ESR: Abusing Alan Turing
esr.ibiblio.org
esr.ibiblio.org
Raymond is referring to this BBC article: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-18561092
It was (distastefully IMHO) published on the day of the centenary and makes a number of schoolboy errors about Turing and suicide:
1. It omits to mention that a significant amount of cyanide was found in his stomach in liquid form. But does mention the fact that the 'apple was not tested for cyanide'. If you omit the former and mention the latter it sounds suspicious. And why would you test the apple for cyanide?
2. The article makes great play of Turing's happiness shortly before his death. This misses the fact that many suicides are outwardly 'happy' before taking their own lives and is so basic that I'm amazed the BBC allowed it.
3. The article plays up Turing's mess in the house and mentions: "The electrolysis experiment was wired into the ceiling light socket.". This was a common practice in those days and I remember adapters wiring things into light sockets as a child in the UK.
4. The article also likes to try to downplay everything negative. For example, "It is often repeated that the chemicals caused him to grow breasts, though Turing is only known to have mentioned this once." The second clause seems to be the most important.
5. The article is rather ugly in that it engages in a bunch of speculation and then ends with the 'expert' saying it's best not to speculate.
But the worst part of the article is that it contains nothing new. The doubt about Turing's suicide is well known and documented by his mother, Hodges and Leavitt. There was nothing newsworthy in the story.
"More: behind much of today’s hagiography there seems to lurk a sort of perverse insistence that if Turing hadn’t been gay and a suicide he would be less apt for veneration, as a founder of computer science or anything else."
I'm not sure where Raymond gets this.
ESR's point is perhaps best made by Einstein's quote:
"If I am proved correct,the Germans will call me a German, the Swiss will call me a Swiss citizen, and the French will call me a great scientist.
If relativity is proved wrong, the French will call me a Swiss, the Swiss will call me a German and the Germans will call me a Jew."
People who don't know an Entscheidungsproblem from a hole in the ground will latch onto this to claim Turing for their own team that: "He was great and English", "He was great and from Cambridge", "He was great and worked at Manchester", "He was great and at King's" , "He was great and gay:, "He was great and a marathon runner" ..etc...
Well, thank goodness, maybe he didn't actually grow breasts. Must not have actually have been that bad being forced to take hormones for no good reason.
There's also a very, uhm, disheartening tone that a lot of commenters on that blog post are taking -- what sort of people is ESR attracting? People are suggesting that Turing's castigation was a preventable result of his homosexuality he should have predicted and avoided. "Just stay in the closet and shut your mouth."
Gross. Really, really gross. ESR should be ashamed.
For saying that Turing should be remembered for his accomplishments rather than for the circumstances of his death?
Isn't it even more disheartening to know that such a thing could happen in an "enlightened" society to someone who had such great accomplishments? It was a complete lack of respect of basic human dignity, and people shouldn't forget that, especially presently when the issue(of gay rights) is finally entering the mass public eye. People should be aware of the results of oppression, it makes them more compassionate.
People should be aware of oppression, it does make them more compassionate, but usually when people find out they've been lied to, manipulated to support a cause, they react by rejecting the cause, sometimes violently. That's a lot worse for your cause than whatever benefit you might wring out of having Turing for a spokesman.
You admitted that terrible things were done to him -- which is enough. It doesn't really matter whether he killed himself over the oppression or not, the argument isn't predicated on that, but whether or not awful things were done to him, which they were, and which are undeniably documented.
But, yeah, I agree that if it's not known whether or not he killed himself specifically over that it shouldn't be brought up -- but there is plenty of substance in what we do know happened to bring up.
Basically, the crowd he attracts is smart in some ways but uncivilized. It's a waste and a disappointment.
But maybe I'm just stuck in the statist mindset, where the government has a monopoly on the use of force. Perhaps they're merely advancing the anarcho-capitalist idea that private entities ought to be contracted to the various roles that have been usurped by the state. So, like private police, presumably there's a market for private jackbooted thugs to oppress dissenting ideas. There's no doubt some heavy ratiocinations I'm missing which make this morally acceptable, rather than the doing of violence to another that it seems on the surface.
Long live the market!*
*sorry
Given the results of coming out, what should Turing have done?
To be clear: Morally, I agree with you fully. Pragmatically, fighting the war only works if you go into it knowing you're going to fight and prepared for the fight. Gandhi was more-or-less nutty in many ways, but he was prepared for the fight. Turing apparently just wanted to continue to live his life, the way most people in the world do.
So, pragmatically, being right is usually secondary to being able to continue living a reasonable life. Unless you think devoting your life to a war is reasonable, as Gandhi did.
The author of that article seems wholly unaware of the nature of depression. When forced into social situations, you learn to hide it. You act happy, tell jokes, disarm the situation if anyone sees you looking sad (I'm tired, have I told you I'm an insomniac?) or crying (allergies, contacts).
why would you test the apple for cyanide?
I haven't read Hodges. The story I've always heard is that Turing killed himself by eating a cyanide-laced apple. If that were the theory, it's obvious why you'd test the apple. So you seem to be saying that the apple theory was always bogus: because the evidence was that he killed himself by drinking a cyanide solution, there was no need to test the apple for cyanide any more than anything else in the room. Am I getting your point?
(In which case it's odd that the apple story ever got going in the first place.)
This is also why I don't read ESR or RMS or any ideologue. Last I heard, it took the product of a northern European leftist-socialist* society to produce a college kid with a "fuck it, lets write a kernel and dismiss the Ayn Rand politics" attitude to do anything with their philosophies.
*by American standands
Not that ESR is not contradicting any of the following:
* Alan Turing lived in a society generally intolerant of homosexuals
* Anti-gay oppression is bad
* Triumph over adversity is laudable
To ESR (and to many other non-progressives), this sort of politically motivated myth-making diminishes the object of the myth. When he writes "Yes, yes...", what he's saying is and it's just so damn tiresome.
If "No", how does that jibe with your definition?
If "Yes", is being a victim of oppression necessarily that big a deal? (Both Einstein and Feynman seemed to do OK for themselves.)
(Note that nothing here excuses or condones the antisemitism that affected both Einstein and Feynman.)
More attention is paid to the oppression that Turing underwent because it seems likely that it was a major factor in his death. If Einstein's life had been ended at a young age, but after he had made contributions to physics that made clear what had been lost, his death and the circumstances around it would be a large part of what we remember about him.
Yes, Turing could have chosen to go to prison instead. Would that have been better somehow? How were homesexuals treated in English prisons then?
It is important that the British government, at the end, cared more about who he wanted to have sex with than his great mental capabilities, and thus destroyed this intellect well before his time.
Sure, it's not as important as Turing's important theoretical and practical work in computing. But that doesn't mean it's not important. It's a cautionary tale and one we should take to heart. How many potential geniuses are we stopping right now because of the unjust things in our society? What are we losing out on? It deserves some thought.
There's a certain mindset that delights in anything that goes against conventional wisdom. Sometimes this is really useful, but the thing is that conventional wisdom is actually right most of the time. A knee-jerk reaction to believe anything that goes against conventional wisdom is no better than a knee-jerk reaction to disbelieve it. A lot of people have this tendency, even very smart people. I'm sure I fall victim to it myself sometimes.
The "Turing didn't really commit suicide" article was perfect for that. It takes a classic story that's attained the status of modern (albeit relatively obscure) myth and turns it on its head. It's attractive for the same reason that articles about radiation being good for you, peak oil being a myth, and the civil rights movement being bad for minorities are attractive: they're intriguing ideas that make you feel smarter than the average joe, since they contradict what "everybody knows".
It's often pretty easy to pull off, too, because most people don't do much research into the things "everybody knows". "Everybody knows" Turing committed suicide by eating a poisoned apple. But few people know the details. Thus, when an article says that the apple was never tested for cyanide, it's extremely convincing, because few people are aware that it was found in Turing's stomach. Likewise, the article discusses Turing's cheerful mood in his last days as evidence against suicide, even though it's actually at best neutral if not evidence for suicide. But most people don't know that elevated mood prior to suicide is common, and not having researched the "everybody knows" story, they'll take it as evidence of the alternative theory.
It's an interesting phenomenon. People will go their whole lives knowing the official story but not knowing any details. Then one single article comes out with a few details and suddenly they're convinced that what they knew their whole lives was wrong, even without doing any further research on their own. I must admit that I went through this exact process with this story, reverting to a sort of generic detail-free skepticism a little while after reading the Turing-didn't-commit-suicide story, and only realizing how silly it was after reading jgrahamc's comment here.
Anyway, that's a good explanation of a phenomenon I have observed as well.
There's a level of uncertainty under which, I agree, it would seem forced and I'd wish that folks would look for another exemplar. By my analysis, and from my perspective the circumstances of Turing's life and death are not so uncertain.
It's a strawman, because in truth the only important part about Turing's life in view of his accomplishments is that it was cut short. i.e. his genius could no longer produce progress. Whether this would have been due to suicide, an accident, or murder is not relevant. It is not relevant because for the people under which his work was meant to be dissipated (people in the same field), the circumstances in which the results are produced are of no importance.
Because of the progress he produced he became a people's hero to his country. People think about and tell tales about their heroes and their lives and circumstances. Irrespective of the direction these tales take, the accomplishments stand on their own among his peers, to wit, those who can actually understand the accomplishments.
Whether people appropriate a part of a life of a hero to underline certain aspects of it, or deny parts of it to underline other aspects of it, matters not one iota.
The facts of the matter are. "The work of Alan Turing was seminal to the entire field of computer science." The rest is history, and, as sometimes happens with history, can be rewritten by whomever needs the pageviews.
"this sort of politically motivated myth-making diminishes the object of the myth"
And any sort of tug of war between two sides who purport to propagate "the true story" is part of this myth. Pretending otherwise is just disingenuous.
s/Not that/Note that/ Rather than confront Turing’s homosexuality, the British authorities
from the arresting constable on up tried to look the other way and
gave every easy out they could; Turing, through some combination of
carelessness and self-destructiveness, took none of them.
Silly queers should stay in the closet.
On his birthday, Letters of note published this letter from him on the eve of his trial: http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/06/yours-in-distress-alan..... Turing's own words:
"I'm afraid that the following syllogism may be used by some in the future.
Turing believes machines think Turing lies with men Therefore machines do not think
Yours in distress,
Alan"
This suggests Turing was greatly concerned with how society's attitude to his sexuality affected how he might be perceived by history, and how that might undermine even the impact of his ideas. That society has moved past those prejudices and is able to look back at his work with admiration, and shame for his treatment, is a gratifying refutation of his fears, not a convenient retelling of his story to fit modern agendas.
You know, the academic jargon about "white male privilege" is kind of cliched, but this quote could serve as the poster child for what they are talking about. "yes, yes, repression, how tedious, how gauche to bring it up" when talking of homosexuals -- but try enacting some gun control legislation and then see if "repression" is something to be handwaved away.
Honestly, to see this guy as a spokesman for hacker culture makes me ashamed to be identified with it.
The LGBT community has been actively fighting oppression for nearly a century. 80 years ago, the Nazi party started ostracising and killing homosexuals. 43 years ago the Stonewall riots occurred, during which LGBT Americans staged an act of civil disobedience that is still remembered in Pride and Christopher Street events around the world (and yet it was only in 2003 that ‘sodomy’ laws were ruled unconstitutional). We're looking back on decades of an AIDS crisis where gay men in first-world countries have had to fight[1] for access to life-saving experimental drugs, and looking forward to a future (which may still be a long way off) where the United States, and other governments, recognise that gay people are people too.
So you know what? I think we're allowed one measly fucking ‘hero’ figure. And if you don't want our gay voices ruining your programming idols, here's a very simple solution: stop persecuting the gay ones.
[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIDS_Coalition_to_Unleash_Power...
If you want to learn more about Turing and the Entscheidungsproblem I recommend Charles Petzold's "The Annotated Turing". It has some great supplemental explanations to go along with Turing's paper plus interesting historical details. Petzold strikes a good balance between presenting the actual work and talking about Turing's personal life.
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1742
Now with Turing, rather than condemn the people who hounded him to death, he is going after those who don't treat his life-story in exactly the manner that esr, lord of propriety, has decreed.
I can't believe anybody buys this crap, and I can't believe I am spending time on it, but esr is often taken to be a spokesman for the entire hacker community, so occasionally stopping to point out his nonsense seems to be a necessary thing to do.
Here endeth the history lesson. Incidentally, you could have googled this if you were interested in hearing an answer rather than signaling indignation and/or contempt.
1. That (according to the article he links) Alan Turing's persecution and death were heavily mythologized.
2. This is not surprising, considering the nature of the myth: a great person becomes a martyr of a persecuted minority group.
3. This is a shame, since it distracts from Turing's actual achievements, which were pretty amazing, and perpetuates the association between heroism and downtrodden martyrdom.
(As an aside, if #1 is true, then I can get behind #2. It seems to be a common enough pattern of folk-hero-making to raises suspicion. Not sure about #3.)
I don't see any libertarian ideology in here. Could you point it out for me?
Edit: To clarify, I mean everything said by ESR here. Yes Turings accomplishments are great. However, it's because of those great accomplishments that what the British government did is even more atrocious. Turing made key and irreplaceable contributions to the Allied war effort, and this was repaid by bigotry.
Also, when ESR blamed turing for his castration was just... bigoted.
I also fear you've misunderstood ESR. See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4158468 for a clarification.
Giving other people rights doesn't take them away from the people who already have them.
Who is "progressives"? And who says I am one? You have a very warped view if you think basic human rights is partisan. The US may well have a fringe group of lunatics who feel that human rights are bad, but in the rest of the free world human rights is not a "depends on your political affiliation" deal.
>I also fear you've misunderstood ESR.
I fear you have no idea who Eric is. He is a bigot, hates gays, liberals, blacks, hispanics, and basically anyone who isn't part of his fringe group of lunatics. You are interpreting his nonsense in the least offensive way possible, but that doesn't mean it is the most accurate way.
That's not what I wrote. I asked who gets to decide what constitutes a "basic human right". Notions about "basic human rights" differ; many are near-universal, such as a "right to life", but a large number of them divide along tribal lines. For example, including "men have a right to marry other men" in the list is very much a recent progressive addition. Other additions, such as "rights" to housing and health care, might sound nice, but to many observers they look suspiciously like rationalizations for political patronage.
Gay marriage is an excellent example. Righteous, progressive crusaders from a hundred years ago would be astonished (and probably horrified) to find gay marriage on the list of "basic human rights". That doesn't mean gay marriage is wrong, but it's disingenuous to claim that gay marriage is obviously a basic human right and that anyone who opposes it is a bigot. Those who insist on its inclusion do so as members of a particular political tribe.
Incidentally, my own views are distinct from what I wrote above. Any attempts to infer my exact views from this discussion will undoubtedly be in error. I do intend to discuss these issues at length at some point, but this isn't the right forum for it.
I fear you have no idea who Eric is. He is a bigot, hates gays, liberals, blacks, hispanics...
I actually know a lot about ESR. In fact, I offer a prize of $100 to anyone who can find even one example establishing that ESR hates gays, blacks, or Hispanics. (He may well hate liberals—at least, some of them—and the feeling is probably mutual.)
Note: The bar for establishing "hate" and claiming the prize is very high. Among other things, making claims that might be true doesn't count as "hate". For example, suppose someone makes the claim "the scientific evidence indicates that people descended from central European Jews are, on average, more intelligent than those descended from non-Jewish Europeans." This doesn't mean the claimant "hates" non-Jewish Europeans, even if the claim turns out to be false.