Before it was announced that uBiome was committing insurance fraud a few years back, my friend and I compared our test results and found that our very detailed, 10-page personalized biome reports were completely identical except for our names. So I believe they were also just completely fabricating their test results from the beginning, and some of the employees at the company must have known this.
>some of the employees at the company must have known this.
what always fascinates me isn't the people who are in on in but the people who are kind of on the edge. From the Theranos case I remember employees not being allowed to enter rooms, secret chat rooms, people being followed by security etc... like, how can you work for a company like this and have a sort of Twilight Zone or Kafka novel experience for years and just be okay with it?
I think it's like boiling the frog. If they ended up in a situation like that abruptly, most would bail. But the little day to day changes can lead to boiling the proverbial frog. We all do that to some extent. Members of the FAANG group of companies indulge in quite egregious practices from an outsider's (wider society) perspective but insiders feel it's normal.
They also are sitting around listening to leaderships carefully crafted justification day in and day out. I’ve had otherwise smart engineers who work in advertising tell me that people enjoy looking them, and any criticism of “user engagement at any cost” is met with bewilderment.
I honestly believe these sorts of blindspots of morality and critical thinking are due to under-exposure to the humanities. A lot of guys in tech could do with reading something - anything - that isn't 538 or a tech blog.
Humanities don’t teach critical thinking anymore than a standard engineering degree. Standard engineering degrees include courses on ethics, basic logic, etc. If you don’t pick up the ability to think critically from that, you’re certainly not going to get it researching humanities.
I went to college for computer programming. Included was a course on business ethics. Later on a job near the end of the programming I saw a possible major problem that would put the company in a bad ethical position (possible legal proceeding to under payment, ANY UNDER payment). When I bought this up with the CEO of the company all he wanted to know was the costs of the extra programming and instead insisted they would manually avoid the problem despite the fact that legal costs would far out weight the programming costs if things went wrong. He refused the extra programming.
Engineering degrees include one, perhaps two courses on those topics. You can scrape a bare pass on the second try without taking in the material and graduate in 3.5 years instead of 3.
In a well-run humanities degree you would never pass the first year without being able to critically engage with difficult ideas, although I would have no trouble believing there are institutions that offer poorly-run ones.
I have a B.S. CS from NYU and I think I had 6 humanities, two specifically dealing with critically engaging with different and difficult ideas, 1 ethics, an additional writing course and two electives from what I recall. I imagine there are many more engineering degrees with requirements like mine. As an aside I also minored in philosophy and I know of multiple engineers who have done similar. I think painting with broad generalities does your point a disservice.
I'll also raise the point a lot more people simply don't care or don't believe these things to be unethical than I think a lot of people are willing to admit.
Discussing the different sides of difficult ideas in a classroom setting is not critical thinking. The ideas don’t even need to be “difficult” to practice critical thinking on.
Humanities does focus a lot on teaching students the current critical views of lots of things in society. But they focus far too much on the substance of the critiques rather than the process of generating and meaningfully evaluating them.
I think you are making general assumptions that are not universally true. I know its the hot take to consider any humanities program to be brain washing kids into SJWs.
Philosophy's basic main tenet is to critically engage with ideas. ONE aspect of that is to engage ideas in the politic sense
> Philosophy's basic main tenet is to critically engage with ideas.
And humanities students no longer do this. If they did, the notion of suppressing the communication of ideas rather than refuting them would be repugnant. However, this instead the first tool reached for by students who find something uncomfortable. Title 9 inquisitions, etc.
It’s not necessarily brainwashing, but it’s awfully coincidental they have nearly uniform political opinions coming out of university and can’t defend them when critically challenged.
> teaching students the current critical views of lots of things in society
Having taken the time to pursue some amount of humanities education next to an engineering degree, this isn't even close to true. If anything, humanities education is a celebration of all the things that it can mean to be human. That certain ideas are currently broadly in vogue in society (in this case I guess for the vocal minority you could say it is "nice at all costs" and "being nice should be criminal" with very little in between) is immaterial to what's happening in such a classroom.
I mean you need to read Marcus Aurelius and Kierkegaard and stuff to learn from the best thinkers on developing a purpose in life. You can do that in a class labeled ENG or LIT or PHL, the designation is hardly relevant, but lots of engineering degrees simply don’t assign this kind of reading.
Reading about the “best thinkers” developing “a purpose in life” is not critical thinking. It’s just reading. Reading about great thinkers makes you a great thinker in the same way that reading about astronauts makes you an astronaut.
Wow, that’s incredibly naive. It is absolutely not a requirement. Critical thinking and logical reasoning are relatively basic skills. Once you learn them, reading about other people doing it just doesn’t matter for improving them.
Einstein did not read about Kierkegaard to form theories on relativity.
You’re confusing studying philosophy with critical thinking. You can think critically with a few basic logic rules and zero knowledge on existentialism.
It can't be a requirement, because at some point there was a first great thinker. That one appeared in a nominal vacuum because otherwise they wouldn't be the first.
That is categorically untrue. Evolutionary, humans are a social species. My comment is it doesn't happen in a vacuum, which is obvious to the extent that it is impossible to live in a vacuum.
A man that somehow survived being raised by wolves would be tremendously irrevocably mentally stunted. We have evolved to learn language from the people around us as children.
I’m not saying you read a biography of Marcus Aurelius, I’m saying you read Meditations. It’s basically one of the enduring blueprints for developing a plan for your life from first principles.
I did not suggest a biography. When you read Meditations, you are ‘Reading about the “best thinkers” developing “a purpose in life”’. It’s still just someone else’s blueprint for “purpose”, even if it is a good one. That doesn’t teach you how to be a great thinker.
The humanities aren't especially good at promoting critical thinking. A very large amount of (I do not use this term lightly) bullshit flourishes in the humanities. The Sokal hoax was 25 years ago and the conditions that provoked it have not improved.
The Sokal hoax (and the sequel linked by the commenter below) exposes the negligence of mostly America-centric journals centered in sexuality/race/identity. But that really doesn’t represent the entirety of continental philosophy, and that shouldn’t be an excuse to ditch your education on humanities as a whole.
There’s a lot of bullshit papers in every field (including computer science) now, due to the corporatization of universities and its chase for numerical metrics. It’s our job as independent thinkers to wade through the bullshit, find the hidden gems, and arrive at our own conclusions. My current take is that if you’re actually trying to find some serious philosophy, don’t look at journal papers but actual full books by philosophers (which is becoming rarer and rarer due to the incentives to pump out high-metric papers).
Not to mention the unbelievably exploitative humanities academia job market. Anyone doing a humanities PhD at this point needs either independent wealth or pathological ignorance of how callously the academy is treating the careers of new scholars. You'd think training in critical thinking would protect you against faith in a blatantly callous institution.
Yeah, I really doubt that reading any given book has an impact morality other than inducing a sort of selection effect (i.e. people who are not interested in the environment won't read The Silent Spring unless compelled to do so in high school).
I'm assuming by your concurrence with the comment above you and your association of that comment with "blindspots of morality" that you believe advertising is immoral. Forgive me if this is mistaken, but hopefully it's clear at least how I came by this impression. I am here to tell you that a person can be a reader of Orwell, or Mieville, or whoever, and still not agree with you on a position like the one you've implicitly espoused. You can have similar base principles as someone and come to very different moral conclusions based on a number of things, like access to different data or relatively subtle nuances in you take on some of those principles.
"anything that isn't 538 or a tech blog" implies more than that to me, but I'd rather you focus on the other part of what I said.
They're not asking for someone to read some particular books they like, but to go reading around and sampling the variety. Your criticism only really applies to the former.
My presumption is the notion is that if people would read the correct things, their minds would be expanded in the correct direction and suddenly they too would see that advertising is wrong (or any other preferred moral position). But let's say you're right and the person's idea was that if people would just read enough they'd come to the correct conclusion. Either way, it is not correct. That's now how reading works. You can find someone with any moral perspective who is widely read. Being widely read unlikely implies any moral perspective besides as a proxy for affluence and education.
Nope. With the possible exception of moral philosophy. And even then, you get most "points" for making sound arguments for (what most people would consider to be) morally dubious standpoints, which is precisely the dynamic in play at all of these ethically bankrupt tech companies.
People can think different things than you or do things that you don't find acceptable and still conform to their own system of ethics (or model of morality). You may not approve, but that doesn't make "ethically bankrupt" a meaningful value judgement. It almost doesn't say anything at all, except perhaps about your views on ethical and moral absolutism.
If the biggest names in the game are ads and finance, you'll find a justification to climb your way into that job. What else are you supposed to do? A comfy middle class life is not a guarantee, and any ambiguous notions of moral duty are quickly discarded to secure some semblance of security.
So you take your money and then leave. But most don’t, they see the next income level coming up all the time. Are they at the “housing security in the Bay Area” leave or “retire at 40 or before/own a large boat/small plane”?
It would be extremely interesting to see what sort of conditioning or other source of behavioral differentiation (??) causes these people to simply not stumble on the overwhelming mountains of similar sentiment on the internet.
Did those engineers tell you that people enjoyed looking at ads, or did they tell you that people prefer looking at ads that are relevant to their search, when they made that search with commercial intent?
I have never heard anyone claim the first (Mind you, I don't go out of my way to ask people to say incredibly stupid things), but I have frequently heard the second statement getting misrepresented as the first. [1][2]
And there's also an entire canyon of statements on the spectrum[3] between the two, many of which I have heard.
[1] Mostly by engineers on, ah, this website.
[2] It's rather easy to make such a misrepresentation, just do a direct quote that drops everything after the word 'ads'.
[3] 'People prefer looking at ads[2] over paying', 'People prefer looking at X ads[2] over Y ads', etc, etc, etc.
>>> prefer looking at ads that are relevant to their search, when they made that search with commercial intent?
This is a good distinction, if it also contains the nub of the problem - "with commercial intent". FAANG have very little
(no, they have no) way of telling if my intent is commercial or just day to day existence.
I spend most of my life not wanting to buy stuff, and yet most of my online interaction assumes that I am wallet out ready to buy ... something.
(I assume (as a straight man) this is what most women feel like on a night out.)
this is also why I think duckduckgo has the right approach - for all FAANGs targeting based in behaviour etc, they are trying 99% of the time not to present the best match given commercial intent but they are trying to convert non-commercial behaviour into commercial behaviour. No wonder the ad conversion rates are poor. And we could get pretty much same response rates with context-only ads ala duckduckgo - or even a tag in google like "shopping: men's trainers"
In short FAANG are like those guys trying to "neg" women into sex. All the effort is in the wrong place.
Yes that's true. (Hilariously, duckduckgo does not track me so my search history is hard to work out ...)
OK: who was phil hartman, alan may quotes, history of netscape, treatment for wrenched neck muscle, dad jokes and campsites in the new forest.
So yes, you could sell me something related to each of those (a dad joke book, a phil hartman dvd) but there is no commercial intent there except for the last, and that's more research than intent.
I am not spending my life in a state of purchasing arousal (I think the analogy to women navigating a world of men is interesting)
But more importantly the lead quality is terrible. I think this is what people are learning - FAANG almost always provides low quality lead density. (More research needed)
It may be a good explanation of Amazon's 20 billion dollar new ad business - if you search for anything in amazon you are almost certainly doing so with commercial intent.
Commercial intent is not consent to be tracked and tagged. Would you visit a Walmart if you knew it had cameras tracking your every eye movement, even if they claimed it was anonymized?
Off-topic subject aside, for the vast majority of people the answer would be "yes". That still doesn't make it okay, but I feel like it highlights why that's not a good way to divine whether or not something is ok.
I feel obliged to point out that frogs, when put into a pan of water which is very slowly heated up, do in fact jump out when it gets too hot, contrary to the old story. But, perhaps humans are occasionally not as smart as frogs?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog
I haven't seen anybody sit in a hot tub until they died, usually we get too hot and then get out. That's nowhere near boiling. Obviously, the boiling frog trope isn't intended to be taken literally.
> Members of the FAANG group of companies indulge in quite egregious practices from an outsider's (wider society) perspective but insiders feel it's normal.
Trees? Isn't the traditional myth they jump off cliffs to drown in the ocean, as exemplified by the old Disney documentary where they filmed it, but in reality it was a river they were crossing, and the species depicted isn't even known to migrate?[1]
Not trying to be pedantic, it's just interesting how these things shift and mutate over time and culture.
One effective way to do this is to isolate the responsibilities of individuals such that no one but the top few have the whole picture view.
While employees may have doubt, they can justify their actions by thinking they are doing "their" part correctly. Which, I can relate to.
If I am not doing pseudoscience and am working on tech / systems that are good in my domain, why would I bother about the whole picture? Morally, yes. But if you have loans to pay and a family to take care of, and are getting your salary on time, everything else is the management's fault.
I can get a job in a similar field somewhere else.
And, IMHO, it is the management's fault out and out. The reason they get to take the big cheques is because they bear the responsibility.
It's not the responsibility of the average lower level worker to worry about it.
Having worked closely but briefly as a technical contractor for a firm that later turned out to be a scam, I figured this is it.
A combination of compartmentalization and churn can keep the charade up for quite a while, and if executed well you can have a pretty big operation with only one or two people being in on it.
I figured something was off but there's a whole gradial spectrum of Schroedinger's Accomplices where most people can seem to be conners or conned.
For this reason, I found the documentaries on NXIVM (Seduced, The Vow) quite interesting - the way the protagonists are framed and how everyone seems to have plausible deniability even with all the video material.
I disagree with your moral conclusion - we all have responsibility as individuals with regards to what our work contributes to. This goes for anything from military personnel to software engineers. That you don't have legal risk doesn't mean you don't have ethical responsibility.
Upvoted for your last paragraph, which is more and more important every day. Far too many software developers’ ethical compasses start and end at “well, the boss told me to write that code so that’s that!” We all have the ethical responsibility to understand the ultimate purpose of our labor and ensure it is a good one. “Just following orders” has a bad history.
> I disagree with your moral conclusion - we all have responsibility as individuals with regards to what our work contributes to. This goes for anything from military personnel to software engineers. That you don't have legal risk doesn't mean you don't have ethical responsibility.
Does that really work in the real world? When you don't have workplace rights and concepts like "at will employment", can you really expect the individual to have any sympathy towards the company or society?
If you and your job is as expendable as a tissue and you struggle your whole life to get one, be in one and earn the almighty dollar, where the lack of the dollar means your kids go hungry and cold, would you place higher priority on morals for "the greater good"?
Those who are made to do un-ethical things in companies are usually picked because they have no other way than to be in the job, or are greedy enough to put their morals behind them.
Good luck trying to force morality on either of them.
To me, this rings similar to people who argue against eating animals with "but what if you're starving and alone on a deserted island?!" (and no, that's not a straw-man)
I think you conflate these two things somewhat:
Of course there are always extreme situations when people are left with tough decisions and have to choose between "doing the right thing" and sustaining themselves and their family.
Separately, there are egotistic people who will disregard the consequences of their actions on others. For those who only care about themselves, it is hard to change things without changing incentive structures.
Finally, some are just ignorant because they don't know or didn't think it through deeply.
Neither of these are justifications to look the other way for those who can find employment either way and are choosing between an $80k job and a $200k job.
Possibly nefarious stuff, but indications seem like it's mostly just a lot of internal competition, people unwittingly building doomed prototypes and such, like the famed "Acorn OS" that was a candidate to be iPhone OS but based on the iPod firmware rather than OS X.
> One effective way to do this is to isolate the responsibilities of individuals such that no one but the top few have the whole picture view.
The following is probably just an already completely debunked conspiracy theory with zero basis in fact but what you describe is precisely how special compartmentalized intelligence works. Maybe many of the corporate and government organizations in security and intelligence operate in this siloed way, possibly at the risk of a lack of oversight and accountability which helps any abuses go unaddressed. Official secrecy oaths and classification perhaps compounds this vulnerability to misuse.
And except for the public heads very occasionally rolling, it's likely nobody takes responsibility (in a justice sense) when abuses occur. How do you get people to carry our these things? Simple finance, and isolation could be one way as mentioned. Coercive control via blackmail, planting evidence, fake accusations or intimidation could be other effective methods, especially when you need to secure the cooperation of key people outside the organization, and especially when your daily work involves intelligence collection and deception.
If it occurs at a deep level under the security and compartmentalization shields, then it's unlikely checks and balances could correct it if this sort of corruption was occurring.
"One effective way to do this is to isolate the responsibilities of individuals such that no one but the top few have the whole picture view.
While employees may have doubt, they can justify their actions by thinking they are doing "their" part correctly. Which, I can relate to."
When you read about iphone development Apple isn't that different. Only Jobs and a few other people knew the whole picture. The rest worked on their little area while not seeing the whole product.
> employees not being allowed to enter rooms, secret chat rooms,
This is providing employees only as much information as needed to do their job. Apple, for instance, seems to do this. So it might not ring any alarm bells with the employee.
Yup. I work at a non-Apple FAANG and there are many rooms/buildings I don’t have access to (and many chats I don’t have access to- it’s all need to know).
I was in a startup in the early aughts and had this experience. We had a telecom company that was supposedly building the "next interwebs for business". Ambitious, hard to sell to people since it was insanely complicated.
I was there at the beginning, then you start to see it. The closed founder meetings, no more team meetings. The hushed conversations at lunch. The rumor mill started to circle - VC money running out. The CEO blew all the money on coke and hookers. Nobody wants to answer basic questions like why the rollout of the new product is taking weeks and weeks to get going.
People KNOW what's going on, but nobody wants to jump off the ship, only to find out the company figures it out and all your co-workers are now millionaires and you're back at some other startup busting your ass for some unknown future.
People hang on, believing its going to happen, then you show up one day and the office is dark, the cop outside says you're not working today or tomorrow or ever really and you should go home. You hold out hope the company can pull out the nosedive, and when it doesn't, you have to go through the five stages of bereavement until you accept that it was really doomed from the start and you should have seen it but didn't want to believe this company was really just a complete façade to fleece money from some big VC firm.
I worked at a place that had a top secret "spam team" shrouded in secrecy. Secret meetings, separate code repo, iirc even a dedicated meeting room, etc. The official reason was that they didn't want their spam detection algorithms to be leaked. Coincidentally there was a lot of outside speculation about whether being in the free vs. paying tier of customer would affect this spam detection.
This is actually sort of reasonable. The details of automatic moderation tools need to remain secret otherwise they can be gamed really easily. Even manual moderation strategies generally work better if they're not explained (see - HN itself).
The thing about Apple is it is pretty clear the company is not a giant fraud, as they have a long track record of shipping functioning products. The company started by shipping a product.
Theranos, by contrast, did not have anything functioning. Ubiome seeks not to have either though I admit it is less clear a case without expertise.
You don't start working with a company if you suspect fraud. The point is secrets and a need to know basis like this is not uncommon in legit businesses. It's not a sign of a company being fraudelant.
As far as Theranos goes I would lay a lot of blame on big shot investors and the press. they had access or should have asked for way more access than the little employee.
Even if you work there and have a bad feeling you are probably doubting yourself quickly when you read that you are actually working for the hottest company in SV.
In a large company, this sort of thing is perfectly normal. There are plenty of buildings in Google where random Googlers working on Ads can't enter.
Unless your work interfaces with what happens in those silos, you generally don't have any idea about what's going on in the Android Hardware Testing building, or the garage out of which Project Loon ran before it was shut down.
I hope that most start up employees view equity as a low-stakes gamble and not a money-making scheme, because the odds of getting rich, or getting anything at all, are very slim. I know that's how I've viewed my equity at the startups I've worked for. Besides, there are way more tangible and guaranteed benefits to working for small companies and companies in interesting spaces.
Normalization of deviance. Little by little bad habits are formed and not stamped out because nothing bad happen. Until a space shuttle explodes. Then years of wrong process are found.
That's why you have to empower new hires to question your methods: someone from outside will see what is not normal, if you dismiss them you may be missing opportunities to right things before you crash.
It would be easier to identify these places if it was the best and the brightest that left. Those with confidence and/or the financial stability to not worry about it can leave. There are plenty of very good and very bright people that don't fall into those categories for one reason or another (young, external factors making it risky to leave, etc).
The problem is also that the best and the brightest aren't wearing always truthful signs on their head marking them as such. There is the bad manager spean "disgruntled former employee" to try to absolve themselves and try to discredit anything they may say.
If it was that obvious then we wouldn't even have interviews.
If you work in tech and you're very bright, it's trivial to see the signs of a bad workplace and be unable to find work elsewhere. I do not believe anyone would choose to stay if they were very talented, because it should have been obvious there were problems and it should have been easy to leave.
Everybody I know in tech that's any good has no problem finding a new job on short notice, including people with less than one year of experience.
That doesn't change the fact that in the current job market they can trivially find a new job. That may not be true in the future but there's no reason not to take advantage of it now.
You sound like you have no more than a handful of years of professional (i.e., taxed paid FT) work experience (if any).
As you get older, jobs aren’t as interchangeable.
Consider at least:
- compensation
- scope
- niche fields
- culture
- work life balance, family policies
- location
- golden handcuffs
- network
I can (and have) found new high paying (at least they were for me at the time) jobs within 1-2 weeks of deciding to look to jump and signing an offer. But as I’ve grown older, that doesn’t fly anymore. If I’m taking a new role, I require certain compensation levels, and that comes with certain output/WLB expectations, which means I need to find it interesting, and my family needs to be ok with the value proposition.
All of those things narrow the search space down quite a bit. Then as you’re more and more senior, and if you can command a large compensation package, it’s usually no longer a 1-2 week ordeal (after initial phone interviews, I had 10 interview sessions over 3 weeks for my current role).
You’re also no longer being interviewed by random engineers and PMs, but higher ups with busier schedules that means it’s no longer a concise 4-5 hour thing.
You might eventually hit a stage in your career where as a candidate, you get to pick a panel for you to interview for a second on-site. These things take time to coordinate and schedule.
I've got about a decade of experience. I still find it relatively trivial to switch jobs. Maybe that'll change as I get older, but so far it hasn't been an issue even when dealing with FAANG. Maybe I'm just lucky.
I think it's pretty obvious I'm referring to SV companies (if not then my apologies), since we're talking about an SV company on HN. Obviously the job market is different in other parts of the world, the same way finance is better compensated in New York.
If you think this is wild, just move to SV and it'll become your new normal.
I spent my whole week writing code to circumvent browser level privacy guards, to gather more data to sell more targeted ads. Most of us make similar ethical transgressions regularly. Ultimately we're all just slaves to the machine as long as it pays for our lifestyles.
I don't mean this as a personal attack on you, but for everyone who is similarly compromising your morals in return for a cushy lifestyle: please stop.
You're not a "slave". You're extremely well paid with in-demand skills, and you could do something else with them. If you keep doing this, you're no better than the tobacco merchants.
I think I agree with your sentiment, but should the GP be worse off for being honest/pessimistic/seeing things clearly? I'm sure there are lots of people doing what the GP describes that don't feel they are doing anything immoral. Are they in the clear? If you're actually participating in fraud it's one thing, but doing something legal but morally dubious like working around browser privacy comes down much more to individual perspective.
This potentially is another argument for laws / regulation.
What’s seen clearly? The comment asserts a lack of morals and takes comfort in an imagined crowd with him. The GP does imply he thinks what he does is immoral. It’s on him.
Why should you intentionally disadvantage yourself when someone else will just step in to fill your place? This view doesn't seem any different than expecting a corporation to voluntarily forego a profitable segment of the market.
Regulation is required in such cases. It's unrealistic to expect otherwise.
> no better than the tobacco merchants
Prior to a certain time, tobacco producers honestly had no idea how harmful their product was. Once they found out, they actively tried to hide that fact from everyone. I don't much like adtech, but unlike tobacco it doesn't cause direct physical harm to the individual. They're also pretty up front about the fact that they try to track you.
In the city I live in there are a lot of jobs in tech for gambling companies. I swore I'd never work for one of those companies, and know others who've done the same.
I often feel guilty for not being as altuistic as I'd like, but at least I know I'm not using my skills to do something that a net negative for humanity.
When I was contractor I had a contract for a few moths with a company that discouraged people from talking to each other and everything was very secret. It felt a little weird but then I thought maybe a lot of companies do it so I played along. For example you hear about people at Apple never seeing the whole device they are working on.
I guess from the inside it's not always so clear to the little guy what's normal company weirdness and what's fraudulent. Although higher up execs should know.
> Twilight Zone or Kafka novel experience for years
Most corporate work is like this. Secrets everywhere, managers acting like they have stuff to hide, actual crimes happening off-camera (and sometimes on-camera). If you spend a year or so working in such an environment it just doesn't really raise your eyebrows unless something really extreme happens. Anything below acute grievous bodily harm is background noise.
I mean I can imagine Apple doing the same stuff. The CEOs of Theranoses get there because they have an incredible ability to convince those people that they are working at a future Apple.
Paycheck. Ultimately how many people were prosecuted at Enron or Lehman Brothers? And honestly why wouldn't you be okay with it you're not killing anyone.
Haha, wow... my insurance company actually paid for their test for me years ago. I'm tempted to share mine here too, just to see if we both had the exact same results as well.
People can justify all kinds of things if they are making money. I knew one of the programmers who was caught up in the Madoff Ponzi scheme. He went along with it for a long time and enriched himself. He had to have known what was going on.
As someone who has had multiple tests over an extended period of time the results were extremely detailed and changed over time. They list every bacteria and the % in each.
Are you saying that you had the exact same list of bacteria and % of each?
Test are not identical. I have a collection of hundreds of different results group by a few medical conditions I was researching.
The data is extremely detailed
and changes to diet reflect changes to samples.
> The data is extremely detailed and changes to diet reflect changes to samples.
Can you verify that they changed in ways that corresponded with your diet? It's possible if they were exceptionally lazy that they just generated a new report for each date haha.
And there were semi popular sports personas who did daily testing and charted foods to changes.
My favourite blogger was a women who's sport involved falling into the dirt and eating it often as a result. Her bacteria profile was mostly a bacteria type found in dirt.
The field is open for a better managed company to take on these challeges.
Are you referring to gauging interest by setting up fake service pages?
If so I suspect most people can see there is a gulf of difference between offering a service on a website and saying its currently unavailable when people hit 'buy' vs "securities fraud, conspiracy to commit health care fraud and money laundering."
Funny, they must have had a good laugh at the expense of their customers while the show was going. I think a real analysis needs tho have fresh feces, if the customers had to send the stuff to their lab then that would not have been the case. (wikipedia says it was the results of a test kit, still not the same thing)
I doubt it was a fabrication. It was likely a software error You could have been linked to the same underlying database file, that could be the ‘default’ output from the bioinformatics pipeline when the quality was low, or some other mixup. They did in fact process your poop.
Employees were always trying to do things the right way. JZ just wanted things done and didnt care how it was executed. If it wasn’t how they wanted it done, they’d find someone they could pay to do it.
Could it be that you did have comparable results? The thing about ubiome was that the results were so high up the evolutionary tree (or at least when I did it in 2014 or so). So it would be like comparing a fish to a tree.
That said, it told me my composition was like that of an East African, which I am not. That wouldn’t surprise me as I have gut issues. My big hope for the next 30 years is we meaningfully crack the nut on microbiomes and can bring the next major evolution in medicine to a reality. We need these kinds of companies as a step 1.
