Rear Admiral Grace Hopper is much a more inspiring computer scientist, imho.
The most important thing I’ve accomplished, other than building the compiler, is training young people. They come to me, you know, and say, “Do you think we can do this?” I say, “Try it.” And I back ‘em up. They need that. I keep track of them as they get older and I stir ’em up at intervals so they don’t forget to take chances.
When Grace Hopper gets mentioned, there tends to be an uncomfortable silence about COBOL. COBOL is actually quite interesting, since it was a serious effort to make programming more accessible and a commercial success. It’s also universally reviled by people who do programming for fun.
Beyond the gender stereotype of women being bad at tech, there is also the stereotype that women don’t do technical tinkering for fun. It’s a bit unfortunate that Hopper’s most famous accomplishment ended up becoming the shorthand for programming as dreary, unfun 9-to-5 bureaucratic grind.
Grace Hopper did not write a compiler, nor did Marie Curie discover radium. Marie Curie was the least important and least qualified person on the three man team that discovered radium. No one remembers the second most important person on the team, and few remember the team leader (Pierre Curie, Marie Curie’s husband and mentor). Similarly Grace Hopper was peripherally involved in events that eventually led to the development of the first compiler, and no one remembers the people that actually wrote the first compiler (which was, by the way, John Backus’ FORTRAN compiler)
Radium was discovered in 1898, and, until the twentieth century, no one thought that Marie Curie was the discoverer. Similarly for compilers. History was rewritten, as it so frequently is.
Your prior should be that a mascot is fictitious until proven otherwise. That a mascot is a mascot is reason to believe that official history has been improved.
In 1906, when Pierre Curie died, his death was reported as follows in the French newspaper Le Matin
"M. Pierre CURIE, le savant qui découvrit le radium, a été écrasé dans la rue et tué net par un camion"
Translation
“Mr. Pierre Curie, the scientist who discovered radium, was crushed in the street and killed by a truck”
As for Grace Hopper, she gets credited with the first compiler: But a compiler compiles a language. The great majority of references to the language her compiler supposedly compiled are mascot references rather than language references, and are hugely outweighed by language references to Fortran. Therefore, no such language, no such compiler.
Grace Hopper’s actual contribution to computing was that she designed the Cobol language, the second high level computer language. She seems to have originally been made a mascot for developing Cobol, which she quite genuinely did, and then, when people responded by saying unkind things about Cobol, got credited with the first compiler instead, an improvement typical of mascot history..
If Cobol was less loathed, Grace Hopper would be a reasonable mascot as the creator of the second high level language. Since Cobol stinks, Lovelace, the second computer programmer, is the better mascot.
Marie shared the 1903 Nobel prize in chemistry with her husband and Bequerel. Seems like relevant authorities at the time thought she had a substantial role. Why should we believe you rather than the Nobel Committee? It’s not like 1903 was a big year for establishment scientists looking for female mascots...
I’m not well versed on the early history of programming languages, and don’t want to opine based on glancing at Wikipedia. But Hopper appears to have been involved in a bunch of pre-Fortran work on higher-level languages: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A-0_System—so this isn’t simply about COBOL.
Marie Curie was regarded as an accomplished scientist by her contemporaries, and it is implausible that this high regard is explicable in terms of political correctness, given the time period. It might still be true that she was the least important member of the team that discovered radium, but the mere fact that a newspaper in 1906 described Pierre Curie as the discoverer of radium is not very good evidence for this.
Even if we grant that Pierre was primarily responsible for the discovery of radium, Marie should still be credited with the isolation of radium. She accomplished this four years after Pierre’s death, and it is one of the accomplishments for which she received her second Nobel.
it is implausible that this high regard is explicable in terms of political correctness, given the time period.
When do you think that the movement for progress toward gender equality began? Keep in mind that women gained to right to vote near the beginning of the 20th century, and the movement to bring that about began many decades before then. This illustrates the point that the movement for progress toward gender equality has been influential for well over a century. It does have a beginning, but that beginning is long before 1903, not after.
An example of a prominent and hugely influential intellectual who favored progress toward gender equality and who lived long before 1903 is John Stuart Mill, who wrote The Subjection of Women.
Political correctness of the sort I’m referring to is not co-extensive with support for gender equity. No doubt there were a number of intellectuals (although probably not a very large number) in favor of women having equal rights, but it doesn’t follow from this that Curie’s contemporaries would feel obliged to praise her scholarship even though they didn’t think that much of it simply because she was a woman. I really doubt there was significant social pressure of this sort at that time. Perhaps a few of her colleagues exaggerated her gifts because they thought it worthwhile to promote a female scientist, but this effect would have been swamped by the opposite effect, I think—people undervaluing her skill because of her gender. This is a time when the Royal Institute could refuse to let her give a talk simply on the grounds that she was a woman. The Sorbonne refused to allow her to have a lab until she threatened to leave. The French Academy of Sciences refused to admit her despite her being a Nobel laureate. In an environment where a significant number of prominent academics considered it acceptable to behave in an egregiously sexist manner, I doubt that people were socially punished for merely not overvaluing female scientists.
This is a time when the Royal Institute could refuse to let her give a talk simply on the grounds that she was a woman.
I find that extraordinarily hard to believe. Can you produce an actual quote wherein the Royal institute gave that reason?
It would be as suicidal to give that reason then, as it would be now.
Of course, in practice, people do tend to quietly assume that women tend to be idiots in certain fields, and might well not allow one to speak for that reason, but they don’t say the reason out loud in plain words.
I don’t have an actual quote from the Royal Institution, and I doubt that they specifically gave that as a reason in this particular case. This page from the American Institute of Physics biography says that “custom ruled out women lecturers”. I concede that this might be a myth, but I don’t think your skepticism is justified. The claim that this sort of reason would be as suicidal then as it is now is, I think, patently false. That sort of discrimination, often justified on the grounds of tradition, was pretty common in the early 20th century.
This is a period when women could not receive a degree at Cambridge, even though they could sit for the Tripos. When Hertha Ayrton was nominated to the Royal Society in 1902 (the first woman to be nominated), the nomination was rejected explicitly because she was a married woman. See here. From the Royal Society’s response:
We are of opinion that married women are not eligible as Fellows of the Royal Society. Whether the Charters admit of the election of unmarried women appears to us to be very doubtful.
The relevant charters were only amended in the 1940s.
I don’t have an actual quote from the Royal Institution, and I doubt that they specifically gave that as a reason in this particular case.
Well of course you doubt—thereby admitting what you deny: that saying such a thing out loud would be politically incorrect then as now.
This is a period when women could not receive a degree at Cambridge,
And men could not receive a degree at Vasser.
Having men and women go to the same institutions has been a disaster for both genders, since it necessitated faking up women’s scores, and dumbing down certain academic fields.
Co education has also caused severe dysgenics by preventing smart women from getting married. Thus, for example, a woman with a PhD in EngLit generally will only marry a male PhD, even though getting an advanced degree in a field with absolutely horrible employment prospects is usually a sign that you are too dimwitted to qualify for a useful degree—EngLit being infamously easy, while useful degrees tend to be hard, with the result that the great majority of PhDs in EngLit are female. And by the time she has completed her degree, her fertile period is running out, she is deeply in debt that cannot be expunged by bankruptcy, has no job, and is looking for a PhD with a sufficient income to support her, with the result that female PhDs tend to wind up as cat ladies.
With separate colleges, females are not on the same status ladder as males, but on separate and independent status ladders, so you can give them all the degrees that are politically convenient, without undermining their ability and willingness to get married and have children.
Thus, the glaringly obvious—that Marie Curie received two Nobel prizes and huge publicity for work that would not have received a Nobel prize or substantial publicity if a man did it (compare the far more important discovery of radon) because she was a mascot rather than because she was a scientist, was as likely then as it is now.
Marie Curie was primarily famous for being a woman scientist. Who discovered the other hundred odd elements?
Giving disproportionate publicity to rather ordinary work in which women were arguably involved implies the reverse of the intended message, implies that woman are, on average, substantially poorer at intellectual fields, especially STEM fields, than men, a lesson confirmed by the SAT and LSAT.
You are arguing that back in the horrible evil bad old days they discriminated against women, therefore affirmative action for women could not possibly have existed. This presupposes that there were no rational grounds for discriminating against women. If rational grounds for discriminating against women exist, both because they are on average less smart and less responsible, and also because their role as mothers is far more important than their role as PhDs, then the fact that discrimination against women was diminishing is evidence for the presence of affirmative action, rather than the presence of remaining discrimination being evidence against the presence of affirmative action.
Is it really good for women that a great many of our smartest women wind up as cat ladies?
Well of course you doubt—thereby admitting what you deny: that saying such a thing out loud would be politically incorrect then as now.
I notice you completely ignored the concrete example I gave of comparable discrimination being explicitly avowed by a premier scientific organization at about the same time (Hertha Ayrton at the RS). No national scientific academy in the West would conceivably respond to a female nominee that way now. How does your model account for this evidence while still maintaining that disallowing a woman from giving a lecture on the gounds of tradition would be as suicidal then as now? I could provide further examples of a similar nature, if you’d like.
My point about Cambridge was not that women were not allowed to attend. They were allowed to attend, but they were denied degrees. Also, responding to ``Women couldn’t attend Harvard (or Yale or Oxford or...)” with “Men couldn’t attend Vassar” completely misses the intended point. Hint: The point is not “There were some colleges that women couldn’t attend. How discriminatory!”
Finally, Marie Curie is not just famous for discovering an element. She was the first scientist to realize that radiation isn’t due to a chemical reaction, but due to structural properties of individual atoms. She was also thereby the first scientist to provide evidence that atoms have an internal structure. This is a hugely significant discovery. And she did all of this before Pierre started working with her on radioactivity. Your belief that Marie Curie’s fame is undeserved appears to be a product of reasoning upwards from a pre-written bottom line, rather than any acquaintance with actual facts about her life and work.
I notice you completely ignored the concrete example I gave of comparable discrimination being explicitly avowed by a premier scientific organization at about the same time (Hertha Ayrton at the RS). No national scientific academy in the West would conceivably respond to a female nominee that way now.
But is this evidence that they are reasonable and realistic now, while they used to be moonbat crazy right wing misogynists back then, or is it evidence that they were moonbat crazy leftwing feminists back then, and even more moonbat crazy left wing feminists now?
If the view in 1911 was right wing misogynist, and the view now is rational and evidence based, why did everyone back then “know” who discovered radium, and yet not know who discovered any of the other elements?
Supposing that the post 1830 view is non ideological and evidence based, this needs to argued for and justified, rather than merely assumed.
Should you assume that the present is wise, and the past was crazy? Is it not at least equally likely that the present is crazy, and the past was wise?
Seems to me that the view of women that was held from 1680 to 1830 was realistic and evidence based, while the view of women held by the influential and higher authority from 1830 to the present is moonbat crazy and ideologically based. For example, the seduction community is today rediscovering politically incorrect truths about female sexuality that everyone knew and took for granted before 1830 - albeit the old account was that women tend to make self destructive sexual choices, so need male kin supervising their sex lives, while the new seduction community account is that women tend to make self destructive sexual choices, so here is how to take advantage of them.
Official truth about sex and the sexes changed pretty drastically some time not long after 1830, but then it took a couple of centuries to remake society in accord with the new official truth. But the strains, the lies, the hypocrisy, and the doublethink required for this social engineering give credence to the 1660-1830 official truth and cast doubt on the post 1830 official truth. The more society is remade in accordance with the 1830 official truth, the more strain it shows.
That you don’t know who discovered any of the elements other than Radium without looking it up, is reason to doubt the version of history in which Marie Curie discovered Radium, and even if she was the discoverer of Radium (which she was not) the fact that everyone “knows” it now, and everyone “knew” it then, shows she was a mascot then as now—which in turn shows that women have been being affirmative actioned for a very long time, which in turn is reason to suspect that the modern view is moonbat crazy—and that it was similarly moonbat crazy in 1911, in fact moonbat crazy from around 1830 to the present.
She was the first scientist to realize that radiation isn’t due to a chemical reaction, but due to structural properties of individual atoms. She was also thereby the first scientist to provide evidence that atoms have an internal structure.
This is simply untrue. Rutherford, and the discovery of radon, revealed that.
And Pierre Curie, not Marie Curie, discovered radium.
Pierre Curie was working with radioactivity before he set his wife to work on it. He invented and made the radiation sensor that she then used to measure various things, under his supervision. He built the sensor; he selected the materials that she measured; he or his assistants prepared the materials that she measured.
Giesel and Elster report that in 1900, PierreCurie, having discovered radium and prepared samples thereof, gave them samples, and they thereupon proceeded to study the chemical properties of Radium.
Giesel, FO. Ueber radioactive Stoffe. Ber Dtsche Chem
Ges. 1900;33:3569–71.
Six years later history was progressively adjusted to give progressively more prominence to one of his assistants.
Which adjustment of history (from the account given at the time, to the account given a few years afterwards) indicates that they were moonbat crazy left wing feminists then, and even more moonbat crazy now.
Marie discovered that thorium gives off the same rays as uranium. Her continued systematic studies of the various chemical compounds gave the surprising result that the strength of the radiation did not depend on the compound that was being studied. It depended only on the amount of uranium or thorium. Chemical compounds of the same element generally have very different chemical and physical properties: one uranium compound is a dark powder, another is a transparent yellow crystal, but what was decisive for the radiation they gave off was only the amount of uranium they contained. Marie drew the conclusion that the ability to radiate did not depend on the arrangement of the atoms in a molecule, it must be linked to the interior of the atom itself. This discovery was absolutely revolutionary. From a conceptual point of view it is her most important contribution to the development of physics. She now went through the whole periodic system. Her findings were that only uranium and thorium gave off this radiation.
These experiments were conducted in 1897. Radon was discovered in 1900, and Rutherford’s research on the transmutation of elements began in 1900 and he performed his gold leaf experiment in 1911. I will admit that I was wrong about Marie Curie being the first scientist to propose that atoms had an internal structure. JJ Thomson hypothesized that electrons were building blocks of atoms in 1897. But as far as I can tell, Marie Curie was the first scientist to realize that radiation is attributable to internal properties of atoms. If you have any evidence suggesting otherwise, please present it.
Is it not at least equally likely that the present is crazy, and the past was wise?
No, it is not. Knowledge is generally cumulative, although there are occasional setbacks.
Anyway, I just responded to correct your factual claim. I’m bowing out of this exchange now, because feeding trolls is bad.
I claimed history was rewritten in the period 1906, 1911. To refute that claim, you need early sources, pre 1906 sources, not today’s sources.
Perhaps you should instead look at 1900 sources, stuff published shortly after Pierre Curie discovered radium, rather than post hoc rationalizations published after Marie Curie had already been made a mascot.
The original basis for making her a mascot was the discovery of radium—in which her role was minor and peripheral.
First they made her a mascot, then they discovered her contributions were absolutely revolutionary.
What was revolutionary was the discovery of radioactive decay, that radioactivity arose from the transmutation of the elements, which discovery came from Rutherford and the circle of people around him, not from Pierre Curie and the circle of people around him, and came from the discovery of radon, not the discovery of radium.
Pierre Curie’s big contribution was to invent and build a device for quantitatively measuring radioactivity, and then set his wife to work measuring the radioactivity of various samples that he and his other assistants prepared.
So even if the discovery that radioactivity was independent of the chemical form of the element was “absolutely revolutionary”, it can even less be attributed to Marie Curie than can the discovery of radium.
If it is not “at least equally likely”, it is still quite likely—particularly in matters influenced by politics, where knowledge, for obvious reasons, does not accumulate.
To defend the present, one has to argue truth, not cite today’s authorities. One has to compare today’s authorities with the evidence on which their claims are supposedly based. That the official truth about the past is a lie reveals social decay, just as that the official truth about the Soviet harvest was a lie revealed that communes do not work.
The way the wind is blowing, future generations living in hovels may well be as amazed by the moon landing as we are amazed by the Antikythera mechanism, as political lies spill over into bureaucratic lies, producing irreproducible results in science.
But as far as I can tell, Marie Curie was the first scientist to realize that radiation is attributable to internal properties of atoms
Untrue—and for evidence of it being true, you would need to quote a paper by her issued before she was made into a mascot, not a paper about her after she was made into a mascot.
For her to be the first scientist to realize that, she would have to issue a paper in which she asserted that, which she did not do.
What she in fact did was measure various samples prepared for her by her husband and another of his assistants, using a radiation measuring device invented and built by her husband, and as a result of these measurements, she did in fact assert that:
“All the uranium compounds studied are active, and are, in general, more active to the extent that they contain more uranium.[25]
From which other people, Rutherford and people around him, concluded that the radiation arose from the internal structure of the atom.
Marie Curie was not able to draw the conclusion you and the twenty first century Nobel committee attribute to her, because the radioactivity she measured was not in fact exactly proportional to the amount of uranium, due to the build up of radon after purification. To make the discovery you attribute to her, would have needed to first discover radioactive decay, or at least first discover radon.
She strongly suspected the conclusion you attribute to her, and did experiments intended to show it, but her results were confounded by radon.
Since the measured radioactivity was not exactly proportional to the amount of the element, the evidence that she thought she saw seemingly showed that radioactive decay was influenced, at least to some extent, by the chemical form.
Which is why the discovery of radon by Rutherford and his people was far more important than the discovery of radium by Pierre Curie and his people: because it enabled Rutherford to draw the conclusion that you falsely attribute to Marie Curie.
The reason Pierre Curie’s group gets bigger publicity than Rutherford’s group is that one of the people in Pierre Curie’s group was a woman.
The discovery of radon made it possible to do measurements that substituted “exactly”, for “generally”, to measure that radioactivity was exactly proportional to the amount of the element, rather than “in general, more active to the extent that they contain more uranium”, from which one could then conclude that radioactivity was internal to the structure of the atom—a conclusion Marie Curie’s evidence seemingly contradicted.
but it doesn’t follow from this that Curie’s contemporaries would feel obliged to praise her scholarship even though they didn’t think that much of it simply because she was a woman.
PC was already in effect in the late nineteenth century. When people said politically incorrect things, they were conscious of transgressing.
This is a time when the Royal Institute could refuse to let her give a talk simply on the grounds that she was a woman.
Really?
They said that was the grounds? Actually said such an unspeakable thing out loud? I find that mighty hard to believe.
Sounds mighty like the story that Tully was lynched for whistling at a white woman.
Now possibly the real reason that they did not have her give a talk was that she was woman, but no one would have dared say out loud “because she is a woman”
Marie Curie was regarded as an accomplished scientist by her contemporaries, and it is implausible that this high regard is explicable in terms of political correctness, given the time period.
Marie Curie was not famous for being an accomplished scientist. You have never heard of the person that discovered Radon, that being a far more important discovery than Radium, for Radon revealed the transmutation of the elements. She was famous, then as now, for being an accomplished female scientist. She was, then as now, like many famous women of the nineteenth century, a mascot.
The evidence that unqualified females have been affirmative actioned in to STEM fields since 1880 or so, and into administrative positions since around 1850 or so, is pretty similar to the evidence that they are being affirmative actioned today. This produces predictable results, which results are then denounced, starting in the 1860s, as the result of incorrigible misogyny, and proclaimed to be grounds to apply affirmative action even more vigorously and suppress thoughtcrimes even more harshly.
In practice everyone acts as if female STEM credentials are given merely for being female, rather than actually being qualified, and those that deny acting in this manner, nonetheless do act in this manner, just as those that repudiate John Derbyshire’s infamous advice as racist nonetheless act in accordance with that advice. This could be because everyone is consciously or unconsciously misogynistic, or it could be because credentials really are given merely for being female.
And this has been the case for well over a hundred years, with everyone saying for over a hundred years that it was the last generation that was horribly misogynistic, but now we are thankfully past all that.
Which then is it? Misogyny or gender realism? One statistic that might be relevant to that question is that today’s SAT is no longer an intelligence test, but instead measures the same thing that grade point average is supposed to measure. Predictably, boys do substantially better on the SAT, and substantially worse on grade point average. Affirmative action grading for female GPA is one possible explanation. You, perhaps, may have a better explanation.
Boys also do substantially better on the LSAT, but that is to be expected, since the LSAT is an intelligence test rather than an accomplishment test.
When I claim that women have been affirmative actioned for over a hundred years, it was of course denied back then, just as it is denied now, so I cannot prove that claim, but the smell of hypocrisy and doublethink were suggestive then, as they are suggestive now.
If you ask me for a properly authoritative citation for that claim, I will not be able to give it. All I can produce as evidence is a funny smell, which funny smell has not changed much in over a hundred years.
If you insist, however, I can give you properly authoritative citations for grade point average, LSAT, and SAT.
I’d like to see the GPA, LSAT, and SAT citations. Would the suggestion that the GPA thing, if accurate, might be due to young girls being more conscientious and mature than young boys offend men?
I agree with many of the things you’re saying about affirmative action, about it hurting its recipients more than helping them, on average. The main argument that I can think of in support of affirmative action is that I do think it’s common for young children to need role models to have an imagination about what their interests and potential futures might be. For example, I bet Obama’s fame will inspire more black people to become lawyers or politicians. Some children do not need role models to want to do something- they see a machine or a performance and are immediately fascinated- but most people are not like this and do whatever they see the people they identify with are doing.
Fame (especially in science and technology) often has as much to do with eccentric personality and unique personal story than intelligence and achievement. In Curie’s case the fact that she got radiation poisoning probably contributed to her fame today. This is a separate issue from if she was being affirmative-actioned up.
The main argument that I can think of in support of affirmative action is that I do think it’s common for young children to need role models to have an imagination about what their interests and potential futures might be.
Why does the role model need to have the same race/gender/etc. as the child?
The role model doesn’t NEED to be anything, theoretically. In practice I think most people relate to others who are similar to them in some obvious way. It could also be a subtle thing, like I read about one saying people found anonymous strangers more likable after being told they shared a birthday. But this type of information is not as obvious as gender.
There exist people who defy all expectations to become whatever they were going to become and you feel it wouldn’t’ve mattered if they’d been born in a hut in Siberia or a brownstone in NYC. But many people are not like this and conform to whatever expectations they feel like they should be living up (or down) to. Expectation is complicated and comes from many factors, a source of which is media and topics at the forefront of the popular psyche.
Race/gender are just some of the most immediate ways of identifying and stereotyping a person. A person might also identify more with someone from the same town, country, religion, etc.
For me, gender was probably a principle factor of who I befriended as a kid. This is much less true now that I’ve been surrounded by men for the past decade. In terms of role models, my impression is that many kids are more likely to aspire to be like a famous person who seems like them in some obvious way. Like part of why I chose to the play the piano and violin was because I saw those Chinese prodigies playing those instruments and my brain absorbed that as what I (as an aspiring awesome Chinese kid) was expected to do. Honestly playing the tuba or drums or flute didn’t even cross my mind. Someone might argue I am naturally disinterested in non-violin/piano instruments, but I don’t think that’s true- I just chose an instrument to try it and it happened to be whatever I saw that small Chinese girl holding on the cover of that CD my mom had.
To clarify: I think there are a lot more arguments against affirmative action than for.
You dismiss the history as innacurate because information has been tampered with in a biased fashion, and yet the only evidence you point to is from a newspaper obituary, a forum of information traditionally uninformed and biased. My priors for “mascots” being fictitious are outweighed by my priors for conspiracy theories being fictitious. You say you know modern history’s opinion has been changed, which implies that there exists at least some piece of convincing evidence that they did NOT manage to change, which you have read. Show it please.
Hmm, that’s fair. My beliefs in that sort of structure influencing how we perceive history is a lot stronger than the conspiratorial version. On the other hand, I still need more evidence than we have to posit that the feminist prospiracy actually existed and influenced things as opposed to any other one.
Near as I can check history, the manufacture of poster girls for science first happens at the start of the twentieth century, but the manufacture of poster girls for computer programming did not happen until much later. Thus history that makes Ada the second computer programmer can be believed, to the extent that it quotes pre twentieth century sources.
Whenever history involves mascots, it should be viewed with suspicion. If people make an undue fuss about a dancing bear, that is evidence that bears cannot dance, rather than evidence that bears can dance. Your prior should be that a mascot is fictitious until proven otherwise.
Ada Lovelace is a mascot, Grace Hopper is a mascot. However Ada Lovelace predates promotion of female mascots, and was the second computer programmer (Babbage being the first), in that she found a bug in one of Babbage’s programs.
Babbage wrote, thirty years before it was policy to ballyhoo the contributions of oppressed groups:
I then suggested that she add some notes to Menabrea’s memoir, an idea which was immediately adopted. We discussed together the various illustrations that might be introduced: I suggested several but the selection was entirely her own. So also was the algebraic working out of the different problems, except, indeed, that relating to the numbers of Bernoulli, which I had offered to do to save Lady Lovelace the trouble. This she sent back to me for an amendment, having detected a grave mistake which I had made in the process.
Ehhh … ok, you do realize not having a better mascot is weak evidence in favour of positions on talent distribution and performance considered sexist right?
Yeah, because instead of a false example we could use a real example, such as a woman who wrote the first compiler… but then, most people (including our target group) would just ask: “what is a compiler?”
Therefore, a false hero may be politically preferable. Until the truth becomes known, and then we either have to accept that this strategy backfired, or make the truth forever our enemy. Which happens often when politics comes first.
She’s not the hero we deserve, but she’s the one we need right now.
EDIT: Well, that’s the last time I make a Batman joke.
Rear Admiral Grace Hopper is much a more inspiring computer scientist, imho.
When Grace Hopper gets mentioned, there tends to be an uncomfortable silence about COBOL. COBOL is actually quite interesting, since it was a serious effort to make programming more accessible and a commercial success. It’s also universally reviled by people who do programming for fun.
Beyond the gender stereotype of women being bad at tech, there is also the stereotype that women don’t do technical tinkering for fun. It’s a bit unfortunate that Hopper’s most famous accomplishment ended up becoming the shorthand for programming as dreary, unfun 9-to-5 bureaucratic grind.
Grace Hopper did not write a compiler, nor did Marie Curie discover radium. Marie Curie was the least important and least qualified person on the three man team that discovered radium. No one remembers the second most important person on the team, and few remember the team leader (Pierre Curie, Marie Curie’s husband and mentor). Similarly Grace Hopper was peripherally involved in events that eventually led to the development of the first compiler, and no one remembers the people that actually wrote the first compiler (which was, by the way, John Backus’ FORTRAN compiler)
Radium was discovered in 1898, and, until the twentieth century, no one thought that Marie Curie was the discoverer. Similarly for compilers. History was rewritten, as it so frequently is.
I would appreciate this post more—and find it more convincing—if it came with references or other evidence for its assertions.
Your prior should be that a mascot is fictitious until proven otherwise. That a mascot is a mascot is reason to believe that official history has been improved.
In 1906, when Pierre Curie died, his death was reported as follows in the French newspaper Le Matin
Translation “Mr. Pierre Curie, the scientist who discovered radium, was crushed in the street and killed by a truck”
As for Grace Hopper, she gets credited with the first compiler: But a compiler compiles a language. The great majority of references to the language her compiler supposedly compiled are mascot references rather than language references, and are hugely outweighed by language references to Fortran. Therefore, no such language, no such compiler.
Grace Hopper’s actual contribution to computing was that she designed the Cobol language, the second high level computer language. She seems to have originally been made a mascot for developing Cobol, which she quite genuinely did, and then, when people responded by saying unkind things about Cobol, got credited with the first compiler instead, an improvement typical of mascot history..
If Cobol was less loathed, Grace Hopper would be a reasonable mascot as the creator of the second high level language. Since Cobol stinks, Lovelace, the second computer programmer, is the better mascot.
Marie shared the 1903 Nobel prize in chemistry with her husband and Bequerel. Seems like relevant authorities at the time thought she had a substantial role. Why should we believe you rather than the Nobel Committee? It’s not like 1903 was a big year for establishment scientists looking for female mascots...
I’m not well versed on the early history of programming languages, and don’t want to opine based on glancing at Wikipedia. But Hopper appears to have been involved in a bunch of pre-Fortran work on higher-level languages: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A-0_System—so this isn’t simply about COBOL.
Marie Curie was regarded as an accomplished scientist by her contemporaries, and it is implausible that this high regard is explicable in terms of political correctness, given the time period. It might still be true that she was the least important member of the team that discovered radium, but the mere fact that a newspaper in 1906 described Pierre Curie as the discoverer of radium is not very good evidence for this.
Even if we grant that Pierre was primarily responsible for the discovery of radium, Marie should still be credited with the isolation of radium. She accomplished this four years after Pierre’s death, and it is one of the accomplishments for which she received her second Nobel.
When do you think that the movement for progress toward gender equality began? Keep in mind that women gained to right to vote near the beginning of the 20th century, and the movement to bring that about began many decades before then. This illustrates the point that the movement for progress toward gender equality has been influential for well over a century. It does have a beginning, but that beginning is long before 1903, not after.
An example of a prominent and hugely influential intellectual who favored progress toward gender equality and who lived long before 1903 is John Stuart Mill, who wrote The Subjection of Women.
Political correctness of the sort I’m referring to is not co-extensive with support for gender equity. No doubt there were a number of intellectuals (although probably not a very large number) in favor of women having equal rights, but it doesn’t follow from this that Curie’s contemporaries would feel obliged to praise her scholarship even though they didn’t think that much of it simply because she was a woman. I really doubt there was significant social pressure of this sort at that time. Perhaps a few of her colleagues exaggerated her gifts because they thought it worthwhile to promote a female scientist, but this effect would have been swamped by the opposite effect, I think—people undervaluing her skill because of her gender. This is a time when the Royal Institute could refuse to let her give a talk simply on the grounds that she was a woman. The Sorbonne refused to allow her to have a lab until she threatened to leave. The French Academy of Sciences refused to admit her despite her being a Nobel laureate. In an environment where a significant number of prominent academics considered it acceptable to behave in an egregiously sexist manner, I doubt that people were socially punished for merely not overvaluing female scientists.
I find that extraordinarily hard to believe. Can you produce an actual quote wherein the Royal institute gave that reason?
It would be as suicidal to give that reason then, as it would be now.
Of course, in practice, people do tend to quietly assume that women tend to be idiots in certain fields, and might well not allow one to speak for that reason, but they don’t say the reason out loud in plain words.
I don’t have an actual quote from the Royal Institution, and I doubt that they specifically gave that as a reason in this particular case. This page from the American Institute of Physics biography says that “custom ruled out women lecturers”. I concede that this might be a myth, but I don’t think your skepticism is justified. The claim that this sort of reason would be as suicidal then as it is now is, I think, patently false. That sort of discrimination, often justified on the grounds of tradition, was pretty common in the early 20th century.
This is a period when women could not receive a degree at Cambridge, even though they could sit for the Tripos. When Hertha Ayrton was nominated to the Royal Society in 1902 (the first woman to be nominated), the nomination was rejected explicitly because she was a married woman. See here. From the Royal Society’s response:
The relevant charters were only amended in the 1940s.
Well of course you doubt—thereby admitting what you deny: that saying such a thing out loud would be politically incorrect then as now.
And men could not receive a degree at Vasser.
Having men and women go to the same institutions has been a disaster for both genders, since it necessitated faking up women’s scores, and dumbing down certain academic fields.
Co education has also caused severe dysgenics by preventing smart women from getting married. Thus, for example, a woman with a PhD in EngLit generally will only marry a male PhD, even though getting an advanced degree in a field with absolutely horrible employment prospects is usually a sign that you are too dimwitted to qualify for a useful degree—EngLit being infamously easy, while useful degrees tend to be hard, with the result that the great majority of PhDs in EngLit are female. And by the time she has completed her degree, her fertile period is running out, she is deeply in debt that cannot be expunged by bankruptcy, has no job, and is looking for a PhD with a sufficient income to support her, with the result that female PhDs tend to wind up as cat ladies.
With separate colleges, females are not on the same status ladder as males, but on separate and independent status ladders, so you can give them all the degrees that are politically convenient, without undermining their ability and willingness to get married and have children.
Thus, the glaringly obvious—that Marie Curie received two Nobel prizes and huge publicity for work that would not have received a Nobel prize or substantial publicity if a man did it (compare the far more important discovery of radon) because she was a mascot rather than because she was a scientist, was as likely then as it is now.
Marie Curie was primarily famous for being a woman scientist. Who discovered the other hundred odd elements?
Giving disproportionate publicity to rather ordinary work in which women were arguably involved implies the reverse of the intended message, implies that woman are, on average, substantially poorer at intellectual fields, especially STEM fields, than men, a lesson confirmed by the SAT and LSAT.
You are arguing that back in the horrible evil bad old days they discriminated against women, therefore affirmative action for women could not possibly have existed. This presupposes that there were no rational grounds for discriminating against women. If rational grounds for discriminating against women exist, both because they are on average less smart and less responsible, and also because their role as mothers is far more important than their role as PhDs, then the fact that discrimination against women was diminishing is evidence for the presence of affirmative action, rather than the presence of remaining discrimination being evidence against the presence of affirmative action.
Is it really good for women that a great many of our smartest women wind up as cat ladies?
I notice you completely ignored the concrete example I gave of comparable discrimination being explicitly avowed by a premier scientific organization at about the same time (Hertha Ayrton at the RS). No national scientific academy in the West would conceivably respond to a female nominee that way now. How does your model account for this evidence while still maintaining that disallowing a woman from giving a lecture on the gounds of tradition would be as suicidal then as now? I could provide further examples of a similar nature, if you’d like.
My point about Cambridge was not that women were not allowed to attend. They were allowed to attend, but they were denied degrees. Also, responding to ``Women couldn’t attend Harvard (or Yale or Oxford or...)” with “Men couldn’t attend Vassar” completely misses the intended point. Hint: The point is not “There were some colleges that women couldn’t attend. How discriminatory!”
Finally, Marie Curie is not just famous for discovering an element. She was the first scientist to realize that radiation isn’t due to a chemical reaction, but due to structural properties of individual atoms. She was also thereby the first scientist to provide evidence that atoms have an internal structure. This is a hugely significant discovery. And she did all of this before Pierre started working with her on radioactivity. Your belief that Marie Curie’s fame is undeserved appears to be a product of reasoning upwards from a pre-written bottom line, rather than any acquaintance with actual facts about her life and work.
But is this evidence that they are reasonable and realistic now, while they used to be moonbat crazy right wing misogynists back then, or is it evidence that they were moonbat crazy leftwing feminists back then, and even more moonbat crazy left wing feminists now?
If the view in 1911 was right wing misogynist, and the view now is rational and evidence based, why did everyone back then “know” who discovered radium, and yet not know who discovered any of the other elements?
Supposing that the post 1830 view is non ideological and evidence based, this needs to argued for and justified, rather than merely assumed.
Should you assume that the present is wise, and the past was crazy? Is it not at least equally likely that the present is crazy, and the past was wise?
Seems to me that the view of women that was held from 1680 to 1830 was realistic and evidence based, while the view of women held by the influential and higher authority from 1830 to the present is moonbat crazy and ideologically based. For example, the seduction community is today rediscovering politically incorrect truths about female sexuality that everyone knew and took for granted before 1830 - albeit the old account was that women tend to make self destructive sexual choices, so need male kin supervising their sex lives, while the new seduction community account is that women tend to make self destructive sexual choices, so here is how to take advantage of them.
Official truth about sex and the sexes changed pretty drastically some time not long after 1830, but then it took a couple of centuries to remake society in accord with the new official truth. But the strains, the lies, the hypocrisy, and the doublethink required for this social engineering give credence to the 1660-1830 official truth and cast doubt on the post 1830 official truth. The more society is remade in accordance with the 1830 official truth, the more strain it shows.
That you don’t know who discovered any of the elements other than Radium without looking it up, is reason to doubt the version of history in which Marie Curie discovered Radium, and even if she was the discoverer of Radium (which she was not) the fact that everyone “knows” it now, and everyone “knew” it then, shows she was a mascot then as now—which in turn shows that women have been being affirmative actioned for a very long time, which in turn is reason to suspect that the modern view is moonbat crazy—and that it was similarly moonbat crazy in 1911, in fact moonbat crazy from around 1830 to the present.
This is simply untrue. Rutherford, and the discovery of radon, revealed that.
And Pierre Curie, not Marie Curie, discovered radium.
Pierre Curie was working with radioactivity before he set his wife to work on it. He invented and made the radiation sensor that she then used to measure various things, under his supervision. He built the sensor; he selected the materials that she measured; he or his assistants prepared the materials that she measured.
Giesel and Elster report that in 1900, Pierre Curie, having discovered radium and prepared samples thereof, gave them samples, and they thereupon proceeded to study the chemical properties of Radium.
Giesel, FO. Ueber radioactive Stoffe. Ber Dtsche Chem Ges. 1900;33:3569–71.
Six years later history was progressively adjusted to give progressively more prominence to one of his assistants.
Which adjustment of history (from the account given at the time, to the account given a few years afterwards) indicates that they were moonbat crazy left wing feminists then, and even more moonbat crazy now.
From the Nobel Prize website:
These experiments were conducted in 1897. Radon was discovered in 1900, and Rutherford’s research on the transmutation of elements began in 1900 and he performed his gold leaf experiment in 1911. I will admit that I was wrong about Marie Curie being the first scientist to propose that atoms had an internal structure. JJ Thomson hypothesized that electrons were building blocks of atoms in 1897. But as far as I can tell, Marie Curie was the first scientist to realize that radiation is attributable to internal properties of atoms. If you have any evidence suggesting otherwise, please present it.
No, it is not. Knowledge is generally cumulative, although there are occasional setbacks.
Anyway, I just responded to correct your factual claim. I’m bowing out of this exchange now, because feeding trolls is bad.
I claimed history was rewritten in the period 1906, 1911. To refute that claim, you need early sources, pre 1906 sources, not today’s sources.
Perhaps you should instead look at 1900 sources, stuff published shortly after Pierre Curie discovered radium, rather than post hoc rationalizations published after Marie Curie had already been made a mascot.
The original basis for making her a mascot was the discovery of radium—in which her role was minor and peripheral.
First they made her a mascot, then they discovered her contributions were absolutely revolutionary.
What was revolutionary was the discovery of radioactive decay, that radioactivity arose from the transmutation of the elements, which discovery came from Rutherford and the circle of people around him, not from Pierre Curie and the circle of people around him, and came from the discovery of radon, not the discovery of radium.
Pierre Curie’s big contribution was to invent and build a device for quantitatively measuring radioactivity, and then set his wife to work measuring the radioactivity of various samples that he and his other assistants prepared.
So even if the discovery that radioactivity was independent of the chemical form of the element was “absolutely revolutionary”, it can even less be attributed to Marie Curie than can the discovery of radium.
There are frequent major setbacks
If it is not “at least equally likely”, it is still quite likely—particularly in matters influenced by politics, where knowledge, for obvious reasons, does not accumulate.
To defend the present, one has to argue truth, not cite today’s authorities. One has to compare today’s authorities with the evidence on which their claims are supposedly based. That the official truth about the past is a lie reveals social decay, just as that the official truth about the Soviet harvest was a lie revealed that communes do not work.
The way the wind is blowing, future generations living in hovels may well be as amazed by the moon landing as we are amazed by the Antikythera mechanism, as political lies spill over into bureaucratic lies, producing irreproducible results in science.
Untrue—and for evidence of it being true, you would need to quote a paper by her issued before she was made into a mascot, not a paper about her after she was made into a mascot.
For her to be the first scientist to realize that, she would have to issue a paper in which she asserted that, which she did not do.
What she in fact did was measure various samples prepared for her by her husband and another of his assistants, using a radiation measuring device invented and built by her husband, and as a result of these measurements, she did in fact assert that:
From which other people, Rutherford and people around him, concluded that the radiation arose from the internal structure of the atom.
Marie Curie was not able to draw the conclusion you and the twenty first century Nobel committee attribute to her, because the radioactivity she measured was not in fact exactly proportional to the amount of uranium, due to the build up of radon after purification. To make the discovery you attribute to her, would have needed to first discover radioactive decay, or at least first discover radon.
She strongly suspected the conclusion you attribute to her, and did experiments intended to show it, but her results were confounded by radon.
Since the measured radioactivity was not exactly proportional to the amount of the element, the evidence that she thought she saw seemingly showed that radioactive decay was influenced, at least to some extent, by the chemical form.
Which is why the discovery of radon by Rutherford and his people was far more important than the discovery of radium by Pierre Curie and his people: because it enabled Rutherford to draw the conclusion that you falsely attribute to Marie Curie.
The reason Pierre Curie’s group gets bigger publicity than Rutherford’s group is that one of the people in Pierre Curie’s group was a woman.
The discovery of radon made it possible to do measurements that substituted “exactly”, for “generally”, to measure that radioactivity was exactly proportional to the amount of the element, rather than “in general, more active to the extent that they contain more uranium”, from which one could then conclude that radioactivity was internal to the structure of the atom—a conclusion Marie Curie’s evidence seemingly contradicted.
PC was already in effect in the late nineteenth century. When people said politically incorrect things, they were conscious of transgressing.
Really?
They said that was the grounds? Actually said such an unspeakable thing out loud? I find that mighty hard to believe.
Sounds mighty like the story that Tully was lynched for whistling at a white woman.
Now possibly the real reason that they did not have her give a talk was that she was woman, but no one would have dared say out loud “because she is a woman”
Marie Curie was not famous for being an accomplished scientist. You have never heard of the person that discovered Radon, that being a far more important discovery than Radium, for Radon revealed the transmutation of the elements. She was famous, then as now, for being an accomplished female scientist. She was, then as now, like many famous women of the nineteenth century, a mascot.
The evidence that unqualified females have been affirmative actioned in to STEM fields since 1880 or so, and into administrative positions since around 1850 or so, is pretty similar to the evidence that they are being affirmative actioned today. This produces predictable results, which results are then denounced, starting in the 1860s, as the result of incorrigible misogyny, and proclaimed to be grounds to apply affirmative action even more vigorously and suppress thoughtcrimes even more harshly.
In practice everyone acts as if female STEM credentials are given merely for being female, rather than actually being qualified, and those that deny acting in this manner, nonetheless do act in this manner, just as those that repudiate John Derbyshire’s infamous advice as racist nonetheless act in accordance with that advice. This could be because everyone is consciously or unconsciously misogynistic, or it could be because credentials really are given merely for being female.
And this has been the case for well over a hundred years, with everyone saying for over a hundred years that it was the last generation that was horribly misogynistic, but now we are thankfully past all that.
Which then is it? Misogyny or gender realism? One statistic that might be relevant to that question is that today’s SAT is no longer an intelligence test, but instead measures the same thing that grade point average is supposed to measure. Predictably, boys do substantially better on the SAT, and substantially worse on grade point average. Affirmative action grading for female GPA is one possible explanation. You, perhaps, may have a better explanation.
Boys also do substantially better on the LSAT, but that is to be expected, since the LSAT is an intelligence test rather than an accomplishment test.
When I claim that women have been affirmative actioned for over a hundred years, it was of course denied back then, just as it is denied now, so I cannot prove that claim, but the smell of hypocrisy and doublethink were suggestive then, as they are suggestive now.
If you ask me for a properly authoritative citation for that claim, I will not be able to give it. All I can produce as evidence is a funny smell, which funny smell has not changed much in over a hundred years.
If you insist, however, I can give you properly authoritative citations for grade point average, LSAT, and SAT.
I’d like to see the GPA, LSAT, and SAT citations. Would the suggestion that the GPA thing, if accurate, might be due to young girls being more conscientious and mature than young boys offend men?
I agree with many of the things you’re saying about affirmative action, about it hurting its recipients more than helping them, on average. The main argument that I can think of in support of affirmative action is that I do think it’s common for young children to need role models to have an imagination about what their interests and potential futures might be. For example, I bet Obama’s fame will inspire more black people to become lawyers or politicians. Some children do not need role models to want to do something- they see a machine or a performance and are immediately fascinated- but most people are not like this and do whatever they see the people they identify with are doing.
Fame (especially in science and technology) often has as much to do with eccentric personality and unique personal story than intelligence and achievement. In Curie’s case the fact that she got radiation poisoning probably contributed to her fame today. This is a separate issue from if she was being affirmative-actioned up.
Why does the role model need to have the same race/gender/etc. as the child?
The role model doesn’t NEED to be anything, theoretically. In practice I think most people relate to others who are similar to them in some obvious way. It could also be a subtle thing, like I read about one saying people found anonymous strangers more likable after being told they shared a birthday. But this type of information is not as obvious as gender.
There exist people who defy all expectations to become whatever they were going to become and you feel it wouldn’t’ve mattered if they’d been born in a hut in Siberia or a brownstone in NYC. But many people are not like this and conform to whatever expectations they feel like they should be living up (or down) to. Expectation is complicated and comes from many factors, a source of which is media and topics at the forefront of the popular psyche.
Race/gender are just some of the most immediate ways of identifying and stereotyping a person. A person might also identify more with someone from the same town, country, religion, etc.
For me, gender was probably a principle factor of who I befriended as a kid. This is much less true now that I’ve been surrounded by men for the past decade. In terms of role models, my impression is that many kids are more likely to aspire to be like a famous person who seems like them in some obvious way. Like part of why I chose to the play the piano and violin was because I saw those Chinese prodigies playing those instruments and my brain absorbed that as what I (as an aspiring awesome Chinese kid) was expected to do. Honestly playing the tuba or drums or flute didn’t even cross my mind. Someone might argue I am naturally disinterested in non-violin/piano instruments, but I don’t think that’s true- I just chose an instrument to try it and it happened to be whatever I saw that small Chinese girl holding on the cover of that CD my mom had.
To clarify: I think there are a lot more arguments against affirmative action than for.
You dismiss the history as innacurate because information has been tampered with in a biased fashion, and yet the only evidence you point to is from a newspaper obituary, a forum of information traditionally uninformed and biased. My priors for “mascots” being fictitious are outweighed by my priors for conspiracy theories being fictitious. You say you know modern history’s opinion has been changed, which implies that there exists at least some piece of convincing evidence that they did NOT manage to change, which you have read. Show it please.
You’re confusing conspiracy and prospiracy.
Hmm, that’s fair. My beliefs in that sort of structure influencing how we perceive history is a lot stronger than the conspiratorial version. On the other hand, I still need more evidence than we have to posit that the feminist prospiracy actually existed and influenced things as opposed to any other one.
The language game we are playing is called “name a female computer scientist more influential than Ada Lovelace.”
Near as I can check history, the manufacture of poster girls for science first happens at the start of the twentieth century, but the manufacture of poster girls for computer programming did not happen until much later. Thus history that makes Ada the second computer programmer can be believed, to the extent that it quotes pre twentieth century sources.
Whenever history involves mascots, it should be viewed with suspicion. If people make an undue fuss about a dancing bear, that is evidence that bears cannot dance, rather than evidence that bears can dance. Your prior should be that a mascot is fictitious until proven otherwise.
Ada Lovelace is a mascot, Grace Hopper is a mascot. However Ada Lovelace predates promotion of female mascots, and was the second computer programmer (Babbage being the first), in that she found a bug in one of Babbage’s programs.
Babbage wrote, thirty years before it was policy to ballyhoo the contributions of oppressed groups:
Ehhh … ok, you do realize not having a better mascot is weak evidence in favour of positions on talent distribution and performance considered sexist right?
But better mascots do exist.
So why aren’t they used? Or rather name three.
Emmy Noether? Grace Hopper (maybe, as discussed above)? Rosalind Franklin?
It’s true that it’s evidence that there are so few, but given the historical status of women in academia, it is quite weak.
They probably aren’t used because “First Computer Programmer” sounds cooler than “Valuable Contributor to Field X”.
Yeah, because instead of a false example we could use a real example, such as a woman who wrote the first compiler… but then, most people (including our target group) would just ask: “what is a compiler?”
Therefore, a false hero may be politically preferable. Until the truth becomes known, and then we either have to accept that this strategy backfired, or make the truth forever our enemy. Which happens often when politics comes first.