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Lynn Conway has died

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Re: Lynn Conway has died

#311

Post by houseplant »

autoexec wrote: post #281
delecti wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that many struggle to understand because they think something like "how would it feel to want to be a woman", rather than flip it to their gender. So if you're a cis man, try to imagine you were a trans man; born female, raised a girl, expected to conform to your local female beauty norms, be expected to bear children, less body hair and muscle mass, curves in places unfamiliar to you, flirted with by men, et…

> So if you're a cis man, try to imagine you were a trans man; born female, raised a girl, expected to conform to your local female beauty norms, be expected to bear children, less body hair and muscle mass, curves in places unfamiliar to you, flirted with by men, etc. Is it weird if I suspect that it wouldn't bother me? I'd have been raised from birth to expect those things so they wouldn't be surprising to girl-me,…

You have to understand that until extremely recently- and still, not everywhere, as politics is any indication- people very seriously and genuinely believe that being gay or trans is tantamount to being a pedophile in terms of wrongness. It isn't so much about how you feel, but how others are making you feel.

Imagine if you felt fine in your body... but people around you stared and turned up their nose at you wherever you went because there was some kind of rumour that said you were a pedo. Imagine how incredibly harmful that would be, day in and day out, to your psyche, to your mental health, unable to escape it. Imagine if everyone avoided you because- even if they didn't believe you were one- they didn't want to be seen associating with someone everyone thought was one. Imagine if your family believed that. Imagine, no matter how much you tried to say you weren't and prove you weren't, they still believed it, because that's what the culture you're in says it's equal a crime to.

It's no doubt that the people who persist because they know their personal truth are unfathomably strong people. And for those who don't make it, you can understand why. Once you realize this injustice, it's hard not to be on their side and be incensed against that prejudice, seeing the laws being passed in the US specifically to harm them, as ludicrous.

Re: Lynn Conway has died

#312

Post by jefftk »

duskwuff wrote: post #284
pclmulqdq wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I ended up teaching Carver Mead's course in its last year at Caltech, which was quite an experience. In many ways, the course was (and is) horribly out of date, and not just because of the fact that students were using open-source Berkeley tools to draw layouts. The real reason why this course was obsolete was that Mead and Conway so thoroughly won the argument on the idea of creating rigorous abstractions that peopl…

> It just seems so obvious today that you can create gates, you can create macros, you can create complex designs, and you can define the interface at every level so you can hook them up and they just work. That idea came out of Conway and the early pioneers of VLSI. And you can see the opposite of this in many early microprocessor designs, like the (original, NMOS) 6502 and Z80. There's a lot of highly idiosyncratic…

> There's a lot of highly idiosyncratic designs for gates, heavily customized for the physical and electrical context that they're used in - and I won't deny that they're often very clever and space-efficient, but they were also extraordinarily time-intensive to design, and weren't reusable.

Is this optimization now something that hardware design tools do automatically?

Re: Lynn Conway has died

#313

Post by houseplant »

hindsightbias wrote: post #87
KennyBlanken wrote: post #35

> Although she had hoped to be allowed to transition on the job, IBM fired Conway in 1968 after she revealed her intention to transition.[19] IBM apologized for this in 2020. Given that in 2012 there was an entire IEEE magazine issue dedicated to her career and contributions to the field which really brought awareness of all her contributions...it's disappointing it took IBM so long to apologize, especially given the…

Have worked with several trans folks at major legacy corps like IBM and while I'm sure there may have been rank-and-file issues, discrimination was not tolerated by mgmt in the latter 90s. My memory is IBM and HP added non-discrimination policies around that time.

non-discrimination policies are one thing. Being able to accept and acknowledge you made a mistake and vehemently admit it to the world is a whole other thing.

Re: Lynn Conway has died

#314

Post by asploder »

SpaceManNabs wrote: post #262

lots of progress in transgender issues since then because of people like lynn conway. Because of people like her, fewer people will lose their careers (or have to rebuild) or kids just because they corrected their gender.

I’m one of those many who owe her a debt of gratitude. May her memory be a blessing.

Re: Lynn Conway has died

#315

Post by stevage »

autoexec wrote: post #281
delecti wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that many struggle to understand because they think something like "how would it feel to want to be a woman", rather than flip it to their gender. So if you're a cis man, try to imagine you were a trans man; born female, raised a girl, expected to conform to your local female beauty norms, be expected to bear children, less body hair and muscle mass, curves in places unfamiliar to you, flirted with by men, et…

> So if you're a cis man, try to imagine you were a trans man; born female, raised a girl, expected to conform to your local female beauty norms, be expected to bear children, less body hair and muscle mass, curves in places unfamiliar to you, flirted with by men, etc. Is it weird if I suspect that it wouldn't bother me? I'd have been raised from birth to expect those things so they wouldn't be surprising to girl-me,…

>Is it weird if I suspect that it wouldn't bother me? I'd have been raised from birth to expect those things so they wouldn't be surprising to girl-me

I guess you're making the assumption that "being raised from birth to expect" things is a stronger force than your own innate personality, desires, etc.

You might compare it to people who are "raised from birth to expect" to be attracted to the opposite sex, but that just isn't who they are.

Re: Lynn Conway has died

#316

Post by mycologos »

robjwells wrote: post #200
cocking wrote: post #196

[flagged]

For those skimming, this is the controversy over J Michael Bailey's book The Man Who Would Be Queen. I highly recommend reading Dreger's article. Conway (and others, particularly Andrea James) conducted a years-long campaign of harassment against Bailey. This included (among many other things) repeated attempts to get Bailey fired from his job at Northwestern, a series of vexatious complaints to an Illinois licensing…

As far as I know the example you mention was the work of Andrea James, and not Conway, but Conway's continued collaboration with someone that cruel and unhinged is, I think, an aspect of her life that shouldn't be ignored.

(Does it cancel out her many unambiguously positive and praiseworthy achievements? No. People are complicated.)

Re: Lynn Conway has died

#317

Post by padolsey »

sspiff wrote: post #190

I never heard of her before today, despite having been interested and educated, and employed in computer science for so long. What a truly impressive list of achievements, and achieving such great things before, during and after transition gender in the 60s of all things. I can't imagine what they would have done without being hampered by the social stigma and discrimination they must have faced. It saddens me that I…

Indeed. It makes me wonder what living figures – in CS and neighbouring fields – are alive and prolific and I'm completely oblivious of.

Re: Lynn Conway has died

#318

Post by mylies43 »

verticalscaler wrote: post #237
moate wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Is this volume of upvotes due to this person being accomplished in their field or because of the transgender thing Yes. >> What is it about computing that it has such a high concentration of trans people compared to other fields. First, prove your thesis: what is this “high concentration” and what “other fields” are you talking about? There seem to be a great deal of trans people in a great many places, and now th…

There's no thesis, we're just talking. I don't understand why I got called names and hostile responses. Meh. The second part of your reply is great, I figured this would be the place to ask somebody who knows about it. I wish you'd have started and ended with that. I'm one of those very nerds who never cared about who wants to sleep with whom. I must note that on occasion trans techies are aggressively hostile to non…

[flagged]

Re: Lynn Conway has died

#319

Post by 01HNNWZ0MV43FF »

sterlind wrote: post #234
nineplay wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I appreciate her making the effort to tell her story. I struggle sometimes to understand what it means when people say they feel born in the wrong gender. They way she describes it - not just about wanting to do 'girl' things but wanting to be soft and round and feminine - is eye-opening for me.

As much as "trapped in the wrong body" is a cliché, the physical aspect of gender dysphoria is profound, and often overlooked. I don't care about competing in women's sports, or what locker room I had to use. I cared about my body becoming grotesque and alien to me, and became overwhelmed with how profoundly wrong it felt. It's not that I want to look like a girl so I can be treated like one - I want to look like a g…

> It's not that I want to look like a girl so I can be treated like one - I want to look like a girl, regardless of how I'm treated.

Same, I figured if I was on a desert island with nobody around and a machine that magically dispensed estrogen, it would actually be easier to transition, since I wouldn't have to justify my decision to anyone. That was part of how I convinced myself to start, way back before COVID.

Re: Lynn Conway has died

#320

Post by CalChris »

Lynn Conway, Dynamic Instruction Scheduling

https://web.archive.org/web/20150814232249/https://ai.eecs.u...

This report was issued February 23, 1966 which was close to a year before Tomasulo's An Efficient Algorithm for Exploiting Multiple Arithmetic Units.

I'd never heard of this report before today. It isn't taught in Berkeley's CS152/252. It's not mentioned in Hennessy and Patterson's books.

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