9 ms·

Lady Ranelagh: The Incomparable Life of Robert Boyle’s Sister

101 points by sohkamyung 6y ago

bigmattystyles 6y ago
I’ve always wondered the true number of Einsteins, Ramanujans, Lovelaces, etc who were forced into a life of physical exploitation, turned into mechanical machines because of life’s and humanity’s brutality. Even in modern times... (not that forcing anyone, even non-geniuses into a life of manual servitude or exploitation is ever ok)
- a_bonobo 6y ago
  >I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops. Stephen Jay Gould, "Wide hats and narrow minds" New Scientist 8 March 1979, p. 777. Reprinted in The Panda's Thumb, p. 151.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- elgenie 6y ago
  Consider also that until the 20th century around half of the people born died before adulthood and around a quarter did so before the age of one [0]. Those geniuses didn't even get the chance to be the smartest uneducated subsistence farmer in the fiefdom, the most intelligent 15 year old to bleed out after childbirth, or the brainiest starving war refugee. [0] https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality-in-the-past https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality-in-the-past
  - prox 6y ago
    If you have the chance to research your genealogy, do so. You get to experience history (and see the actual implications of this statistic) for yourself, but also how resilient and resourceful your ancestors had to be.
- spoonjim 6y ago
  Or, there's even the Mozarts who were just never put in front of a piano. Maybe they had parents who were really into sports and signed them up for every sport and they never got exposed.
  - max_entropy 6y ago
    But the piano created Mozart. What I'm suggesting is that the limiting factor is the number of pianos and musical cultural environments, rather than the amount of potential musical geniuses.
- bedobi 6y ago
  "Imagine that you’ve got a million people farming in Antarctica. They’re eking out this bare subsistence in agriculture in the snow," "Obviously, if you let those farmers leave Antarctica and go someplace else to farm, the farmers are better off. But isn’t it also better for the world if you let people stop eking out this existence, contributing nothing to the world, and go someplace where they could actually use their skills and not just feed themselves, but produce something for the world economy?" The failure of the developed world to enable all of humanity to realize their potential is a huge, huge problem for everyone. Imagine you had been transplanted to Haiti or Equatorial Guinea at basically any point in your life, and you weren't given an education, you weren't allowed or able to move to anywhere else etc etc. It would be a huge loss not just to you but to everyone else that your potential went unrealized.
- telesilla 6y ago
  This exactly is the purpose of my branch of feminism! To be liberated from social systems of oppression of all kinds. It's refreshing to see a genial discussion here on HN, challenges aside.
  - DromedaryCase 6y ago
    Except oppression isn't necessarily an end and allowing certain groups to define oppression or deriving it from immutable historical fact simply creates another privileged class and gives one a stick to beat oppressors who may not even intentionally participate in so called "oppressive acts" with. I argue fighting oppression is only useful insofar as it presents a utilitarian good for society and that certain levels of structural violence is necessary for nation states to function. At the end of the day, there always needs to be a (large) class of street sweepers, accountants and restaurant workers for the benefit of the rest of society.
    - telesilla 6y ago
      We don't get robots?
      - DromedaryCase 6y ago
        Eventually, but currently 7.50 an hour is much cheaper than a state of the art burger flipping machine. Once that changes, I assume the unemployment rate will rise and legislation against inequality will be needed.
    - andrepd 6y ago
      > At the end of the day, there always needs to be a (large) class of street sweepers, accountants and restaurant workers for the benefit of the rest of society. As long as they're not you. Furthermore the argument is't "nobody should have to be a garbageman", it's "perhaps garbagemen deserve more than 1/3500th the pay of a CEO"
      - jl2718 6y ago
- pjc50 6y ago
  Full many a gem of purest ray serene The dark unfathom'd caves of ocean bear: Full many a flower is born to blush unseen, And waste its sweetness on the desert air. Some village Hampden that with dauntless breast The little tyrant of his fields withstood, Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest, Some Cromwell guiltless of his country's blood. "Elegy written in a Country Churchyard", Thomas Gray https://www.bartleby.com/101/453.html https://www.bartleby.com/101/453.html (Ironically time itself has pushed Hampden https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Hampden https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Hampden out of the list of names that one may reasonably expect English people to recognise, while Milton and Cromwell still remain)
grouphugs 6y ago
nope
dash2 6y ago
Arguments like this make me suspicious. Essentially, we've got no way of knowing how much Lady Ranelagh would have achieved if... so that leaves us free to speculate about how she was an unknown genius. There's an infinite supply of these figures for feminist academics to make hay with. Meanwhile, how many people can name an achievement of Robert Boyle, who actually was the greatest English scientist before Newton? Maybe I'm wrong, and if I read the book I'd find convincing proof that she was a brilliant mind who could have made great discoveries. What's in the article doesn't seem much: she tested a cure for rickets, paid for her brother's lab, and wrote down somebody's experiment.
- DyslexicAtheist 6y ago
  as a man, how insecure does one have to be to take offense at a book that celebrates the achievement of a woman, and to question the accuracy of it without having actually read it?
  - okamiueru 6y ago
    Seems a bit of a straw man no? I don't see how the parent comment expressed having taken offense, nor particular insecurity, and surely not enough to infer their gender, or any such grounds for "motives". The comment you are responding to also explicitly points out the basis being just the article in question, and being open to the possibility of a better argument posed in the book. So, I honestly do not see the issue here. edit: As is evident from the response they got, the book seems to give better insights, which must be a win for everyone?
    - DyslexicAtheist 6y ago
      straw man? No there is a dead giveaway right here: > "There's an infinite supply of these figures for feminist academics to make hay with." He devalues the content of the article by labeling the author as "feminist academics"? Not just saying "researchers" or "academics" - he needed to point out that it was a woman with a feminist agenda. But the fact that this is the top comment and gets defended (instead of flagged for the misogyny it is) says enough.
mark254 6y ago
That's "Odysseus of Ithaca" in "A Perfect Vacuum"[1], by Stanislav Lem. Ad 1: https://stanislaw-lem.fandom.com/wiki/A_Perfect_Vacuum https://stanislaw-lem.fandom.com/wiki/A_Perfect_Vacuum
m0llusk 6y ago
Publish or perish, right? This was when much scientific process was young, so she may not have framed things that way. It is also possible that she was more concerned about making progress than taking credit for it or monetizing it.

101 points by sohkamyung 6y ago

I’ve always wondered the true number of Einsteins, Ramanujans, Lovelaces, etc who were forced into a life of physical exploitation, turned into mechanical machines because of life’s and humanity’s brutality. Even in modern times... (not that forcing anyone, even non-geniuses into a life of manual servitude or exploitation is ever ok)

a_bonobo 6y ago
>I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops. Stephen Jay Gould, "Wide hats and narrow minds" New Scientist 8 March 1979, p. 777. Reprinted in The Panda's Thumb, p. 151.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
elgenie 6y ago
Consider also that until the 20th century around half of the people born died before adulthood and around a quarter did so before the age of one [0]. Those geniuses didn't even get the chance to be the smartest uneducated subsistence farmer in the fiefdom, the most intelligent 15 year old to bleed out after childbirth, or the brainiest starving war refugee. [0] https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality-in-the-past https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality-in-the-past
- prox 6y ago
  If you have the chance to research your genealogy, do so. You get to experience history (and see the actual implications of this statistic) for yourself, but also how resilient and resourceful your ancestors had to be.
spoonjim 6y ago
Or, there's even the Mozarts who were just never put in front of a piano. Maybe they had parents who were really into sports and signed them up for every sport and they never got exposed.
- max_entropy 6y ago
  But the piano created Mozart. What I'm suggesting is that the limiting factor is the number of pianos and musical cultural environments, rather than the amount of potential musical geniuses.
bedobi 6y ago
"Imagine that you’ve got a million people farming in Antarctica. They’re eking out this bare subsistence in agriculture in the snow," "Obviously, if you let those farmers leave Antarctica and go someplace else to farm, the farmers are better off. But isn’t it also better for the world if you let people stop eking out this existence, contributing nothing to the world, and go someplace where they could actually use their skills and not just feed themselves, but produce something for the world economy?" The failure of the developed world to enable all of humanity to realize their potential is a huge, huge problem for everyone. Imagine you had been transplanted to Haiti or Equatorial Guinea at basically any point in your life, and you weren't given an education, you weren't allowed or able to move to anywhere else etc etc. It would be a huge loss not just to you but to everyone else that your potential went unrealized.
telesilla 6y ago
This exactly is the purpose of my branch of feminism! To be liberated from social systems of oppression of all kinds. It's refreshing to see a genial discussion here on HN, challenges aside.
- DromedaryCase 6y ago
  Except oppression isn't necessarily an end and allowing certain groups to define oppression or deriving it from immutable historical fact simply creates another privileged class and gives one a stick to beat oppressors who may not even intentionally participate in so called "oppressive acts" with. I argue fighting oppression is only useful insofar as it presents a utilitarian good for society and that certain levels of structural violence is necessary for nation states to function. At the end of the day, there always needs to be a (large) class of street sweepers, accountants and restaurant workers for the benefit of the rest of society.
  - telesilla 6y ago
    We don't get robots?
    - DromedaryCase 6y ago
      Eventually, but currently 7.50 an hour is much cheaper than a state of the art burger flipping machine. Once that changes, I assume the unemployment rate will rise and legislation against inequality will be needed.
  - andrepd 6y ago
    > At the end of the day, there always needs to be a (large) class of street sweepers, accountants and restaurant workers for the benefit of the rest of society. As long as they're not you. Furthermore the argument is't "nobody should have to be a garbageman", it's "perhaps garbagemen deserve more than 1/3500th the pay of a CEO"
    - jl2718 6y ago
pjc50 6y ago
Full many a gem of purest ray serene The dark unfathom'd caves of ocean bear: Full many a flower is born to blush unseen, And waste its sweetness on the desert air. Some village Hampden that with dauntless breast The little tyrant of his fields withstood, Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest, Some Cromwell guiltless of his country's blood. "Elegy written in a Country Churchyard", Thomas Gray https://www.bartleby.com/101/453.html https://www.bartleby.com/101/453.html (Ironically time itself has pushed Hampden https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Hampden https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Hampden out of the list of names that one may reasonably expect English people to recognise, while Milton and Cromwell still remain)

grouphugs 6y ago

nope

dash2 6y ago

Arguments like this make me suspicious. Essentially, we've got no way of knowing how much Lady Ranelagh would have achieved if... so that leaves us free to speculate about how she was an unknown genius. There's an infinite supply of these figures for feminist academics to make hay with. Meanwhile, how many people can name an achievement of Robert Boyle, who actually was the greatest English scientist before Newton? Maybe I'm wrong, and if I read the book I'd find convincing proof that she was a brilliant mind who could have made great discoveries. What's in the article doesn't seem much: she tested a cure for rickets, paid for her brother's lab, and wrote down somebody's experiment.

DyslexicAtheist 6y ago
as a man, how insecure does one have to be to take offense at a book that celebrates the achievement of a woman, and to question the accuracy of it without having actually read it?
- okamiueru 6y ago
  Seems a bit of a straw man no? I don't see how the parent comment expressed having taken offense, nor particular insecurity, and surely not enough to infer their gender, or any such grounds for "motives". The comment you are responding to also explicitly points out the basis being just the article in question, and being open to the possibility of a better argument posed in the book. So, I honestly do not see the issue here. edit: As is evident from the response they got, the book seems to give better insights, which must be a win for everyone?
  - DyslexicAtheist 6y ago
    straw man? No there is a dead giveaway right here: > "There's an infinite supply of these figures for feminist academics to make hay with." He devalues the content of the article by labeling the author as "feminist academics"? Not just saying "researchers" or "academics" - he needed to point out that it was a woman with a feminist agenda. But the fact that this is the top comment and gets defended (instead of flagged for the misogyny it is) says enough.

mark254 6y ago

That's "Odysseus of Ithaca" in "A Perfect Vacuum"[1], by Stanislav Lem. Ad 1: https://stanislaw-lem.fandom.com/wiki/A_Perfect_Vacuum https://stanislaw-lem.fandom.com/wiki/A_Perfect_Vacuum

m0llusk 6y ago

Publish or perish, right? This was when much scientific process was young, so she may not have framed things that way. It is also possible that she was more concerned about making progress than taking credit for it or monetizing it.