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Comment by gloryjulio | Hacker News Reader

As an Asian, decolonize scientific subjects is one of the funniest thing I have ever heard. What does it even mean?

Ohm's law you called resistance law, Maxwell's equations you called electromagnetic equations, Planck's constant you called the quantum constant...

-- The Three Body Problem

Yeah sure, if it's just renaming of the functions and variables in the code base that's harmless I guess.

But why would you do that if it's indeed from certain person (provided by that it's not stolen credit)? Are we going to getting rid all of the human names from the heaven's objects? We are still naming those things with ppl's names afaik

Also, aside from credit, it just makes it harder to research the history. I mean did someone else discover Maxwell’s equations, and Plank’s constant who we are overlooking?

Do we need to stop using the word algorithm, and replace it with say, “procedural recipe”?

Doesn't seem to make it easier. The name is Planck

I see. So it seems like a good reason to change the names is so people don't lose marks over spelling mistakes.

It's a quote from a novel, the passage goes on with "all scientific accomplishments resulted from the wisdom of the working masses, and those capitalist academic authorities only stole these fruits and put their names on them"

Compared to that, the example in the OP linked article is funny indeed

Maybe read about the topic before immediately discrediting it entirely?

One example of decolonizing science is simply giving proper attribution for scientific discoveries that come from the global south, but are in the textbooks as being discovered by europeans. Of which there are numerous examples.

If that's only thing they are doing, how about just call it giving the right credit?

Because that's completely sanitizing the reasons attribution wasn't given in the first place, which were often either explicitly racially motivated, or deeply involved in the logistics of settler colonialism. Calling it what it is seems like a good idea.

Sure but there are subjects and places to discuss that. Do you think biology, physics, maths all need to come with their own disclaimer each time.

Fairly attributing blame for the non-attribution of credit is not going to be easy.

Perhaps it’s best to avoid attribution at all when presenting scientific and mathematical ideas themselves? There are many contexts when priority claims are messy (colonialism and not) and are fundamentally an oversimplification of an incremental process that involves many people. I do think there is an important place for describing the people who did the work, perhaps in the context of history of science and math.

That gets into what we even mean by calling someone the "inventor" of someone. Plenty of people made flying contraptions of one sort or another, such as Clément Ader, Gustave Whitehead, Richard Pearse, and Karl Jatho

But the Wright Bros caused the world to start flying, finding errors in the prior equations for lift and making practical planes capable of sustained flight as well as the means to control them.

The others on that list contributed in their own ways, but did not have the same impact.

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