
How Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage Invented the World’s First Computer - joubert
http://www.brainpickings.org/2015/06/15/the-thrilling-adventures-of-lovelace-and-babbage-sydney-padua/
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austenallred
I just think this thread is interesting; the first time I've ever seen when
the top post had negative upvotes

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walshemj
Sounds like HN has its own sad puppys crowd

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MCRed
What do you mean by that?

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stefantalpalaru
Probably a reference to this: [http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/sad-
puppies](http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/sad-puppies)

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stefantalpalaru
I understand the need to create a mythology and tell nice stories for noble
purposes, but this is simply too much, too soon. We live in an age when even
impressionable young pups can go to Wikipedia and get their cold shower:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace#Controversy_over_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace#Controversy_over_extent_of_contributions)

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hoopd
Agreed. I've noticed a pattern of attempting to mythologize as many females in
STEM fields as possible while simultaneously looking for any excuse to attack
males for their sexism (or whatever else you can find.) I take this as a sign
that as a culture we've decided that yes, sexism is the reason science has
always been filled with guys. Alternative hypotheses are merely a product of
that same sexism.

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.

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dalke
It's very easy to see patterns which aren't present. We as humans are quite
good at doing this. How might I confirm that this pattern is present?

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/](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...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_demographics_of_the_United_States)
) 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?

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hoopd
If it wasn't clear when I say "I'm noticing a pattern" I'm talking about
recent history, as in the last twenty years not the last hundred. I'm looking
at what we're doing _now_ , your way only tells us if the unfairness of the
past 20 years is greater than or less than the 80 years before that.

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](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9606497)),
The Women Science Forgot
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9744684](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...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_films_about_mathematicians)

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Joeri
Hollywood makes whatever sells, they don't try to be fair, and right now what
sells is diversity. Why do you have to make it a bad thing? When Ryan Reynolds
stops getting roles because he's a white male, then we'll have a problem.
Although, maybe that's a bad example, because I might not really care why they
stopped giving him roles, just as long as they did.

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hoopd
I'm just pointing out what's happening.

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.

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dalke
The problem in my view is that the evidence you have given is weak, and can
support many hypotheses. For example, it could be that the change are
adjusting to reflect changes in the number of of non-white, non-male, non-
straight, and non-disabled people that now do science.

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.

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innguest
All I'm hearing is "I don't want to read about Cultural Marxism because I
can't deal with the cognitive dissonance".

