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Comment by samschooler | Hacker News Reader

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.

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

Probably no. The most manipulative are still not in the jail and are running some well-known big companies.

Has the public at large "seen" those people though? They tend to want to stay out of the limelight, for obvious reasons.

And the rest are in DC.

The simple concept is some version of the Peter Principal.

You just flat out don’t get into these positions without being a psychopath. Partially that it wouldn’t be attractive to you, and partially that you won’t succeed without those behaviors.

I’m a big fan of conscript political assignments. The people that don’t want to do it I think would make better decisions.

And whole countries.

> are running some well-known big companies.

Or religions, or religious-like communities.

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).

I've worked for someone very like her.

It's worse than reckless. They make not-knowing part of their operating model.

And they make sure nobody else with power and influence does too much knowing either. Silos, stay in your lane, don't ask questions about how your department's KPIs mesh with the next one over, or what conclusions might be inferred.

How does this work though. At the end of the day, you can’t as a CEO say “I didn’t know” when your whole operating model is a scam.

> At the end of the day, you can’t as a CEO say “I didn’t know” when your whole operating model is a scam.

There's always the chance one could have ridden fake-it-till-you-make-it long enough for the engineers to solve the underlying issues...

It is one thing to fake and misrepresent the completeness of a video game, but it is entirely another to provide false or unverified medical results to patients.

While far from a complete technical breakdown, Hank Green's recent video on Theranos is a good starting point. These are not serious people. The special sauce has never been the self promotion.

https://youtu.be/d9EaqyoA29E

Yes. So many of her replies to Nathan's questions were "I don't know" or "I don't remember" or "I don't understand" for questions that were very straightforward.

At her level of responsibility she'd better know. Whatever the case, she's either deceitful or incompetent. Neither answer is flattering or acceptable.

It's manufactured incompetence. You can see it a lot in companies who use a lot of subcontractors.

Deceitful vs delusional or incompetent matters for your legal defense, your parole hearing etc

In virtually every company there are questions you intuitively know that your managers don't necessarily want to know the answers to (or at least, they only want to know the answers to them if you have a solution), usually it's something relatively trivial like minor infractions of corporate rules.

There are some leaders who are extremely good at convincing you about the importance of belief in a particular thing to the point where you avoid even thinking up those questions - if they are ever cornered (and they rarely allow it to get to that point) they will wriggle endlessly rather than responding to a line of inquiry that bursts the collective bubble.

Do they know? It's hard to argue about their internal motivations.

When a lawyer says "reckless" it's an extremely strong word. It doesn't mean "negligent", IANAL (and it depends on the state etc) but it's more like if you knowingly run over a pedestrian in your way, and you aren't trying to hurt them but don't care if they get hurt. And often criminal law will treat it as just a little less bad than intent.

It very much depends on where the lawyer is. What you’ve described would be more like “depraved heart” or “wicked recklessness” in jurisdictions that have it, where reckless was that you were doing 90 in a residential area. I think the point is more that the legal term “reckless” may have a specific meaning in given places.

It's above reckless, in other legal systems there is a level above gross and reckless negligence where the prosecution argues not only they should have known, in fact they did know and chose to proceed anyway.

Best take of the movie here. When the whole crew met with them before production, Nathan's idea to say "fuck it, let's just see how they do business" was the right call and might show she actually may not have known as much as you'd think, but it's fully intentional to the point of complete insanity.

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

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

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.

I don’t think an accusation of ‘apologia’ is justified here. If some particular cognitive process generates deception genuine to the deceiver, that does not make the deception acceptable.

There’s a story in the movie about a magician performing a trick, but where there is no trick. The magician really does the thing he appears to do. I think that’s more where GP’s question lies, i.e.: Is her unusual processing of the world an elaborate conscious construction, or is it automatic, and to what degree?

That isn’t a direct determination about her merit or culpability.

For a lot of people, they wouldn't say it's a hit piece on her; more on someone near to her. I also wouldn't call it a documentary fully. It really is hard to watch the movie, and come to any solid conclusions. I'd like to say also I'm not questioning her guilt, and specifically called out that that's not what the provocation is about in the movie. So apologia may be the wrong term her? It's more about how can you understand someone and the motives of their actions.

I have no idea what this movie is actually about. I only know Holmes is a classical sociopath. Knowing what that means I cannot imagine any surprises coming from this movie.

Here are key observations of sociopathic personalities:

* They are never wrong, but there are rare times they will admit to being wrong if they have calculated an advantage in doing so.

* They don't care about you, or anybody else. They can't. A sociopath is a damaged personality that cannot empathize. What's interesting is that introspection is the same skill as empathy, so they cannot do that either. As such, they have no faults.

* Sociopaths tend to be charming. They want to appear pleasant. A primary goal of any narcissist is admiration. This is all temporary though, because they lack the empathy necessary to adapt and build trust or extend relationships, which means they are more important than you. It also means they will extend an irrationally great amount of energy to inform you of just how charming they are or how wrong they aren't.

* Sociopaths tend to become hostile when they don't get want they want. They live in a world of "i want" or "i don't want" and there is no further action to execute. This also tends to make for controlling and abusive personalities.

* Sociopaths are not necessarily sadists. The goal is not typically to harm other people, but rather to fulfill themselves irrespective of any harm.

While not criminal like Homes this seems to describe a lot of the most currently vaunted tech CEOs

Musk, Altman and Zuckerberg all are able to somehow ignore the harm they cause and have an amazing ability to justify it in pursuit of some “greater good”.

The Gervais Principle [0] decades ago was arguing that Sociopathy is what companies have optimized themselves for in their upper management. That it is almost the expected "social class" of wealthy people today.

[0] https://ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-t...

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