Online trolls are harassing a scientist who helped take pictures of a black hole • Hacker News Board

Re: Online trolls are harassing a scientist who helped take pictures of a black hole

#61

Post by fzeroracer » Sat, Apr 13, 2019, 5:07 PM UTC

throwawaysea wrote: post #56

Nasrudith wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No because their concerns are transparent misogyny - if they wanted actual coverage they would shame them with a complete list of contributors and snark that "an additional kilobyte or printed page isn't that expensive!". Sadly so many choose to be outraged over irrelevant bullshit instead of something which remotely matters.

Fact-finding is not misogyny. And the facts in this case are that Bouman's algorithm was not used in the black hole image that is being hailed as a scientific milestone. She had other contributions here (see https://twitter.com/thisgreyspirit/status/111651854732747571... which credits her with writing the testing framework), but what was pitched in news headlines about her role/contributions was explicitly false. Poi…

People pointing out that Andrew Chael was far more important because he had '850k lines of code written' making her contributions worthless was not pointing out the truth. It was explicitly about tearing down her contributions.

Re: Online trolls are harassing a scientist who helped take pictures of a black hole

#62

Post by blub » Sat, Apr 13, 2019, 5:07 PM UTC

yodon wrote: post #58

daenz wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There is nothing new here except the application of misogyny. No, the new thing here is pretending that this only happens to women: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Prize_controversies Look at how many of those controversies are over people not being recognized for the credit, specifically in Physics and Chemistry. Women experiencing this phenomenon is not "misogyny", it's par for the course.

Of course controversy over credit exists. Please post links to the high traffic outraged threads on HN in connection with those controversies. I've known and worked with perhaps half a dozen Nobel Prize winners, and dozens of their students, collaborators, and post docs, including some cases where the list of names on the Prize has been at best debatabely correct. That is the reality of large science. It always has b…

Having missed the main discussion, and getting the chance to see additional info become available, it seems that the critics were right, even if they perhaps had ignoble reasons to complain, as you claim.

There were apparently 30 people involved, four algorithms, one of which belonged to the main character of our story and in the end that algorithm was not used, according to one of her colleagues :)

Re: Online trolls are harassing a scientist who helped take pictures of a black hole

#63

Post by throwawaysea » Sat, Apr 13, 2019, 5:12 PM UTC

fzeroracer wrote: post #61

throwawaysea wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fact-finding is not misogyny. And the facts in this case are that Bouman's algorithm was not used in the black hole image that is being hailed as a scientific milestone. She had other contributions here (see https://twitter.com/thisgreyspirit/status/111651854732747571... which credits her with writing the testing framework), but what was pitched in news headlines about her role/contributions was explicitly false. Poi…

People pointing out that Andrew Chael was far more important because he had '850k lines of code written' making her contributions worthless was not pointing out the truth. It was explicitly about tearing down her contributions.

I agree, that particular argument was meaningless (since lines of code is not everything) and wrong (since a lot of those 850K lines were data). I agree some people behind that line of argument might have been looking to tear her down, and that the impulse to do so may have been rooted in misogyny.

That said, I also think it's not everyone, and that some who were examining the code base were just on a fact-finding mission given that this story was seemingly everywhere online and something felt off.

Re: Online trolls are harassing a scientist who helped take pictures of a black hole

#64

Post by daenz » Sat, Apr 13, 2019, 5:12 PM UTC

yodon wrote: post #58

daenz wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There is nothing new here except the application of misogyny. No, the new thing here is pretending that this only happens to women: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Prize_controversies Look at how many of those controversies are over people not being recognized for the credit, specifically in Physics and Chemistry. Women experiencing this phenomenon is not "misogyny", it's par for the course.

Of course controversy over credit exists. Please post links to the high traffic outraged threads on HN in connection with those controversies. I've known and worked with perhaps half a dozen Nobel Prize winners, and dozens of their students, collaborators, and post docs, including some cases where the list of names on the Prize has been at best debatabely correct. That is the reality of large science. It always has b…

>Please post links to the high traffic outraged threads on HN in connection with those controversies.

Honestly, take the time and read the comments and see how similar they are to the Katie Bouman "outrage": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15395347

Re: Online trolls are harassing a scientist who helped take pictures of a black hole

#65

Post by Mirioron » Sat, Apr 13, 2019, 5:13 PM UTC

blub wrote: post #54

high_derivative wrote: post #3

"Highlighting the achievements of a brilliant, enthusiastic scientist does not diminish the contributions of the other 214 people who worked on the project, either. " That is, in my experience, untrue, if it is highlighted in a way that unjustly lifts one contribution above all others. Does not tend to make collaborators happy. Since there is no money involved (as in, no big salary increases), academics (being one my…

I've read the following in a newspaper article: "[...]30 of the 200 scientists were responsible for the image processing. There were four algorithms developed in parallel to transform the telescope data into pictures, one of them developed by Bouman during her Phd at MIT[...]" The gist was that she's a great researcher, but not a hero or the face of the project, as she was presented. Frankly, it looks like the media…

I mostly feel bad for her. She didn't try to claim that fame, others did it for her and she's the one to suffer the backlash.

I saw an article with the same title on futurism [0] and didn't really question it at first. Perhaps there were others who saw similar things, but as they learned more about the story they felt like they had been lied to.

[0] https://futurism.com/the-byte/first-black-hole-image-katie-b...

Re: Online trolls are harassing a scientist who helped take pictures of a black hole

#66

Post by grawprog » Sat, Apr 13, 2019, 5:14 PM UTC

I feel bad for all the people that have nothing better to do than sit around and dig into someone's life and harass them because a picture was posted of them working on a project.

I feel worse for the people they're harassing, but fuck they must have bleak meaningless lives if they choose to spend their time harassing scientists over a photograph.

I mean the thought behind it from the actual team was probably something like 'Hey we're getting the image loaded, we should get a picture of this'

That's what it looks like in the caption for the tweet. It mostly looks like her name's mentioned because she's in the picture. It refers to her as Researcher.

How is anything about that unreasonable or giving her credit for everything?

Why would people interpret it this way?

I mean i'm pretty the more imporant part of that picture was the image of the black hole being loaded for the first time.

Re: Online trolls are harassing a scientist who helped take pictures of a black hole

#67

Post by belisarius1948 » Sat, Apr 13, 2019, 5:15 PM UTC

kzcqt wrote: post #7

Media invents a fact, that she is responsible for everything, and make her the face of the discovery, when it was a team effort. They get tons of clicks for saying something that is clearly preposterous. Some people get upset, some even start trolling about it, and badmouth the poor woman, who's not responsible for what the media said in their quest for clicks. A loss of time for everybody involved. Media reports the…

women considering a STEM career should think again. any time they have a notable success their fame will attract a swarm of obsessed agenda monsters intent on drafting them into their moronic sexist jihad. isnt it ironic?

Re: Online trolls are harassing a scientist who helped take pictures of a black hole

#68

Post by plemer » Sat, Apr 13, 2019, 5:19 PM UTC

matt4077 wrote: post #12

kzcqt wrote: post #7

Media invents a fact, that she is responsible for everything, and make her the face of the discovery, when it was a team effort. They get tons of clicks for saying something that is clearly preposterous. Some people get upset, some even start trolling about it, and badmouth the poor woman, who's not responsible for what the media said in their quest for clicks. A loss of time for everybody involved. Media reports the…

Care to find any example among the myriad of „meet the man behind...“ stories where the same thing happened?

Good question.

In the first 20 results of searching HN for "the man behind"(https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22the%20man%20behind%22&sort=...):

* The Man Behind AMD's Zen Microarchitecture: Jim Keller (wikipedia.org) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14989551

>Zen is the work of a huge team of talented engineers. To single one out as "the man behind Zen" seems very wrong. I don't know what Jim Keller's contribution to Zen was (and without a blog or autobiography or similar from someone well placed inside the team, then neither do most commentators), but if he did work on the Zen architecture, it's hard to believe that he would have accomplished much without the help of a good team. Keller is the main AMD engineer singled out for praise on The Internet, while the hard work (and given that Zen is such a success, it's surely the result of a mountain of hard work) of everyone else is mostly ignored.

* Never give up: The story of the man behind Tetris. (mixergy.com) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=830679

> This story is not about "the man behind Tetris" and I am dubious of several of the claims made. >"Henk didn't invent Tetris, but he's the entrepreneur who went into the Soviet Union to win the rights to the game, and he's the man who made it a world-wide phenomenon" >The three statements above are true, dubious and false in that order.

Granted, that's only 2 out of 20. Other posts: * a few generally critical (e.g., The Man Behind Windows Powershell - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15250349), so there wasn't any esteem to be divvied up, * many projects that realistically wouldn't have existed but for the work or leadership of one man (e.g., Kim Peek with Mega, Dread Pirate Roberts with the Silk Road, Christopher Steele with the Steele Dossier), and * many projects where I'm not familiar enough with the subject matter to say if the man was a "but for" influence (e.g., Brad Cox and Objective C).

Also interesting are the results for searching "the woman behind" (https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22the%20woman%20behind%22&sor...). Everything after the first three results has either no comments or only one. The discussion on the first three are positive to very positive though.

On the specific question of how much credit Bouman deserves, without being intimately familiar with the project, I'd guess that Bouman herself gets it right: "No one of us could've done it alone. It came together because of lots of different people from many backgrounds." (https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/10/us/katie-bouman-mit-black-hol...). I personally find her an intelligent and likable ambassador for her team.

Re: Online trolls are harassing a scientist who helped take pictures of a black hole

#69

Post by yodon » Sat, Apr 13, 2019, 5:19 PM UTC

blub wrote: post #62

yodon wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course controversy over credit exists. Please post links to the high traffic outraged threads on HN in connection with those controversies. I've known and worked with perhaps half a dozen Nobel Prize winners, and dozens of their students, collaborators, and post docs, including some cases where the list of names on the Prize has been at best debatabely correct. That is the reality of large science. It always has b…

Having missed the main discussion, and getting the chance to see additional info become available, it seems that the critics were right, even if they perhaps had ignoble reasons to complain, as you claim. There were apparently 30 people involved, four algorithms, one of which belonged to the main character of our story and in the end that algorithm was not used, according to one of her colleagues :)

All I can say is I am sorry you have fallen prey to that narrative. It is not uncommon for large science to involve not 30 people but hundreds, and not four algorithms but dozens. In the end, science still talks about the work as having been done by an individual, just as we say that Steve Jobs created the iPhone. Everyone involved understands that Steve Jobs didn't solder the battery connectors or write the display driver. What he did was make the project happen. The same is true in science, particularly in large science. There is nothing new here except misogyny. Your favorite male experimental Nobel Prize winners of the past 50 years also worked with large teams and also didn't write all the code on their projects. That's how large projects work and how large research efforts are personified.

Re: Online trolls are harassing a scientist who helped take pictures of a black hole

#70

Post by yodon » Sat, Apr 13, 2019, 5:31 PM UTC

daenz wrote: post #64

yodon wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course controversy over credit exists. Please post links to the high traffic outraged threads on HN in connection with those controversies. I've known and worked with perhaps half a dozen Nobel Prize winners, and dozens of their students, collaborators, and post docs, including some cases where the list of names on the Prize has been at best debatabely correct. That is the reality of large science. It always has b…

>Please post links to the high traffic outraged threads on HN in connection with those controversies. Honestly, take the time and read the comments and see how similar they are to the Katie Bouman "outrage": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15395347

First, I know Art McDonald, the scientist in question in that thread, and I do consider leading a large project to be a critical element of the project's success. Second, the quality of the discussion in that thread was much higher and the level of angry, punitive downvoting much lower (elsewhere in this thread I was downvoted currently to -2 for asserting that trolling != misogyny, an assertion that I think would be supported by every online and offline dictionary definition of the terms and is a measure of the emotional rather than rational factors driving much of this debate). Controversy over credit is not new. Weaponized misogyny driven outrage is. [edit added: Also thanks for finding and posting that link, it is a relevant component to include for comparison, even if we disagree on the conclusions to be drawn from it]