One of the most irritating things about Theranos's defenders is their argument about how Theranos should be given lesser scrutiny because of how important and noble its mission is...that's the exact opposite of how it should be, IMO.
Using Facebook as the archetypical unjustifiably-rich-startup (not my opinion, just well-repeated), in which the goal is to lower friction between friend-network-contacts...even if FB's news feed algorithm was corrupt, users have multiple ways of assessing the quality of their experience -- including out-of-band assessments (um, hanging out with friends IRL) and being able to defriend/filter lists...
The whole point of Theranos is to reduce the friction in personal health assessment...which is a great idea regardless of noble motives...but lowering friction essentially means being able to more frequently collect and analyze data about yourself. If the assessment process is bad, then using more of the product is fundamentally terrible for the person. But the bigger problem is that it isn't easy to compare health tests...if getting an old-fashioned blood draw test was trivial, then Theranos would have no purpose in the first place. So with Theranos, the easily imaginable bad-case scenario is literally that people die because of false positives and negatives, no matter the kind motives and ambitions of Holmes.
But I have to admit...at least Theranos believes in their own product? Because if it were just snake oil, they probably would've worked out a way to not use their flawed procedures for the Safeway executives, who have much interest and motive (and money) to do comparative quality testing. (unless of course the Safeway execs conducted their own blind tests...which is obviously what they should do but obviously, not all big money executives have been that skeptical of Theranos)
Using Facebook as the archetypical unjustifiably-rich-startup (not my opinion, just well-repeated), in which the goal is to lower friction between friend-network-contacts...even if FB's news feed algorithm was corrupt, users have multiple ways of assessing the quality of their experience -- including out-of-band assessments (um, hanging out with friends IRL) and being able to defriend/filter lists...
The whole point of Theranos is to reduce the friction in personal health assessment...which is a great idea regardless of noble motives...but lowering friction essentially means being able to more frequently collect and analyze data about yourself. If the assessment process is bad, then using more of the product is fundamentally terrible for the person. But the bigger problem is that it isn't easy to compare health tests...if getting an old-fashioned blood draw test was trivial, then Theranos would have no purpose in the first place. So with Theranos, the easily imaginable bad-case scenario is literally that people die because of false positives and negatives, no matter the kind motives and ambitions of Holmes.
But I have to admit...at least Theranos believes in their own product? Because if it were just snake oil, they probably would've worked out a way to not use their flawed procedures for the Safeway executives, who have much interest and motive (and money) to do comparative quality testing. (unless of course the Safeway execs conducted their own blind tests...which is obviously what they should do but obviously, not all big money executives have been that skeptical of Theranos)