On Faking It
It is a long weekend in the United States, and like everyone else, I want to take advantage of the good weather and catch up on my long reading list of papers, articles, and books. So, I will keep this weekend’s newsletter short and sweet.
Last night, I watched The Inventor, an HBO documentary about Theranos and its founder, Elizabeth Holmes. It’s a version of the story that was so brilliantly reported by John Carreyrou in his book, Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup.
In the retelling, the documentary invokes Thomas Edison, who used a series of lies and half-truths after making a claim that he had solved the incandescent light bulb problem. It would be four years before he could deliver a working bulb, but he faked it till he made it.