Katie Bouman, a researcher who helped create the first image of a black hole, quickly gained internet fame Thursday for her role in the project after a photo of her went viral.
But internet trolls soon followed, questioning Bouman’s work and floating false claims that she did not have much of a role in the project. Colleagues rallied to her defense, but the situation highlighted the vitriol that women continue to face on the internet, and the continued vulnerability of major internet platforms to trolling campaigns.
Isn’t it funny how it’s always men?
This is getting really tiring…
It is. It’s freaking 2019, you’d think mankind would have matured beyond petty sexist behavior like this by now. Gender has absolutely nothing to do with how talented and smart someone is.
People who troll will cotton onto anything they think will result in a reaction.
If going on about the subject being a woman got nothing more than a bemused, baffled response, then they wouldn’t do it.
“Gender has absolutely nothing to do with how talented and smart someone is.”
To be clear: Gender and ethnicity have a lot to do with intelligence. The damn thing is mostly hereditary and we do have different mean-IQs for men and women.
BUT:
It were the media-outlets that went: “Look! A Waman in science doing sciency stuff!11!!1!!!”
As far as I know Katie never wanted to be in the spotlight…
“To be clear: Gender and ethnicity have a lot to do with intelligence.” To be clear: this is bullshit, which has been debunked time and time again. Intelligence is hereditary, but only to a small degree. Upbringing and education are way more important.
That’s not true either. Upbringing and education are small parts. Way more important are nutrition and health care. The rise in mean IQ over the years is directly due to improved nutrition and health care.
“Genome-wide association studies establish that human intelligence is highly heritable and polygenic” https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3182557/
“It is thought that around 50 to 80 per cent of variation in general intelligence between people is down to genetics.” https://www.newscientist.com/article/2163484-found-more-than-500-genes-that-are-linked-to-intelligence/
See, spending 30 seconds on google before making a claim can save one from making unsubstantiated and wrong ones.
Having noted intelligence is (mostly) hereditary, I think a troll attacking someone’s achievement based on the gender of that someone, is a loser himself (or herself) and will never ever achieve something noteworthy.
Yeah that’s a whole lotta bullshit. Its as credible as trying to prove the flat earth.
I prefer gaussian IQ curve for women – less at extremes, fatter/higher peak (so average woman has a greater chance of beeing at least moderately intelligent)
That is very upsetting. I for one put her on my Facebook page and applauded her and all her compatriots in the effort. I said, “we need more super heroes like her.” I will admit that sometimes negative generalizations (memes, etc) regarding men bother me. But then a bunch of men do something like this. Way to go troglodytes!
Not sure what to say, I’ve never understood why some men have to feel superior to women.
Because these same men need to feel superior to EVERYBODY, including other men. Most people refer to these men by the technical name, “assholes”.
JFL65,
I’d like to see examples where they harassed men in similar positions, to the same degree.
Matt Taylor.
The1stImmortal,
Which Matt Taylor? And, just the one?
There are some significant differences between the harassment of Katie Bouman and Matt Taylor. The most obvious one is that the abuse Taylor received largely came from feminists and the “social justice” crowd rather than anonymous trolls.
While the mainstream media has celebrated Bouman and condemned the trolling, clickbait journalists produced hit pieces smearing Taylor and encouraging the mob.
Those 4chan trolls infesting twitter can be hurtful, but thankfully they’re pretty much powerless. In contrast the proudly self-righteous bullies who celebrated bringing Taylor to tears included some activists with influence. There was a genuine threat to his career when they campaigned for him to be fired.
For a couple of software dev examples, see the treatment of Larry Garfield at Drupal, or Tim Soret of Odd Tales.
Some of the abuse activists like Shanley Kane dished out against certain women at Drupal (who dared to defend Garfield’s right to a private life) was as nasty as anything I’ve seen aimed at Bouman. For some reason that didn’t draw the same condemnation…
Phil Mason
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Mason
Kinda fails either the “same position” and/or “to the same degree” criteria, but okay. Whatever.
Os this real or just an exaggerated editorial to get viewers to NBC? I ask because in my circles I see only praises for Katie Bouman and memes with the black hole image, while the article quotes one single video that briefly managed to be very visible on YouTube.
You obviously haven’t spent any time on Twitter…
Is there a good reason to spend a lot of time on Twitter?
There is no motive to spend time on a place where, basically, we can’t post well constructed arguments due to ridiculous rules about how long in chars it can be. Also, there are lots of people that believe on the “power” of single/simple sentences to catch the “essence” of complex subjects, I’m not one of them.
Eh, yeah even two well meaning people can get into verbal spats on twitter. Communication via text is difficult enough for good friends with unlimited chars. Strangers with a cap on response size trying to deal with even moderately difficult subjects often doesn’t end well.
Throw in a ton of evil people with bad intentions and motivations, and a severe lack of serious moderation effort on twitter’s part and you have the twitter cesspool we have today. But, its great for simple messages/ jokes or for small communities passing innocuous messages. I’m part of both Kubernetes and serverless groups, and its surprisingly constructive and lacks a lot of flamewarring. Most of the time.
No, nor Facebook, either. Most people would be better off ignoring both. If you use either for connecting with family and friends, go private and only share with family and friends. Making a public account on either site is just begging to be trolled by the worst of the net.
This whole thing seems to have started (surprise surprise) with a troll thread on 4chan, which then spread to Reddit and managed to spawn a youtube video and some nasty twitter comments.
As unpleasant as that is, the positive articles and congratulatory messages celebrating Katie Bouman must outnumber the trolls by at least 1000 to 1. Even on Twitter there were far more comments that misleadingly presented the black hole image as if it was purely her achievement (something she was quick to correct) than there were sexists dismissing her contributions.
In my opinion clickbait articles presenting this as a serious controversy just feed the small fringe of idiots and trolls.
“Sexist backlash” sells more clicks than “Woman photographs black hole” sell more clicks than “Man photographs black hole” sells more clicks than “A team of 200 photographs black hole”. Click sales count more than facts and that is a fact. Here is a more balanced article which should not have to be written…..
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/11/science/katie-bouman-black-hole.html
I like the subtle idea in some comments that insinuate that because some public platform X has been taken over by abusive people, it’s people’s own fault for getting abused on public platform X and that they should stay off public platform X.
Play this game out to the end, and what they’re really saying is that we should surrender to abuse wherever the abusers flock to. People should be allowed to pile on abuse in public platforms and they should have free reign to take over any new public platform that comes up.
No, it isn’t always “men”. In fact, it’s rarely ever “men”. It’s immature little jerkwads hiding behind a pseudo-anonymous online identity who’ve never been held accountable for their behavior by anyone (to be clear, I include the 45th President of the USA in that category).
Real, actual, grown-up men appreciate the effort and work that went into producing that image, and give full respect to everyone on the team, regardless of gender or race.
Comparing these turds to bottom-feeding scum-sucking pond dwellers is in fact an insult to bottom-feeding scum-sucking pond dwellers– they at least serve a purpose.
Calling them men, which implies maturity, is incredibly insulting to actual adult males, and gives these twerps some actual credibility. Let’s call them what they are, which is meaningless internet trolls without lives.
We sugarcoat things too much in modern society. We are so careful to use words that won’t insult anyone, that we lose total sight of the fact that some people NEED to be insulted.
Sorry, but this is very ridiculous. Ok, a woman is acuse of something. That mere fact is wrong? No. People HAVE THE RIGHT of having doubts. Not because someone is a woman, suddenly is over the good and evil and EVERY word she says MUST TO BE TRUE.
Second, what about that irresponsible last sentence? “Isn’t it funny how it’s always men?”
CAN YOU UNDERSTAND HOW SEXIST THAT IS?
The base of ALL bigotry is when people label an entire group. All jews are usurer. All blacks are delinquents. ALL MEN ARE TROLLS.
Do you have proof that EVERY COMMENT ON THE INTERNET ABOUT THIS WOMAN WAS MADE BY A MAN? No, you DONT.
We live in dangerous times, times in we, instead of make real progress, we are simply changing one type of discrimination to another. Now, if you are a man, clearly you are a male chauvinist, BECAUSE ALL MEN ARE. If you are white, clearly you are a red neck nazi, BECAUSE ALL WHITE ARE.
And so on…
I thought this site could try, at least, to be above the average.
The thing is Katie Bourman is a victim of the media’s desire to ‘promote women in STEM’ and turn her in to a poster child, and it would seem Thom is of the same mindset. Promoting women good, let’s not let the details get in the way and anyone who says anything contrary are bed men. See “Isn’t it funny how it’s always men”, well no Thom, it isn’t but isn’t it funny how **some** men are so quick to take a dump on men in general to show how good they are.
For information on how the team was made up, and there were a **lot** of people involved, see here;
https://bhi.fas.harvard.edu/our-people
She was one of many people but, for some reason, the media were obsessed with turning her in to a totem figurehead for ‘women in STEM’. The sooner the media lose their ‘identity politics’ obsession the better for everyone.