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

#51

Post by daenz » Sat, Apr 13, 2019, 4:51 PM UTC

yodon wrote: post #30

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…

The first part of the scenario, where one scientist is held up as responsible for a large team's discovery, has played out in every Nobel Prize for experimental work in the past fifty years. That's how science works and everyone who does science professionally knows this. The second part of the scenario, where the internet goes wild and declares this a horrendous miscarriage of credit, happens only when the leader of…

>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.

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

#52

Post by ALittleLight » Sat, Apr 13, 2019, 4:51 PM UTC

fzeroracer wrote: post #49

ALittleLight wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm far from an expert on either of these topics but just looking at your links, one main difference is that the "man behind Windows PowerShell" was the Chief Architect of the project. Katie Bouman (per a ten second Google search) seems to have been a contributor to the black hole project. When I looked at the PowerShell thread, the top five threads were people hating on PowerShell, followed by one person who liked i…

As a thought experiment, if you believe Bouman can't be described as 'the woman behind the black hole pictures', then can you describe for me what contributions she made?

As I mentioned I am not especially familiar with Katie Bouman or the black hole project and everything I'm writing is just from a few seconds of google searching. Based on that, I would say that Bouman was a scientist, mathematician, and programmer who worked on the project.

Per Wikipedia

Bouman - She researches computational methods for imaging, and was a member of the Event Horizon Telescope team that captured the first image of a black hole

Snover - Jeffrey Snover is a Microsoft Technical Fellow, PowerShell Chief Architect, and the Chief Architect for the Azure Infrastructure and Management group which includes Azure Stack, System Center and Operations Management Suite. Snover is the inventor of Windows PowerShell

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katie_Bouman

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Snover

From these two excerpts alone it sounds more correct to say that Snover was the "Man behind" PowerShell than Bouman was the "Woman behind" the black hole pictures.

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

#53

Post by throwawaysea » Sat, Apr 13, 2019, 4:53 PM UTC

adventured wrote: post #31

matt4077 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Sure, there are several famous examples that everyone is aware of. Steve Jobs with the iPhone or iPod. Elon Musk with both SpaceX and Tesla. Jeff Bezos with AWS and Amazon's success generally. In every thread (or media article) in which those people are given opulent credit for the thing in question, it's persistently pointed out that in fact the teams, designers, employees, engineers, leadership, etc. behind those t…

While I think it is important to recognize that Jobs/Musk/Bezos all had large organizations working on things they are often credited with, I think it is more reasonable to credit them in this way because they were explicitly the leaders and founders of their companies. They envisioned, created, and led the organizations that produced all those products.

I don't think that is an apples-to-apples comparison with this story. The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) is a collaboration between numerous organizations (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Event_Horizon_Telescope#Collab...) and it does have a leadership team (see https://eventhorizontelescope.org/organization). But in this story, we did not discuss the leaders of this effort. We discussed one contributing engineer/scientist who was elevated above the rest, when her algorithm was not even used in the production of the final image (which is the underlying scientific milestone that is being recognized here).

I find it bizarre because from all that I've seen, Bouman was not in a leadership position but was a peer-contributor alongside many others. Her contributions matter, and are important (as credited by Andrew Chael), but it is bizarre to recognize her alone and not everyone else who is on equal footing in terms of their contribution (or even greater footing, for those who came up with the algorithms that were used for the final image).

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

#54

Post by blub » Sat, Apr 13, 2019, 4:53 PM UTC

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 screwed up in their attempt to transform her into the face of women in science and turned her into a target of harassment. I've seen e.g. an article from a major publication titled "Without this woman, there would be no picture of the black hole". She seems to be a very competent researcher and had an important contribution. Saying that would have been accurate, fairer and would have prevented the malicious gossip, I assume.

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

#55

Post by 13of40 » Sat, Apr 13, 2019, 4:53 PM UTC

throwawaysea wrote: post #50

13of40 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There were about 30 people in dev/test/pm working on PowerShell version 1. What were their names again?

Prior to it being a full-fledged team, it was indeed a one-man project code-named "Monad". You can find the original vision document, written by one person (Jeffrey Snover), at https://devblogs.microsoft.com/powershell/monad-manifesto-th...

At least a year before that we all got together in that conference room off the building 40 cafeteria and watched the vision demo of making every management action in MMC translate to script. I don't recall Snover being in the picture at that point. Could be wrong. I got the impression he was brought in to solve a problem that was already distinctly on the radar.

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

#56

Post by throwawaysea » Sat, Apr 13, 2019, 4:56 PM UTC

Nasrudith wrote: post #37

malvosenior wrote: post #11

Can this not be viewed as a call for the media to more accurately report stories? I think people are just tired of massive media outlets manufacturing the news instead of reporting it. This was obviously a team effort but a single individual got put on a pedestal because it fit with a larger narrative. People are mad and tired of it. Why don't we step back and look at the bigger picture and listen to what people are…

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. Pointing out the truth is not misogyny.

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

#57

Post by brianpgordon » Sat, Apr 13, 2019, 4:57 PM UTC

yodon wrote: post #30

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…

The first part of the scenario, where one scientist is held up as responsible for a large team's discovery, has played out in every Nobel Prize for experimental work in the past fifty years. That's how science works and everyone who does science professionally knows this. The second part of the scenario, where the internet goes wild and declares this a horrendous miscarriage of credit, happens only when the leader of…

My guess is that what most people are instinctively turned off by is the clickbaity element that they see as implicitly in play when a headline reads "meet the woman behind X" instead of something more generic like "meet the researcher behind X." In the former case, the headline writer is going beyond the standard obnoxious media spin that likes to oversimplify the research process and also apparently hitching their wagon onto the "women in STEM" angle to get more clicks. It's just even more over-the-top than normal, and people are put in an especially critical, even dismissive, frame of mind right off the bat.

That said, I think it's fairly uncharitable to read the headline that way, and we shouldn't jump to conclusions about the author's intent when it's so ambiguous. But it's also uncharitable to read some kind of sinister latent misogyny into HN reactions critical of the headline.

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

#58

Post by yodon » Sat, Apr 13, 2019, 5:00 PM UTC

daenz wrote: post #51

yodon wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first part of the scenario, where one scientist is held up as responsible for a large team's discovery, has played out in every Nobel Prize for experimental work in the past fifty years. That's how science works and everyone who does science professionally knows this. The second part of the scenario, where the internet goes wild and declares this a horrendous miscarriage of credit, happens only when the leader of…

>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 been. What is new is the weaponization of misogyny.

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

#59

Post by belisarius1948 » Sat, Apr 13, 2019, 5:01 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 shitty 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

#60

Post by throwawaysea » Sat, Apr 13, 2019, 5:04 PM UTC

fzeroracer wrote: post #49

ALittleLight wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm far from an expert on either of these topics but just looking at your links, one main difference is that the "man behind Windows PowerShell" was the Chief Architect of the project. Katie Bouman (per a ten second Google search) seems to have been a contributor to the black hole project. When I looked at the PowerShell thread, the top five threads were people hating on PowerShell, followed by one person who liked i…

As a thought experiment, if you believe Bouman can't be described as 'the woman behind the black hole pictures', then can you describe for me what contributions she made?

Per Andrew Chael (the person who seemingly did most of the implementation in terms of code, and would therefore have some authority to speak to this) - https://twitter.com/thisgreyspirit/status/111651854732747571...

> With a few others, Katie also developed the imaging framework that rigorously tested all three codes and shaped the entire paper

So taken at face value, her contribution seems to be this image testing framework and whatever she contributed to the paper.

Most articles attributed Bouman as the inventor of the algorithm used to generate the image. This was directly in the titles of these articles. Now it is clear her algorithm was not used in the generation of the image (see https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/11/science/katie-bouman-blac...).

This isn't to say her own algorithmic work did not count as a contribution just because it wasn't used. I think that exploration matters, if only to see where that path leads while others explore alternative paths. She is listed as the primary author on this 2016 paper (http://people.csail.mit.edu/klbouman/pw/papers_and_presentat...).

But I think given that there were at least 5 other papers here relating to image reconstruction, given that the code was written mostly by others, and given that 3 other algorithms (which she was not involved in) were used in the construction of the final image, I think it is fair to say that Bouman was not the woman behind the black hole picture. She was a woman, alongside a team of many women and many men. Sara Issaoun (female scientist on same project) said on Twitter that a team of 40 worked on image reconstruction: https://twitter.com/SaraIssaoun/status/1116304522660519936