When Carl Sagan sued Apple twice (2014) • Hacker News Board

Re: When Carl Sagan sued Apple twice (2014)

#41

Post by gwf » Sun, Jul 10, 2022, 3:08 PM UTC

ShamelessC wrote: post #26

adastra22 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is true (source: worked at NASA and heard other astronomers opinion of Sagan). The other chief aspects were (1) some had professional disagreements with Sagan and resented that he still won academic battles for mindshare just by being Sagan, and (2) resentment of his success by academics who were just as good but didn’t get fame and the grant wins or lucrative work that came from it.

This sort of stuff makes me happy I worked on open source research rather than try to get a PHD. Same thing is playing out with LeCun. The excessive, perhaps egotistical need for attribution in academia is in strict opposition to what I consider “good science”.

I don't think this comparison is fair to LeCun. He has literally been at the forefront of ML for over 40 years, starting with his PhD thesis and continuing to the present, and his public fame is entirely a byproduct of the awareness of the impact of his work. (Disclaimer: I've known Yann for decades and worked down the hall from him during his NEC years.)

Re: When Carl Sagan sued Apple twice (2014)

#42

Post by JKCalhoun » Sun, Jul 10, 2022, 3:25 PM UTC

Reason077 wrote: post #21

Apple today is starting to remind me a bit of the Apple of the early 1990s. Gone are the simple product portfolios where each model has a clear position and purpose within the line up. Now, the number of models is creeping up gradually with more and more overlap and less clarity of purpose between them.

A victim (again) of its success? Perhaps.

Jobs famously pared the Macs down to laptop/desktop and pro/consumer to create a grid of four platforms (of course this predates phones, watches, ipads...).

I suspect Jobs was over-correcting because he had to, because Apple was floundering. But the model matrix for the Macs are not a lot bigger than Job's 2 x 2 minimalist stable.

Re: When Carl Sagan sued Apple twice (2014)

#43

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Jul 10, 2022, 3:29 PM UTC

Reason077 wrote: post #21

Apple today is starting to remind me a bit of the Apple of the early 1990s. Gone are the simple product portfolios where each model has a clear position and purpose within the line up. Now, the number of models is creeping up gradually with more and more overlap and less clarity of purpose between them.

[deleted]

Re: When Carl Sagan sued Apple twice (2014)

#44

Post by NikolaNovak » Sun, Jul 10, 2022, 3:40 PM UTC

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #38

sokoloff wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ref #2, I wonder if scientists feel similarly to Neil deGrasse Tyson today. He doesn’t seem likely to be wildly better as a scientist than his peers, but being wildly better as a communicator has incredible differentiating value (and likely has a tailwind for the other scientists in terms of public support for science when it’s something they feel is almost within their grasp).

>I wonder if scientists feel similarly to Neil deGrasse Tyson today. Find it hard to imagine anyone taking him seriously after seeing his Twitter account.

I suppose I'll need to check it out, I am not on Twitter so don't frequent it.

At the same time... If twitter existed back then, how would the famed scientists and communicators come out? Einstein, Feynman, Asimov, Clarke have all had pretty damming (defined at minimum as "unacceptable by modern cultural standards") behaviour come to light. Respected scientists and philosophers of 70s who are still alive have similarly gotten themselves into serious hot water on social media more recently.

Never meet your heroes and all that...

Re: When Carl Sagan sued Apple twice (2014)

#45

Post by mistrial9 » Sun, Jul 10, 2022, 3:48 PM UTC

cosmiccatnap wrote: post #39

Ah apple, often times thought incorrectly to be less evil than Microsoft or Google but has, in time been just as shameless as either in their own "apple-y" way

four decades is a long time; there have been cultural shifts and economic changes.. some people at Apple just do their job, others are certainly comic book level obnoxious

Re: When Carl Sagan sued Apple twice (2014)

#46

Post by JKCalhoun » Sun, Jul 10, 2022, 3:48 PM UTC

xbar wrote: post #29

emsign wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Apple engineers' unwillingness to back down but even pushing things further with their insulting second code name shows a degree of arrogance that's astonishing.

My memory is that the average 90's Silicon Valley engineer was arrogant. It was not at all astonishing.

Arrogant is a strong word and I think carries too fine a point.

The industry was interesting (bizarre) at the time in that the engineers were more or less left to run their domain. Upper management might give the overall direction of what to work on but beyond that there was not a lot of middle or lower management that could tell engineers how to do that.

This left a lot of the responsibility (and authority if you will) in the hands of engineering to accomplish what the company wanted. And so engineers chose code names. To be sure too they were not meant for (sanitized by) the PR department — they were strictly at the whim of engineering.

Engineers don't want to have to put on a "marketing hat", or get marketing to sign off on a codename (for chrissakes).

That one of those code names leaked somehow and caused bad publicity for the company — that was management's/marketing's problem, not the engineer's.

We're in a more modern era now where the balance has shifted to a much more top-down model — diminishing the broader role engineers used to have.

Re: When Carl Sagan sued Apple twice (2014)

#47

Post by JKCalhoun » Sun, Jul 10, 2022, 3:51 PM UTC

UncleSlacky wrote: post #28

bigjimmyk3 wrote: post #9

Interesting that the article didn't mention the oddly named "sosumi" system sound.

That was to do with the agreement they'd previously made with Apple (the Beatles' company) not to be involved in anything relating to sound/music (to preserve the differentiation between two companies with the same name), it was a kind of dare or challenge.

> Apple (the Beatles' company)

Apple Corp is usually the way I distinguish the two.

Re: When Carl Sagan sued Apple twice (2014)

#48

Post by JKCalhoun » Sun, Jul 10, 2022, 3:55 PM UTC

cosmiccatnap wrote: post #39

Ah apple, often times thought incorrectly to be less evil than Microsoft or Google but has, in time been just as shameless as either in their own "apple-y" way

The malfeasance in Apple's case rests on a few engineers that were flipping the bird (perhaps just at much at Apple upper management as much as at Carl Sagan). A bit of a stretch to make this a "corporate policy" of the likes of Microsoft or Google.

Re: When Carl Sagan sued Apple twice (2014)

#49

Post by kloch » Sun, Jul 10, 2022, 4:02 PM UTC

> One does not seriously attack the expertise of a scientist using the undefined phrase "butt-head."

But one does seriously attack the expertise of a scientist using the undefined phrases "crackpot" or "crank", which are not very far from "butt-head"

So while I think the ruling was correct in that the average person would not take the insult seriously, I can see why Sagan might have taken it seriously.

Re: When Carl Sagan sued Apple twice (2014)

#50

Post by ad404b8a372f2b9 » Sun, Jul 10, 2022, 4:49 PM UTC

ShamelessC wrote: post #26

adastra22 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is true (source: worked at NASA and heard other astronomers opinion of Sagan). The other chief aspects were (1) some had professional disagreements with Sagan and resented that he still won academic battles for mindshare just by being Sagan, and (2) resentment of his success by academics who were just as good but didn’t get fame and the grant wins or lucrative work that came from it.

This sort of stuff makes me happy I worked on open source research rather than try to get a PHD. Same thing is playing out with LeCun. The excessive, perhaps egotistical need for attribution in academia is in strict opposition to what I consider “good science”.

Neither of the things described in the parent comment have to do with ego, they have everything to do with career opportunities and outcomes.

The ability to have your research funded is a practical and existential problem for scientists. And I find it quite natural having issues with someone being able to achieve better outcomes through marketing and fame rather than through the quality of their work.

It's something I find aggravating with Google, OpenAI, and cie in the field of machine learning for example. The amount of marketing they benefit from, before their papers are even published, is unfair and anti-meritocratic. I don't want to have to do SEO to be able to stand on even ground with these people.

(And that's not to say Sagan wasn't a good scientist, or that his work communicating science wasn't useful.)