Beware the Alan Turing fetish | Hacker News Reader

Beware the Alan Turing fetish

blog.jgc.org

115 pointsjgrahamc41 comments

The media has a strong, strong bias towards established narratives. (So do all of us, but they're in the professional business of telling stories, so it's relevant that one can tell in advance what collection of observations makes a "good story.")

"Our benighted ancestors had it all going well but then they did really bad things due to a malign corrupting influence and we're still suffering as a consequence" is a very powerful narrative. It's so powerful that if you're telling a story which has e.g. all the elements but the snake that you'll invent a bloody snake because everyone knows this story needs a snake.

In Britain I think the 'malign corrupting influence' in your example turns out to be ourselves. We seem to love a story where we failed to recognize something as important, or spend money on it, or overlook the genius in our midst.

A lit-crit class could go alllllll day with this one, but I think in most versions of the Turning story [+] that I've seen that "we" are Eve, evil unseen British homophobes are the snake, and Turning would almost certainly be Adam. The apple is sex because the apple is always sex.

I would not repeat the above in a lit-crit class that I had a desire to pass, because the kind of people who do lit-crit on persecution of homosexuals did not get their doctorates on "Gender Politics In Genesis: Pretty Much Peachy Keen", but I think it's the right call theory-wise. (Practically speaking, to get the A, a) mention the problem and b) recast Turing as Amaterasu. That's a pretty strained reading, but ahem the narratives one needs to pay attention to in a lit-crit class are not the narratives in the text.)

+: n.b. I am not talking about any event which actually happened anymore, I am talking about talking about events that happened. The rough sketch of thought on this goes something like: "History doesn't insert snakes. Historians insert snakes. There is no history without historians."

"The apple is sex because the apple is always sex." I can't speak for lit-crit classes, but I'll just say that in Catholic theology, the fruit (an apple is not mentioned) is not about sex. I suppose the apple=sex idea is another persistent narrative that got established somehow.

My bad: if it wasn't obvious, I was talking Bible-as-literature mode rather than Catholic-dogmatist mode.

Anyhow, apologies for the tangent.

The fruit is knowledge, aka knowledge of good and evil, aka sex.

[A Recovering Catholic]

Any Catholic who told you that was pushing an agenda. Well, another agenda.

[Catholic...ish?]

The fruit == loss of innocence. So, in the original story, it's "knowledge of good and evil." But to most people, loss of innocence brings sex to mind, so the fruit is very commonly used as a metaphor for sex.

OT: it is said that whatever the fruit was, it certainly wasn't a southern watermelon. If it was, Eve would never have repented :)

I agree that this has nothing to do with Turing himself and everything to do with journalistic low standards. However, I don't think it's an effort to fit Turing into the "forbidden fruit" story, and I really see no snake coming up in this. It's just sensationalism: making each bad story really bad, and each good story really good.

It's hard to explain Turing's achievements to non-technical readers anyway. The documentary calls him a codebreaker, which is not exactly why they've named the Turing Award in his honor. But it's much easier to put across to the general public the point about Enigma (he helped win the war!) than about computability (huh?).

And to be fair, the code breaking machines (bomba) were important early computers.

It's called "Lapsarianism" and is a pervasive and pernicious force on the (Western) world.

That's the straight reading. Enigma, the biography that brought Turing widespread attention, follows a gay narrative: "we make modernity," and "the Nazis change, but they don't go away."

And now, after we made this bit of the modern narrative, you lot are stealing it. Typical. :-p

Turing's work was almost always purely theoretical and his genius very much lied in his ability to think at a level of abstraction way higher then most of us can handle; the idea that he might have jump-started a new industrial revolution only seems to indicate that whoever came up with it had no understanding whatsoever of what Turing did besides hearing that Turing was "the father of the computer". This is so wrong I am surprised somebody went as far as to write an article about this, someone should just tell the Sunday Times guy to maybe do his homework next time he utters some sentences to thousands of people. Turing had more in common with Newton or Einstein (I think the mental leaps he did for example in his work on the Entscheidungs problem are almost of this order, even though again the abstract nature of his work make its applications and implications narrower and harder to see), then with Henry Ford or Thomas Edison.

Absolutely. What the newspaper piece seems to ignore is there's no reason to suppose that if Turing had lived longer he would have become the British Bill Gates rather than, say, enjoyed life as an academic computer scientist or mathematician?

Turing had more in common with Newton or Einstein...than with Henry Ford or Thomas Edison.

Yeah, I agree. It's really a shame more people aren't aware of his brilliance. His code-breaking literally did save a massive number of lives.

> Turing's work was almost always purely theoretical [...]

Turing also got his hands dirty, and actually build some computers. So I'd put him closer to Feynman, who also did more applied work, than the theorist Einstein.

I'm always irritated by the fact that these documentaries tend to paint hime as the codebreaker when that part of his work was very much a team effort with other mathmatical minds and the electrical/physical engineers that created and maintained the quipment they used.

I feel this is wrong on two counts: it means very few people know of the other people working at Bletchly Park despite their significant contributions, and it ignores his "solo" work in the areas of computation/information that was incredibly significant in building up to the technological revolution that has taken place over the last fifty years or more.

Thanks for the notice, will watch that tonight.

Sounds like an example of mediocre journalism picking up on well worn themes: brilliant outcast genius, untimely death and potential riches lost, extrapolated and simplified.

As an aside, and I don't know if this will be covered in the programme, there was an interesting report on Radio 4 some time ago about the treatment Alan Turing went through to "cure" his homosexuality. Whilst I had previously thought this only to be barbaric acts by small minded people, the report suggested some of the medics genuinely thought that this science could actually change him and be a force for good.

Doesn't really change much, but it altered my views...slightly.

This is well covered in the program. The actual docudrama is very well done. Sure there are some TV moments with a few too many shots of Macbook Airs, but here's a very long thoughtful documentary mixed with very well acted drama that covers the life of a man and four very complex ideas: Turing machine, Turing test, morphogenesis and the Enigma break.

the treatment Alan Turing went through to "cure" his homosexuality. Whilst I had previously thought this only to be barbaric acts by small minded people, the report suggested some of the medics genuinely thought that this science could actually change him and be a force for good.

Yes there was attempts to turn homosexuals into heterosexuals, and they failed. There is amble scientific evidence, as a result of these abuses, that sexual orientation can't be changed.

Could you please present your "am[p]le scientific evidence [...] that sexual orientation can't be changed".

I'll present an anecdote which, amongst several I've seen/heard, suggests to me that you're wrong in your assertion.

"On Freddie Mercury's Sexuality

'I think it was an undiscussed thing for a long time. The truth of the matter is nobody should care. Why should anyone care what sexual persuasion people have? It's about the music, and Freddie would have been the first to say that. He never hid the fact that he was turned on by men instead of by women, but strange enough, I don't think it was always the case. Because in the early days, we used to share rooms. So in the early days, I know who Freddie slept with, and they weren't men, but I think it gradually changed. And I have no idea how these things work, but it wasn't really anybody's business but his, and we never talked about it as if it were important. Why should it be important? We just made music together.'"

quoted from http://m.npr.org/news/front/128935865?singlePage=true

Could you please present your "am[p]le scientific evidence [...] that sexual orientation can't be changed".

I do not have scientific studies, and do not know off hand if there are scientific studies. But there are loads of people who went through these 'treatments', and it didn't work.

And there are plenty of gay men who would have slept with women when they were younger. Especially in the 1960s/70s UK. Just look at all the married, right wing coversative politicans who are caught with male prostitutes.

So in short your claim is anecdotal and there isn't any scientific evidence you know of (nevermind ample)?

Just that I have heard people personally state they have changed their orientation, by choice, both from homo- to heterosexual and vice-versa.

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

-- C. S. Lewis

The barbaric act, in my mind, is that they tried to change his sexual orientation at all, and went to such lengths to try that. Just because it was supposed to be somehow "bad" to be homosexual, not because he was a danger to anyone.

Sorry, but how is this barbaric if the person undergoing the 'treatment' wants to undergo it? There are a lot of men who want to be women, I'd imagine there are some homosexuals who wish they were straight (and vice versa).

If we had the capability to alter sexual orientation, and the person wanted to, what's so wrong with that?

A fine example of the banality of being contradictory for the sake of it. Turing was coerced into 'treatment' (the alternative being prison, a grim prospect for a man like Turing), consequently 'barbaric' is spot on as a description; doubly, trebly so, given his contribution to the war effort.

What are you going to try next? How about quibbling with something being called murder because the 'victim' might have wanted to die?

I'm not being contradictory for the sake of doing so, I'm being contradictory because your assertion is incorrect - many people might actually wish to alter their sexual orientation, and there is nothing 'barbaric' about it, provided we have the ability to do so humanely. Being forced into it is obviously not what I was referring to.

Your second point is called 'assisted suicide', and people do quibble about the difference.

I was talking about forcing people to undergo such a treatment, or coercing them into it some other way. That's barbaric.

If someone really wants to change their gender or orientation and is really sure I don't see why it would not be allowed, but that was not my point.

Right, I agree. My original reading of the comment had me interpreting it as 'changing or attempting to change sexual orientation ever is barbaric', which I had a slight disagreement with depending upon the context. Apologies.

I think this is part of the "fetish".

Turing is supposedly openly homosexual according to his friend and biographer and yet his fiancee still agrees to get engaged and appears to be surprised by his admission to her that he was attracted to men - they worked together and spent a lot of time outside of work together, you'd think she'd be the first to know if he was openly homosexual. This incident in his life certainly suggest bisexuality.

Moreover it seems that Turing considered his homosexual activity to be a perversion; his acceptance of the hormone therapy moves in that direction. Turing as an exceptional chemist himself would be more than aware of the possible consequences of continuing the treatment. Surely he'd choose prison otherwise?

I've a pet theory about his apparent ephebophilia and that he fell for a "honey" trap leading to his arrest but that's pushing us OT quite a bit I think.

Ooh, I love "what if" stories!

Hey, if Turing had died even earlier, maybe the Valley would be in Germany!

And I'd be eating pretzels and bratwurst.

There was a lot of code breaking that had nothing to do with Turing. The enigma was broken because some polish mathematicians showed up with pictures of the device and a method of deciphering it. And for comparison just about all of Japan's high level codes where broken by the US. So, while Turing was important, I suspect vary little would have changed if he had not been part of the decoding efforts. (Largely because you can't use information gained from decoding messages all that often or they notice and change the codes.)

Rejewski[1], Zygalski and Różycki have actually been reading the Enigma messages for over six and a half years before the war began. They built mechanical devices called "bomby kryptologiczne", known outside Poland as "bombas", which then inspired the British "bombes".

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marian_Rejewski

And if a rather more brilliant and more important code breaker, Bill Tutte, had been recognised by Canada they would have a silicon valley now.

As far as 'if,but, maybes' go, if us British had recognised the brilliance of both men... However, one man is continually overlooked. Without Tommy Flowers' engineering brilliance, the work of both Tutte and Turing would have had less impact.

Turing allegedly killed himself by putting cyanide in an apple in and eating it. That is, according to urban legend, why the Apple logo has a bite taken out of it.

Probably entirely false, but a neat idea.

And re: established narratives, I think often times the people reporting on great minds like Turing, Tesla, Einstein, etc., just can't even fathom their abstraction and the level they think on.

How timely! Just this morning I learnt a few anecdotal factoids about Turing's stay in Manchester, and his quarrels with the "old engineering guard" (Williams and Kilburn.) This comes from one of the professors who just retired from the University -- where Turing worked for a few year on the Manchester SSEM, also known as the Baby. It was the first stored program computer - effectively the first Von Neumann computer (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manchester_Baby http://www.computer50.org/)

The Baby was built by Freddie Williams and Tom Kilburn. They were both engineers who believed they were building a machine on which to do real science. At the time the only way to program the machine was by flipping switches and hacking away in binary machine code. Alan Turing was hired to come to Manchester and provide a sort of higher-level language so that scientists can use the machine, a sort of an assembler if you will.

However, it turned out that Turing didn't mind all this bit twiddling at all! Instead of doing what the rest of the engineers were expecting, he ended up writing all sorts of AI and maths programs to work on problems he thought were interesting. Problems, which the "old guard" thought of as mere games. They were trying to do science, while this guy is just playing! Oh how the world changed... This lead to a great deal of friction between him and the engineers, the remains of which can still be seen today in Manchester. For example, none of the CS buildings were named after him -- the Alan Turing building was completed in 2007 and became the home of Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, but not CS.

Some have suggested that in addition to the above, his sexuality didn't practically help when dealing with the alpha-male 1950s engineering types he was dealing with, but let's not go that way...

>his sexuality didn't practically help when dealing with the alpha-male 1950s engineering types he was dealing with //

I imagine it may well have been because in commong with other genius mathematicians he was [borderline] autistic.

Anyone else want to share a stereotype?

Not completely related reading: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/7736196.stm

"At the same time an Alan Turing fetish means we might overlook the other great people who worked in early computing" --- They could have used many other words instead of fetish. I have to wonder if the word subconsciously chosen for the history of his personal life... I hope not.

If Turing had been still alive he'd have solved P?=NP by now! ;-)

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