It's also a damn fun book. The characters quote boastful mike-drops that are actually found in historical record, such as "with all the steam I can command, your ladyship". I recommend you buy it. Or you can check out her stuff from her website, also chock-full of fascinating footnotes:
I don't think it's a coincidence that the men who have most recently received the mythology treatment are disabled (Stephen Hawking), gay (Alan Turing), had severe mental health challenges (John Nash) or are black (Neil DeGrasse Tyson). I imagine next will be a transgendered hero.
To start, let's look at movies that deal with "Scientists, Engineers, Doctors, Researchers, Inventors, Explorers and People who do Amazing Things", from http://www.imdb.com/list/ls050940841/ . These include Apollo 13, Fat Man and Little Boy, Einstein and Eddington, Shackleton, Creation, Captain Cook: Obsession and Discovery, Gorillas in the Mist, Temple Grandin, Jobs, and Reach for the Sky.
Of the 31 films (though two are not biographies or based on real-life), 2 are about women (Gorillas in the Mist, Temple Grandin), and the rest are about men. Einstein is certainly high on the list of mythologized people, so mythologization is not limited to women. (Feynman would be another. Infinity (1996) is a biopic about Feynman, but it's not on the list.)
Women appears underrepresented in that list compared to their modern presence in STEM fields. To be fair, the movies include Pasteur from the 1800s, and Harrison from the 1700s. Women were often strongly restricted from doing research in STEM fields during that time.
I saw one non-white person on that list, Vivien Thomas, from the 2004 film "Something the Lord Made".
"Reach for the Sky" from 1956 is "The true story of airman Douglas Bader who overcame the loss of both legs in a 1931 flying accident", and Temple Grandin is autistic. However, since 1956 is rather a long time ago, it does point out the need for a baseline - if the percentage of movies about disabled people has been stable, then it's not a growing pattern. As another example of someone who 'received the mythology treatment', consider "Helen Keller in Her Story" from 1954.
(Howard Hughes, in 'The Aviator' (2004), may also fall into the mentally challenged category, due to his obsessive-compulsive disorder which was present already by the 1930s. I haven't seen the film to see if it touches on his mental illness.)
Films about gay people would have been restricted under the Motion Picture Production Code, so not really seen in films from the 1930s to 1968. That would make it hard to establish a long term pattern. Still, as about 2% of the US adult population (1.2 to 5.6 according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_demographics_of_the_Unite... ) identifies as LGBT, then about 2% of the films about famous people in STEM should concern someone LGBT.
It should not be hard to come up with an evaluation technique, like "all biopics about people in STEM done as movies/made-for-TV movies in the US from 1970 to the present", and redo this same evaluation to see if there is a pattern.
The tricky part is to normalize it. If 2% of the population is homosexual, then what percentage should we expect to see portrayed as they are in movies? If 51% of the US population are women, and 27.9 percent of the PhDs in the physical sciences are women, what patterns should we expect to see in films?
Otherwise you might just be seeing the secular trend that more women are getting involved in STEM, that policies like the ADA make it easier for people with disabilities to get advanced educations, etc.
How have you done the analysis to determine if the patterns you see are due to the expected shift in population distribution of people in STEM, vs. any special sort of mythologization?
Instead of IMDB's list of mostly TV movies, how about Wikipedia's Films About Mathematicians[1], look at the biographical films. There are only 8, but the last film biopic of an average white dude was Feynman's back in '96. Last year alone we had major films about Turing and Hawking, and A Beautiful Mind came out in 2001.
Take a look at the most recent big-budget sci-fi. Q: Who had 95% of the screentime in Gravity? A: A woman. Q: Who were the hero scientists in Interstellar? A: A black guy and two women. (How long did Doyle last? What was the race and sex of the disgraced scientist in Interstellar again?)
If you would like to provide a counterpoint, simply name the regular white guy scientists or mathematicians we've mythologized in the past 20 years.
We'll compare that to the efforts towards mythologizing females on HN in the past 30 days. Emmy Noether (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9606497), The Women Science Forgot (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9744684), and today's Ada Lovelace.
We'll throw in male scientists who have been publicly disgraced in the past year (offhand I can think of 3) and compare that to the number of disgraced female scientists (I count 0).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_films_about_mathematic...
One difficulty is that the Wikipedia list does not include made for TV movies and documentaries, like 'Dangerous Knowledge' (2007) on Georg Cantor, Ludwig Boltzmann, Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing, or the BBC documentary 'Isaac Newton: The Last Magician' (2013), or the PBS documentary 'Newton's Dark Secrets' (2005), or "Breaking the Code" (1996), another biography of Turing, or "Freedom Man" (1989) about the black American mathematician Benjamin Banneker, or the 1973 Italian TV movie "Non ho tempo" about Galois, or Simon Singh's 1996 documentary "Fermat's Last Theorem", focusing on Andrew Wiles but including other mathematicians.
Or the BBC documentary "The Birth Of Calculus" (1986) on Leibniz, the four-part BBC series "The Story of Maths" (2008), the 2008 "Julia Robinson and Hilbert's Tenth Problem", or ... I think you get the picture that there are many TV movies about mathematicians, and most of them are white males. BTW, none of them are "average".
When "Moneyball" was turned into a movie, people asked how a book that dealt with statistics could be turned into a movie, since statistics alone isn't that interesting. What big screen movie is there to make out of Dirichlet's life? Of Riemann's? Of Wiles'?
So, of "regular white guy scientists or mathematicians we've mythologized in the past 20 years", where I'll define "mythologized" to mean "made a movie about them", and I'll limit it to feature length films based on lives of actual scientists:
"Kinsey" (2004) on Kinsey, "Copenhagen" (2002, TV) on a meeting between Bohr and Heisenberg, "Creation" (2009) on Darwin, "Something the Lord Made" (2004) about heart surgeons (one of which was a white male), "Tim's Vermeer" (2013) though that's more an amateur scientist, "The Aviator" (2004) about Howard Hughes (aerospace engineer and inventor), "A Dangerous Method" (2011) concerning Jung, Freud, and Sabina Spielrein (the first two being white males), this fall the film "Experimenter" about Stanley Milgram will be released, "The Insider" (1999) is a drama based on the research scientist Jeffrey Wigand, and "The Strangest Dream" (2008) about the physicist Joseph Rotblat.
Those are movies about 10+ real scientists, all male, straight, and not disabled, plus a couple of others. (There were a few movies with other than white, male, straight characters, but certainly not this many.)
You for some reason switched to fictional scientists with Gravity (2013) and Interstellar (2014). Why is that? For that matter, you restricted me to scientists and mathematicians, while the protagonists of Gravity are engineers and astronauts - it's poor form to change your metric part-way through.
If I expand the list to include engineers, astronauts, and similar occupations, then "Captain Phillips" (2013) concerns the captain of the MV Maersk Alabama, which was hijacked by pirates, "The Wind Rises" (2013) about Jiro Horikoshi, the man who designed Japanese fighter planes during World War II ... oops ! Sory, not a white man, though he would have been an "honorary white" in apartheid South Africa, " Zvorykin-Muromets" (2010) about the Russian inventor of television, "Flash of Genius" (2008) about the Robert Kearns and his invention of the intermittent windshield wiper,
A problem with your list is it's easily interpreted as cherry picking. Jodie Foster was the protagonist of "Contact" (1997), a big budget sci-fi film. How does your choice now of "Gravity" indicate a changed pattern from nearly 20 years ago?
Another problem is that you haven't established what the baseline should be. Given the 12.2% of the US population is "Non-Hispanic Black or African American", what percentage of films with 'hero scientists' should have a "Non-Hispanic Black or African American" in that role? Given that 51% of the adult population in the US are women, how many hero scientist movies should have a women in that role? Perhaps it's more that these roles were previously underrepresented?
Is the pattern you see simply explained by the secular trend that people other than straight white males are becoming more frequent in science?
You ended by picking two items from a different context - postings to HN in the last month and 'male scientists who have been publicly disgraced in the past year', I think to establish a pattern. But you again lack the evidence needed to tell if your observations are really a pattern instead of cherry picking. What is the expected baseline?
If the ratio of men to women in science is 4:1, then we would expect a female scientist to be publicly disgraced with about the same ratio. (It's hard to give a good ratio since I think it's more likely that a senior researcher will be found out and reported in the international news. I believe there are more males in higher level positions than females. Also, "Japanese women account for only 10% of the researchers in Japan" and "only 12 percent of the science and engineering workforce in India was female in 2010", so the international ratio is probably more like 8:1.
Checking now, I searched "Retraction Watch" for all people described by the writers as being "disgraced". The complete list of male scientists in the last few years are: Naoki Mori, James H. Hunton, Dipak Das, Don Poldermans, Yoshitaka Fujii, Joachim Boldt, Diederik Stapel, and Woo-Suk Hwang.
The only disgraced female scientist mentioned is Bengu Sezen.
This 8:1 ratio is about what I expect from the percentage of women doing science in the world stage, and within the error bars for something with so few numbers.
What method did you use to count disgraced male and female scientists? I see you missed Haruko Obokata as another disgraced female scientist, so it doesn't seem like you've done a systematic search.
(A double-check search against sciencemag.org finds Jens Förster and Marc Hauser as additional 'disgraced' male researchers and no additional female researchers. Note that Science does not use the term 'disgraced' in articles about Haruko Obokata.)
Also, what do you use as the ratio for males in science vs. females in science? If it's 4:1 or higher then with 3 male disgraces you would expect less than a 50% chance of hearing about a female in the same situation, no?
Otherwise, if you're just making connections based on the latest hot gossip, then you'll be suffering from some serious bias error. You're not going to hear about Naoki Mori on HN.
Regarding postings to HN, what is your criteria? For example, "Alain Badiou Is Making a Movie About Plato with Brad Pitt and Sean Connery" from 7 days ago is a movie about a guy. Is it mythologizing a male? What about "Deep Web (2015 Documentary) – The Story of the Silk Road" from a month ago - does it mythologize Ross William Ulbricht? How do you define 'mythologizing' in such a way that it's at least roughly repeatable?
If you can't do that, then you don't really have a good metric.
But let's look at the other ones, shall we:
2004's Kinsey. Kinsey's a hero to the social justice movement, also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Kinsey#Personal_habits
2009's Creation. Opened on 7 screens in the US. Hardly a cultural phenomenon.
2004's Aviator. Close, big surprise Hollywood chooses to mythologize a legendary director's early life.
Tim's Vermeer. "Inventor Tim Jenison seeks to understand the painting techniques used by Dutch Master Johannes Vermeer." Are you intentionally wasting my time?
2011's A Dangerous Method. Look who got first billing and is on the center of the cover. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1571222/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1
2015's Experimenter. Do you not know who Milgram is? From the IMDB page the focus of the movie is his inhumane experiments. Whose case does "look at the horrible things this white guy did to people" help more?
1999's Insider. It's a stretch because it's a movie about a whistleblower who happens to be a scientist, but at least it was a big film with real actors.
2008's The Strangest Dream. A Canadian documentary that nobody's ever heard of. Doesn't even have a cover picture on IMDB or even one vote on Rotten Tomatoes. It's about the one guy who left the Manhattan Project. What are the odds that this is a vehicle to pass judgement on all the other guys who didn't leave the Manhattan Project?
> You for some reason switched to fictional scientists with Gravity (2013) and Interstellar (2014). Why is that? For that matter, you restricted me to scientists and mathematicians, while the protagonists of Gravity are engineers and astronauts - it's poor form to change your metric part-way through.
I hoped you would connect the dots that I was talking about large-scale, big-budget movies.
> If I expand the list to include engineers, astronauts, and similar occupations, then "Captain Phillips" (2013) concerns the captain of the MV Maersk Alabama, which was hijacked by pirates, "The Wind Rises" (2013) about Jiro Horikoshi, the man who designed Japanese fighter planes during World War II ... oops ! Sory, not a white man, though he would have been an "honorary white" in apartheid South Africa, " Zvorykin-Muromets" (2010) about the Russian inventor of television, "Flash of Genius" (2008) about the Robert Kearns and his invention of the intermittent windshield wiper,
At this point it appears you're intentionally wasting my time for effect, like maybe you're hoping somebody who glances over your post will assume it's well-researched and well-thought.
Naoki Mori? I was hoping you would notice from context I was referencing male scientists who were publicly disgraced as people, not as fraudulent scientists.
I'm sure you'll understand that I don't have enough time to fact-check your ridiculous list of movies and sift through all of your loaded questions, so I've left them unanswered.
> How do you define 'mythologizing' in such a way that it's at least roughly repeatable?....If you can't do that, then you don't really have a good metric.
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/mythologize
At least you closed with Deep Web which might be an actual counterpoint.
My entire point is that your data points are too vague and have multiple reasonable interpretations, and that it's possible to make it more rigorous.
You did not specify what "mythologize" means. I interpreted it mean "the subject of a biopic" produced by a movie studio for the big screen. You give a dictionary definition, but that doesn't define what it means to 'mythologize' someone in a movie, or determine if some group is excessively or under-mythologized. Is a biopic about Plato mythologizing Plato? Which groups do or don't need mythologization? Are British biopics over or under represented?
You believe that a movie about the Nobel Peace Prize winner Joseph Rotblat is likely about to "pass judgement on all the other guys who didn't leave the Manhattan Project" and not about the events that lead to his getting the Peace Prize. I have just watched the film, and it does not do what you pessimistically assumed.
You believe that a movie about research which is usually interpreted as a caution against the implicit acceptance of authoritarian roles, is actually about research about the "the horrible things this white guy did to people".
(You write about Milgram's 'inhumane experiments'. While he worked to understand why humans might do things that are inhumane, the people being "shocked" were actors. It was emotionally stressful, certainly, though as http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4346260/ comments, "Milgram invoked post-experimental survey data and psychiatrists’ reports to demonstrate that most participants were glad to have participated and that none had been harmed". It adds careful qualifiers to that interpretation. What part of his experiments do you consider to be 'inhumane'?)
And you don't like moves that are well-regarded by those in the social justice movement. Nor, if I understand your objection to "A Dangerous Method", is a film acceptable if it has a female actor on the movie poster, even though your original criteria asked about "the regular white guy scientists .. we've mythologized", and not movies which only mythologize regular white male scientists. This feels very might like raising the goal posts.
Again, this is acceptable. You get to define your own coding criteria, so long as it's transparent enough that others can have a hope of reproducing it.
It does mean that "Dr. Strangelove" (1964), which is about white men bringing nuclear destruction to the world, where one of the main characters is handicapped, and is well-loved by the anti-war crowd, is an example of movie that you think puts straight white males in a bad light. "A Clockwork Orange", "Brazil", and "1984" all portray white men in oppressive positions of power. As reactions to authoritarianism is the topic of Milgram's work, these also seem to fall into your pattern.
Again, perfectly acceptable. Once you define your criteria, it can be applied more rigorously against a longer period of time, to see if there's a trend.
Of course, it ends up with strange problems, where "Wrath of Khan", which has the Indian character Khan Noonien Singh (played by the Mexican actor Ricardo Montalbán) on the movie poster, so doesn't count as a white, straight, male movie. Ghostbusters II (1989) has a black man on the movie poster. Tony Stark in the "Iron Man" films has a chest injury which requires him to wear a regulator for his heart, so is handicapped. "Star Wars" (1977) also had a woman on the movie poster.
As "Dr. Strangelove" and these examples show, this "pattern" you've identified, of sometimes having non-white, non-male, non-straight, or handicapped actors, has been around for a long time. It's not clear that it's a new thing, and seems to match the secular trend since the 1960s of letting people besides white, straight men have the positions of power in US politics, science, and other fields.
You said "I was hoping you would notice from context I was referencing male scientists who were publicly disgraced as people, not as fraudulent scientists.", in regards to "publicly disgraced in the past year (offhand I can think of 3)".
I believe you are limiting the topic to people who have not been disgraced for scientific reasons but because of other events in their lives. That is, despite that some of the disgraced people I mentioned committed no crime, their social ostracism isn't the right kind of social ostracism for you. I presume the only criteria you accept is that the person must be criticized for racist, sexist, or similar reasons?
With that qualifier in mind, I assume you mean Watson, Taylor, and Hunt. Do note that Watson has been disgraced "as a person" for years for his racist and sexist views.
For example, in http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/fury-at-dna-pionee... from 2007 titled "Fury at DNA pioneer's theory: Africans are less intelligent than Westerners" and subtitled "Celebrated scientist attacked for race comments: "All our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours - whereas all the testing says not really". This caused people to, for example, cancel his visit (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/london/7050020.st...) and "Because of the public controversy, on 18 October 2007, the Board of Trustees at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory suspended Watson's administrative responsibilities." Indeed, the reason why he sold his Nobel Prize last year was to make money, because he had been ostracized for years, and wanted the money.
Thus, only two of those have happened this year, and not the three you suggested. Or are you thinking of someone else? If so, who?
Other similarly personally disgraced scientists include Kary Mullis, Nobel Prize winner and well known HIV/AIDS denialist, climate change denialist, and believer in astrology; and William Shockley, a Nobel Prize winner also known for his racist views and support for eugenics.
Of course there have been few women who have won the Nobel Prize, so with only 4 examples of male Nobel Prize winners ostracized for their views, we would not expect there to be a female winner similarly ostracized. Thus, lack of such a counter-examples is completely expected from the statistics.
Since you include astronauts as a field of science, it's easy to point to Lisa Nowak, who has been personally disgraced for her attempt at kidnapping Colleen Shipman, who pleaded guilty to charges of felony burglary of a car and misdemeanor battery, and who was discharged from the Navy in under other than honorable conditions. However, part of that was quite clearly illegal, so may not constitute the right kind of disgrace "as a person" that you are looking for.
But these are events that hit the big time news. What do you know about scientists who aren't Nobel Prize winners, and who aren't on world-wide TV?
That's why a more rigorous search is needed. Retraction Watch and Science magazine both use the phrase "disgraced" in reference to scientists, and have a more complete coverage of what goes on in science. Do note that those science oriented sites don't use "disgraced" to refer to the racism and sexism of Watson, et al., so the term "disgraced" is itself rather ill-defined.
For example, in http://news.sciencemag.org/people-events/2013/10/special-rep... a co-worker says of Anja Strømme “She feels abused and disgraced, and it should have never happened”; do we accept that this is a case of being disgraced? If not, what constitutes a sufficient level of disgrace?
Or, if many male scientists thought it was disgraceful that a woman like Lise Meitner should work in physics, and snubbed her socially and in her career, is that really disgraceful? Or do you require that someone be successful and famous first, before being disgraced?
If your definition is so strict that only a few people over the decades meet the definition, the it's hardly a useful definition, is it? Who else can you think of that have been disgraced? You make it sound like something that's happened more than a dozen times, so it shouldn't be hard to come up with more examples, no? Based on those numbers, how many women do you think should have been disgraced by this time?
Here's a different approach. Read about the history of dishonesty[0] of the woman called the twitter mob to destroy Tim Hunt's career and just think about it for a little while. That's it, just think.
[0] - http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3141158/A-flawed-acc...
The bad thing is that we're biasing our culture in a particular direction and pretending that we're not. "Diversity selling" is the product of a massive intentional cultural shift and I'm surprised people get so upset when it's pointed out to them.
You suggest there is "a pattern of attempting to mythologize as many females in STEM fields as possible", but perhaps it's the case that males are already as sufficiently mythologized as is possible, and what you are seeing is the mythologization of women catching up to men.
For that matter, you haven't defined what 'mythologized' means, nor how one can tell if someone is 'mythologized' or if a given category of people is under- or over-mythologized.
Without these, you have the advantage of controlling the discussion, because you are in charge of the definition.
My other commentary is to show that such terms can be defined in ways that others can verify for themselves. Your inability to come up with a meaningful definition, combined with your apparent cherry-picking of the data, likely contributes to the downvotes you've received.
I'm the son of a computer programmer. My mother got her degree in this back when it had just barely become a college degree. I went to the same college in Junior High to take programming classes. I was taught by a woman. Later in High School our computer sience teacher was a woman, about %40 of the students in the classes were females.
There was no perceived gender imbalance in computer science in the southern USA in the 1980s and early 1990s. In my early jobs there was a 50/50 split roughly, though women were slightly more likely to be testers than programmers, our whole team was managed by a woman.
Slowly there were fewer women programmers over the years until the great programmer boom around 2000. At that point we stopped seeing "programmers" being almost always "logical hacker types with a strong interest in computers" and we started seeing people who had never written a line of code before college who decided it was a good career to go into. Those types of programmers were almost always men.
I really don't have a problem mythologizing real heros-- like Alan Turing. The other three are celebrities, and you're always going to see that kind of celebrity stuff. Tyson deliberately chose to make himself a celebrity.
I do lament that now "tech girls" are so often women who are not actually technical (Adrianna Richards, Shanley, FemFreak for example) who use that title for the sole purposes of pushing a political agenda and harassing people. Adrianna deserves to pay a lot of money to the men she victimized. (That political agenda, people seem to be calling cultural marxism, which is at least consistent with the marxist ideology most of them have).
Like the "War on terror", so called "Feminism" has found that it makes a lot more money and lands more punches when it switches from "women are people too" to "men are rapists, you're not safe!!!1!1".
The geek is stereotypically meek and socially awkward, and thus a perfect target for their abuse. Same thing with gamers.
I have noticed that actually technical woman have almost zero correlations with these types.
The idea that men should be ashamed because there aren't more women in programming is silly. Women aren't in programming because they've chosen not to be.
In nearly 30 years working in the software business, not one of the offices I've worked with was hostile to women-- and I've worked for some real jerks-- I've never seen any of the so called rampant sexism that these people claim.
[citation needed]. If you're going to call them non-technical, we need to apply that same label to people like ESR, whose biggest contribution to the community -- like Shanley -- is writing/editing books about hacker/open-source culture. Both of them happen to write code, but it's not what they're famous for.
crtl-f "raymond"
D: ncurses library co-maintainer
D: terminfo master file maintainer
D: Distributions HOWTO editor
D: Instigator, FHS standard
D: Keeper of the Jargon File and curator of the Retrocomputing Museum
D: Author, Emacs VC and GUD modes
In any case, at least half of that is non-coding community-maintenance and prose editing work, which is great, but that's also what Shanley does.
> `git log --author='Eric S. Raymond'`
On which repo? The current one only goes back to 2005.
ESR is common name, this is the first I've heard of Shanley. I'm really hoping you're not talking about the twitter personality. If you're putting that person and ESR on the same level I don't know what to say.
I would suggest, though, that you think about why ESR is such a common name to you. He's a genius at self-marketing, and he's managed to set himself up as the arbiter of hacker culture while mostly just writing things about other people's code. Shanley is also a genius at self-marketing: although her goals are very different, it's useful for her political goals for you to think of her the way you do. If all you think of either of them is their online personas, you're being played, and they're winning.
I've never heard of Shanley until today and glancing through what she does it's inflammatory political theater.
> it's useful for her political goals for you to think of her the way you do
I dislike her because people who are that combative make me uncomfortable, not because I can't handle what she says. It's a shame people like her have degraded our culture to a point where having people dislike you is a sign that you're saying something worthwhile.
Really, a recent post is:
> i hate when people make shitty acoustic covers of pop songs just fucking stop you suck at guitar and singing
That's just abusive. But if I don't like her it's a good thing? I'm at a loss, this is like junior high all over again.
Like I said earlier, I can't tell if you're trolling or not.
Honestly I don't care if these twitter personalities are "technical" or not. We're not talking about Adria and Shanley because of their technical ideas, or their ideas about technology because as far as I know they have none. They're famous for their social activism.
If you `git log --author='Eric S. Raymond' -p` on gpsd, you'll find that the majority of it is documentation, comments, style, etc. The code, by and large, is from other people.
A downvote is a bashful admission of the correctness of a statement.