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Comment by bambax | Hacker News Reader

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?!?

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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

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