Why so many people from the defense and foreign policy establishment? The epidemiologist is great, but there aren't as many business people as you would think.
So this totally doesn't exist yet, you can't get or pay for the tests and nobody knows how good they are, they just have VC funding which, with some financial hand-waving, puts her paper wealth in the billions. Is there a separate "most likely to suddenly not be a billionaire" list? It looks like she should be on it.
But yeah. Having a cool idea for a medical device as a college sophomore: good! Being at Stanford, having a ton of built-in seed money since your family is from old wealth, having the backing of government heavyweights your parents know so that you can last long enough as an enterprise to clear the many high, high bars involved in both manufacturing and medical device production and licensing: arguably more important!
Anyhow, good for her. She seems smart!
I happen to know a bit about this area, the patents involved, the business strategy. Dr. Evil is a good person to have on board for their plan. They're setting up a very aggressive IP position, marketing the fact that they're going to be x fold cheaper than existing tests to break into the payment schedules, and they're planning to build monopoly market share at which point we're all fucked. They're setting up to exploit the very non-fluid market of diagnostics, between IP, FDA, and reimbursement negotiation. Don't be surprised if in 10 years you can't get the traditional kinds of blood tests and this test costs more than standard ones do now, with a vastly larger profit margin for our little genius.
It occurs to me that I actually knew a woman who developed a best-in-class device for instant diagnosis of a dangerous condition as a college undergrad. I don't think she made a red cent off it, despite having the patent, but maybe there's still time.
I had been wondering where Bill Frist had found himself.
5 to 1- the reason for all the defense people is that military contracting takes advantage of some of the same kinds of market failures to lock companies into long term monopoly profits.
None of which is to say the technology is a bad idea- it is quite useful. But we're going to pay for it.
Dr. Evil is a good person to have on board for their plan.
If this is true of your business, it can only say bad things about the state of your soul.
this totally doesn't exist yet
It does, from what I can tell--at a few dozen Walgreens in Arizona and one in Palo Alto.
10: What if you just have a business concerning hairless cats?
12: I'd favor a board comprised of burly, no-nonsense Eastern European women, based on the stories I've heard.
Am I the only one for whom the name "Theranos" invokes images of a hulking purple-skinned death worshipper from Titan?
14: I thought of that immediately, too.
I also failed, this afternoon, to adequately answer a 9-year-old's questions about the infinity gauntlet.
Young, attractive entrepreneur worth billions doing medical industry stuff, with a board full of quiescent military-industrial lackeys? I kind of assume she's one of the aliens from V.
Okay, now I feel under-accomplished for my age. I'm not even a millionaire yet, let alone a billionaire!
Not in terms of dollars, teo. But you're a millionaire … in spirit.
not her natural hair color
Is there a blood test to determine that?
I'm sort of surprised that something like this took so long to appear. Tons of people were working on the "lab on a chip" idea back in the late 90s/early 2000s. A lot of that work was being funded by the military, which might explain the military types on the board.
This doesn't sound exactly like lab on a chip, but it's not far off.
Female scientists are usually supposed to be either librarian-sexy or sort of spinster aunt. I'm surprised she doesn't wear glasses to look smarter. (Yeah, I'm touchy. Because getting asked whether my hair color is natural shouldn't have a thing to do with whether I am good. No, wearing glasses doesn't make me look smarter, thanks. No, I don't want to be a sales rep.)
Nobody thinks my glasses make me look smarter.
If you look through the bottom of them, everyone looks smarter.
My hair color is natural, but I have no venture capital.
They're setting up a very aggressive IP position, marketing the fact that they're going to be x fold cheaper than existing tests to break into the payment schedules, and they're planning to build monopoly market share at which point we're all fucked. They're setting up to exploit the very non-fluid market of diagnostics, between IP, FDA, and reimbursement negotiation. Don't be surprised if in 10 years you can't get the traditional kinds of blood tests and this test costs more than standard ones do now, with a vastly larger profit margin for our little genius.
"My plan is to make ONE MILLION DOLLARS by dominating the blood test market."
"How will you achieve this, sir?"
"Simple. In stage one I will found a startup company that will break into the blood test market with cheaper technology. In stage two, I will gain a monopoly market share. And in stage three I will increase prices to far beyond their current level and exploit my monopoly position! Yes, what is it, Number Two?"
"Sir, isn't there a risk in stage three that someone will just found a startup offering the current technology at the current price, and undercut your inflated prices?"
"Don't be a cretin, Number Two. Everyone knows it is impossible for a startup to break into the blood test market simply by offering a cheaper service."
"Oh, right. Sorry, sir."
My hair color is natural, but I have no venture capital.
This sounds like the first two lines of a rap.
So all this hype is because this is The Silicon Valley Startup version of a concept that many many other people have, but it is inevitably going to be the one and only winner because Silicon Valley Startup status means infinite capital that it can use to make its products incredibly cheap until its competitors are gone.
What's the test for? I should read the link, I guess, but I'm just going to assume syphilis.
It's the test for EVERYTHING THAT YOU CAN DO A BLOOD TEST FOR. They're disrupting blood.
Everything-everything or all social diseases-everything?
Everything. Blood sugar, malaria, HIV, depression, night starvation, restless leg syndrome, liquidity trap, petitio principii, card clash, communism, transonic wobble and supercavitation.
And, of course, crise de foi, falling out and solar magnetic storms.
You can get a lipid panel and a syphilis screen for under $20.
45 is interior decorating advice you can use.
44:
Absolutely. It's had that impact on generations in my family, and I observed the intellectualization of both my kids, who had the home culture to carry it off. Doubly reinforcing.
I would have expected the social effect of this to have worn off generations ago, but it only seems to grow stronger as a presumption, and definitely impacts how others see you and how you see yourself, so to speak.
Pol Pot was on to something.
47: controlled experiment that heebie can do. First child doesn't wear glasses. Second wears glasses (with flat lenses, if her sight is OK). Third child wears a monocle. Observe the effects.
45- Add a liver function test and market it as the Night of Debauchery special.
It makes sense that the social effect of glasses has grown stronger. Contact lenses and corrective surgery are better and cheaper now, so glasses are optional for a lot of people.
The ideal outcome from my POV is that sometime around age 22 she unpins her hair and takes off the glasses in a sexy librarian reveal.
Gross.
50: Those really aren't options available for kids, but I suppose even so I would affect the culture overall.
Gross.
I think he means "rediscovers that she's conventionally beautiful and learns to trade on that, because why not?" Or he means he's going to have sex with his daughter. You never know.
You can take the boy out of West Virginia but ...
cheaper now, so glasses are optional for a lot of people
And in our Warby Parker age are treated as an accessory that people have 5-7 pairs of.
I wish the "take the glasses off and the mousy girl turns into Rachael Leigh Cook" thing worked. I also wish that when I took my glasses off I turned into George Clooney. Life is so disappointing.
And 54 was below the belt.
If you can't keep it above (the pants) the belt (is holding up)...
55.last: Yes it was. I hesitated briefly before clicking "Post.".
In the future, wearing glasses will just make everybody think you're in the NBA.
I hesitated briefly
You'll get over that.
57: I'd say this is a good thing in general. Turning long-term medical aids into accessories helps with destigmatization. And having 5-7 pairs helps with breaking them.
I hesitated a lot as a teenager.
49: "shoot, fella could assess the effects of a pretty good weekend in Vegas with this."
destigmatization
But that's what my glasses were already for.
Turning long-term medical aids into accessories helps with destigmatization.
On a related note, I hope that more elderly people using walking aids helps revive the walking stick as an article of daily use. I really want a reason to buy a sword cane.
Unfortunately the walking stick is not so common anymore. I think you'll have to get a double-barrelled walker-cannon.
65: shoot
Ob. trivia: Was "Dallas" in the original. But not when it opened Jan.29, 1964.
I blame this new rock 'n roll music and the hi-fi stereos these kids have today.
The market has provided canes with actual swords hidden in the middle. What the market hasn't done yet is provide a way for a forty-something guy to carry one without looking like super-douche.
69: Would not have been as obnoxious as this Dallas tour bus. Bonus strategic door handle placement.
Searching TFA for "sword cane" brings up 16 hits. Impressive.
I have few obsessions and they are durable.
73: You could go for the "middle aged Alex and his droogs" look.
What you need is google sword glass. Then you'd look cool!
Eccentric Squirrel Hill Cob House Resident Assaults Russian Emigré with Cane Sword in Parking Dispute. Suspect Later Apprehended at Nearby Bar.
74: Tour bus company weighing an ebola tie-in, I'm sure.
You could be the famed bartitsu master of Shadyside, Moby.
I hardly ever go to Shadyside, though I guess I'm about three blocks away from it.
"The stick-fighting academic of Regent Square" has a better ring to it.
I wish the "take the glasses off and the mousy girl turns into Rachael Leigh Cook" thing worked
I don't know what's not working for you. When I take off my glasses, everybody turns blurrily and indistinctly lovely.
Let's face it. Our neighborhood's name isn't intimidating in the slightest. It sounds like a joke.
But I do like the new squirrel-shaped bike-locking-things. Which I admittedly couldn't parse as squirrels until someone else pointed it out.
It is hilly, in an eroded plateau kind of way, and full of squirrels.
There are squirrels everywhere. But Squirrel Hill is the only place I've ever seen a Flying squirrel.
Away with this yet another digression into the hole that has no bottom, Pittsburgh neighborhoods. What's the deal with this youthful titan of industry?
85- And it's much cheaper than obtaining the equivalent effect via alcohol.
88: But Squirrel Hill isn't as hilly as Greenfield.
89: A'ight. I'm done. My understanding is that she doesn't wear glasses because she is an alien from V.
My understanding is that she doesn't wear glasses because she is an alien from V.
She should start showing up to investor meetings and press conferences carrying a sword cane. That way every one would know that her company is bad ass.
She should starting showing up to investor meetings with a sword cane because Dr. Evil might be there.
Come on, it's Thanatos or whatever we're talking about, not Palantir.
Should I call him Dr. Strangelove instead?
94 was to 92. Dr. Evil and Palantir seem perfectly congenial.
Clearly the solution to making it super-big as an entrepreneur is a name that makes your company sound crazy evil. Uber, Theranos, Palantir, Blackwater. Just wait until I launch Secret Volcano Lair Inc.!
Greenfield would be a good place for a lair.
That is, if you can't get a volcano or if you realize that trying to hide in a volcano is difficult due to the legendary persistence of vulcanologists.
"godDAMMIT those weirdos from the volcano blog are flying drones overhead again. What the hell do I even build killer robots for?"
96.2: but, then again, Google. We're worried about the danger to our civil liberties and our very identities posed by an organisation whose name literally is a noise made by a preverbal toddler.
I wish the "take the glasses off and the mousy girl turns into Rachael Leigh Cook" thing worked
Man, was I disappointed when I found out this didn't work reliably. Peace Corps, working late with a fellow teacher, glasses off, hair down, soulful looks...? Nothing.
Stupid New Zealanders.
100: hm, so names that are evil and names that are childish work? How big a Series A round you think we can get for Mr. Poopy Monster Enterprises?
My next big texting app idea, "I know you are but what am I?"
Baby Hitler. Company slogan. "Goo goo! Gaa gaa! Achtung! Schnell!"
102: Maybe should have stuck with mousy? An attractive New Zealander is going to be athletic and fit as all get out. First-year economics says that you should play up your comparative advantage.
"Torn condom? No need to waste it."
Clearly the solution to making it super-big as an entrepreneur is a name that makes your company sound crazy evil. Uber, Theranos, Palantir, Blackwater. Just wait until I launch Secret Volcano Lair Inc.!
And with Blackwater, they had to change from Victorian evil to cyber-evil ("Xe").
Maybe Theranos should just become "V".
108: It's a massive improve'lence over the tacks.
107: Not to impugn the fitness of a man I was actually crushing on at the time, but you're picturing the wrong kind of New Zealander.
You're into the unattractive New Zealanders.
I've expressed my irritation with Palantir before, but are there any other companies out there with Tolkienish names? Mithril? Nazgul? Gandalf? Most of the obvious ones are un-Googleable, I suppose.
I was at a school forty miles from the ferry that was the only way to get to the less populated island of Samoa, and if I'd dated a local I would have had to marry them (or at least pretend I was going to). I was working with the options available. Not successfully, mind you.
43: A crise de foie you can do a blood test for. A crise de foi you need a theologian for and they don't come so cheap.
Despite this, I wouldn't like to be raising venture capital for an app which will disrupt the market in theologians.
What I find myself wondering is this: if blood tests (for all kinds of things, apparently!) suddenly become much faster and cheaper, how many companies, schools, prison systems, etc will step up their use of blood tests and develop new regulatory regimes? In theory there's HIPAA, of course, but my home institution has about a million "we will give you an insurance discount if you will give us your medical history" programs for employees, which seem to be completely legal. How long before "unless you take this blood test twice a year, you'll be paying $100/extra per month for health insurance" becomes standard? Not to mention how all this could go down in prisons, the military and schools. I bet you could get a lot of useful information if you were able to insist on regular, fast blood testing.
111: I meant more that given what someone from enzed can find back home as a matter of course, you can't win in the conventional attractiveness competition. You need to take the competition elsewhere, real blue ocean stuff.
113: I've mentioned them, too. A recruiter from them cheerfully and enthusiastically linkedin stalked me. Creepy.
If the test works it's only a matter of time before cops are issued little finger-stickers to test for the presence of drugs in traffic stops and the like. I notice the test picks up MDMA and Marijuana (the only two I looked for), so presumably the whole thing could be turned into a drug-specific little unit that could fit in the trunk of a cop car. I doubt that the four-hour turnaround would apply to something as simple as a drug screen.
Since I haven't read the thread I'm probably pwned, but I was busy reading the OP links, unlike some people.
117: I find the steady trend of employers finding ways to use "health" as an excuse to push into their employees' private lives to be extremely chilling.
There's Elrond Hubbard, but I guess that isn't a company.
How long before "unless you take this blood test twice a year, you'll be paying $100/extra per month for health insurance" becomes standard?
About a year and a half.
118.1: Despite the fact that this was literally twenty years ago, I'm depressed now.
117: I saw that movie already.
124: The various realizations I've had over the years of failed tactics and missed opportunities always manage to depress me a bit. I've got some doozies.
If you search for Legolas on Google Maps, you'll find a housing development at the very northern tip of Charlotte with a lot of Tolkienian side streets - Hobbitshire, Elendil, Bucklebury, Brandybuck, Aragorn, Numenore, etc.
If the test works it's only a matter of time before cops are issued little finger-stickers to test for the presence of drugs in traffic stops and the like. I notice the test picks up MDMA and Marijuana (the only two I looked for), so presumably the whole thing could be turned into a drug-specific little unit that could fit in the trunk of a cop car. I doubt that the four-hour turnaround would apply to something as simple as a drug screen.
Isn't it a slight improvement to use blood rather than urine? Not detecting people who used something two weeks ago, but mostly people who are currently under the influence?
I shall choose to believe that none of you reprobates gets 13, rather than credit the obviously-unreasonable possibility that it wasn't funny.
124: Sorry. That was shit of me, wasn't my intent. But you have ended up having what sounds like a pretty badass life since then. (And actually, Peace Corps in Samoa is awesome, too.)
13 did get a snicker out of me.
129: No, no, I've been doing 'romantically hapless' schtick here for a decade. No actual feelings were hurt in the production of comment 124.
UCI has (or at least used to have) a bunch of dorms named after places in Middle Earth.
Sure someone must have started a hedge fund called Morgoth Investments by now, right?
131: Oh. Phew. I was thinking "successful marriage whose courtship involved a catsuit" would win out over past missed opportunities.
The catsuit story is something I think of as part of the hapless schtick. It was entirely ridiculous.
But it was successful, right? So it's not hapless but instead passes into sexy legend.
Results-based thinking based on individual episodes is the root of many flawed strategies. (See Ravens long-term contract with Joe Flacco for instance).
116: Wow. I hadn't heard of that. I feel like the mainstream thing to do these days is go to the Church Divinity Shool of the Pacific, if on the West Coast or Yale's Berkeley if the East. Harvard may be acceptable but you have to pursue extra Anglican education. The diocese of Northern California will not let postulants go to either EDS or Nashotah House. It looks like General could be on that list.
And holy crap, I hope that the woman who heard the Dean say "I love vaginas" sues on the grounds of sexual harassment.
It's totally absurd to get rid of daily Eucharist if your job is the formation of Episcopal priests.
So, now I'm regretting that I didn't read the link in 116.
140: Among other things, he doesn't want General to be known as the gay seminary.
134: and there was me thinking that you were after talking stage Irish.
117: They already do the thing where you pay extra for health insurance. Right now, some people lie and say they got the blood tests. I'm holding out, because I value my privacy.
I had a co-worker who got her insurance through her husband's employer, a biginsurance company. She believed that because she was healthy--exercised and didn't smoke--she should pay less. I thought that this was kind of odd for someone who worked with/served disabled people with serious mental illness who were poor and on public insurance.
She also failed to disclose to her car insurer that she used her personal car in her work.
I would be okay with cash payments to go to the gym, if we didn't have an employer-based health insurance system.
Having read the thread, I'd just like to say that the candid photos in 25 look like a very attractive woman to my eye. Aside from the fact that we're obnoxiously dissecting her looks.
144: It's Knecht, who has a long history of being like that. From someone else, I'd figure it was intentional chain-yanking, but from Knecht I think he's just really impressively not self-aware about this stuff.
But of course you're right.
I've seen the documentaries: it's clear that NZ is full of people who look like this.
Okay, now I feel under-accomplished for my age. I'm not even a millionaire yet, let alone a billionaire!
Incidentally, I've been feeling like an underachiever lately because somebody that I met when he was building his own niche fantasy basketball game (about 8-10 years ago) is now, at 26, VP for Basketball Strategy of the 76ers (with a reported $250K salary).
Knecht is the true feminist. I do think he's mostly right about 148--the most Zuckerberg got was some grumbling about his hoodie.
"Decidedly average" is pretty batshit, based on the photos you linked, unless to you 'average' doesn't mean "near the median of attractiveness" but means something more like "Probably couldn't make a living in a job depending on her looks alone."
Other than that, I don't think there's anything more to explain than that a professionally polished look, on a young, attractive woman, isn't all that different from a glamorous look. Starting from what she actually looks like, her options are glamorous or affirmatively scruffy.
This sort of picking apart the significance of what women look like is a thing in itself -- that there is no mode of self-presentation for a woman that's unmarked. At least, not so long as guys like you are putting in the effort to make sure there isn't.
Speaking of making into mannequins, I had no idea that Gigi was so recent or that Colette died in the 20th century. I'd always thought of her as being back with Flaubert and Hugo. Possibly because I never read any of them.
I wanted to say 144 but wasn't sure how. "I'd still hit that, but in a feminist way that doesn't belittle her success, and only if she were into it."
She's still, in my opinion, a very attractive person in both the candid and pre-dye pictures. It is interesting and sad that her presentation even needs to be a part of the conversation, but less interesting to me than her being a 30-year-old billionaire heading a presumably evil corporation.
Are our social norms on presentation of CEOs being directly transferred from the social norms we've learned for supervillains from movies? Female supervillains need to be hot or old, male supervilliains either ugly or European.
146: I'll be in my bunk.
149: I read 26 the way that he put it in 148. Not saying you're totally wrong about certain tendencies KR generally has.
151: I saw those. I just thought my response was more fun.
Anyway, Zuckerberg himself may have had fun with hoodies, in part because it played up his I'm-the-youngest-richest!, but my father-in-law gets plenty gussied up for his photos that appear in trade magazines or whatever. My parents joke that Jammies' parents look like a Viagra commercial.
Also, one of your "candid" photos is the same photo as from the first link in the OP, which wasn't included to display her grodiness. To me, the gap between her candid photos and her professional headshot is pretty bog standard, and we're only discussing this because we can't see her nipples.
156: Yeah, but 148 was still bullshit. The problem with 26 was only partially that it was an unnecessary insult to a professionally accomplished woman for not being a supermodel (and for fraudulently claiming to be prettier than Knecht knows she really is). The reading in 148, that if you see a woman in public, it is always and inevitably relevant and interesting to whatever she's doing to focus on what her hair and clothes really mean, is independently something that makes life hard for women who are visible in public.
This particular woman is an evil billionaire, I guess, so I'm not shedding any tears on her behalf. But boy it's wearisome to listen to.
She's still, in my opinion, a very attractive Visitor in both the candid and pre-dye pictures.
My parents joke that Jammies' parents look like a Viagra commercial.
I'm going to assume this is because of constant trouser-tenting.
a professionally polished look, on a young, attractive woman, isn't all that different from a glamorous look
When I first realized this I had a very clear "Huh. We really do rule the world" moment.
because we can't see her nipples
Maybe. Has anybody checked 4chan?
Semites have special nipple-viewing powers?
By the way, happy (or whatever emotion is correct) Yom Kippur where applicable.
I thought the issue with 26 was its revelation of a free-wheeling tendency to rate-n-rank without shame? Anyway, this study has probably been linked before (actual paper here), but some researchers found that physical attractiveness seems to matter more for men than for women doing pitches to VCs (women were generally less successful). I totally agree with 152.2, cf. all the "you have to wear makeup to look 'professional'" advice given to women.
Most companies don't have a glamour shot of the CEO on the home page of their website.
Huh? Of course they do.
By the way, happy (or whatever emotion is correct) Yom Kippur where applicable.
"Hungry".
166: Jesus I'm a bad Jew. I didn't even realize it was tonight.
Jesus,
I'm a bad Jew.
Love, Josh.
They don't count as glamour shots if the CEO's aren't young women. Men visible in public are normal. Women visible in public are only doing so as part of a strategy.
But deliberate strategy it is, if my nose for these things is at all accurate, which I think it is.
You're the one who also thought that Sarah Palin was deliberately dressing up as a porno librarian-type.
166 and the Gigi thing are both because I've been reading Wikipedia instead of working. I was trying to sort out what happened in which war of whatever coalition.
173: I think that is probably right. What else could she possibly be doing?
163: The mens. Straight mens. (Unless you really were talking about Judaiovision, then carry on.)
173: I sort of thought she was, too, but I'm willing to attribute that to sexism on my part.
That seems even less useful than trying to learn who, specifically, was fighting in which of the Napoleonic Wars.
It took me until I got to the very first company.
I guess that was the board, and not the executive management, but the links are side-by-side.
Given the purpose of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, a cheerful salutation is challenging. The most common I've heard is "Have an easy fast!'
Like everyone else, Moby, you've probably got Colette confused with George Sand. Or with "Cosette" from Les Miserables.
Also, the first article I linked equivocates but the paper abstract affirmatively states that "Investors prefer pitches presented by male entrepreneurs compared with pitches made by female entrepreneurs, even when the content of the pitch is the same. This effect is moderated by male physical attractiveness: attractive males were particularly persuasive, whereas physical attractiveness did not matter among female entrepreneurs." That last finding is kind of amazing to me.
Sure, but he wasn't running France until the Third Coalition.
177: Are you not remembering the conversation at all, or just contesting how I've characterized it? I'm not successfully locating it in the archives (can't think of unique enough search terms), but I recall it clearly.
185.1: Possibly. I've never read or seen Les Mis, but it's in the air.
I thought the post was referring to Dr. Everett Koop, and spend a minute looking for him on the board of directors website. However Wikipedia now tells me that he died last year.
a) That's not a glamour shot. b) The website looks more like a website for a promising startup, not a website for a Fortune 500 company. No one needs to know who's on the board of a Fortune 500 company to see if they're a real company or not.
Oh, thanks. And this:
Cala, I can't articulate why, but the simple juxtaposition of these ingredients does not a porn trope make. Palin's getup has that certain je ne sais quoi that unfailingly evokes a stock character from early 1990s feature-length porn. I'm not suggesting the Dems promote this meme, I'm just stating it as fact (or, more precisely, concurring with max). If you can't see it, you haven't watched enough of the relevant genre.
In Knecht's defense, he does not explicitly say that she was doing it deliberately.
She's on the home page.
She is? I guess there's a link to an interview with her toward the bottom, but the picture is grayed-out and not very prominent.
On closer inspection, there's a series of links to media coverage at the bottom, most of which have thumbnail pictures with her in them. Nevertheless, still not very prominent.
By the way, happy (or whatever emotion is correct) Yom Kippur where applicable.
Oh hm yeah I once, back in the days when I was dragged to services, says "gut yontif" which means "happy holiday" and which you say for most things, and someone laughed and corrected me. I think you can still say "chag sameach" which means..."have a sandwich." It doesn't mean that, but I don't know what it means and I think "have a sandwich" is a perfectly nice thing to say to someone who is not eating because god is mad at them.
I'm enjoying the ambiguity in whether 201 is defending Holmes' curated presence on the front page of the website or Palin's porno-library-hottiness.
202: "Chag Sameach" means the same thing as "Gut Yontif," but in Hebrew rather than Yiddish.
201: So, what exactly about the home page and the pictures thereon (is she the one on the left in the link at the bottom? It's too small for me to be sure) "isn't accidental"? I'm looking at the only thing on that page that might be a picture of her, and I have to say that I'm not blown away by the prominently displayed feminine pulchritude.
Indeed, what you said speaks for itself.
"chag sameach" is Hebrew and translates as "happy holiday"
"gut yontif" is yiddish, and I don't know yiddish, but my guess is "have a good "good day"" - in which "good day" is how you say holiday.
The correct thing to say to Jews on Yom Kippur is "I forgive you for all your wrongdoings to me during the last year, and may all your other sins be forgiven as well."
If you don't actually forgive the person, then I suggest avoiding them around Yom Kippur.
Ol' knipples ruprecht is backpeddling mightily.
208.3: Can we list the wrongdoings in the process?
But luckily, I forgive knipples for all his wrongdoings to me during the last year, and may all his other sins be forgiven as well.
"gut yontif" is yiddish, and I don't know yiddish, but my guess is "have a good "good day"" - in which "good day" is how you say holiday.
That is correct.
(BTW, the k in my pseud is not silent.)
Kanipples.
193: Ah yes, that mess of a thread. A nugget from tripp's meltdown towards the end of the thread:
With Ogged gone I think it is fair to say the community standards (whatever that means) of this blog have shifted to the feminist viewpoint, which is fine, but I think the blog description should be updated to reflect this change.
But now that ogged is back, I guess we no longer need the update.
212: Because I do love the last word, knecht -- the comment Blandings quotes opens with "Max is right, though." Let's scroll up to see what Max was right about:
Personally, I have been avoiding the whole 'she's a woman' thing. It has been bugging me all week, from the first picture I saw of her: 'She looks like....She looks like...huh. She looks like...hrmmm.' However, it finally connected when I watched the speech, and calling her a Heather is not the right description. She looks like a porn star. [Thus the joke.] The fake glasses, the affected bun, the slightly off taste in suits, the possible surgery, and the biggest thing of all, the fake tan (in Alaska?!). Straight out of every fuck loop ever made involving a 'teacher'. Or straight off the Fox News desk.
Kay Bailey Hutchinson does not look like a porn star. Or a Fox News anchor.
And she knows what she looks like; the glasses are fine tuning to allow her to get away with the tan. In turn, her appearance is exactly why McCain picked her, and why most women seem to hate her, unless they buy into the whole 'she's a good Christian woman' act. Which is going to come apart at the seams when the affairs start coming out.
Just to clarify why I might have thought that you were saying she was deliberately dressing as a porn librarian.
215: We are still claiming to be interested in golf. I suppose someone here might be, but I've never seen much evidence of it.
Jammies is off playing golf right this very minute.
Maybe he could come back and give us a report from the feminist viewpoint.
"gut yontif" is yiddish, and I don't know yiddish, but my guess is "have a good "good day""
I've always understood "yontif" to be a Yiddish, relaxed derivation from the Hebrew, "Yom Tov," which does mean "good day." Yom is day, as Yom Kippur is the Day of Atonement and Tov is good, as in Mazel Tov, good luck.
So Gut Yontif!, which may be said on any holiday but probably most on this one, does mean "good good day."
Can we list the wrongdoings in the process?
You are confusing Yom Kippur with Festivus.
It's hard to keep the different Jewish holidays straight.
You're supposed to pronounce the 'k' in kvetch.
I always want to wish my Jewish friends an atoneful Yom Kippur, but I fear it's in bad taste.
"Given all the shit you've pulled on me in the past year...."
Most companies don't have a glamour shot of the CEO . . .
Okay, out of curiosity, I looked up the photos of the management team for the company that Bruce Shneier is involved with. Would you say that those are glamor shots? They've clearly had a photographer take pictures of everybody with a consistent background and lighting, and the people that have hair have clearly had their hair done . . .
226: What? It looks like they went out of their way to achieve the "passport photo" look.
I feel like that's an effort to crate a taxonomy of rugged middle-aged men.
Now let's rummage up some candids of these shlubs and rank how well they clean up.
At least three of those guys have their eyes squinted in such a way that it looks like they are trying to appear dishonest, which I guess might be a good way to get in good with Wall Street.
The VP of Sales is trying too hard to appear honest.
a porn librarian.
I love the ambiguity of that designation.
I'm off the blog now for about thirty hours.
Gut Yontiff, everyone.
I would somewhat more happily go to an atonal Yom Kippur service than a regular one.
You could probably find a place with a shitty cantor.
I just realized the confusion about where Knecht was seeing the picture of Holmes: It's not on theranos.com, it's on the page Ogged linked, which is the "Our Mission/Our Company" link from the front page.
The equivalent page* at Walmart is this one, which does not feature any executives. The Our Story page, 2 clicks in, does feature the current CEO as well as ol' Sam. The CEO is talking at a conference, not photographed formally or in a tie (or a decent suit, from the looks of it).
No executives on the comparable page at Exxon.
Not going to take a position on any of this, just trying to get everyone talking about the same things.
*by which I mean, the first non-retail link available on the home page
I almost always look terrible in photos, more washed out than I do in real life. Plus, in real life I can pretend that the hair on the back of my head is more groomed than it really is.
Are you sure you linked to the right Exxon page? Anyway, there are plenty of Exxon glamour shots easy-to-find here, and if we're actually debating which link from the front page one has to follow to find the glamour shots, then this is a very silly argument.
241: me too. Just avoid mirrors facing each other.
242: I like the background for Michael Dolan's the best. It's kind of cozy. Mark Albers is less warm and fuzzy to me because of the windows. The gray backgrounds of all the other pictures just seem depressing. That's probably, because it's pretty dreary outside right now.
Our electricity rates are about to go up 37%. I know that I should be conserving more, but it is hard for me not to have lots of lights on during the winter.
Everybody's investor relations page will have photos of the execs. (Well, no, not everybody's, though it's more standard in Europe than here.) I also agree that she appears more than usually curated for hotness, but that's probably a combination of deliberately wanting her to look extra good because she's so young and innovative (and rich!) and that she may well want to herself and has the money to do things up properly, etc.
Still don't underrate the "she just looks like that" factor. in the context of what professional appearance norms are for women.
I mean, obviously, she, like every other executive who we've linked a picture of, is expensively and professionally groomed to present an image that they think will benefit their company. But for a pretty young woman (which, pace Knecht, she is) there really isn't an image of "professional but not hot" to aim for. She could aim for wacky or scruffy scientist, or she could aim for theatrically severe, but if the look she wants is ordinary professional, it's going to end up looking glamorous on her.
(I feel that I may be giving the impression that there would be something wrong if she were dressing and grooming herself to look pretty. In fact, no, there's not a thing wrong with that. All of my irritation in this thread has been about the fact that there is no image she could possibly have presented that wouldn't have been subject to this sort of analysis, whereas if she were a man, no one would care what she looked like absent genuine weirdness. It's like Jessica Valenti being unable to pose in a group picture with Bill Clinton without being accused of culpably having tits.)
I feel like we need a knechtel test.
How did I miss this? Children, that's how. It seems knecht said two things: 1) she's pretty average, they really dolled her up! and 2) we still live in a world where even the CEO, if she's a woman, has to sell with looks.
1 wrong, 2 right, no?
And of course Palin knows she looks like a porn librarian? Was this seriously a discussion? The former pageant queen? Miss "I may be broke, but I'm not flat busted"? I'm not going to click through or discuss it, but if you say I'm wrong, at least I can shake my head offline with the bros.
I am actually being sociable! I am down by the group cabana, reading unfogged.
246.3 is fair and I don't mean to fault her for looking hot-for-a-CEO or whatever. I don't spend a ton of time looking at startups' websites, but I don't think there's any way to look at this page and not read it as presenting her as The Company and thus what you're buying into. No other employees are listed. No one else is pictured. (No one has even bothered to decide not to use an Oxford comma for a list of two items.) She's just there with her arresting blue eyes and carefully tousled hair, which again no shade intended, because she is what the company has to offer right now. And I do think portraying her that way is a deliberate strategy. They're playing up her youth as well as her competence and how she's photographed and presented is part of that strategy.
242:There are two parts of the discussion. One is whether the corporate photos are "glamour shots" (which is probably pointless), the other is how prominent the CEO is. In the case of Theranos, she's one click deep. To get to the page you linked from exxon.com, you have to click 3 times*. So no, Andrew P Swiger (I have no clue why he's first on the page, he's just a SVP and PFO) is not the face of Exxon in the way that Holmes is the face of Theranos.
Chevron, Microsoft, Apple - none of them show a CEO type on their first corporate (as opposed to consumer-facing) page. Now a lot of that is that they're large, diverse companies, and Theranos is not. I have no idea what would be a more comparable company to look at (pre-IPO FB might have been a good one).
*again, if you're not hunting for the corporate officers page; Holmes is on the Mission page, not the "Here are pictures of our Board" page. Exxon=>corporate.exxonmobil=>About Us=>Management
226 doesn't seem to fit with 246.2. Unless it does, in which case I'm an asshole.
252: I'm not going to say you're an asshole for it, but I will bet that the dudes linked in 226 don't look anything like that good in person, and that some real effort went in to making them look like that.
253: Now you're just being insulting, LB.
251 is ridiculous. Exxon is not a baby startup. Their websites not being perfectly parallel doesn't make anything a phenomenon.
253 is what I was trying not to say explicitly.
And because I'm contractually obligated to disagree with LB (it's a condition of my return), this "professional for a woman is indistinguishable from glam," 1) is coming from someone who admitted recently that she couldn't read the signifiers in profile pictures and 2) even if we grant it as a general proposition, isn't true in this case, since Holmes has clearly (and self-consciously) adopted the Jobsian black turtleneck uniform--that's not just looking professional; it's aiming for a very specific image (it may also be her "fuck you" to the pressure to always look good and have her looks dissected, by saying, "Just like Jobs. I dare you to say something.")
So she is being super glam while also wearing a black turtleneck signifying that she's thumbing her nose.
The very important distinction between what she's wearing and the "Jobsian uniform" is that she isn't wearing dad jeans. Or sneakers. Also she's wearing a jacket in those pictures. The black turtleneck is the only similarity. At no point does she approach the weird casualness of Jobs.
I'd certainly agree that as a startup, Theranos is presenting its founder as the face of the company; I'd expect that's pretty common for startups, but I don't have a list of startup websites to look at.
the depressing thought that somewhere along the way, one of her advisors (or she herself) determined that "hot blonde"* needed to become a core pillar of her "personal brand", the better to generate buzz for the enterprise.
This is what I was pushing back against -- that a pretty woman isn't allowed to be visible in public without "depressing" people with the the thought that the only reason she'd be visible in public being all pretty and female was to manipulate people with her appearance. If Holmes, looking like she does, is going to be visible in public being well groomed, people will think she's pretty. That doesn't make her face a media strategy, other than in the sense that any executive's personal appearance is the part of their media strategy.
I'm on LB's side, except that in addition to being "well groomed", being the public face of the company means she becomes blonde. Or maybe she changes her hair color all the time, who knows.
Wait, you think she's dressed up to look specifically like Steve Jobs? In the pictures linked in 26?
What the fuck are you smoking?
251 would be more ridiculous if it didn't include the critique embodied in 255 right in its text.
Jobs-era Apple would certainly be a company that might benefit from putting its CEO front and center on its corporate page, but I bet they didn't.
258: I did think the claim that a black turtleneck is unsignifying corporate wear was a bit of a stretch.
262: About a third of the women in America dye their hair blonde. (No idea of the numbers, but it's a lot. For an adult to be really blonde is pretty rare; 90% of the blonde women you see are dyeing it.) I don't think that needs any explanation at all.
What do you want from me, I'm lounging by a cabana. Oiled bodies ahoy.
264.last: One of my points throughout this is that there isn't unsignifying corporate-wear for a woman. There is literally nothing that means what a conservative suit, shirt, and tie do for a man (that is, just "I am a business-person dressed business-formally"). A woman's suit is sexy, or severe, or schoolmarmish, or mannish, but people determined to dissect women's choices won't let it be just a suit.
That doesn't make her face a media strategy
We're not going to settle this without access to her emails with her publicists or confidantes, but I've been part of conversations with attractive young women going to business meetings where playing the "pretty young thing" card has been explicitly acknowledged. Obviously it happens. If you want to say that even mentioning that its happening makes the world a worse place, I guess we can have that discussion.
I would go so far as to say that most women color their hair, period. Maybe not blond necessarily, but they get the gray out, or add highlights, or whatever.
263: I agree. She's obviously dressing to look like Steve Wozniak.
268: yeah but using an innocuous photo as a launching point for that conversation is a stretch.
Jesus fuck, Ogged. Yes, the fact that you've met women who have flirted in business contexts means that while no one cares what the fuck a man looks like, it is always vital to be depressed by the perfidy revealed when women are attractive in public.
What on earth point are you trying to make?
you think she's dressed up to look specifically like Steve Jobs?
From what I gather, she has adopted the black turtleneck as a uniform (that was in one of the write-ups; maybe it's not true). You can't be the face of a high-profile startup, dress like that, and not intend to invoke, in some way, Steve Jobs.
(Breathing deeply, resolving to say fuck less often.)
I wonder if any women go out dressed as "Slutty Steve Jobs" on Halloween.
273: At which point, so? I mean, I really don't see it. The jacket over it makes it a completely different look to me.
If black turtlenecks are a uniform for her, it easily might be a way to finesse the neckline problem. Too low, and Knecht's going to get sad about how she's selling her business with sex. Higher can look dowdy, but a turtleneck looks a little funky? bohemian? (which I guess could be a Jobs kind of thing.)
I don't see it. Steve Jobs had a very specific uniform - black mock turtleneck (which is totally different from a turtleneck!), blue jeans, and New Balance sneakers. This woman looks like she's just wearing all black and trying to be as covered-up as possible, with a black fleece and long black skirt (or possibly loose pants).
I'm just trying to argue the other side of whatever point you're trying to make, obviously. I think you want to say something like: realize that you're projecting when you comment on a public woman's appearance, because there's no neutral way for a woman to appear in public, and I'm saying yes, that's true, and Holmes is pretty clearly trying to control the impression she leaves, going beyond "competent and professional" to "mythical founder."
275: It's the Slutty Bill Gateses you really have to watch out for.
I would go so far as to say that most women color their hair, period.
Yeah, lots and lots of women I work with have been variously blonde and not without it implying a corporate strategy.
Go ask them if their hair is dyed. Hurry. People are heading out the door now.
261
I'd certainly agree that as a startup, Theranos is presenting its founder as the face of the company; I'd expect that's pretty common for startups, but I don't have a list of startup websites to look at.
Anecdata: a tech startup I'm kinda friends-of-friends with the founders of requires two clicks to find out what they look like, and then you have to watch an embedded video clip of a news report. So she's certainly more the face of her company than they're the face of theirs. And they're your more conventional geeks: socially maladjusted 30-something men in academia.
But then, their company has a terrible Web site in several ways, which I feel guilty about because I meant to offer to edit it for them and never got around to it. So maybe they actually should be more the face of their company just like she's more the face of hers.
275: It's been done. Only slutty Bill Gates were variants on this, which it's safe to say is definitely a CEO glamour shot.
Pardon me, I have to go prepare food for the soul-sucking, mewling creatures the world calls my children, so that they can throw it on the floor and say they want pizza.
283.1: I was thinking a thinner turtleneck.
resolving to say fuck less often
Whoa, whoa, everyone settle down.
I went on a date once with a slutty Bill Gates, but I had to keep rebooting it [I'm happy to say that it's been so long since I've been on a Windows box that the better, dorkier jokes are eluding me]..
Dude. I had a meeting with slutty Bill Gates, but he wouldn't stop going down on me.
Back to dinner...
||
I timed "being social" to give me about 45 minutes of small talk before Jammies and the golfing crew got back. Jammies just texted that he's drunk and passed out in our room, goddamn it. So now I'm stuck in smalltalkville or I can plead pregnant, I guess, but sheesh.
|>
I tried making out with slutty Billy Gates, but he froze up when I did two things at once.
289, 290: Problems you had with Windows 3.1 is always good small talk.
Heebie, I don't know how to tell you this, but your husband is almost certainly not passed out if he's texting you.
I tried making out with slutty Windows 8.0, but I didn't know where to start.
I assumed that he texted and then passed out. Evidence for the latter being no response to "get down here you lush" texts from her.
I exited and am now back in my room, where Jammies is definitely passed out.
You are legally obligated to draw dicks on his face and post a picture to the internet.
I've seen candids of the Sock Club guys and let me tell you. . . https://www.sockclub.com/about
Haven't not really caught up, some evidence for ogged's points above as I understand them (if I'm wrong about his points and he's just being a jerk, ignore me): naive observers are able to guess corporate success from nothing but pictures of the CEO's face (female or male). Obviously (as she isn't dumb) the Theranos woman (and her presumably very expensive stylists and photographers) is very aware that this happens -- so are male CEOs, and the "neutral" business outfit is pretty much a myth.
Hm, possibly I'm agreeing with everybody. Okay! This woman is being positioned in a very specific way with regards to her look and visibility, and so is every other CEO of a successful company. That this is being done, for Theranos, in a fashion that gets leverage from sexist norms seems obvious, and seems like it would almost be malpractice, from the investor point of view, if it wasn't happening. It also isn't Knecht's fault, necessarily, although it may be.
I've got nothing to disagree with there, except to say that the following "That this is being done, for Theranos, in a fashion that gets leverage from sexist norms seems obvious" should be phrased as "is pretty much inevitable/inescapable" -- once you're starting from Holmes as raw material, any plausible CEO-type image for her is going to come across as attractive.
What drove me into a frenzy of froth-spewing rage was Knecht's "Isn't it a pity that she felt like she had to harlot herself up like that, not that I'm judging the poor dear" routine. (Note to careless readers -- not actual quotes from Knecht). Like any CEO, she's got a professionally maintained public image; given her demographic and appearance, that image going to be pretty much inevitably that of an attractive woman.
253: I find that a not-particularly-flattering picture of Schneier; if I know the other guys I've only seen them in peculiar hackercamp clothes, hard to judge. No! I have judginess! They should either wear ties or choose shirts with different collars: the unbuttoned button-down looks dumb by daylight.
physical attractiveness did not matter among female entrepreneurs
I bet it isn't linear, anyway. Not only is there no room between `groomed' and `glamourous', there's no room between `glamourous' and `slutty' and tastes vary and no-one gives power to women who they think look slutty. Different online board had an increasingly depressing week of discussion about how, for women who were busty or anything but lily-white, some people can't see anything between `ungroomed' and `slutty'. Serious HR-complaint-level can't see a difference, for women wearing granny bras and turtlenecks and skirts past the knee. I think V here is running as close to severe as possible without looking fetish-y, which is an understandable tactic for a young woman.
Also, she isn't a hot blonde. She's a cool blonde. She may also be hot, de gustibus, but the style is cool.
I don't think "groomed" or "glamorous" are really the right vectors. What screws female corporate types, arguably, is that their self-presentation gets discussed along vectors of attractiveness where really, for any CEO, that is going to get subsumed into different aspects of personality. So the human-mimicking alien at issue here is trying to look attractive only incidentally -- ogged's "mythic founder" phrasing had it right.
Neither here nor there, but the original post is really a marvel of online writing. Compact, efficient, good use of links, even a punch line. (Not to mention, except parenthetically, spurring 300+ comments.) I tip my hat.
302.1: Plus, their heads are shiny.
Anyway, if it makes you feel better, I'm using all of the time I've saved by not worrying about my personal presentation to dig a trench in Minecraft. It goes from the top of the ground to the bedrock and so far crosses two biomes.
I'm going to use all the rock to pave the Nether because the lava annoys me.
Seconding LizardBreath's analysis, also rage. Also:
My dad had a banker's glamour shot done every couple of years while he was in a bank. Very careful haircuts; grey temples desirable but posed to minimize jowls, wrinkles, stoop required. One of the photographers powdered his skin. Dark sharp suit. Not-too-aggressive tie. No pocket square (would be too dressy at his banks). I can't remember where these photos got used, but it was something the bank needed, they went somewhere.
Also, we get murmurs regularly about how Silicon Valley's philojuvenilia drives men to plastic surgery early and often.
I think 302.3 and 303 are saying some of the same thing.
302: What kind of collars are considered appropriate for wearing unbuttoned? Asking for a friend.
305: How often in Minecraft I've set out with a real creative goal and then just virtually dig a trench. Depressing.
What kind of collars are considered appropriate for wearing unbuttoned?
I think this is an open problem in men's clothes. That is, there are several collars meant to be open or at least tieless, but they don't read Business Formal to most of the US/UK yet; polos, the very sensible Philipino cut that I've forgotten the name of. Band collar shirts look good to me (maybe because one of my grandfathers decided in about 1925 to wear band collars and an odd crossover tie no longer seen anywhere but in Westerns. It's short; won't catch in machinery.)
Collars cut with enough structure to hold a tie rumple weirdly without one. Coder's hunch makes this worse, also I think makes ties and collars less comfortable. Women's shirts have started cutting very narrow Vs that only *look* like unbuttoned plackets, I suppose someone could do it for men's, I mentioned this to the CEO of Cutter & Buck once and got a politely neutral nod.
-d but guess where
I'm pretty sure that's going to cause an error
God fucking damnit, no one goes to the Exxon or Walmart website thinking "You know what's the best predictor of a company's future success? The people. So who are the PEOPLE at this company?"
This woman is 30 year old billionaire. She's a freaking unicorn. No one was saying Zuckerberg "needed" to wear a hoodie to do whatever the hell he was doing. All this insightful, knowing commentary about how women's appearances are judged is part of the problem, not the solution.
I hate those little half collar shirts. I had a professor who wore them a lot. They just made his neck look fat.
Me? Basically I'm on your side. The comments that this woman's company's website doesn't look like the websites for the world's biggest brands are ridiculous.
312 was informative and useful. I'm very lazy about how I wear my collars even though I can usually tell I'm getting them wrong. (And, hey, male privilege in tech that you can get away with looking kinda disheveled.) Thanks!
Don't let him off the hook, LB! Why is he even looking at you like that?!
No one was saying Zuckerberg "needed" to wear a hoodie
Correct. They were saying he needed to dress up.
original post is really a marvel of online writing
Hey, thanks. The new punchline? I had to check who wrote it.
One of the biggest things to get used to when I started posting here is the brevity. Two sentences makes a paragraph. The formatting makes everything look longer than it is, and so the goal is just to be concise and get something up.
But didn't Kevin Drum write about this yesterday? Sure. Actual thing. ogged is poaching.
313: hah. and it generalizes.
317: Not just because the collar was too tight? A stand-and-points collar of the same size would have been better?
When looking at a panel or around a conference table it often strikes me that men's business clothes focus everything on their faces very well, while a lot of women's fashion doesn't -- independent of showing cleavage and looking sexy, I think open V-necks dilute the focus on the face. What did the Notorious RBG wear before elevation? ... off to google...
RBG's present-day bizarro collars are in a league of their own.
I mostly get a particular radial net crochet collar and some rockin' jabots. Also, evidence that a lot of people really despise her. .
315: except, if you show people pictures of those companies' CEOs and ask them which company makes more money, they'll get it right.
Oh, okay. In what sense doesn't it generalize well?
330: Is that this study (PDF)?
Everything about this article screams "throw random shit together and wait for some correlations to show up with asterisks next to them" to me, but I could be wrong.
Nothing deep, that people's predictions about which company is more profitable (assuming that you're defining this as just net profits, not profits as a ratio of revenue or capital) based on CEO appearance would be wrong. In particular Facebook against most traditional CEOs would fail (but not those particular ones, because they're truly mammoth companies).
336: it is! You are! (It replicates.)
337: maybe? Probably not? People turn out to be quite good at making these kinds of judgments, which if you ask me is because people are quite good at picking up on social cues like "hired the absolute most expensive photographer".
Following on 336, as far as I can tell the single result from that paper is that perceptions of CEO power (calculated as an average of perceptions of competence, dominance, and facial maturity) were correlated with the CEO company's actual profits, even after controlling for the age of the CEO and judgments about the CEO's affect and attractiveness. I mean, this is one statistically significant result coming out of a dozens of variables thrown together, and there's no reason to think it would hold up in another study. (Perceptions of power aren't even statistically significantly correlated with actual revenues in this study, but I'm sure people are observing subtle things about profit margins in people's jawlines.)
300-odd comments -- has anyone mentioned the annoying lack of parallel structure on the bios page? "Elizabeth" is referred to by her first name, as is one other person. "Dr. Kissinger" and "General __" are referred to with those titles. Neither former senator seems to be called Senator.
I don't know who their PR/communications person is, but that wouldn't fly at my company.
Yeah, the correlation between ratings of competence and so on from face images and actual success in competitive scenarios (corporate success, but also electoral success for politicians) is actually quite robust and relatively easy to replicate. Which isn't actually that surprising, fundamentally, but anyhow.
I guess I'll dig up the research at some point, but I just don't believe it, and it seems like the sort of thing that is open-ended enough that you can see it everywhere if you ignore when it doesn't hold. In this particular example, it's not competence that's being correlated with success, it's a combination of competence, dominance, *and* facial maturity (how convenient that the researchers have the flexibility to assemble this hybrid measure). And does it track CEO pay or just profits? How correlated is CEO pay with profits anyway -- is that something that you need some training to investigate empirically, or can people figure it out from pictures? Can people distinguish between CEOs and COOs and CFOs from pictures? etc etc
I kind of doubt the quality of photographer that Zuckerberg can afford and that the ExxonMobil guys can afford is that different?
At no point in that study did they actually ask the participants to rate which company made more money. They ask them a bunch of questions and then found a component of those questions that had medium positive correlation with profitability. Said component was much more strongly correlated with age.
The closest they came to directly asking was the leadership assessment ("How good would this person be at leading a company?") and that had only a small positive correlation (0.24 not controlling for age, attractiveness, etc.) that wasn't asterisked.
So...I think I'm not impressed with what this says about people's ability to judge CEOs' quality from appearance. Or I'm reading this wrong? (I don't read a lot of experimental psychology papers.)
That should be "perceived competence" not "competence"
That should be "perceived competence" not "competence"
Or what Disingenuous Bastard, who clearly is more knowledgable of this sort of thing than I am, said.
Since you both seem very interested in this topic, I encourage you to check out the review paper linked with the second link in 299, which contains several dozen references that might be apposite.
I dunno, Sifu, I think double-posting signifies more competence to me. You might lose.
I should probably post a picture of my serious face.
So I read that review paper (which was interesting!), and the only references it had to predicting corporate success was to the authors' own papers, namely the one in 336 and the corresponding one for female CEOs. (Yes, there were references to electoral success, which is more convincing to me.) I'm still not convinced that this says much impressive about people's ability to tell which company makes more money from just looking at the CEO.
And even if it did say that, that's not the same as the ability to judge company profitability relative to a baseline of size and sector. They aren't claiming this is going to tell you which companies are high growth, good investments, or particularly well-managed--just which companies are big. Which is unfortunate.
350: well, yeah, dude. They also couldn't tell you which CEO has a diaper fetish. But for Fortune 500 publicly-traded companies, "big" is a pretty okay synecdoche for "successful", and I would hope that the article would convince you that people are pretty good at predicting a whole range of instrumental variables for "successful" from face images alone, and that this would be enough to suspect that venture-funded companies which aspire to be "successful" or "big" would be very attuned indeed to presenting their founders in the fashion that would best elicit such judgments.
this would be enough to suspect that venture-funded companies which aspire to be "successful" or "big" would be very attuned indeed to presenting their founders in the fashion that would best elicit such judgments.
Certainly based on my experience over the past week of looking at that sort of company, this is true. OTOH I'm not sure how you correct for the fact that, while they're all presenting their founders that way, they're also all following the same basic design template that's currently in vogue in web design.
Some of these companies are so hip they picture their founders behind shitty mutant smiley faces so you can't even see their faces.
They also couldn't tell you which CEO has a diaper fetish.
Can the fMRI do that yet?
351: Yeah, I guess the things I'm quibbling about are probably not that important and I'm misrepresenting the magnitude of the results.
353: I think it's safe to say I won't be trying to get a job with those guys.
Relevant to this thread, I was going to link to the company I talked to yesterday, but as it turns out their board of directors and management pages are both returning empty responses. I think if I hadn't already decided they're not the place for me that would have probably tipped me over the edge.
Maybe this has already been pointed out, but the images at the bottom of the Theranos website are in a "carousel" and appear to all be links to various news and announcements. They probably have a feed of media mentions and press releases that runs in the background and then someone picks certain ones to highlight on the front page.
Just on a quick glance, it looks like most of the news and announcements items have a picture of the CEO because she appears in the thing linked in some way: it's an interview, promotional video, etc. But if you scroll through the carousel, you'll see things without her picture, such as a picture of William H. Foege, M.D., M.P.H, linked to an announcement of his appointment to the Board of Directors, and whatever you think of Foege's appearance, I think we can all agree that he's not a hot young blonde woman and yet he's on the front page (sort of). Does that mean they have a deliberate strategy to highlight a photo of an older man on the front page? Or is it just that his photo is the logical image to appear next to an announcement relating to him? I think it's the latter or I wouldn't have set up a pair of leading questions like that.
There's clearly a deliberate strategy to make the CEO the public face of the company - but that's not exactly an uncommon strategy - and there's a deliberate strategy to highlight the company in the news on the front page of the website. The combination has the effect of putting the CEO's picture on the front page, but if the strategy was to put her picture on the front page for the sake of putting her picture on the front page, I think the picture would be right up in your face instead of in the carousel just about the footer.
On the Palin thing, someone should do a content analysis of professions represented in porn. I suspect librarian would actually rank fairly low. The study would have the added benefit of allowing you to say you only watch porn for the professionals.
Following up on the Yom Kippur greeting subthread, at services tonight I heard several different variations, including both "Gut Yontiff" and "Chag Sameach" (much more of the former than the latter, interestingly), but the most common was "Shanah Tovah" ("Happy New Year"), which has the useful feature of referring to the season in general rather than this somber holiday in particular.
If "yontiff" supposed to rhyme with "pontiff"? Is this a secret papist plot?
It does rhyme with "pontiff," but the etymology is as given in 220 so the possibility of papist influence seems remote. It's actually often pronounced more like "yuntiff," anyway.
"L'shanah tovah" is for last week, dammit!
Tell it to all the people at my mom's synagogue.
That would involve me going to services.
It would also involve you traveling to Albuquerque, so yeah.
I don't have their numbers, though. I guess I could send Josh the synagogue directory.
What good Jew would answer the phone on Yom Kippur?
On the Palin thing
I'm going to have to throw in with team Ogged on this one. Of fucking course she knew.
What good Jew would answer the phone on Yom Kippur?
The kind that would answer with "L'shanah tovah," of course.
I once got a misdirected, earnest apology via SMS on Yom Kippur. Also an extraordinary passive-aggressive email from an ex many years earlier; he may have been made woozy by the fasting? "I still care for you, even as you infuriate me" (we had not spoken for three years or something). I didn't respond because... boy.
heebie - hope the eye is feeling better! Should be starting to have some relief by tomorrow morning.
Important Vegas tip, from brief trips there for business - avoid looking at the carpets. Truly dreadful.
I don't think I've been to Vegas since I was a kid and I think I've been to Reno only once since I turned 18 and I still wasn't old enough to gamble or drink legally. Reno had a fun age-group swim meet every year that was timed to coincide with the end of the school year so lots of people used it as an excuse for a quick weekend + day or two vacation.
It's more efficient to write that as 374 += 5 * awesome.
381: already today it felt waaay less painful. Amazing. Yesterday was one of the most miserable in recent memory, and today was basically fine, in comparison.
He's going to post that comment every time someone in teo's mom's synagogue answers the phone.
Sorry commenting from new phone.
I'm surprised that there hasn't been more attention in this thread to the shear overwhelming amount of pure evil concentrated in the company's board.
I mean, obviously they can't be doing something as innocuous as making a simpler blood test, right? Maybe the devices you stick yourself with are actually loaded to infect you with ebola and then the company makes you sell your family into indentured servitude in order to get the cure.
There's just no way that that list of people would be involved in something that wasn't awful somehow or other.
I love the idea that someone actively sought out Henry Kissinger for membership on the board. What motivates that kind of decision, I wonder? The man is nearly universally recognized as one of the greatest monsters of the twentieth century*, not to mention, he's very nearly dead. What's the point other than assembling a collection of cartoon villains? It's too bad Ariel Sharon's not still comatose; they could wheeled his hospital bed into the annual meetings.
* If you happened to be inured to Kissinger's oeuvre of evil, the new stuff that's come out suggesting that, had Ford been elected, the US would have gone to war with Cuba might bring you back to the man's glory days.
Here's a link. Somebody get that man a seat on the board! He's an outta-the-box thinker!
390: My favorite part of that article is that Kissinger apparently said he wanted to "clobber the pipsqueak". Who but a cartoon villain would use such a goofy set of words to talk about an actual war?
Exactly. It's like he told himself that he was the Jewish Ben Grimm.
If we had gone to war with Cuba, and won, interment on Guantanamo would have probably been more difficult if not impossible.
VW, objectively anti-civil rights.
I thought Ben Grimm was the Jewish Ben Grimm.
I thought I remembered that Kirby had consciously designed him to look like a golem, but Google just turns up people speculating that, so maybe Kirby never explicitly said it.
I'm reading about Meadowcroft. The top layer, post-Columbian, was found to contain the highest concentration of Schlitz cans.
I wonder at what point in thinking through the Peace of Westphalia as a graduate student Henry Kissinger realized he would be on the board of a medical startup as a nonagenerian.
Mel Brooks is Jack Kirby was Jewish?!
It's not just my imagination that his sort cling to life like Voldemort, living far longer than expected, right? I suspect frequent transfusions of the stem cell rich blood of infants.
351: But for Fortune 500 publicly-traded companies, "big" is a pretty okay synecdoche for "successful", and I would hope that the article would convince you that people are pretty good at predicting a whole range of instrumental variables for "successful" from face images alone, and that this would be enough to suspect that venture-funded companies which aspire to be "successful" or "big" would be very attuned indeed to presenting their founders in the fashion that would best elicit such judgments.
What? First, the article doesn't establish a statistically significant correlation between CEO face and company size (revenues), just company profits (why one and not the other?) Second, Fortune 500 companies are all already huge. This is like showing people pictures of Nolan Ryan, Randy Johnson, Billy Wagner, and Stephen Strasburg and expecting them to be able to figure out who has the fastest fastball and who's coming off surgery. Fortune 500 CEOs are already a ridiculously small selected group of people who have passed through a number of performance/appearance hurdles. Furthermore, predicting company profitability is difficult even if you know things like the company's track record, the industry they're in, and the general economic environment, so why on earth would CEO looks be a reliable predictor (as opposed to a spurious corrleation)?
I can't take the survey article in 299 seriously because there's no analysis of what facial studies *can't* predict. There are a million things that they *could* theoretically predict, so why is it surprising that people are able to publish a body of studies showing some positive correlations? Is it that academics don't have incentives to churn out publications with spuriously low p-values?
404.last is so, so stupid, truly. But in a way where I clearly am not going to be able to make a dent so, okay, agree to disagree!
Right, you've already put in so much work with "look, someone published an article in a journal" I mean, if that doesn't close the argument, what other possible tools could be at your disposal? It's not like no one's ever published statistical garbage in Psychological Science before!
How is 404.last stupid? It could be wrong, but it's not like it's never happened before.
403: Right? But seriously, what do you think Dick Cheney would do with the existing scientific research showing the benefits?
Wait, first Ben Grimm and now Dick Cheney? My tribe grows bigger every day.
After seeing the composition of the board, I think she ought to change the name of the company to SPECTRE, and appear at investor meetings stroking a white cat.
410: Surely a black cat, if she wants to keep the black turtlenecks.
A white cat before Labor Day, and a black one after.
A chimera cat engineered to be black on one side and cream on the other.
Must I even say "Schroedinger"?
I just want to say I fell into the world's biggest internet hole today reading about the Fleischmann's yeast fortune, the Fleischmann-Holmes family cabal, Christian Holmes' crazy Hawaii estate, Ambassador Genta Holmes, CEO Holmes's father's tenure at the EPA, acetaldehyde pollution from yeast factories, Oakland's old yeast factories, Nora Holmes and Congressmen Critz and Murtha, and Tenneco. It's all Ogged's fault, I am now convinced Dr. Evil is but the tip of the iceberg, and I am probably going to have nightmares invoking Nancy Kress's novel Oaths and Miracles b/c this sure seems like a an implementation of Cadaverico. If you don't hear from me for a while its b/c I gave up on society and moved off grid, or b/c the fucking Palantir got me.
I just want to say I fell into the world's biggest internet hole today reading about the Fleischmann's yeast fortune, the Fleischmann-Holmes family cabal, Christian Holmes' crazy Hawaii estate, Ambassador Genta Holmes, CEO Holmes's father's tenure at the EPA, acetaldehyde pollution from yeast factories, Oakland's old yeast factories, Nora Holmes and Congressmen Critz and Murtha, and Tenneco. It's all Ogged's fault, I am now convinced Dr. Evil is but the tip of the iceberg, and I am probably going to have nightmares invoking Nancy Kress's novel Oaths and Miracles b/c this sure seems like a an implementation of Cadaverico. If you don't hear from me for a while its b/c I gave up on society and moved off grid, or b/c the fucking Palantir got me.
The very rich are different from you and me: they're pure evil, whereas the rest of us are only partly evil.
My dreams were *off the hook*. But that might be b/c it turns out I'm sick and was probably getting sick yesterday. So I guess it's only partially Ogged's fault.
The're pure evil *and rich*. My being partly evil and having no money is *particularly* frustrating.
