Skip to main content

Tamny for Holmes

Image result for Theranos

John Tamny has written about the Theranos "Bad Blood" case for the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER) and seems to have gotten it utterly wrong. He thinks one ought to stand up for Elizabeth Holmes out of some admiration for heroic entrepreneurship.

Sorry, but Holmes is the kind of crook who gives the ideal of heroic entrepreneurship a bad name.

Every securities fraudster, when caught blames the losses of his victims on the fact that he got caught.  It is a very old and very tired line.

I might tell you, dear reader, that I have an algorithm that allows me to take advantage of inefficiencies on the onion futures exchanges. I might take your money, transfer it to my Swiss back account, and then with every appearance of broken heartedness, tell you that my well-intentioned scheme went awry. We lost your money. Those darned unreliable onion futures exchanges.

If I'm caught, though (perhaps by authorities who are aware that there are no onion futures exchanges) I have another excuse. I could have made money on onion futures (through over-the-counter trades -- you didn't think I was serious when I said 'exchanges' did you?) I will say, "Damnation! Being busted interrupted my deal. I was just about to get that algorithm to work and pay everybody involved their principal AND a nice profit.)

It is always crap and always irrelevant, yet that is what Tamny is saying.

Bah.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.   We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a majesti
9 comments
Read more

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere.  At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak
17 comments
Read more

Five Lessons from the Allegory of the Cave

  Please correct me if there are others. But it seems to be there are five lessons the reader is meant to draw from the story about the cave.   First, Plato  is working to devalue what we would call empiricism. He is saying that keeping track of the shadows on the cave wall, trying to make sense of what you see there, will NOT get you to wisdom. Second, Plato is contending that reality comes in levels. The shadows on the wall are illusions. The solid objects being passed around behind my back are more real than their shadows are. BUT … the world outside the the cave is more real than that — and the sun by which that world is illuminated is the top of the hierarchy. So there isn’t a binary choice of real/unreal. There are levels. Third, he equates realness with knowability.  I  only have opinions about the shadows. Could I turn around, I could have at least the glimmerings of knowledge. Could I get outside the cave, I would really Know. Fourth, the parable assigns a task to philosophers
Post a Comment
Read more