The Portrayal of Early Manned Spaceflight in Hidden Figures: A Critique [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

The Portrayal of Early Manned Spaceflight in Hidden Figures: A Critique [pdf]

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26 pointsatdrummond8 comments

From my reading the critique seems to be sensible, often correcting simple facts such as the launch date of Gagarin or the fact that the rockets always launched eastward, as westward launches are nonsensical for the location of the space centre.

I don’t know quite how to feel about it, seems that the book did exaggerate a lot of facts in order to tell a story and perhaps should be categorised as a historical fiction, but that does not quite make the book worthless, as even a good story can be a launching point for many talented young women to get into science.

Makes me wonder how many other things I’ve watched and read were edited for the purpose of telling a better story.

Certainly not a reason to cite 1984 though.

Claiming that a fictional account is true is called lying, and lying is wrong.

When truth is exaggerated or stretched to further an agenda, then does it still remain the truth? I think the problem I have with people who exaggerate the truth is that they are doing it for a certain reason, and then I have to ask myself what that reason may be. However, I do agree that material like this can be extremely motivating, but imagine if you based your entire career on something you thought was the truth, but later found out was actually made up by someone. I would certainly feel confused and maybe even a bit angry about it.

Religion?

I dislike the implication that "significance inflation" is new -- the result of "woke-ness". Did Teddy Roosevelt do all the things he is credited with? Or Thomas Edison? (or Napoleon?) I'm know little about historians, but I think there is an industry of discovering unrecognized accomplishments, followed by debunking them (what did Steve Jobs invent?).

I think it is naive to suggest 1984 is suddenly upon us. Orwell I'm sure knew that history has been re-written for at least 2500 years.

I'm well aware that quoting from 1984 isn't exactly innovative, but in my opinion no other quote describes as succinctly what we've seen happening in the name of Diversity, Equity (not equality), Inclusion for a few years now.

"Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.

And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. ‘Who controls the past’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past."

Rewriting history and books is actually exactly what's happening in Florida under ostensibly fascist rule, which is precisely what Orwell was referring to.

I don't want my street named after a slave owner, period. No, it doesn't destroy history to change it. History recorded safely, in many other places, is exactly why street names and books are being updated - to include more accurate, less sugar-coated retellings of history.

If you have a problem with the increased scrutiny and exposure of how deeply our systematic failures run, you're the problem.

I think both your comment and the reply by scrozart are hyperbolic. A particular person accruing perhaps undue historical acclaim in the popular press relative to the actual scope of their accomplishments happens all the time.

In this case, yes, there's a lot of "wanting it to be true" involved because the tale of a black woman mathematician working in the 1960s makes for a heroic story of triumph over adversity.

Per the "How Did It All Get Started?" section of the PDF it seems like the misconstrual of what happened began not as some kind of woke project in the last 10 years, but in the 1960s with the mathematician in question, proud of her accomplishments, inflating them beyond their real significance. And then the tale grew in the telling as the events receded in her memory.

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