Online trolls are harassing a scientist who helped take pictures of a black hole
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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
Yet for her (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.
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.
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.
Yet now we have 'the media' pushing a 'feminist narrative' because they're highlighting a woman on the team. Now why would pushing a 'feminist narrative' using your logic cause people to get angry?
People get upset when the media pushes a feminist narrative because feminism is a very divisive issue. Talking about a divisive issue drives clicks, interactions, retweets, etc. Especially when you get dismissive with one half of the pie. The only purpose of the media is to piss people off so they can get eyeballs on ads.
If that's your honest reading of events, then you're the problem here, my dude.
Because whenever they don't have an agenda to push, they apportion credit for accomplishments with perfect accuracy from the beginning?
It's common for recognition to come from some combination of hard work, intelligence, and luck. When you see people getting all bent out of shape over the luck involved in this case and not in others, you have to wonder why.
Everything I'm finding about Jeffrey Snover indicates that he did, in fact, by himself, invent PowerShell. The idea and original implementation was developed by him, and then he picked a small team (Bruce Payette and James Truher) to bring it to maturity. So I don't see how that's a fair comparison.
> . . . It's a miserable language, full of unexpected behaviors and badly designed features. . .
> I haven't met a single person who likes PowerShell. It's perhaps the textbook example of ugly design that looks technically consistent but utterly unfriendly and mind bogglingly verbose. . .
> PowerShell is one of the few bits of software which has actually made me throw a computer in anger. The idea has potential but the implementation is just bad. . .
No one is really looking into his IC but the thread is not positive. I have no idea who contributed what, but I’m not sure anyone would want to claim part of the credit for powershell.
——
Here’s a thread for man behind AMD’s zen architecture: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14989551
First comment:
> Zen is the work of a huge team of talented engineers. To single one out as "the man behind Zen" seems very wrong. . .
——
The man behind objective-c: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8422695
Second comment:
> The man behind Objective-C these days (and for the past decade plus) is this guy: http://www.sealiesoftware.com/blog/
——
For the other threads I saw, some were actually individual efforts, others were just ignoring “the man behind” and talking about the tech. Changing my search to “woman behind”, I saw no comments disparaging the level of contribution.
EDIT: I’m also by no means justifying the vitriol in the black hole thread or the harassment. Just doing some legwork.
When I looked at the PowerShell thread, the top five threads were people hating on PowerShell, followed by one person who liked it. In general, I think comments tend to be biased towards people with a disagreement with the main article. If you agreed with it entirely, you'd just upvote and move on. If you're leaving a comment you probably have an objection or qualification you want to make. In the PowerShell example the qualification was how much people hate PowerShell. In the Bouman example it's arguing over the phrase "woman behind".
Here's a counter example about "The woman behind two men and a truck" [1]. None of the top level comments seem to be complaining about her not being the only one to contribute to the company etcetera. As far as I can tell with a bit of research, she really is the woman behind the company (the founder), the PowerShell guy really was the Chief Architect, and Bouman really was a contributor but not the lead or central figure behind the black hole effort. So, I'm not persuaded this is evidence of a misogynistic attitude at HackerNews. I think it can be true that women face sexist attitudes in the sciences, that mean people are being mean to Bouman online, and that Bouman can be incorrectly described as the "woman behind black hole pictures".
Per Wikipedia
Bouman - She researches computational methods for imaging, and was a member of the Event Horizon Telescope team that captured the first image of a black hole
Snover - Jeffrey Snover is a Microsoft Technical Fellow, PowerShell Chief Architect, and the Chief Architect for the Azure Infrastructure and Management group which includes Azure Stack, System Center and Operations Management Suite. Snover is the inventor of Windows PowerShell
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katie_Bouman
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Snover
From these two excerpts alone it sounds more correct to say that Snover was the "Man behind" PowerShell than Bouman was the "Woman behind" the black hole pictures.
> With a few others, Katie also developed the imaging framework that rigorously tested all three codes and shaped the entire paper
So taken at face value, her contribution seems to be this image testing framework and whatever she contributed to the paper.
Most articles attributed Bouman as the inventor of the algorithm used to generate the image. This was directly in the titles of these articles. Now it is clear her algorithm was not used in the generation of the image (see https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/11/science/katie-bouman-blac...).
This isn't to say her own algorithmic work did not count as a contribution just because it wasn't used. I think that exploration matters, if only to see where that path leads while others explore alternative paths. She is listed as the primary author on this 2016 paper (http://people.csail.mit.edu/klbouman/pw/papers_and_presentat...).
But I think given that there were at least 5 other papers here relating to image reconstruction, given that the code was written mostly by others, and given that 3 other algorithms (which she was not involved in) were used in the construction of the final image, I think it is fair to say that Bouman was not the woman behind the black hole picture. She was a woman, alongside a team of many women and many men. Sara Issaoun (female scientist on same project) said on Twitter that a team of 40 worked on image reconstruction: https://twitter.com/SaraIssaoun/status/1116304522660519936
Monad was available in various early stages internally within Microsoft and externally to the world, before it eventually became a feature with a whole team behind it.
Snover, by the way, is a Microsoft Technical Fellow (their highest title for engineers): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Snover
This is a very different example than the effort behind the EHT, which includes not just those working on imaging and reconstruction, but numerous others as well. The total team has been said to be ~200 people. Furthermore, even on the imaging side, there were several papers and several different reconstruction algorithms to fill in gaps in sensor data. And those papers themselves reference numerous prior work in this space, upon which these newer algorithms are evolutionary improvements.
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-blac...
"[...]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.
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-b...
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
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.
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.
Why don't you say what you really mean by 'calling for the media to more accurately report stories'?
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.
That said, I also think it's not everyone, and that some who were examining the code base were just on a fact-finding mission given that this story was seemingly everywhere online and something felt off.
If one is concerned about poor accuracy of say a report on 9/11 that claimed Steve Buschemi rescued the most survivors then it makes sense to slam the report as inaccurate tripe. Certainly not start harassing a guy actually involved with the rescue but had a role exaggerated. That is why I refer to it as transparent misogyny - since in what world does it make sense to lash out against the people who are misreported?
It is possible to act as a fact finder. By all means compile a complete list of contributions and itemize it in excruciating detail. Calling it fact-finding is just trying to use it as a rhetorical motte and bailey.
> 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-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+%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-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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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#Collab...) and it does have a leadership team (see 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).
In the first 20 results of searching HN for "the man behind"(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
>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
> 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), 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&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-hol...). I personally find her an intelligent and likable ambassador for her team.
No, the new thing here is pretending that this only happens to women: 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.
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.
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 :)
Honestly, take the time and read the comments and see how similar they are to the Katie Bouman "outrage": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15395347
That said, I think it's fairly uncharitable to read the headline that way, and we shouldn't jump to conclusions about the author's intent when it's so ambiguous. But it's also uncharitable to read some kind of sinister latent misogyny into HN reactions critical of the headline.