{"id":59877,"date":"2021-10-14T07:35:37","date_gmt":"2021-10-14T12:35:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=59877"},"modified":"2021-10-14T07:35:37","modified_gmt":"2021-10-14T12:35:37","slug":"feynmans-law-writ-large","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=59877","title":{"rendered":"Feynman\u2019s Law writ large"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Feynman\u2019s Law writ large<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Elizabeth Holmes, Chairman and CEO of Theranos, is a living archetype for the modern age.\u00a0 Lauded by\u00a0upmarket glossy magazines<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0heralded as a symbol of modern feminism<\/a>, Holmes was the world\u2019s first female tech billionaire.\u00a0 In the tradition of Apple\u2019s Steve Jobs and Tesla\u2019s Elon Musk, Holmes was a driven individual determined to push aside the bureaucrats and naysayers who stand in the way of progress.\u00a0 A university drop-out with no background in medicine nor tech, Holmes convinced some of America\u2019s most powerful men \u2013 including Henry Kissinger, George Schultz and Bill Clinton \u2013 that she had succeeded where thousands had failed in developing a\u00a0Star Trek<\/em>-type non-invasive blood testing technology.\u00a0 But Holmes was closer to Elon Musk than to Steve Jobs, in that, like Musk\u2019s hyperloops, solar roofs and Martian colonies, Holmes\u2019\u00a0blood testing technology was a work of fantasy<\/a>.\u00a0 Unlike Musk \u2013 so far at least \u2013 Holmes is currently on trial for fraud and faces up to twenty years in jail if convicted.<\/p>\n

My interest here is less to do with Holmes so much as with the technicians and engineers who she employed to work on the development of a technology which all of them must have known could never work.\u00a0 Nevertheless, almost all of them continued to take their monthly salary in exchange for long hours and considerable effort which they knew could never pay off.\u00a0 John Michael Greer offers\u00a0a plausible explanation<\/a>\u00a0for why this occurred:<\/p>\n

\u201cCrackpot realism is one of the downsides of the division of labor. It emerges reliably whenever two conditions are in effect. The first condition is that the task of choosing goals for an activity is assigned to one group of people and the task of finding means to achieve those goals is left to a different group of people…<\/em><\/p>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Feynman\u2019s Law writ large Elizabeth Holmes, Chairman and CEO of Theranos, is a living archetype for the modern age.\u00a0 Lauded by\u00a0upmarket glossy magazines\u00a0and\u00a0heralded as a symbol of modern feminism, Holmes was the world\u2019s first female tech billionaire.\u00a0 In the tradition of Apple\u2019s Steve Jobs and Tesla\u2019s Elon Musk, Holmes was a driven individual determined to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,7],"tags":[265,1394,786,31962,31360],"class_list":["post-59877","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-energy-2","category-survival-2","tag-energy-crisis","tag-safety","tag-technology","tag-the-consciouness-of-sheep","tag-tim-watkins"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59877","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=59877"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59877\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":59878,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59877\/revisions\/59878"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=59877"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=59877"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=59877"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}