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Online trolls are harassing a scientist who helped take pictures of a black hole
- iamdave 7y agoI wonder sometimes if writing articles “Trolls did thing trolls are known for doing” is incidentally giving the trolls exactly what they want.
- matt4077 7y agoNo, it’s letting them know they stand outside what’s considered polite company. Rereading the discussion about her, this community is among those standing to learn something by considering how she is being treated differently than any man ever featured in such stories.
- tom_ 7y agoI find it useful to have a handle on which subjects are currently triggering outbursts. Makes it easier to spot when some other discussion might be heading (or, sometimes, being steered...) in the direction of derailment, I think, if I feel like I have an idea of the current themes.
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- yodon 7y agoTrolling is a thing. So is misogyny. They are not the same thing.
- plemer 7y agoPopular usage seems to have shifted from "someone who posts solely to get a rise out of people" to "a jerk online." It's too bad because there are plenty of terms for the latter already.
- yodon 7y agoSee also the corruption of the word terrorist. Not all bad people are terrorists, some are simply criminals. Similarly not all bad people are trolls, some are simply misogynists. The linguistic difference in each pairing is not measure of badness but motive.
- high_derivative 7y ago"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 myself) are incredibly petty about these things, and bitter feuds are fought about small points of recognition. For example, another female collaborator of hers was actually the one to point out that Katie Bouman's algorithm was not the one used for the image, as pointed out by the NYT: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/11/science/katie-bouman-black-hole.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/11/science/katie-bouman-blac...
- blub 7y agoI'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.
- Mirioron 7y agoI 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-bouman https://futurism.com/the-byte/first-black-hole-image-katie-b...
- EamonnMR 7y agoI knew exactly which one it was in particular before clicking. There's a deep rot in the online culture.
- Broken_Hippo 7y agoThis isn't "online" culture, it is simply culture. There has always been a horrible group of folks in culture: What we find acceptable changes over time.
- amanaplanacanal 7y agoThis kind of horrible is limited to online culture, though. People don't troll when talking face to face. If they did, everybody would see they were assholes, and they would suddenly find that nobody wanted to hang out with them anymore.
- Broken_Hippo 7y agoThe US constitution declared slaves as 3/5th of a person. Women couldn't do much without a man until recently. We've tortured folks and the Holocaust was a thing. The crusades were a thing. On a lesser note, people gossip. They'll have "private" conversations about you while they know you can hear. Stop talking to folks because they think you are lesbian. People are horrible.
- matt4077 7y agoReposting my comment from another story that didn’t get traction (edit: thar was quickly flagged off the front page, as this one is now as well): It should be noted that this community here was among the worst in this regard. This isn’t about measuring the exact contribution she may or may not have made to the project. It’s that there are limitless stories of „meet the man behind <x>“ where that question just never crosses anyone’s mind. See "The Man Behind Windows PowerShell" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15250349 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15250349 Yet for her (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19632086 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19632086), the discussion was easily dominated by attempts to tear her down, a few defenders, and entirely transparent attempts to differentiate her case from all the others that avoid the obvious reason.
- kzcqt 7y agoGiving one person the credit for a team effort is wrong. In this case some people are pretending it's right because it's a female, but two wrongs don't make one right.
- fzeroracer 7y agoAnd yet these discussions, as Matt brings up, generally only occur when there are women involved. No one's been giving her sole credit for this project, they've been highlighting her as part of the team. She admits that it was a team effort, her team admits it was a team effort and wants people to stop downplaying her accomplishments. Yet the discussion on sites like HN keeps veering into a narrative in which she is being overly credited or attempting to downplay everything she did.
- kzcqt 7y agoShe and the team she belongs to have been reasonable. I'm talking about what the media is reporting, since they are exploiting this story just for clicks. These discussions are the result of the media trying to push a feminist narrative. They chose a female member of the team, and they knew where they were going with it. People can see through it, and are rightly upset. Harassing her personally is, obviously, not the way to go, though. I'm sure the media doesn't care about her at all, or they are even happy that she's getting harassed, because they now have more stories to run.
- kzcqt 7y agoMedia 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 backlash. They get tons of clicks for that too. Summary: media wins. Everybody else loses.
- matt4077 7y agoCare to find any example among the myriad of „meet the man behind...“ stories where the same thing happened?
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- 0815test 7y agoWhat stories - the one about PowerShell? Do you think it makes sense to compare the EHT (a literally worldwide effort) to PowerShell?
- adventured 7y agoSure, 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 things deserve enormous credit, while the famous person at the front is getting the credit as a visionary genius. Why? Because it sells better to put Bezos on the cover (with his head in a box). State in an HN thread that Elon Musk founded Tesla sometime, see what response you get 100% of the time. I've been watching that specific response play out over and over for the better part of a decade here as one example. Musk persistently gets given overwhelming credit by the media, and he persistently gets torn down for it. You also constantly see it when it comes to team efforts generally to take this further. For example when NASA and ESA work on something together and then NASA gets blanket credit. The more famous team will get the overwhelming credit, because it sells. That last part is what it's all about.
- malvosenior 7y agoCan 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 complaining about instead of just admonishing them.
- tom_ 7y agoRiiight, so it is about ethics in journalism.
- malvosenior 7y agoYes? What else would it be when people are tired of the media acting unethically?
- matt4077 7y agoAh, yes, „ethics-in-astronomy-journalism“...
- fzeroracer 7y agoSo you're saying the reason why people are making fake profiles, spreading fake rumors etc is because of the media narrative? Why don't you say what you really mean by 'calling for the media to more accurately report stories'?
- malvosenior 7y agoI'm saying that the media caused all of that through yellow journalism and the pushing of political agendas: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism Over the past decade they've been in a race to the bottom of what historically would have been thought of as journalistic ethics. People aren't stupid and can see this. Some people are reasonable and have well thought out rebuttals, some are unreasonable and troll to vent their frustration. Either way, it was the media that created the entire situation we find ourselves in.
- wesammikhail 7y agoI know I am gonna get down-voted to hell for this but here goes nothing: Am I the only one who was born and used the internet early enough to understand how it actually works? It´s like suddenly everyone is talking about trolls as if it´s some massive internet problem when in actuality trolling is as old if not older than the internet itself. The mere fact that people are complaining about trolls is in itself mind-boggling to me. People are assholes. You give them the ability to be anonymous and they will take advantage of it. In fact, most of you have probably at one point done something that would be considered trolling. So why the heck is everyone so outraged at the existence of trolls? like really?! How thin skinned do you have to be that some mean comments on the internet aimed to piss you off actually do work? Man I miss the old days when people didn´t associate their online @mynameisabcdef with their actual offline worth and self-esteem. The less you separate your online life from your offline one, the more you´ll get hurt. Get off the internet, take a walk and if you want to have a proper discussion, seek a forum where people talk seriously. There web is a much bigger space than the cesspool that is Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. It´s as if some people live and die by what is said on Twitter these days. In my book that´s nothing short of insanity. I get that people want the problem fixed. I really do. But you are up against human nature. If you think you´re going to beat that by pointing fingers and getting angry, then you don´t really understand the problem. She did something amazing and no matter what, no amount of trolls can take that away from her. Simple as that. And if trolls can actually take that away from her then what she did was probably not so great after all. Let the work speak for itself rather than worrying about what some schmuck on twitter said
- berrynice 7y agoI'm so sick of this MSM/social media fueled gender shit flinging. She herself never claimed she did all the work, the MSM did.
- daenz 7y agoExactly. This is the media setting the stage for a fight among people and then reporting on that fight for more revenue. Then acting shocked that the fight is even happening.
- throwawaysea 7y agoI'm confused by all the comments here attacking those who viewed this entire story with skepticism, considering the skeptics were ultimately correct. See https://twitter.com/SaraIssaoun/status/1116304522660519936 https://twitter.com/SaraIssaoun/status/1116304522660519936 > There are more of us. Katie's algorithm, despite the media's stance, was not used to produce this image. There were three algorithms used and combined to form the final image, and a team of 40 scientists part of that aspect of the project (including myself and more women). Katie Bouman's algorithm was not even used in the construction of the final image. If that's not an indictment of modern journalism, I don't know what is. Even the New York Times has published a story corroborating all this, and as far as I can tell they were one of the few journalistic outlets that did not publish a prior story pushing the narrative of the single female scientist solving this problem: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/11/science/katie-bouman-black-hole.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/11/science/katie-bouman-blac... > While she led the development of an algorithm to take a picture of a black hole, an effort that was the subject of a TED Talk she gave in 2016, her colleagues said that technique was not ultimately used to create this particular image. Ultimately, this fiasco is a textbook example of news media and social media spinning up a manufactured, hyped-up story to push a certain narrative. Virtually every news outlet was publishing the same story emphasizing how a singular female scientist was behind this effort. Bouman herself was even quoted in some of these articles as saying it was a team effort, by the way, so none of this is her fault. But news media and ideologues on Twitter pushed a gender-centric narrative nonetheless, and in doing so, overtly politicized the story. For example, take a look at the Washington Post's article on this story. Initially it was titled "Katie Bouman, #womeninstem star, created algorithm [...]". You can still see this title in Google search results (https://www.google.com/search?q=katie+bouman%2C+%23womeninstem+star https://www.google.com/search?q=katie+bouman%2C+%23womeninst...). Now the story has been revised to "Katie Bouman helped the world see a black hole. Fans want ‘a rightful seat in history’ for her." https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2019/04/11/katie-bouman-helped-world-see-black-hole-fans-want-rightful-seat-history-her/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2019/04/11/katie-boum... Given how ubiquitous this story was for those 1-2 days, I think it makes sense that people would also examine the details critically, and also question if they were the victim of media manipulation pushing some ideological narrative. And as I stated at the very beginning, they were ultimately correct.
- grawprog 7y agoI 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.