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If it wasn't clear when I say "I'm noticing a pattern" I'm talking about recent history, as in the last twenty years not the last hundred. I'm looking at what

by hoopd 11y ago

If it wasn't clear when I say "I'm noticing a pattern" I'm talking about recent history, as in the last twenty years not the last hundred. I'm looking at what we're doing now, your way only tells us if the unfairness of the past 20 years is greater than or less than the 80 years before that. Instead of IMDB's list of mostly TV movies, how about Wikipedia's Films About Mathematicians[1], look at the biographical films. There are only 8, but the last film biopic of an average white dude was Feynman's back in '96. Last year alone we had major films about Turing and Hawking, and A Beautiful Mind came out in 2001. Take a look at the most recent big-budget sci-fi. Q: Who had 95% of the screentime in Gravity? A: A woman. Q: Who were the hero scientists in Interstellar? A: A black guy and two women. (How long did Doyle last? What was the race and sex of the disgraced scientist in Interstellar again?) If you would like to provide a counterpoint, simply name the regular white guy scientists or mathematicians we've mythologized in the past 20 years. We'll compare that to the efforts towards mythologizing females on HN in the past 30 days. Emmy Noether (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9606497 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9606497), The Women Science Forgot (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9744684 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9744684), and today's Ada Lovelace. We'll throw in male scientists who have been publicly disgraced in the past year (offhand I can think of 3) and compare that to the number of disgraced female scientists (I count 0). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_films_about_mathematicians https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_films_about_mathematic...

Joeri 11y ago
Hollywood makes whatever sells, they don't try to be fair, and right now what sells is diversity. Why do you have to make it a bad thing? When Ryan Reynolds stops getting roles because he's a white male, then we'll have a problem. Although, maybe that's a bad example, because I might not really care why they stopped giving him roles, just as long as they did.
- hoopd 11y ago
  I'm just pointing out what's happening. The bad thing is that we're biasing our culture in a particular direction and pretending that we're not. "Diversity selling" is the product of a massive intentional cultural shift and I'm surprised people get so upset when it's pointed out to them.
  - dalke 11y ago
    The problem in my view is that the evidence you have given is weak, and can support many hypotheses. For example, it could be that the change are adjusting to reflect changes in the number of of non-white, non-male, non-straight, and non-disabled people that now do science. You suggest there is "a pattern of attempting to mythologize as many females in STEM fields as possible", but perhaps it's the case that males are already as sufficiently mythologized as is possible, and what you are seeing is the mythologization of women catching up to men. For that matter, you haven't defined what 'mythologized' means, nor how one can tell if someone is 'mythologized' or if a given category of people is under- or over-mythologized. Without these, you have the advantage of controlling the discussion, because you are in charge of the definition. My other commentary is to show that such terms can be defined in ways that others can verify for themselves. Your inability to come up with a meaningful definition, combined with your apparent cherry-picking of the data, likely contributes to the downvotes you've received.
    - hoopd 11y ago
      The quality of my arguments remains fairly constant over time, the reactions to them depend heavily on the politics involved.
    - innguest 11y ago
      All I'm hearing is "I don't want to read about Cultural Marxism because I can't deal with the cognitive dissonance".
- innguest 11y ago
  There is a double-standard that you are glossing over, perhaps willingly. Jewish influence in the media is overstated by their own admission, and they are notorious for not furthering diversity within their own group. If I am wrong please correct me so I learn, instead of downvoting me to shame me.
dalke 11y ago
That list was incomplete. I added a recent Indian film about Ramanujan and a Soviet film about Sofia Kovalevskaya from the 1980s. FWIW, there's also an upcoming film "Dau" (in post-production) about the Russian mathematical physicist Lev Landau. One difficulty is that the Wikipedia list does not include made for TV movies and documentaries, like 'Dangerous Knowledge' (2007) on Georg Cantor, Ludwig Boltzmann, Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing, or the BBC documentary 'Isaac Newton: The Last Magician' (2013), or the PBS documentary 'Newton's Dark Secrets' (2005), or "Breaking the Code" (1996), another biography of Turing, or "Freedom Man" (1989) about the black American mathematician Benjamin Banneker, or the 1973 Italian TV movie "Non ho tempo" about Galois, or Simon Singh's 1996 documentary "Fermat's Last Theorem", focusing on Andrew Wiles but including other mathematicians. Or the BBC documentary "The Birth Of Calculus" (1986) on Leibniz, the four-part BBC series "The Story of Maths" (2008), the 2008 "Julia Robinson and Hilbert's Tenth Problem", or ... I think you get the picture that there are many TV movies about mathematicians, and most of them are white males. BTW, none of them are "average". When "Moneyball" was turned into a movie, people asked how a book that dealt with statistics could be turned into a movie, since statistics alone isn't that interesting. What big screen movie is there to make out of Dirichlet's life? Of Riemann's? Of Wiles'? So, of "regular white guy scientists or mathematicians we've mythologized in the past 20 years", where I'll define "mythologized" to mean "made a movie about them", and I'll limit it to feature length films based on lives of actual scientists: "Kinsey" (2004) on Kinsey, "Copenhagen" (2002, TV) on a meeting between Bohr and Heisenberg, "Creation" (2009) on Darwin, "Something the Lord Made" (2004) about heart surgeons (one of which was a white male), "Tim's Vermeer" (2013) though that's more an amateur scientist, "The Aviator" (2004) about Howard Hughes (aerospace engineer and inventor), "A Dangerous Method" (2011) concerning Jung, Freud, and Sabina Spielrein (the first two being white males), this fall the film "Experimenter" about Stanley Milgram will be released, "The Insider" (1999) is a drama based on the research scientist Jeffrey Wigand, and "The Strangest Dream" (2008) about the physicist Joseph Rotblat. Those are movies about 10+ real scientists, all male, straight, and not disabled, plus a couple of others. (There were a few movies with other than white, male, straight characters, but certainly not this many.) You for some reason switched to fictional scientists with Gravity (2013) and Interstellar (2014). Why is that? For that matter, you restricted me to scientists and mathematicians, while the protagonists of Gravity are engineers and astronauts - it's poor form to change your metric part-way through. If I expand the list to include engineers, astronauts, and similar occupations, then "Captain Phillips" (2013) concerns the captain of the MV Maersk Alabama, which was hijacked by pirates, "The Wind Rises" (2013) about Jiro Horikoshi, the man who designed Japanese fighter planes during World War II ... oops ! Sory, not a white man, though he would have been an "honorary white" in apartheid South Africa, " Zvorykin-Muromets" (2010) about the Russian inventor of television, "Flash of Genius" (2008) about the Robert Kearns and his invention of the intermittent windshield wiper, A problem with your list is it's easily interpreted as cherry picking. Jodie Foster was the protagonist of "Contact" (1997), a big budget sci-fi film. How does your choice now of "Gravity" indicate a changed pattern from nearly 20 years ago? Another problem is that you haven't established what the baseline should be. Given the 12.2% of the US population is "Non-Hispanic Black or African American", what percentage of films with 'hero scientists' should have a "Non-Hispanic Black or African American" in that role? Given that 51% of the adult population in the US are women, how many hero scientist movies should have a women in that role? Perhaps it's more that these roles were previously underrepresented? Is the pattern you see simply explained by the secular trend that people other than straight white males are becoming more frequent in science? You ended by picking two items from a different context - postings to HN in the last month and 'male scientists who have been publicly disgraced in the past year', I think to establish a pattern. But you again lack the evidence needed to tell if your observations are really a pattern instead of cherry picking. What is the expected baseline? If the ratio of men to women in science is 4:1, then we would expect a female scientist to be publicly disgraced with about the same ratio. (It's hard to give a good ratio since I think it's more likely that a senior researcher will be found out and reported in the international news. I believe there are more males in higher level positions than females. Also, "Japanese women account for only 10% of the researchers in Japan" and "only 12 percent of the science and engineering workforce in India was female in 2010", so the international ratio is probably more like 8:1. Checking now, I searched "Retraction Watch" for all people described by the writers as being "disgraced". The complete list of male scientists in the last few years are: Naoki Mori, James H. Hunton, Dipak Das, Don Poldermans, Yoshitaka Fujii, Joachim Boldt, Diederik Stapel, and Woo-Suk Hwang. The only disgraced female scientist mentioned is Bengu Sezen. This 8:1 ratio is about what I expect from the percentage of women doing science in the world stage, and within the error bars for something with so few numbers. What method did you use to count disgraced male and female scientists? I see you missed Haruko Obokata as another disgraced female scientist, so it doesn't seem like you've done a systematic search. (A double-check search against sciencemag.org finds Jens Förster and Marc Hauser as additional 'disgraced' male researchers and no additional female researchers. Note that Science does not use the term 'disgraced' in articles about Haruko Obokata.) Also, what do you use as the ratio for males in science vs. females in science? If it's 4:1 or higher then with 3 male disgraces you would expect less than a 50% chance of hearing about a female in the same situation, no? Otherwise, if you're just making connections based on the latest hot gossip, then you'll be suffering from some serious bias error. You're not going to hear about Naoki Mori on HN. Regarding postings to HN, what is your criteria? For example, "Alain Badiou Is Making a Movie About Plato with Brad Pitt and Sean Connery" from 7 days ago is a movie about a guy. Is it mythologizing a male? What about "Deep Web (2015 Documentary) – The Story of the Silk Road" from a month ago - does it mythologize Ross William Ulbricht? How do you define 'mythologizing' in such a way that it's at least roughly repeatable? If you can't do that, then you don't really have a good metric.

by hoopd 11y ago

Joeri 11y ago

Hollywood makes whatever sells, they don't try to be fair, and right now what sells is diversity. Why do you have to make it a bad thing? When Ryan Reynolds stops getting roles because he's a white male, then we'll have a problem. Although, maybe that's a bad example, because I might not really care why they stopped giving him roles, just as long as they did.

hoopd 11y ago
I'm just pointing out what's happening. The bad thing is that we're biasing our culture in a particular direction and pretending that we're not. "Diversity selling" is the product of a massive intentional cultural shift and I'm surprised people get so upset when it's pointed out to them.
- dalke 11y ago
  The problem in my view is that the evidence you have given is weak, and can support many hypotheses. For example, it could be that the change are adjusting to reflect changes in the number of of non-white, non-male, non-straight, and non-disabled people that now do science. You suggest there is "a pattern of attempting to mythologize as many females in STEM fields as possible", but perhaps it's the case that males are already as sufficiently mythologized as is possible, and what you are seeing is the mythologization of women catching up to men. For that matter, you haven't defined what 'mythologized' means, nor how one can tell if someone is 'mythologized' or if a given category of people is under- or over-mythologized. Without these, you have the advantage of controlling the discussion, because you are in charge of the definition. My other commentary is to show that such terms can be defined in ways that others can verify for themselves. Your inability to come up with a meaningful definition, combined with your apparent cherry-picking of the data, likely contributes to the downvotes you've received.
  - hoopd 11y ago
    The quality of my arguments remains fairly constant over time, the reactions to them depend heavily on the politics involved.
  - innguest 11y ago
    All I'm hearing is "I don't want to read about Cultural Marxism because I can't deal with the cognitive dissonance".
innguest 11y ago
There is a double-standard that you are glossing over, perhaps willingly. Jewish influence in the media is overstated by their own admission, and they are notorious for not furthering diversity within their own group. If I am wrong please correct me so I learn, instead of downvoting me to shame me.

dalke 11y ago

That list was incomplete. I added a recent Indian film about Ramanujan and a Soviet film about Sofia Kovalevskaya from the 1980s. FWIW, there's also an upcoming film "Dau" (in post-production) about the Russian mathematical physicist Lev Landau. One difficulty is that the Wikipedia list does not include made for TV movies and documentaries, like 'Dangerous Knowledge' (2007) on Georg Cantor, Ludwig Boltzmann, Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing, or the BBC documentary 'Isaac Newton: The Last Magician' (2013), or the PBS documentary 'Newton's Dark Secrets' (2005), or "Breaking the Code" (1996), another biography of Turing, or "Freedom Man" (1989) about the black American mathematician Benjamin Banneker, or the 1973 Italian TV movie "Non ho tempo" about Galois, or Simon Singh's 1996 documentary "Fermat's Last Theorem", focusing on Andrew Wiles but including other mathematicians. Or the BBC documentary "The Birth Of Calculus" (1986) on Leibniz, the four-part BBC series "The Story of Maths" (2008), the 2008 "Julia Robinson and Hilbert's Tenth Problem", or ... I think you get the picture that there are many TV movies about mathematicians, and most of them are white males. BTW, none of them are "average". When "Moneyball" was turned into a movie, people asked how a book that dealt with statistics could be turned into a movie, since statistics alone isn't that interesting. What big screen movie is there to make out of Dirichlet's life? Of Riemann's? Of Wiles'? So, of "regular white guy scientists or mathematicians we've mythologized in the past 20 years", where I'll define "mythologized" to mean "made a movie about them", and I'll limit it to feature length films based on lives of actual scientists: "Kinsey" (2004) on Kinsey, "Copenhagen" (2002, TV) on a meeting between Bohr and Heisenberg, "Creation" (2009) on Darwin, "Something the Lord Made" (2004) about heart surgeons (one of which was a white male), "Tim's Vermeer" (2013) though that's more an amateur scientist, "The Aviator" (2004) about Howard Hughes (aerospace engineer and inventor), "A Dangerous Method" (2011) concerning Jung, Freud, and Sabina Spielrein (the first two being white males), this fall the film "Experimenter" about Stanley Milgram will be released, "The Insider" (1999) is a drama based on the research scientist Jeffrey Wigand, and "The Strangest Dream" (2008) about the physicist Joseph Rotblat. Those are movies about 10+ real scientists, all male, straight, and not disabled, plus a couple of others. (There were a few movies with other than white, male, straight characters, but certainly not this many.) You for some reason switched to fictional scientists with Gravity (2013) and Interstellar (2014). Why is that? For that matter, you restricted me to scientists and mathematicians, while the protagonists of Gravity are engineers and astronauts - it's poor form to change your metric part-way through. If I expand the list to include engineers, astronauts, and similar occupations, then "Captain Phillips" (2013) concerns the captain of the MV Maersk Alabama, which was hijacked by pirates, "The Wind Rises" (2013) about Jiro Horikoshi, the man who designed Japanese fighter planes during World War II ... oops ! Sory, not a white man, though he would have been an "honorary white" in apartheid South Africa, " Zvorykin-Muromets" (2010) about the Russian inventor of television, "Flash of Genius" (2008) about the Robert Kearns and his invention of the intermittent windshield wiper, A problem with your list is it's easily interpreted as cherry picking. Jodie Foster was the protagonist of "Contact" (1997), a big budget sci-fi film. How does your choice now of "Gravity" indicate a changed pattern from nearly 20 years ago? Another problem is that you haven't established what the baseline should be. Given the 12.2% of the US population is "Non-Hispanic Black or African American", what percentage of films with 'hero scientists' should have a "Non-Hispanic Black or African American" in that role? Given that 51% of the adult population in the US are women, how many hero scientist movies should have a women in that role? Perhaps it's more that these roles were previously underrepresented? Is the pattern you see simply explained by the secular trend that people other than straight white males are becoming more frequent in science? You ended by picking two items from a different context - postings to HN in the last month and 'male scientists who have been publicly disgraced in the past year', I think to establish a pattern. But you again lack the evidence needed to tell if your observations are really a pattern instead of cherry picking. What is the expected baseline? If the ratio of men to women in science is 4:1, then we would expect a female scientist to be publicly disgraced with about the same ratio. (It's hard to give a good ratio since I think it's more likely that a senior researcher will be found out and reported in the international news. I believe there are more males in higher level positions than females. Also, "Japanese women account for only 10% of the researchers in Japan" and "only 12 percent of the science and engineering workforce in India was female in 2010", so the international ratio is probably more like 8:1. Checking now, I searched "Retraction Watch" for all people described by the writers as being "disgraced". The complete list of male scientists in the last few years are: Naoki Mori, James H. Hunton, Dipak Das, Don Poldermans, Yoshitaka Fujii, Joachim Boldt, Diederik Stapel, and Woo-Suk Hwang. The only disgraced female scientist mentioned is Bengu Sezen. This 8:1 ratio is about what I expect from the percentage of women doing science in the world stage, and within the error bars for something with so few numbers. What method did you use to count disgraced male and female scientists? I see you missed Haruko Obokata as another disgraced female scientist, so it doesn't seem like you've done a systematic search. (A double-check search against sciencemag.org finds Jens Förster and Marc Hauser as additional 'disgraced' male researchers and no additional female researchers. Note that Science does not use the term 'disgraced' in articles about Haruko Obokata.) Also, what do you use as the ratio for males in science vs. females in science? If it's 4:1 or higher then with 3 male disgraces you would expect less than a 50% chance of hearing about a female in the same situation, no? Otherwise, if you're just making connections based on the latest hot gossip, then you'll be suffering from some serious bias error. You're not going to hear about Naoki Mori on HN. Regarding postings to HN, what is your criteria? For example, "Alain Badiou Is Making a Movie About Plato with Brad Pitt and Sean Connery" from 7 days ago is a movie about a guy. Is it mythologizing a male? What about "Deep Web (2015 Documentary) – The Story of the Silk Road" from a month ago - does it mythologize Ross William Ulbricht? How do you define 'mythologizing' in such a way that it's at least roughly repeatable? If you can't do that, then you don't really have a good metric.