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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 say

by kzcqt 7y ago

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 backlash. They get tons of clicks for that too. Summary: media wins. Everybody else loses.

matt4077 7y ago
Care to find any example among the myriad of „meet the man behind...“ stories where the same thing happened?
- deleted 7y ago
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- 0815test 7y ago
  What stories - the one about PowerShell? Do you think it makes sense to compare the EHT (a literally worldwide effort) to PowerShell?
- adventured 7y ago
  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 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.
  - throwawaysea 7y ago
    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#Collaboration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Event_Horizon_Telescope#Collab...) and it does have a leadership team (see https://eventhorizontelescope.org/organization 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).
- faissaloo 7y ago
  Literally any time someone brings up Steve Jobs
- plemer 7y ago
  Good question. In the first 20 results of searching HN for "the man behind"(https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22the%20man%20behind%22&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22the%20man%20behind%22&sort=...): * The Man Behind AMD's Zen Microarchitecture: Jim Keller (wikipedia.org) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14989551 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14989551 >Zen is the work of a huge team of talented engineers. To single one out as "the man behind Zen" seems very wrong. I don't know what Jim Keller's contribution to Zen was (and without a blog or autobiography or similar from someone well placed inside the team, then neither do most commentators), but if he did work on the Zen architecture, it's hard to believe that he would have accomplished much without the help of a good team. Keller is the main AMD engineer singled out for praise on The Internet, while the hard work (and given that Zen is such a success, it's surely the result of a mountain of hard work) of everyone else is mostly ignored. * Never give up: The story of the man behind Tetris. (mixergy.com) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=830679 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=830679 > This story is not about "the man behind Tetris" and I am dubious of several of the claims made. >"Henk didn't invent Tetris, but he's the entrepreneur who went into the Soviet Union to win the rights to the game, and he's the man who made it a world-wide phenomenon" >The three statements above are true, dubious and false in that order. Granted, that's only 2 out of 20. Other posts: * a few generally critical (e.g., The Man Behind Windows Powershell - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15250349 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15250349), so there wasn't any esteem to be divvied up, * many projects that realistically wouldn't have existed but for the work or leadership of one man (e.g., Kim Peek with Mega, Dread Pirate Roberts with the Silk Road, Christopher Steele with the Steele Dossier), and * many projects where I'm not familiar enough with the subject matter to say if the man was a "but for" influence (e.g., Brad Cox and Objective C). Also interesting are the results for searching "the woman behind" (https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22the%20woman%20behind%22&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22the%20woman%20behind%22&sor...). Everything after the first three results has either no comments or only one. The discussion on the first three are positive to very positive though. On the specific question of how much credit Bouman deserves, without being intimately familiar with the project, I'd guess that Bouman herself gets it right: "No one of us could've done it alone. It came together because of lots of different people from many backgrounds." (https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/10/us/katie-bouman-mit-black-hole-algorithm-sci-trnd/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/10/us/katie-bouman-mit-black-hol...). I personally find her an intelligent and likable ambassador for her team.
yodon 7y ago
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 the team is female. It is not a miscarriage of credit. It is how scientific teams are credited and how they have always been credited, by personifying the collective work through the persona of the leader of the team. There is nothing new here except the application of misogyny.
- daenz 7y ago
  >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 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.
  - yodon 7y ago
    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.
    - blub 7y ago
      Having missed the main discussion, and getting the chance to see additional info become available, it seems that the critics were right, even if they perhaps had ignoble reasons to complain, as you claim. There were apparently 30 people involved, four algorithms, one of which belonged to the main character of our story and in the end that algorithm was not used, according to one of her colleagues :)
abunner 7y ago
No. The summary is that by tearing down the woman lead, women everywhere see what will happen to them if they achieve a measure of recognition on the internet.
belisarius1948 7y ago
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?
belisarius1948 7y ago
women considering a STEM career should think again. any time they have a notable success their fame will attract a swarm of obsessed agenda monsters intent on drafting them into their moronic sexist jihad. isnt it ironic?

by kzcqt 7y ago

matt4077 7y ago

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

deleted 7y ago
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deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
0815test 7y ago
What stories - the one about PowerShell? Do you think it makes sense to compare the EHT (a literally worldwide effort) to PowerShell?
adventured 7y ago
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 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.
- throwawaysea 7y ago
  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#Collaboration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Event_Horizon_Telescope#Collab...) and it does have a leadership team (see https://eventhorizontelescope.org/organization 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).
faissaloo 7y ago
Literally any time someone brings up Steve Jobs
plemer 7y ago
Good question. In the first 20 results of searching HN for "the man behind"(https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22the%20man%20behind%22&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22the%20man%20behind%22&sort=...): * The Man Behind AMD's Zen Microarchitecture: Jim Keller (wikipedia.org) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14989551 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14989551 >Zen is the work of a huge team of talented engineers. To single one out as "the man behind Zen" seems very wrong. I don't know what Jim Keller's contribution to Zen was (and without a blog or autobiography or similar from someone well placed inside the team, then neither do most commentators), but if he did work on the Zen architecture, it's hard to believe that he would have accomplished much without the help of a good team. Keller is the main AMD engineer singled out for praise on The Internet, while the hard work (and given that Zen is such a success, it's surely the result of a mountain of hard work) of everyone else is mostly ignored. * Never give up: The story of the man behind Tetris. (mixergy.com) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=830679 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=830679 > This story is not about "the man behind Tetris" and I am dubious of several of the claims made. >"Henk didn't invent Tetris, but he's the entrepreneur who went into the Soviet Union to win the rights to the game, and he's the man who made it a world-wide phenomenon" >The three statements above are true, dubious and false in that order. Granted, that's only 2 out of 20. Other posts: * a few generally critical (e.g., The Man Behind Windows Powershell - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15250349 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15250349), so there wasn't any esteem to be divvied up, * many projects that realistically wouldn't have existed but for the work or leadership of one man (e.g., Kim Peek with Mega, Dread Pirate Roberts with the Silk Road, Christopher Steele with the Steele Dossier), and * many projects where I'm not familiar enough with the subject matter to say if the man was a "but for" influence (e.g., Brad Cox and Objective C). Also interesting are the results for searching "the woman behind" (https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22the%20woman%20behind%22&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22the%20woman%20behind%22&sor...). Everything after the first three results has either no comments or only one. The discussion on the first three are positive to very positive though. On the specific question of how much credit Bouman deserves, without being intimately familiar with the project, I'd guess that Bouman herself gets it right: "No one of us could've done it alone. It came together because of lots of different people from many backgrounds." (https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/10/us/katie-bouman-mit-black-hole-algorithm-sci-trnd/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/10/us/katie-bouman-mit-black-hol...). I personally find her an intelligent and likable ambassador for her team.

yodon 7y ago

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 the team is female. It is not a miscarriage of credit. It is how scientific teams are credited and how they have always been credited, by personifying the collective work through the persona of the leader of the team. There is nothing new here except the application of misogyny.

daenz 7y ago
>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 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.
- yodon 7y ago
  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.
  - blub 7y ago
    Having missed the main discussion, and getting the chance to see additional info become available, it seems that the critics were right, even if they perhaps had ignoble reasons to complain, as you claim. There were apparently 30 people involved, four algorithms, one of which belonged to the main character of our story and in the end that algorithm was not used, according to one of her colleagues :)

abunner 7y ago

No. The summary is that by tearing down the woman lead, women everywhere see what will happen to them if they achieve a measure of recognition on the internet.

belisarius1948 7y ago

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?

belisarius1948 7y ago

women considering a STEM career should think again. any time they have a notable success their fame will attract a swarm of obsessed agenda monsters intent on drafting them into their moronic sexist jihad. isnt it ironic?