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I recently read Bad Blood and Original Sin. Bad Blood is about the downfall of Theranos and Elizabeth Holmes and the fraud that she committed. Original Sin is about the uncovering of Biden's mental degradation and the lead up to his decision to drop out of the presidential race.
I liked both books quite a bit, and I learned more from them than from most things that I read. I particularly enjoyed reading them one after the other because I thought that, despite addressing in many superficial ways very disparate situations, they had a lot of interesting commonalities that seem like they say something important about human nature and epistemics (including reinforcing a bunch of lessons I feel like I learned from the experience with FTX).
A few of those commonalities:
- Both deal with the concealment of extremely valuable and in some sense difficult-to-conceal information for an extended period of time.
- Both feature very driven and intelligent people who commit profound acts of self-deception that were very damaging for them, the people around them, and to some extent the world. Both “got in too deep” such that there was probably no escape that seemed good by their lights by the end.
- I think this is an underrated point: the extent to which self-delusion and selfishness can bring people to take actions that are clearly incredibly destructive and irrational from their own perspective. Especially with Holmes, who must have been aware of the profound shortcomings of her technology even as she pushed forward with deploying it, it seems pretty clear that she was "walking dead" for quite a while. Towards the end, she was in a bad situation with no real chance of success, towards the end. Yet she continued to double down and dig herself deeper.
- There's something especially depressing about this. Not only can smart, well resourced people be selfish and sadistic, they can do horrible, destructive things to prolong a situation that isn’t even good from their own perspective, perhaps because the short-term pain of coming clean is too aversive even if it’d reduce their long term suffering.
- Arguably, both “fly too close to the sun” and miss out on nearby worlds where they left much better legacies (if Biden had stopped at the end of his first term, if Elizabeth had settled for being a smart, driven and very charismatic person who probably could have risen to a relatively high level in a legitimate business).
- This doesn't seem like an unfortunate accident. Both got to positions of prominence by seeking and holding on to power.
- Both additionally deal with a collection of accomplished, well-resourced people who are adjacent to the deception and have a lot to lose from it, and yet fail to act quickly and effectively to reduce the damage.
A few lessons I took from them (not new, but I thought they were particularly poignant examples):
- Having generically smart, competent people adjacent to a situation absolutely does not guarantee that even really obvious and important things will get done with any reliability or quality. It's easy for things to fall between the cracks, For something to be aversive and get deprioritized by busy people. It's easy for something to not be anyone's job. It's easy for someone to be smart and successful in many domains, but completely miscalibrated, ignorant, or catastrophically distracted in others.
- Intimidation and harassment of potential whistleblowers is often effective for extended periods of time. Extreme insularity and litigiousness is at least a yellow flag.
From Original Sin
- A huge disanalogy between the two books is that in Original Sin, a big factor was prominent Democrats thinking that they needed to back Biden despite their misgivings to increase the chances that he beat Trump. While I think this is ethically fraught and backfired in the end, it's easy to see how they arrived at that position, and the reasoning that got them there seems potentially compelling. This isn't as much the case with Bad Blood.
- The book seems like it doesn't really want to call out prominent Democrats other than Biden's inner circle as having fucked up. But assessing the suitability of the presidential candidate really seems like one of the most important roles and responsibilities of senior party officials, so I feel pretty bad about their performance there.
- Personal connections seem like they were pretty destructive. A lot of people seemed very reluctant to damage the prospects of someone they considered a friend, even when they thought the fate of American democracy could potentially be at stake, even when they thought it could mean the difference between a competent and incompetent president.
- Biden is depicted as surrounding himself largely with sycophants who come to rely on him as their own personal sources of power and who hide poll numbers for him. And then, as a consequence, ending up with really miscalibrated takes on his probability of winning the election. I think I hadn't fully processed the degree to which one effect of surrounding yourself with people who rely on you for power might push you to take risks to retain your power that you, if you were clear-headed, might think better of.
And from Bad Blood in particular:
- Important companies can leverage and deceive generically smart and prestigious board members who are highly distracted and aren't subject matter experts. In Bad Blood, Holmes manages to deceive and maintain control over a board of extremely generically competent and powerful people (Henry Kissinger, former Secretary of State George Shultz, former Secretary of Defense William Perry, former Defense Secretary General James Mattis, Rupert Murdoch), to their substantial reputational (and in some cases, financial) detriment. In a poignant episode, George Schultz sides with Holmes against his own grandson, a former Theranos employee-turned-whistleblower being harassed by the company, dividing their family.
- It seems like as non-SMEs in healthcare and lab testing, they were slow to notice warning signs about misconduct, and very bad at doing due diligence on what was going on. I worry a lot about non-technical board members of AI companies being similarly manipulated and low context on what their companies are doing
- It seems like aggressive lawyers kind of shoot themselves in the foot by being extremely aggressive towards high-profile investigative journalists. It seems predictable that this would trigger the journalists to double down rather than scaring them off or reassuring them that there's nothing to be concerned about. I don't know what's going on here; maybe they can't code switch / they just get stuck on a strategy of being aggressive all the time.
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4I loved Original Sin. Most of it is very depressing, but one brighter moment is the story of Chuck Schumer visiting Biden a week before he dropped out:
“Mr. President, you’re not getting the information as to what the chances are. Have you talked to your pollsters?”
“No,” Biden said.
Schumer said to him, “If I had a fifty percent chance of winning, Mr. President, I’d run. It’s worth it. But, Mr. President, your chances of winning are only five percent. I’ve talked to your pollsters; I know all three of them. I’ve talked to Garin and Pollock and Murphy. And they think it’s a five percent chance. Five percent.”
“Really?” Biden said.
“They’re not telling you,” Schumer said of Donilon and Ricchetti. “The pollsters told me, ‘He’s not seen our polls. It all goes to Donilon, and Donilon interprets it.’ Okay? You have a five percent chance. The analytics guy who probably knows this best said it’s one percent.”
“If I were you, I wouldn’t run,” Schumer said. “I’m urging you not to run.”
“Do you think Kamala can win?” Biden asked.
“I don’t know if she can win,” Schumer said. “I just know that you cannot.”
Biden said that he needed a week.
They stood. On their way out, Biden put his hands on Schumer’s shoulders. “You have bigger balls than anyone I’ve ever met,” Biden told him.
The thing I found most interesting about Original Sin is that Biden's senility was incredibly big-if-true and incredibly plausible-on-priors, but evidence of it still didn't manage to make it to a bunch of key decision makers who were extremely strongly motivated to understand it. I think that along some important dimensions it's the most extreme example of mass epistemic failure that I'm aware of.
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1is this a case where many decision makers were kept in the dark, or where one key decision maker - Biden himself - was kept in the dark about his political chances by his inner circle?
Mass epistemic failure seems a lot less plausible to me than what amounts to a case of epistemic elder abuse.
Biden's inner circle seemed to have conspired to keep many people (other senior party officials, members of Congress, Republican Party members, the media, the public, leaders of foreign states) in the dark about Biden's condition. How involved Biden was in that, or how self-aware he was of his own deterioration, seems a bit unclear. The book describes extensive measures taken to make Biden seem more competent than he was to a vast array of different audiences.
Theranos was a conspiracy, but in the two chapters of Original Sin I’ve read so far, it seems to be describing a presidential campaign that went badly awry. It’s very interesting and maybe more important to understand, precisely because it’s much more normal. I’m just not sure I’d use the term “conspiracy“ to describe what I’ve listened to so far.
mass epistemic failure
It seems to me an example of "epistemic failure" to think the "key decision makers" genuinely didn't understand and not simply lying.
The book seems like it doesn't really want to call out prominent Democrats other than Biden's inner circle as having fucked up.
My read is that the book thinks it would have been harder for them to do much better.
But assessing the suitability of the presidential candidate really seems like one of the most important roles and responsibilities of senior party officials, so I feel pretty bad about their performance there.
I think this is just literally not how political parties in the U.S. work. The party apparatus has very little hard power over the nomination, and they were afraid to use the power that they had because of the risk that a split between them and Biden would make Trump win.
I like Matthew Yglesias's discussion of this here. "If you decide after delving into the data that you need to warn “Democrats” about something and you give them a call, it turns out there’s nobody picking up the phone."
Another interesting quote from that Yglesias article:
“You could run against Biden by saying age isn’t just an electoral liability, he’s actually senile and unfit to serve, but most Democrats don’t believe that (it’s not true) and you’d lose.”
Imagine if any Democrat had had the guts to run, force Biden to get on the stage and debate them, and gotten the big reveal of his senility in the Democratic primary to lift their candidacy instead of in the national debate to lift Trump’s.
This is a pure calculus failure on Yglesias’s part. He implies total confidence that Biden wasn’t senile. Even if he thought it unlikely, which was more reasonable, the possibility that he was would have completely changed the calculus for a Democratic challenger. Probably Biden’s fine, but if he’s not, you look like a hero for saving the party from him. Anyone whose career wasn’t dependent on the Democratic Party or who just had enough ambition and guts could have taken that bet.
Yeah, Yglesias was extremely wrong about this, and I think that it's extremely interesting that he got it so wrong.
I actually wonder if the Democratic disarray stems from a particular failure mode due to their high level of education. Hypothesis:
Dems culturally believe in data-based decisions, accuracy, cooperation and the greater good. So they lean on polls, focus on the maximum likelihood outcome, and sacrifice their ambitions in service of a perceived need for unity.
But polling is notoriously unreliable. They get confused by it. Their focus on the most likely outcome leads them to underrate tail risks and opportunities. And their self-abnegation leaves them vulnerable to both inertia and to exploitation by selfish actors within their party.
The cure would be to encourage aggressive, self-serving political ambition within the Democratic party. Instead of Ds being nicey-nice with each other, they show sharp elbows and openly focus on their own political career advancement not as an exception but as a rule.
Though, in the book, the polls were pretty on track, and the problem was that they were not being communicated to, believed in, or listened to.
We don’t know if they were on track, because Biden ultimately did not run, so we did not get a chance to find out. But the main issue I’m trying to highlight is that the Democratic Party may have a tendency to assign too much decision-making weight to polling data, despite its inaccuracies and the challenge of interpreting it. And this applies to Biden too - he should have looked himself in the mirror and said “I’m too old to run,” not assigned so much weight to his own beliefs about how he was polling.
I don't know if the book thinks it would have been hard for them to do much better, but I certainly didn't come away believing that that's true, given that, once the distastrous debate had happened, it seemed like they were pulling a lot of different levers at the same time and could have been even more aggressive.
I felt like the book was just pretty slow to criticize people who failed to act, as opposed to criticizing people in the inner circle who actively made the situation worse, but I think that there was an abdication of responsibility.
I agree that senior party members didn't have direct levers, and it wasn't directly in their job description to assess the suitability of a candidate, and it seems like a correct update that if something isn't literally part of someone's job description, it is a lot less likely that they will act on it than if it is. This is why I think DRIs are a good and important concept. But I don't agree that it wasn't fundamentally and spiritually their job / part of overall ensuring a good future for the Democratic Party (especially given that they knew that it was not anyone else's job more than it was their job). And while the party has little hard power, I think they have a ton of soft power. For example, they have the power to talk to donors, they have the power to coordinate Congress people, they have the power to throw support behind other candidates (and if I recall correctly, you start to see these levers get used, just way too late)