[HN Gopher] Always the same warning signs
___________________________________________________________________
Always the same warning signs
Author : rossdavidh
Score : 275 points
Date : 2023-06-14 13:09 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.science.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.science.org)
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| "people will find all sorts of ways to believe what they want to
| believe, to avoid hearing things that they don't want to hear,
| and to avoid thinking about things that are too worrisome to
| contemplate"
|
| Wizard's First Rule (Terry Goodkind)
| bix6 wrote:
| Everyone always decries these as failures of venture capital.
| There is fraud in every industry. You cannot conceivably check
| everything and there is a level of trust required. Even if
| someone sends you raw data you are taking their word that it's
| the true data. There can be deception at every level and smart
| people will be deceived by criminals. Where there is money there
| will always be crime so I am grateful to see our justice system
| working even if it takes many years.
| feoren wrote:
| > Even if someone sends you raw data you are taking their word
| that it's the true data.
|
| With hundreds of millions on the line, is it so much to ask
| that VC firms employ a couple statisticians to at least do a
| sanity check on the data? Fake data can often be identified as
| fake.
| bix6 wrote:
| VCs differ wildly. A small VC will certainly not earn enough
| in fees to employ multiple dedicated statisticians. They will
| likely have a CFO/other analysts who can check the data but
| there's no guarantee they will catch cleverly manipulated
| data. Obviously this is a much later stage investment so
| different diligence is expected but there are many ways to
| deceive. Certainly some VCs saw red flags while others did
| not.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Wrong. "Due diligence" is a term that's there for a reason.
| bix6 wrote:
| Due diligence and 100% complete due diligence that accounts
| for every single thing are drastically different.
| jgeada wrote:
| That's facile and ignores that VC is supposed to be a vetting
| gatekeeper: the reason they keep a fraction of all the money
| going through their accounts is because they're supposedly
| vetting the investment opportunities and have money and access
| to knowledge as necessary to validate claims, etc. If they're
| not doing this, what is the value add the VC company is
| providing, other than being a skimmer on the money flows?
|
| The reality is that as long as there is no liability for
| passing the buck (ie the scammer's and middemen's beloved
| caveat emptor), the system continues to encourage bad players.
| bix6 wrote:
| My point is that no matter how much due diligence you
| perform, there is still a chance to be deceived. No amount of
| money could get you to 100% diligence and cover every edge
| case.
|
| There is liability for knowingly passing the buck. VCs have
| been sued before.
| ackbar03 wrote:
| Anybody have the actual Stat article?
| BSEdlMMldESB wrote:
| Stat does, and sharing is caring: https://archive.ph/1vHlW
| (still paywalled)
|
| but they don't care, they don't share....
| radicaldreamer wrote:
| not great formatting but available in the comments on reddit:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/biotech/comments/147o153/does_anyon...
| sebstefan wrote:
| This really shouldn't keep happening in 2023
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sch%C3%B6n_scandal
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hwang_Woo-suk#Official_probe_a...
| photochemsyn wrote:
| Transparent audit protocols are the only solution - e.g. raw
| data should be immediately available upon publication, and even
| more rigorous protocols should be employed for grant
| application review (show us the daily log etc.), but those who
| oppose this approach say it'll expose intellectual property to
| outsiders causing the loss of competitive edge.
|
| Open-source research is thus the only kind of research that
| should be allowable with public funds, and closed-source
| proprietary research shouldn't be publishable in any research
| journal. If people want to invest in the latter they'll be the
| ones responsible for due diligence, I suppose.
| archgoon wrote:
| [dead]
| zaptheimpaler wrote:
| The big takeaway here for me is to make liberal use of the phrase
| "Shoo, little people! Out of my way!" when they don't approve my
| code reviews.
| cratermoon wrote:
| I had a co-worker who would reject feedback and then complain
| that it was the reviewers' fault that his PRs weren't merged.
| brianmcc wrote:
| Also, go right ahead and reject the feedback you Simply Do Not
| Want To Hear!
|
| (I just _loved_ that use of capital letters!)
| throwaway202351 wrote:
| Sounds like they're not Team Players if they give you
| feedback you Simply Do Not Want To Hear!
| Ialdaboth wrote:
| Already been doing it for years, implicitely, by making my code
| as unreadable as possible. But now I can justify it by saying
| I'm doing Science.
| bluGill wrote:
| Arrgh, why didn't I.think of that? I just left for vacation
| with an open code review that should have been easy because
| some new junior found some issues that I couldn't resolve
| before packing my suitcase.
|
| Thanks junior, the issues you found were real, even if small,
| and things will be better when I return and fix them.
| toast0 wrote:
| I prefer the less disparaging, "Well, I'm going to check it in
| anyway" and as a bonus, it doesn't directly acknowledge the
| existance of other people.
| [deleted]
| ProjectArcturis wrote:
| Derek Lowe is a treasure.
| rossdavidh wrote:
| Truth. The best thing about the pandemic is that it somehow
| brought his column to my attention.
| xnx wrote:
| Agree. I didn't know who he was until I heard him in a piece of
| On the Media from WNYC and was immediately struck by how
| reasonable he was.
| pico303 wrote:
| Is this what happens when research moves from universities to the
| private sector? Not sharing data and results seems par for the
| course for things like proprietary algorithms. Why would biotech
| be any different?
| janeway wrote:
| In fairness, one good thing about commercialisation is that if
| they don't produce the goods in the end, it fails. In pure
| research it can go unnoticed much longer.
| phs318u wrote:
| Yes. Always the same warning signs, because humans always ignore
| their senses when they are overwhelmed by the same greed. Always.
| dmbche wrote:
| Man how insane is it that these guys and gals raised 400 millions
| on tech without any raw data, nothing to show for it? It was
| never reproduced? They just said they got it?
| ryandrake wrote:
| The more I live in this world, the more I realize that its
| winners are pretty much exclusively charismatic bullshitters. I
| used to think that professional investors actually were a
| little smarter than the rest. I mean, here they are making huge
| bets on particular numbers on the roulette wheel--they must
| know something we don't! But they keep getting fooled!
|
| They have gobs and gobs of money to invest. Rich people chasing
| ever riskier rewards just handing money to them! They have to
| find something promising to throw it at. But who is it going
| to? Evidently, a lot of it goes to founders whose primary skill
| is storytelling. I used to think, no matter how handsome and
| smooth and persuasive you are, you at least have to have a
| little substance behind your enchanting narrative and ivy-
| league mannerisms. But here we are with failure after failure
| (and a once-a-decade colossal failure like Theranos) where all
| the warning signs were visible to someone _not_ under the
| spell, and these bullshitters are still getting funding
| shoveled at them.
|
| It's pretty sad that "look like you know what you are doing and
| convince gullible people" is probably the best future career
| advice I can give to my school-age daughter.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > I used to think that professional investors actually were a
| little smarter than the rest.
|
| It's been my experience that you can't tell who's smarter
| than who by what they do for a living. On the whole, no group
| is actually smarter than any other group.
|
| > It's pretty sad that "look like you know what you are doing
| and convince gullible people" is probably the best future
| career advice I can give to my school-age daughter.
|
| I don't agree with that takeaway. I think the takeaway is
| that confidence is the primary thing that people take as a
| proxy for competence. It's not really about gullibility as
| much as people engaging in a heuristic. So learn to fake
| confidence, but have the chops to back it up.
| adrianmonk wrote:
| > _It 's been my experience that you can't tell who's
| smarter than who by what they do for a living. On the
| whole, no group is actually smarter than any other group._
|
| I assumed they meant professional investors are smarter
| about evaluating potential investments. Not generally
| smarter, just smarter about what they put their money into.
| ryandrake wrote:
| OP here. I guess rather than "smarter" I meant to convey:
| less gullible, less vulnerable to being influenced by
| silly signals like someone's mannerisms and confidence,
| less reliant on unexplainable gut feels.
|
| I guess when I think of professional investors picking
| some of these dogs, my mind imagines that scene in
| Moneyball[1] where the old timers are trying to pick
| baseball players by who "looks good," "has a good jaw,"
| "how the ball sounds when it pops off his bat, and "what
| the player's girlfriend looks like."
|
| 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWgyy_rlmag
| kriro wrote:
| I'd venture that professional concert piano players or
| chess professionals (just to pick two random ones that
| popped into my head) are on average more intelligent than
| other fields which I won't name.
|
| I suppose it depends on the definition of smart which I
| understand as intelligent/good rational decision making but
| maybe you mean somthing else.
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| I think the point GP was trying to make was about
| individuals in the groups, not averages. There are some
| brilliant janitors, and some professional piano or chess
| players have had savant syndrome. You're unlikely to find
| unintelligent or savant biochemists, but I'm sure more
| than a few are hyperfocused on their discipline to the
| exclusion of competency in other areas.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > On the whole, no group is actually smarter than any other
| group.
|
| This is the law of averages. Almost never true.
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| You're ignoring GPs first sentence: "It's been my
| experience that you can't tell who's smarter than who by
| what they do for a living."
|
| This first sentence indicates that they are writing about
| _individuals_ with a vocation, not a group average.
| Statistically, in developed countries, any given manual
| laborer is likely to be less smart than any given venture
| capitalist, but Elon Musk, for instance, has been both.
| If you 'd randomly picked him, in December of 1989, from
| the pool of manual laborers, you would have been wrong.
| [deleted]
| rossdavidh wrote:
| I sometimes think that the real reason ChatGPT scares/excites
| so many tech business types, is that it has automated the one
| skill they have and are looking for in startup founders,
| which is to BS convincingly.
| binkHN wrote:
| A shrewd businesswoman once told me to "fake it until you
| make it"--I think this applies here.
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| "conniving" or "fraudulent" might be more apt than "shrewd"
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| But the turtlenecks lent such an air of authority and
| deep experience.
| iamflimflam1 wrote:
| Having sat on the other side of the table reviewing pitch
| decks and proposals, most investment decisions seem to be
| taken on either a very obvious "this is complete nonsense",
| or on a completely gut feel of: does this sound reasonable,
| do the numbers look sensible, does the team look good.
| feoren wrote:
| > a completely gut feel of: does this sound reasonable, do
| the numbers look sensible, does the team look good.
|
| That's really the only way you ever could do it. But the
| key words there are "reasonable" and "sensible". Reasonable
| and sensible things don't revolutionize the entire world.
| They're not brand new, unprecedented technologies. It's not
| sensible to claim you'll create a ten-billion-dollar+
| market overnight. It's not reasonable to claim that a
| problem that 10,000 smart scientists have worked on for
| decades was just solved in an unexpected way by this
| twenty-something "wunderkind" upstart and no you can't see
| behind the curtain. And yet these people get hundreds of
| millions in investment anyway. That's the question: why the
| hell did that ever sound reasonable; why the hell did those
| numbers ever look sensible!?
| juve1996 wrote:
| To me it's a natural consequence of wealth inequality.
| When you have mega funds like the oil countries have,
| where even losses like this are not really relevant, you
| will have this behavior. They know it's a moonshot. It's
| high risk high reward. And many will fail - but in the
| end, it doesn't really matter that much.
| mhb wrote:
| _Even so, these people of the Power Elite were visibly much
| smarter than average mortals. In conversation they spoke
| quickly, sensibly, and by and large intelligently. When talk
| turned to deep and difficult topics, they understood faster,
| made fewer mistakes, were readier to adopt others '
| suggestions._
|
| https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CKpByWmsZ8WmpHtYa/competent-.
| ..
| ryandrake wrote:
| Nice find! The author, it seems, falls for the same sorts
| of things I mentioned. He talks about an "executive-nature"
| that sets these people apart. Their "aura". Whether they
| "sparkle with extra life force." People who "just came
| across as... formidable, somehow." And over and over
| through the article, he confuses these things with genuine
| competence and intelligence.
| mhb wrote:
| _The author, it seems, falls for the same sorts of things
| I mentioned._
|
| That was not my intent. The point of the essay was
| exactly the opposite. Maybe I fall for the same stuff,
| but Eliezer is a very smart guy who was predisposed (as
| he makes clear in the essay) to believe that the people
| he met were all fluff. He was surprised that they were
| not just demonstrably knowledgeable, but, in addition,
| had other appealing characteristics.
| archgoon wrote:
| [dead]
| Andrex wrote:
| I view investors like I view critics of media: necessary for
| society in small doses, but otherwise contributing little
| value of their own into the world.
|
| And my threshold for having "too much" of these is pretty
| low...
| bonadrag wrote:
| Look at the stock market and fixed income investments around
| you. There is nothing there, very modest growth. That explains
| in part why so many people shifted part of their pile of cash
| to VC investments. The pile is not growing fast enough. Too
| many suckers out there who have not realized that we are in a
| new normal: low growth, low productivity, an aging, less
| dynamic society.
| Aerbil313 wrote:
| > how insane is it that these guys and gals raised 400 millions
| on tech without any raw data, nothing to show for it?
|
| Abolish Venture Capital.
| asylteltine wrote:
| Whatever VCs invested in it deserve to lose their money.
| Theranos was a learning opportunity
| malfist wrote:
| I don't agree. A conman's mark may be foolish, but it is not
| their fault they were conned and they don't deserve to be
| punished. The conman does.
| The_Blade wrote:
| I like the take of Joseph "Yellow Kid" Weil as well as the
| guy who sold the Eiffel Tower... twice
|
| to conflate movie quotes, a fool and his money were lucky
| enough to get together in the first place, and we just
| can't help ourselves
| pessimizer wrote:
| VCs aren't marks. They're fencers, hoping to get rid of the
| product before anyone realizes it's worthless or stolen.
| The (possibly sometimes subconscious) reason they don't
| care to deeply investigate is because if they're convinced
| by a shallow inspection, they're pretty sure they'll be
| able to _convince others._
|
| It's a greater fool shockwave, pretending to buy into
| something and betting that you can get someone else to buy
| into it before the bottom falls out. Not that you know for
| sure the bottom will fall out, but if you're going to buy
| in based on how marketable the pitch is, examining it too
| hard might weaken that pitch or make it fall apart. In that
| case you've wasted time and money and have to find
| something else. If you're committed, the last thing you
| want to do is examine the business; you're shortening your
| bullshit runway.
| 11101010001100 wrote:
| You ask to see the data and agree to sign an NDA. If the
| company does not agree to this, then you walk.
|
| IF the company agrees, but then shows fraudulent data, then
| you are fucked.
| dmbche wrote:
| Actually I think you can sue for damages since the
| defrauded you, so they probably wouldn't agree to the NDA
| tyingq wrote:
| Someone selling a pure bullshit idea may not have many
| resources to extract via a lawsuit.
| [deleted]
| notatoad wrote:
| we really need to stop talking about these situations with
| legitimate terminology. They aren't "VCs" or "Investors".
| They're marks, and they got scammed.
|
| "you can't cheat an honest man" definitely applies.
| gostsamo wrote:
| Not sure why you were flagged, but many people handling
| millions say that they can do it because they know how to do
| it. There is a case to be made that some of them actually
| don't.
| masswerk wrote:
| Also, a certain corrective factor is required to make the
| "because" in this argument work.
| hef19898 wrote:
| I know of a company, in a totally different field, operating on
| the same principles, with the same warning signs. They raised
| close to one billion and are in the process of raising 200
| million more. Happens all the time, but never to me (quoting a
| line from the classic Margin Call).
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| I'm pretty naive about investing, but IIUC there are ways to
| bet against the stock price of a publicly traded company.
|
| Is there a mechanism for betting against a _pre-IPO_ company?
| feoren wrote:
| That sounds a little bit like "If I can tell this company
| is defrauding investors, how can I get in on the fraud?"
| Whoever you borrow that stock from is now your mark that
| you are defrauding -- indirectly, of course, since you're
| not forging fake results or something. It still feels icky.
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| > That sounds a little bit like "If I can tell this
| company is defrauding investors, how can I get in on the
| fraud?"
|
| That's not how I meant it. I was thinking more generally
| about pre-IPO companies that you think (for reasons that
| you can legitimately use when investing in this manner)
| have dim prospects.
| pessimizer wrote:
| It's not you that are doing the defrauding. You're
| betting that it's a fraud and not trying to convince
| anyone of anything.
|
| Lack of short-sellers increases fraud, it doesn't reduce
| it. Nobody spreads more anti-short seller animus that
| people trying to commit fraud.
| hef19898 wrote:
| Oh, that one is post-SPAC...
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| Invest in its publicly traded competitors.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| Yes, but not as easily. Just need to be accredited and find
| someone willing to take the other end of the trade, as with
| anything else.
| andrepd wrote:
| Remember: capitalism is the best system for allocating
| resources.
| thimkerbell wrote:
| "Only one person can get this great stuff to work;... Legitimate
| questions are met with stonewalling;... Important data are
| missing or kept secret"
| hinkley wrote:
| One of my managers had a rule of 2 (different from my rule of
| 2). You haven't proven you know how to do
| something until you've done it twice.
|
| That was expanded by later managers to a more general sense of
| reproducibility, where 'we' don't know how to do it until two
| other people have done it.
|
| There are certain aspects of my life that are informed by a
| general dread that some day I will leave my house and never be
| seen again. For instance I try to tell tell people I love them
| when we part, even if I'm mad at them, in case those are our
| last words for a long while, or forever.
|
| If I really thought I was doing something at work that would
| forever change a corner of the world, I'd be super paranoid
| that the secret could die with me. That's the perfect recipe
| for me overworking. If I can't trust anyone with the
| information (eg, intellectual theft), then I positively
| vibrate. If I told people and they don't care, I have to finish
| it enough that I can demonstrate why they should care.
| toss1 wrote:
| Yup. Like the saying I heard from a friend about how to treat
| engineering tests:
|
| "The first test result is an error. The second is a
| coincidence. If the third lines up, then you might be getting
| a hint of a result."
|
| As in: if you can't reproduce it reliably, you have nothing.
| protonfish wrote:
| Precisely - these aren't "Warning signs" that are only clear in
| hindsight. They are proof of fraud beyond a reasonable doubt.
| If a person or organization has these traits and you continue
| to trust them, it is not an honest mistake.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| These VC's: they suffer from Reverse Imposter Syndrome (tm),
| commonly found in "elite" institutions, as I outlined in here:
|
| https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/when-talent-is-not-enoug...
|
| That's when you _think_ you 're smart enough to be there, but
| you're really not.
| garbagecoder wrote:
| I enjoyed reading that.
|
| It was a huge climbdown for me when I went to college. In high
| school, I was in the top 25 of my class of almost 1000 and I
| never broke a sweat. I never developed study habits because I
| didn't need them. One semester my junior year, my friend and I
| just spent one week in early November doing the entire
| semester's work, some late, some early. The rest of the time I
| could spend doing dumb shit and also hacking away on my
| computers.
|
| I did so well I got into a college where I was annoyingly
| average. By the time I developed some semblance of study habits
| and realistic sense of my abilities, it was too late to get my
| GPA much above 3 (this was before grade inflation was much of a
| thing). In graduate school I finally got my shit together and
| learned to just work, but I wasn't in as elite of an
| environment anymore thanks to my performance in undergrad.
|
| I had wanted my whole life to be away from the normies in high
| school and once I got there, I didn't love it. It was
| humiliating. But that was _good_ for me. Realizing you 're 1 in
| 1,000 or 1 in 10,000 instead of 1 in a million is probably much
| more realistic. And also annoyingly, this is exactly what
| testing when I was like 7 years old told me, but the illusion
| of being in an exurban high school made me think otherwise.
|
| Now I read we are shaped more and more and more by our
| experiences at around age 18. That's the music you hang on to
| and even, I read this week, the politicians we hang on to. I
| love to think I'm different, but I really am part of Generation
| Clinton. I really am not 1 in a million or 1 in 100,000 even.
|
| I think a lot of the kinds of people drawn to tech had similar
| experiences in their formative years. You see a lot of posts
| here with ideas about reforming education, but schools need to
| get everyone through, not just the 1 in 10,000 or even 1 in 100
| types. In the US, you don't get sorted like that until about
| age 18 when you're already having a lot of defining
| experiences.
|
| So my interpretation of what you're writing is that people just
| get used to being the smartest guy in the room. Some may like
| being around others like that, but if they're honest I bet most
| people don't. They should!
|
| The lamest possible source turned me around on this. I was
| listening to Howard Stern (not my parents, not my friends, not
| my teachers) rant about how when he did his movie he found the
| movie people interested in building stars up, but his
| background in radio was all about burning people down and
| recycling them. I decided I liked building people up more. The
| karma didn't take long to pay me back.
|
| When you're anonymous on the Internet, nobody knows if you're
| full of shit or really pack the gear, so we see a lot of
| bullshit words to add the kind of credibility you might see
| from a resume.
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| The 1 in a million are either screwed over worse than you
| were, or are recognized early and perennially challenged to
| further their development.
|
| > In the US, you don't get sorted like that until about age
| 18 when you're already having a lot of defining experiences.
|
| Programs for regular and exceptionally gifted students do
| exist in the US, but this varies state-to-state and district-
| to-district.
|
| The best "reform" I've thought of to address almost
| everything you've mentioned is to teach kids, early on, about
| failure. That it isn't the end of the world, what they can do
| to try to identify it happening, and how they can recover
| from it. Though like anything else this has to be done in
| moderation, as people who keep failing eventually give up
| entirely.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| True story: one of my neighbors went to University of
| Chicago High School ("Uni High" as it's called). It was
| (and probably still is) a school for the extremely gifted.
| (I suppose they have some Reverse Imposters there, too, but
| I wouldn't know /s )
|
| My dad was against my going there; I wouldn't be able to
| talk to ordinary people if I was only ever around those
| "gifted" kids.
|
| I suppose there's _something_ to that; I cited this
| article:
|
| https://theamericanscholar.org/the-disadvantages-of-an-
| elite...
|
| by a guy who didn't know what to say to the plumber
| standing in his kitchen, whereas I'd much rather be around
| people like that than the Reverse Imposters.
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| Acceleration (universal or subject-specific grade
| skipping) can help with this. It challenges the gifted
| student appropriately while still allowing them to
| socialize with regular people.
|
| Naively it might seem that this could lead to bullying,
| but from what I read it tends to work really well. The
| older students aren't threatened by the prodigy.
| macintux wrote:
| I took geometry as a freshman in a class full of juniors
| and seniors. The bullying was frequent, and the teacher
| strategically refused to show up on time so I had to
| either wait around outside the classroom like a coward or
| go in and be hazed.
| garbagecoder wrote:
| GATE programs are underfunded and to the extent they exist
| they only make it worse most of the time because they
| basically are telling you: you are elite! and in your
| school you probably are, but you're usually still in the
| same school. Most of the time it's just pull outs.
|
| Also, I wasn't screwed over. I live a charmed existence
| that I am thankful for every day. (=
|
| eta: 100% agree we need to teach kids about failure. I
| understand the concerns about too much, but right now I
| don't think they are exposed to enough.
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| College instead of high school is a nice alternative in
| some states.
|
| There are some magnet schools for highly gifted or
| aptitudinally talented students, including an online one:
| https://www.davidsongifted.org/the-davidson-academy/
|
| But yeah, the situation for regularly gifted students is
| often as you say. And any school program that truly held
| them to higher standards would also end up penalizing
| them with lower grades that would make them look non-
| competitive to highly selective universities.
|
| > but right now I don't think they are exposed to enough.
|
| Except those in the bottom 25%. They are human too, and
| deserve a good, well-tailored education.
| uoaei wrote:
| That's just called Dunning-Kruger and is a well-studied
| phenomenon.
|
| You see it all over HN too, for instance, people coming up with
| a "new" idea, writing a blog post about it, and self-promoting
| as if they've contributed something novel.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| If you actually read the article, it's not exactly the same.
| uoaei wrote:
| Cynically angling for click-throughs by trying to redefine
| words or introduce trivial distinctions is another classic
| move.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Nothing you'd ever do, Mr. I'm The Expert and You All
| Should Show Respect?
| uoaei wrote:
| Look, Bob, I don't have a personal vendetta against you.
| I do find value in clarifying things that are obscured by
| pomp and rhetoric. What's more, I don't appreciate
| muddied conversations, particularly when the motivation
| for the introduction of such mud is purely self-serving,
| especially in monetary terms.
|
| It seems obvious to me that Substack assesses your
| quality as a writer by checking on click-throughs from
| various sources and I would wager good money that they
| pay out differently depending on the behavior of the
| users who follow those links, either algorithmically in
| realtime or whenever it comes time to renegotiate terms.
| It's not even 2+2 here, Bob.
|
| PS: morality is more than just "would someone else do
| it". Don't make me start quoting cliches typically
| reserved for 5 year olds.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| My Substack is free, so nix to that.
|
| Maybe you should try writing something people _like_ to
| read. Come back and tell us how it went.
| uoaei wrote:
| _Is_ free, perhaps. But that could be for many reasons,
| including that you haven 't _yet_ convinced Substack to
| monetize your offerings. Isn 't that how it always is
| when publishing on platforms you don't own? That you must
| prove your worth to get the paying gig?
| AlbertCory wrote:
| For someone who doesn't have a personal vendetta, you
| sure spend a lot of time writing about me.
|
| Tell you what: all publicity is good publicity. Why don't
| you mention my book titles next time?
| uoaei wrote:
| About you? Where? I'm responding to your comments. Do you
| know of a popular blog that I write that I don't know
| about?
|
| Does spilling your secret sauce threaten you? I can't
| imagine why, you certainly don't need the money. Aren't
| you writing to write things people like, or was that an
| empty and hypocritical moralizing jab?
|
| Why are you, who has a public persona easily traced to
| your real personhood, and who aspires to uphold a
| reputation to make money writing under that persona,
| replying with schoolyard-style taunts?
| stbede wrote:
| The Dunning-Kruger effect is not well established. It often
| doesn't reproduce.
|
| Also the effect isn't that people misjudge their knowledge,
| it's that they misjudge their place within a distribution.
| Suppose I give an exam to 30 people, and the results are
| normally distributed around a score of 70 with a low of 40
| and a high of 97. The bottom of the distribution may
| accurately predict that they scored about 40 on the exam, but
| if you ask them how they performed relative to their peers,
| they will believe that they are about average and guess that
| a sizable portion of the class performed worse than them.
| Alternatively, if you ask the top performer who scored a 97,
| they will say that they think they scored about 97, but they
| will think maybe a few other people scored higher and maybe
| that the average was in the high 80s. The Dunning-Kruger
| effect posits that people are actually pretty good at
| accessing their own knowledge without being a good judge of
| how knowledgeable others are.
| bumby wrote:
| > _Also the effect isn 't that people misjudge their
| knowledge, it's that they misjudge their place within a
| distribution._
|
| Put differently, isn't this saying it's a misattribution of
| confidence? In the context of the original claim about
| investing, that seems very relevant.
| corwinstephen wrote:
| Zing
| Conscat wrote:
| I suppose that the Dunning Kruger effect is "well studied" in
| that there have been many attempts to study it, which so far
| cannot find reproducible results, and suggest that it isn't a
| real psychological phenomenon.
| Kye wrote:
| It's an example of wikigenesis. It didn't exist before
| someone created a Wikipedia entry naming something based on
| some studies.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Dunning%E2%80%93
| K...
|
| It started as a syndrome. I don't think it would survive
| Wikipedia's modern standards if it hadn't generated its own
| support by existing in a different era.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| > wikigenesis
|
| I like it. Better than "reification."
| [deleted]
| garbagecoder wrote:
| Look, I understand there's a lot of trouble in psychology
| in general and there has been some reproduction issues with
| that one. But the truth is, we all know instances of the
| guy who thinks he knows everything just because he's good
| at something else and just thinks everything people went
| through to get where they are was a mistake. Whether or not
| this is a psychological thing in reality, it's something
| most of us have experienced and that's the name people know
| it by.
| verall wrote:
| > we all know instances of the guy who thinks he knows
| everything just because he's good at something else
|
| That's _not_ Dunning-Kruger
| garbagecoder wrote:
| Again, I'm not saying that's what it SHOULD be called,
| I'm saying it's a useful term for something we
| experience. At some point the wrong definition becomes
| the correct one, that's most etymologies.
|
| It's why people say "and I" as an object and don't know
| what question begging is or whatever. It just doesn't
| matter in the long run.
| uoaei wrote:
| No, but the behavior expressed by adopting such an
| attitude is. Yours is a nitpick that is probably worth
| mentioning but doesn't really change the analysis.
| garbagecoder wrote:
| We just need a name for that now. Replyguy? Ackshually
| guy? Sounds too memey. The Nelson-Poindexter Effect?
| ravi-delia wrote:
| That's not even what the original study claimed to find
| though! It caught on because it seems so intuitive, yes,
| but the specific curve of confidence vs. skill doesn't
| seem to look like that at all.
| garbagecoder wrote:
| This is how memes or memetics or just language works
| though. Things often get called something they aren't and
| if it sticks it sticks. I'm not saying it's correct or
| whatever, just that it stuck because it vaguely gave a
| name for something people experience and didn't have a
| name for before.
|
| Look through any etymological dictionary and you'll see
| this phenomenon. What does a computer have to do with "to
| strike" in PIE? Something! But it's not the literal
| meaning.
| [deleted]
| uoaei wrote:
| Those studies, which do consistently show significant
| effects despite your citation-unladen claim, explore
| averages across a general population and seek to explain
| society-wide phenomena through the lens of "average"
| humans. This implies an assumption of homogeneity within
| the general population. Such tests will of course be
| underpowered compared to case studies in specific
| circumstances, particularly those involving self-selection
| and a cohort-level cultural bias toward "I'm smart and need
| to pick things up quickly for my day job which means that
| skill is equally accurate and transferrable to everything I
| read about".
| [deleted]
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| I just started reading your article, and am down to "What If
| You Really Are a Fraud?". I think the more interesting thing is
| not people who have delusions of competency, but people who
| feel they have "imposter syndrome", but are actually imposters
| (not just newbies who are still learning), and convince
| themselves that they aren't after finding out about imposter
| syndrome.
|
| I don't know how much this happens, but in areas such as
| education I think it could happen, as the criteria for most
| tertiary, and some secondary, educators isn't competency in
| teaching, but competency in a subject. And teaching
| effectively, especially to a large class, is quite hard.
| z3t4 wrote:
| The more you learn about a subject the more you areas you
| discover that you do not know about. Learning has three basic
| stages 1) You are new 2) You think you know everything 3) You
| think you know nothing. I think at stage 3 impostor symptom
| can kick in. The dangerous stage is stage 2 where you feel
| very confident.
| wcarss wrote:
| > people who feel they have "imposter syndrome", but are
| actually imposters (not just newbies who are still learning),
| and convince themselves that they aren't after finding out
| about imposter syndrome.
|
| I could be one of those. But the thing is: a) one can rarely
| tell. And b) one way to look at imposter syndrome isn't that
| everyone is actually great while feeling terrible; it's that
| most people are quietly struggling in a lot of ways, which
| they see in themselves, but which are hidden from others. We
| could mostly be (and likely are) mediocre.
|
| So I can be struggling for real, and be a real "impostor",
| _and_ be doing fine relative to the average population of my
| peers, all at once. I see many ways I 'm struggling with
| things my peers seem to breeze through, but I might not see
| the ways I'm succeeding where they're quietly struggling
| themselves, and vice versa.
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| Completely agree. You have a very healthy way of looking at
| this personally, and this is the larger lesson people need
| to take in. "Imposter syndrome" is more a rule of thumb to
| not be too hard on yourself. The bigger, and more difficult
| lesson, is to recognize what needs improvement, what you
| can improve, and what you can't, in yourself and other.
|
| May you find your proper niche!
| btilly wrote:
| That's so good I submitted it as
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36331178 in the hopes that
| more people would wind up reading it.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| well, thank you, sir.
|
| I did actually Submit that when I wrote it. Getting to the
| front page is kinda a crapshoot, of course.
| currymj wrote:
| The level of fraud going on in life sciences seems absolutely
| astounding. I used to think that fraudulent research was mainly
| "paper mill" stuff.
|
| But in the last couple years there are so many cases of outright
| data falsification from famous scientists' labs and in
| Science/Nature/Cell publications.
|
| It seems even worse than the social science replication crisis,
| and with worse consequences.
| z3t4 wrote:
| It's like doping in sports, the cheaters get all the money and
| glory - until they get tested. The solution is more tests. If
| the study can't be replicated then there is a problem. There
| should be more tests in science, without tests it's not
| science.
| pneumonic wrote:
| La Round, er, Laronde, seems to have a singular focus.
| zoogeny wrote:
| I think that it is easier to spot warning signs in hindsight.
| Simply based on this article, it seems possible and even likely
| that the lab head was deceitful. And the article suggests that
| the company management was either naive to the point of
| negligence or possibly they were actively defrauding investors.
|
| No matter what is the case, legitimate mistakes made by
| egotistical scientists compounded by negligent management or
| outright deceit and fraud, it is amazing that hundreds of
| millions of dollars were invested before it was discovered.
|
| Sometimes I lament the fact that I feel nervous asking for a
| raise even though I have demonstrably provided value and
| delivered massive projects. One the other side of the spectrum is
| the gall to ask for 100 million with nothing to show. It
| sometimes feels like there is a missing middle.
| HelloNurse wrote:
| Witholding data, explanations and assistance from those who
| want to evaluate and reproduce an experiment is obvious and
| immediate hostile and antiscientific behaviour, not a flaw that
| is only recognized in hindsight.
| zoogeny wrote:
| It is easy to believe that is what happened based on the
| details in the article but what we are seeing is a filtered
| view in hindsight.
|
| It's like when you watch a movie with a twist that you didn't
| see coming. But then you go back and re-watch it knowing the
| ending and you gleefully point out all of the places the film
| makers put subtle clues which you didn't catch. Imagine
| telling the ending to a friend. He then watches the film and
| says: "how could anyone not see the twist? it was so obvious
| the entire time!"
|
| What seems in hindsight as "withholding data" might have been
| seen at the time in a completely different light.
|
| It reminds me of situations I heard stories about at two
| workplaces. Both were cases where a new hire was given a task
| to complete. They were giving excuses, showing partial
| progress, dodging inquiries. In both cases the new hire
| lasted over 3 months before it was realized they were doing
| absolutely no work at all. In all cases it was obvious in
| hindsight but during the course of the deception all of the
| excuses added up.
| anonymousiam wrote:
| I wish we had more details, but something stinks. There's
| always a conflict with "science" when somebody tries to
| monetize it. A possible explanation here is a desire to keep
| some elements of the process proprietary, but I don't see how
| that could apply to sharing within the same organization.
| mrandish wrote:
| > There's always a conflict with "science" when somebody
| tries to monetize it.
|
| Sadly, the replication crisis in science shows that the
| causes are equally present in purely academic settings as
| well. Status, power, job security or ego can be as powerful
| as money and the effects can corrupt someone subtlety and
| even entirely unconsciously. It's good to remember that no
| human is immune from confirmation bias or self-deception.
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| > Status, power, job security or ego can be as powerful as
| money and the effects can corrupt someone subtlety and even
| entirely unconsciously.
|
| Yeah. How many times have any of us had what seemed like a
| good idea, tried it, and found it didn't work? It just
| takes a little more effort to try it a few more times
| thinking that something was wrong. Eventually you might get
| a result due to random chance. And at that point you've
| convinced yourself that your idea was a good one all along.
| getoffmycase wrote:
| In that case I think the "monetization" is in the form of
| misaligned incentives with scientific endeavors. The
| incentives are having a job, getting grants funded, and
| obtaining prestige.
| csours wrote:
| Related recommendation: Bobby Broccoli's documentaries
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ett_8wLJ87U&list=PLAB-wWbHL7...
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfDoml-Db64&list=PLAB-wWbHL7...
| searine wrote:
| Love Bobby B videos. Second that recommendation.
| fasteo wrote:
| >>> Laronde, a Boston/Cambridge area biotech firm that seems to
| have had some major problems reproducing the data that helped
| raise them hundreds of millions of dollars last year
|
| VCs: How the hell you put 100MM+ in a company without having a
| 3rd party verify that the "thing" works ?
| deeg wrote:
| It would be interesting to know how many companies with these
| warning signs were legit. Is it possible that investors look at
| these as lottery tickets and hope that just a few hit?
| bee_rider wrote:
| Is it possible that computer tech was just weirdly susceptible to
| startup funding, and it is a really poor fit for biotech?
|
| Computers mostly are
|
| * well understood at every step (well, at least it was all
| designed by humans and the bits and bobs do what they say on the
| tin).
|
| * mostly involve producing some kind of output for everyday
| normal people to use, in the end.
|
| So they are easy to understand and evaluate. Even some investors
| can manage it.
|
| Biotech stuff seems to mostly involve making tools for other
| technicians and scientists. And the process by which is works is
| some ridiculous, quirk-laden byzantine madness that evolution
| happened to throw together. At least from an outsider point of
| view it seems like an absolute nightmare.
| matthewaveryusa wrote:
| It's susceptible for funding because the marginal cost is
| (typically) close to zero after the first unit is sold.
| getoffmycase wrote:
| It is an absolute nightmare. Biology is fundamentally fuzzy and
| our knowledge is incomplete. Biological actors, DNA and RNA and
| proteins, can act in surprising ways in feedback loops that are
| extremely difficult to track and quantify.
|
| Imagine every time you needed to troubleshoot something in a
| computer, you had to break out the multimeter. But the
| multimeter only works for one specific thing, which is an
| indirect measurement of the phenomena you're actually
| interested in and trying to troubleshoot. Also the multimeter
| has some serious flaws and biases that make it seem like it's
| working, but everything you get out of it is wrong and leads
| you to misinterpreting your results. That's what its like to do
| biology.
|
| A lot of innovation and progress is made when new tools to
| probe what's going on in biology are invented. For example,
| cell viability assays used to be conducted by literally
| counting the number of live cells vs dead cells. Now, you can
| use a photometric test that's extremely easy and takes a lot of
| guesswork out of the assay and makes it routine.
|
| Researchers fundamentally need more of those types of assays to
| make life easier. And that's where the dream and the profit
| people in biotech are chasing after.
| renox wrote:
| This reminds me of a school project (building a sound card)
| where I noticed that when I plugged the oscilloscope at one
| point it changed the output at another point --> I threw out
| the board and decided to never do hardware again..
| mwint wrote:
| Also, due to ethics rules, you aren't allowed to open a
| computer to probe it with your broken multimeter unless it
| has already died. With a lot of paperwork, you may be allowed
| to probe an abacus and extrapolate the results to a computer.
| HPsquared wrote:
| Gold rushes and pickaxe sellers comes to mind.
|
| https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/pick-and-shovel-
| play.as...
| pfisherman wrote:
| It is just a way for large biotechs to offload some of the risk
| / cost of R&D to VCs in exchange for some of the upside. People
| are always willing to make those types of bets.
| cortesoft wrote:
| No, I think software companies work well with startup funding
| simply because of the strange effect that unit costs have on
| software profits.
|
| The way computer (and especially internet) companies work is
| that once you have a working product, you can sell it a
| practically infinite number of times for practically zero
| marginal cost.
|
| This means that the successful software/internet companies are
| INCREDIBLY profitable, since they can sell the same product
| millions of times.
|
| Are startup investors good at predicting which company is going
| to be successful? Oh god no, they are awful at it. 90% of the
| companies they invest in fail completely.
|
| It doesn't matter, though, because they only need one success
| to make all those failures worth it. The cost of investing in a
| failure is WAY lower than the cost for NOT investing in a
| success.
|
| This means they don't really care that they can't evaluate
| which companies will be successful, they just cast a wide
| enough net to not miss the successes.
| civilitty wrote:
| It's actually the other way around: it's surprising software
| investing works so well compared to biotech.
|
| While biotech companies carry a lot of all-or-nothing R&D risk,
| their "product market fit" is all but guaranteed. Their
| addressable market size is well known based on patient numbers
| and how much they can charge nationalized healthcare agencies
| and insurance companies based on quality of life improvements
| is well understood. Once they have premarketing approval,
| they're all but guaranteed an exit to one of the pharmaceutical
| giants. The most promising ones get acquired in phase II before
| efficacy is even 100% demonstrated.
|
| Look no further than IPOs: on HN we lament all the unprofitable
| public tech companies but the average biotech IPOs _pre-
| revenue_! Before it's even legal for them to sell a product!
| That's increasingly been the case since the 80s due to the
| exhaustion of small molecules and other low hanging fruit.
|
| In practice, scientific due diligence is harder to fake than
| aspirational user growth numbers which are far easier to game
| (case in point: Reddits ongoing bullshit). The FDA isn't going
| to let anyone put a dozen people at risk of death in phase I
| trials without a level of due diligence that puts all VCs to
| shame.
| renewiltord wrote:
| A few years ago, I posted an anecdote from my family on faked
| science in a biotech lab
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25926188
|
| The problem appears to be that our present text conversation
| climate is such that you must either pick Team Science or Other
| Team, and should you mention that there are faked results
| hiding in plain sight, people get upset because they think
| perhaps what you're saying is "Maybe vaccines _do_ cause autism
| " and "Maybe HCQ _does_ cure COVID-19 ".
|
| But that's not the truth. There is no monolithic Science
| entity. It is a property of _every_ organization that reward-
| alignment is a stronger long term mechanism than fact-
| alignment. And it is impossible to direct the two in the same
| direction. This means that among the science establishment,
| there will be those who have ruthlessly optimized for the
| reward.
|
| This is part of why the general Internet arguer's approach of
| "There is some evidence that X is Y look at this study
| url://url.url/url.pdf" is often the blind leading the blind.
|
| Non omnis scientia est scientia.
| burnished wrote:
| Yes. Most people bring it up because they have an interest in
| a specific study or result being wrong, which I suspect has
| trained people to be dubious of anyone questioning The
| Science.
|
| And some people treat it as a quasi belief system, which
| makes sense, with precepts like 'the world is deterministic,
| causes precede effects' and so on. You could do worse. But
| they aren't scientists and they don't generally grok that
| science is an activity whose output is sometimes useful
| models and not 'Truth'.
|
| My mental model here is that you thus get people who trust in
| science as a paradigm, who then see doubt or skepticism as
| aimed against the whole edifice that is part of their
| fundamental understanding of the world, resulting in
| discomfort and leading to expected results.
|
| In other words pretty normal stuff that resembles when you
| come across an argument whose implications are opposed to
| your principles, that you suspect of trickery, but lack the
| rhetoric to dismantle yourself.
| namaria wrote:
| I don't think it's about the type of tech. Calling both groups
| "tech companies" is misleading to start with. The California
| start-up ecosystem is based on applying tech to create consumer
| products and once market fit and growth potential are evidenced
| it's straightforward to scale it globally.
|
| Biotech companies are developing new technology, in a highly
| regulated environment where, like other comments point out,
| there's a predictable economic niche. They only share a
| denomination, the dynamics are wholly different.
| eapressoandcats wrote:
| Lots of Biotech stuff does fine, and plenty of tech startups
| are basically frauds (WeWork for example). I don't think you
| can extrapolate that startup funding doesn't work for Biotech.
| rfgmendoza wrote:
| [flagged]
| AlexandrB wrote:
| I'm not sure what makes WeWork a tech startup. Renting short
| term office space is not a high-tech endeavor. But it's true
| that there are plenty of tech startup frauds, like Nicola.
| kneebonian wrote:
| Because we work isn't a short term office rental it is a
| company that aims to "revolutionize global consciousness"
| which is clearly a growth industry.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Revolutionizing global consciousness sounds more like a
| religion or something, but whether it was a, uh, niche
| religion or a real estate company, surely neither of
| those things is tech.
| wbl wrote:
| Tell that to Softbank
| fullshark wrote:
| Their argument paraphrased from the failed S-1
|
| https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/8/14/20804029/wework-ipo-
| tec...
| bee_rider wrote:
| I'm sure there are other great examples, but WeWork doesn't
| really seem like one; they were a real estate company, right?
| Cryptocurrency stuff maybe could be a better example though.
| ravi-delia wrote:
| I feel like Crypto generally delivers on what it promises
| in terms of technology. If I go to investors to found
| Holebucket to produce the worlds first bucket manufactured
| with a one inch hole straight through the bottom, it isn't
| exactly hard to accomplish my goal. Crypto startups have a
| product, it's just a really dumb product. But Theranos for
| instance just straight up never had a product in the first
| place.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-06-14 23:00 UTC)