought it was Tyler, or the CLIA Lab Director (Adam) plotting against them.... when their scam was just in plain sight of regulators that bothered to actually do the work.

Holmes/Sunny reaction to Tyler's email and to Adam's resignation (Nov 2014) is one of outrage. Using the power inbalance to make their point, is 101 fraud.

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Sunny's response to Tyler's email, the one full of sincere concern for the well-being of the company:

Tyler.

We saw your email to Elizabeth.

Before I get into specifics, let me share with you that had this email come from anyone else in the company, I would have already held them accountable for the arrogant and patronizing tone and reckless comments. In your case, I am giving you the benefit of doubt that your intentions are in the right place, and am taking the time to respond, even though your tone in this email all the way through the last paragraph is not that of someone seeking to understand, but rather someone standing at higher perch of morality and business wisdom. Perhaps this too was not your intent but this clearly comes across as your mind set.

See my comments in red below.

> someone standing at higher perch of morality and business wisdom

This is a good reminder that arguments on morality and wisdom are used and abused.

And also a good reminder that if someone is coming off to you as "at a higher perch of morality and business wisdom" maybe you should listen to them.

Sunny's interpretation of the tone is another way of saying "you come here acting all superior". This is very different from accepting someone is superior, so it has the opposite effect of wanting to listen.

If someone is coming off to you as "all superior" you would only listen if you genuinely agree they are, and it's not an act. Otherwise you'll just see a person trying to make you feel inferior. Nobody listens unless they are truly convinced of that superiority, or else it's just an insult. Sunny of course chose to see this as an insult. But the opposite, taking the superiority at face value and just listening to anyone who sounds superior is no better. There are many more signals to take into consideration before deciding whether someone's opinion is worth listening to or taking into consideration.

If someone is coming off as superior to you then you should probably figure out why. Because sometimes the reason is because they have too high an opinion of themselves. And sometimes it's because you are in defense mode and they are right.

> If someone is coming off as superior to you then you should probably figure out why

You really shouldn't. The weight of the message should never come from the attitude of the messenger. If the "superiority" of the other person is what gives importance to the message then you're in "appeal to authority" fallacy territory. Analyze the message, if you think it carries weight, dig deeper into the content. The attitude is just a distraction. If you have enough time analyzing everyone's attitude imagine how much more you could achieve if you only focused on the substance.

I think we said the same thing? Understanding why you perceive someone that way involves understanding not their tone but primarily the content of what they said. Tone is more often misunderstood than people think.

I don't think that follows. A lot of folks like to position themselves as "holier-than-thou".

The key idea, perhaps, is that in questions of fact, tone is noise.

... and that doesn't mean one gets to discard the message because its tone is noisy. Especially when the message is warning of jail-time-worthy consequences for one's actions.

If someone says "Hey asshole, stop standing on those tracks, that's how idiots get dead..." Their tone makes it hard to accept their message but one is still standing on the tracks.

Wow. Do execs really talk/communicate like this in normal companies???

Absolutely not. If an exec talks to you like this you should leave immediately.

well, in a large company, you cannot leave for every asshole that thinks he is better than you, or you never work anymore.

I read the book (Bad Blood) and watched the mini-series (The Dropout) -- both absolutely great! and yet I still don't completely understand how Sunny & Holmes were able to fool experts inside their own company for so long.

Fooling the public is easy. But how do you fool the people working on the machines and trying to get actual results out of them? Sure, dividing the work into micro-tasks help, and creating an atmosphere of suspicion/excitement/respect for authority, etc. But still?!?

It is exceedingly difficult to convince someone of a lie, if their livelihood depends on believing that lie.

I think you wrote the opposite of what you meant to write.

English is not my native language, and by the time I posted this my English was all but used up for the day. But I think most understood what I was trying to say anyway, so I'm chill.

No, it scans correctly. It's a paraphrase of a well-known quote.

I can't speak to Theranos, but having worked in scientific R&D the researchers are used to business folk telling them work is good enough/sellable even when they think it needs more study, are worried about edge cases, etc. And it can be true and not fraudulent. A lot of scientists are always looking for 'better', a more complete model, an answer closer to 'truth'; business is looking for what can I sell, what is slightly better (or differentiated enough) than current market offerings.

I think that can create enough plausibility in researchers' minds (along with keeping work divided and some psychological manipulation). They're thinking this looks kind of terrible and doesn't work for A, B, or C situations, but the business folks tell me this is exactly what they need and works on the market. Add in good pay (Theranos paid well above market for biotech for quite a while) and people won't think too hard about it.

A case study in human psychology for sure.

$$$ and NDAs work

Wow I had never heard of this whistleblower guy Tyler, this email is honestly amazing.

> In my meetings with Daniel I found that the discrepancies between our CVs were due to Daniel calculating CV based on the median value of each precision run, while I was calculating CV of the entire data set for each level. When I asked him why we do this, he said that it was a way to average out the noise. I was under the impression that the coefficient of variation was meant to be, at least in part, a measure of how much noise exists in the data. By averaging out this noise before CV is calculated, the CV as a metric of assay performance becomes less meaningful.

“Becomes less meaningful”… this is the most polite way I can imagine telling your CEO, “hey, our results are all BS”. His message is so thorough and measured, and they just tear into him. He’s the only professional in the room.

Read about him.

He was really young at the time, with some work experience, but no bonafides. Meanwhile investors in Theranos were hisliteral family members - many were considered untouchable members of high society. The level of pressure he was subject to was incredible, and we was coming from a place where he was most vulnerable.

He is literally the star with morals, that you expect to come out of schools like Harvard etc. Instead we get the Holmes class, the Epstein class, the Blankfeins etc. We have been short-changed.

the level of political correctness he uses to write his email should be forbidden in any tech / medical company lol

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