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asr comments on Happy Ada Lovelace Day - Less Wrong Discussion
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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.
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"
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.