Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your statement is ignorant of office and network politics: I work surrounded by men who communicate professionally with men, primarily. At conferences they drink and socialise with each other. It's harder as a woman to get into these networks. When there is an opening, this information spreads via the network. Which has few women in it. You may feel uncomfortable knowing the hiring process is weighted. But I feel unc…
It seems very likely that as a woman, you would have an easier time to get into those assumed networks (and so would other women). Don't believe all the propaganda.
Katie Bouman, the computer scientist behind the first black hole image
511–520 of 547 posts
Re: Katie Bouman, the computer scientist behind the first black hole image
#512Katie Bouman, the computer scientist before the first black hole image (bbc.com)
Behind was a huge team, but the reporter conveniently needed a figurehead. So he took one and out her in front of the image.
Re: Katie Bouman, the computer scientist behind the first black hole image
#513Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your statement is ignorant of office and network politics: I work surrounded by men who communicate professionally with men, primarily. At conferences they drink and socialise with each other. It's harder as a woman to get into these networks. When there is an opening, this information spreads via the network. Which has few women in it. You may feel uncomfortable knowing the hiring process is weighted. But I feel unc…
I'm a man and I am ignorant of this alleged man-only social network that supposedly helps me get notice of job openings. Doesn't that suggest that it doesn't exist? If it does exist yet I'm ignorant of it, doesn't that suggest that the same might exist for women? I propose that there is a woman-only social network that is helping you to get notice of job openings, and you are exactly as ignorant of it as I am ignoran…
Women make up 48 percent of the total work force, yet only 24 percent of STEM workers https://haasinstitute.berkeley.edu/women-stem-its-not-just-n...
https://www.commerce.gov/sites/default/files/migrated/report...
15% of engineering professionals are women https://ngcproject.org/statistics
Women make up less than 10% overall in computer science and engineering https://www.higheredtoday.org/2015/03/03/where-are-the-women...
Re: Katie Bouman, the computer scientist behind the first black hole image
#514Earlier quoted context omitted.
> This is what makes me somewhat feel that this focus on her is not quite fair. Thought experiment: if you saw an article titled "Jony Ive: The Man Behind The iPhone" would you be commenting on how unfair it is to single him out? After all, he just designed the thing, a huge team of people built the software and the hardware that actually made it possible.
Yes, absolutely. I've made comments before to the effect of: I cringe hard enough to actually feel physical discomfort every time a headline refers to a team effort of SpaceX as "Elon Musk's Rocket."
Re: Katie Bouman, the computer scientist behind the first black hole image
#515Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you at all, in any way willing to entertain a viewpoint that suggests that those gentlemen have their titles dropped possibly because they have become synonymous with their crafts and a lifetime of achievement that-at least in the case of Dr. Sagan has spanned generations (Dr. deGrasse-Tyson's work and personality on the cusp of enjoying the exact same), and their names closely associated with a deep personal con…
"Are you at all, in any way willing to entertain a viewpoint that suggests that those gentlemen have their titles dropped possibly because they have become synonymous with their crafts and a lifetime of achievement that-at least in the case of Dr. Sagan has spanned generations (Dr. deGrasse-Tyson's work and personality on the cusp of enjoying the exact same), and their names closely associated with a deep personal co…
Re: Katie Bouman, the computer scientist behind the first black hole image
#516Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well luckily we can verify just how much code she actually committed to the project. The Event Horizon Telescope Analysis Toolkit is a publicly available repository on Github: https://github.com/sao-eht/eat according to Katie's profile klbouman, she was responsible for a subset of that toolkit known as hopstools - which is described in the readme as "tools to convert data from the HOPS format": https://github.com/klb…
I'm reluctant to even dignify this kind of low-effort drivel with a response. There's a bunch of other commits linked from that very same user profile, related to -- and this will blow your mind -- image reconstruction: https://github.com/achael/eht-imaging/commits?author=klbouma... Even if that were not true, scientific code often does not end up public, let alone on github. Not to mention that Dr. Bouman is the fir…
Re: Katie Bouman, the computer scientist behind the first black hole image
#517I've read comments on Hacker News for many years, often finding them a useful source of additional information and insight into details from whatever the linked piece is. Sometimes these threads are full of only subtly veiled hatred and leave me with a feeling of disgust. This thread is one of those. There have been countless threads over the years where a man gets the credit for something a team has worked on and th…
Yes, quite a number of big academic, scientific or industry figures have had stories about their achievements without any major reference to their (obviously necessary) team. No-one felt moved to point out there were contributions from the graduate students and staff that worked with Yann LeCun, Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio in the HN story about the latter three's Turing Award. I don't think I've ever seen so ma…
Dr. Bouman is a talented, enthusiastic and no doubt indispensable force on the larger team responsible for this achievement. Her role is as a co-lead for one small team which is responsible for one algorithm (out of four) used for imaging, as well as for an imagine verification algorithm (with Dr. Bouman's focus more on the latter). The larger imaging group (about 45 people by my rough count, led by Drs. Michael Johnson and Kazunori Akiyama) is itself one part of the analysis group, which has three other working groups, and then the analysis group is one of a half dozen larger groups in the EHT project which produced this result.
So it's not a case of the project lead being presented as the face of the project, which is par for the course in academia (and the outside world). It is a postdoc one level above the grad students who form the least-senior rung of the project, and many levels from the top suddenly being misleadingly presented as the key figure in a major result.
Imagine you worked on a small team of a couple of postdocs and a few grad students near the bottom of a hierarchy of teams involving hundreds of people, and then came in one day and your colleague and co-lead at the same level as you was suddenly presented as the face and key contributor for not only your small slice of things, not even the larger component to which the slice belongs, but the entire project?
You'd probably be pretty happy for them, but also confused as to why the many people with the actual role as overall group leaders or the project leaders aren't mentioned. One might also note how distant the general public is from the machinations of the academic world that no one is asking how a 20-something CS postdoc ended up leading a multinational astronomy project involving top faculty from top institutions? In terms of notability and improbability, that would probably be a bigger story than any image produced by the group!
Explaining her actual position and contribution is not in any way to detract from her contributions: only to clarify the record in the face of an onslaught of misleading media articles, which seemed to largely sourced (transitively) from a few misleading tweets, themselves triggered by a viral image.
On top of that, none of this is doing Dr. Bouman any favors. Although they are mostly silent, no one in the EHT project is confused about her role, and none of the other people in her faculty or almost anyone else who matters will be under any misconception despite the headlines. If anything, academia is even more picky than other fields when it comes to attribution, so any type of misplaced credit can be viewed very negatively and can attach itself to a person indefinitely. Now she hasn't invited this or propagated this story, so one should consider her a blameless victim here: but not everyone in a position to care will necessarily remember that subtlety.
Re: Katie Bouman, the computer scientist behind the first black hole image
#518Earlier quoted context omitted.
I hate it when news outlets and movie production companies focus on individuals and ignore the team effort and dynamic, and it's not because I care about distributing credit. I want them to tell more stories about teams and communities working together to build things, not more lone genius stories. I get it. I truly do. But consider the context: This picture of a blackhole is going around along with an iconic picture…
> Margaret Hamilton with a stack of papers. That was used to say "well women are doing something very important" (If we're truly focused on equality should be yes.. that is normal.. but why is that important to advertise that message) The feeling that I'm getting from all of this is that the result is showcased to the side and they're trying to make her into a celebrity. I would love to hear her praise "her team" (he…
You see how sexist that assumption is, right? Don't be that guy. Give her the benefit of the doubt you'd give a male researcher.
Re: Katie Bouman, the computer scientist behind the first black hole image
#519Earlier quoted context omitted.
From the article: > But Dr Bouman, now an assistant professor of computing and mathematical sciences at the California Institute of Technology, insisted the team that helped her deserves equal credit. > The effort to capture the image, using telescopes in locations ranging from Antarctica to Chile, involved a team of more than 200 scientists. > "No one of us could've done it alone," she told CNN. "It came together be…
I'm going to edit the parent comment to show my response to that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19638629
Re: Katie Bouman, the computer scientist behind the first black hole image
#520Earlier quoted context omitted.
What do you base your first sentence on? Unsurprisingly there is now research indicating that female candidates are now twice as likely to be chosen as equally qualified men for tenure track positions in university science departments. [1] And I'm sure my computer science class was no exception in that the generally ~three females in the class had about 90% of the rest of the class willing to do any and everything th…
It's based on things I've listened to women say about working in male-dominated fields, and on the many other studies that contradict the one in that article. Even the author of that study doesn't go as far as you, she admits the results do not mean there is no discrimination. "Radically overcorrecting" seems a couple of steps beyond that. I guess we'll just both be astonished. Sometimes two people look at the exact…
I did not say women do not face discrimination. They do. And, to varying degrees, everybody does. This is true even in the most homogeneous of societies. The region of birth based discrimination in China is far more vigorous than any form of discrimination we've had in many decades. What matters of course are the consequences of such discrimination. Cultures, interests, and aptitudes vary among any selection of individuals. Even what seem to be completely 'agnostic' selection criterion such as height will yield extreme differences in distributions [1]. So the presumption of equal opportunity leading to equal results is nonsensical. "Bias" is a loaded word, and not completely equal is not the same thing as biased, or at least the connotation of such.
I think there are two salient issues here:
1. There is a severe publication bias both against negative results and results that are not 'meaningful.' Negative results are results that indicate a hypothesis is not true. This sounds reasonable but it isn't in practice as it leads to the scenario we are currently in where finding evidence of discrimination is generally publication worthy. Yet, and this study notwithstanding, finding a lack of discrimination is generally not publication worthy. I expect the replication crisis, which is hitting the social sciences particularly hard, is in part driven by this. People need to publish something, and it generally needs to be shocking. That leads to...
2. Many people's careers and livelihoods depend upon the presence of discrimination. At one time astrology was a science at least as reputable and scholarly as psychology is today. And it's quite likely that a good number people who studied the field for decades had some inclining, perhaps buried deep in the back of their mind, that it was a bunch of crap. But of course they would quickly snuff such wrongthink out simply because such a possibility was unacceptable. After all, what are you to do when you've dedicated your life to something and you come to no longer see it as relevant? You go from a well regarded expert, to a master of nothing perhaps past thee point of being able to reboot your direction in life. No, such possibilities cannot be accepted. This is not to say discrimination is no more real than astrology. It certainly is. But rather I emphasize only that when people's livelihood depends upon finding evidence of discrimination, they will find it - whether or not it exists. "Science advances one funeral at a time."