I watched the HBO documentary on the Theranos disaster last night. Well, I watched the first half before I fell asleep. That’s not a criticism of the movie; the information transfer rate of movies (and podcasts) is just much, much slower than reading and the visuals weren’t sufficiently arresting to compensate for the slow rate of information flow. At least not to someone who has spent most of their adult life in a lab. And had already read Bad Blood and so knew the story.
So why did I watch it at all? Mostly I was curious to see what people found so compelling and believable about Elizabeth Holmes. TED talks and most news shows bore me (too slow, too facile) and so I had never heard her famously low-pitched voice or watched her unblinking gaze.
And now, having watched, I still don’t get it. Of course, that’s easy to say when she has already been unmasked as a fraud. I don’t claim any special powers of BS detection, and have been taken in by colleagues whom I thought were trustworthy. Maybe it was different listening to her in person, but I remain perplexed. She reminds me of nothing so much as this:
And why would you trust a snake?
But then, I am pretty terrible when it comes to persuasion. I can’t shake myself of the belief that a logical and well-constructed argument, amply supported by facts, is sufficient to overcome opposition, erase doubts, and win support. I mean, it should be, right? However, this just about never happens–not when writing grant proposals, not when making pitches to bosses or investors, nor when pitching article and book proposals to agents and editors. I keep making the same mistake over and over.
What convinces people are stories. Stories are mind-hacks. They take advantage of the associational nature of memory: the more links an item has to other items, the better we can remember it. And the more easily we can remember something, the more likely we are to believe it, an effect known as the “availability heuristic“.
Holmes made herself memorable through her speech and her dress and her affect. She certainly didn’t make herself memorable (at least not in a good way) by explanations like this:
A chemistry is performed so that a chemical reaction occurs and generates a signal from the chemical interaction with the sample, which is translated into a result….
Bad Blood, p224
She eschewed facts and logic altogether, and told stories. These stories were made all the more memorable by inclusion of personal and tragic details, such as an uncle who could have been saved from cancer if only he had gotten a timely blood test.
The story was compelling and it was told with conviction, without any hedging or qualifications. Never mind that no blood test has much diagnostic value for detecting cancer (except for cancers of the blood). No need to mention that fingerstick blood composition is different and more variable than venous blood. Nor that few outpatient tests are time-sensitive. Or that most results have to be interpreted in the context of patient history, which is why a requirement for a doctor’s prescription is the norm. That’s a lot of stuff to remember and consider, and it ruins the story.
When you think about it, stories are at the root of just about every dumb thing that humans do or believe. Stephen Jay Gould wrote an entire overlong book (“The Mismeasure of Man“) about how the power of stories overwhelmed the judgement and observational abilities of smart, dedicated scientists. He railed frequently (and of course, at great length) about the “just-so stories” that corrupt biology.
The corrosive power of stories doesn’t stop there. Every claim of racial or national or religious superiority is based on a story. Slavery, misogyny, genocide–every one of them is justified by a story, usually one found in a sacred text. There really seems no limit to the harms that a compelling story can inflict.
I don’t mean to sound the cynic here. Truth–boring, complicated, unsatisfying truth–catches up to stories. Usually. Holmes has been exposed for who and what she is. But man, I wish it wasn’t so hard.