Comment by high_derivative | Hacker News Reader

Comment by high_derivative | Hacker News Reader

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high_derivative

"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-blac...

I'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.

I 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-b...

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