[kzcqt]

Media invents a fact, that she is responsible for everything, and make her the face of the discovery, when it was a team effort. They get tons of clicks for saying something that is clearly preposterous.

Some people get upset, some even start trolling about it, and badmouth the poor woman, who's not responsible for what the media said in their quest for clicks. A loss of time for everybody involved.

Media reports the backlash. They get tons of clicks for that too.

Summary: media wins. Everybody else loses.

[yodon]

The first part of the scenario, where one scientist is held up as responsible for a large team's discovery, has played out in every Nobel Prize for experimental work in the past fifty years. That's how science works and everyone who does science professionally knows this. The second part of the scenario, where the internet goes wild and declares this a horrendous miscarriage of credit, happens only when the leader of the team is female. It is not a miscarriage of credit. It is how scientific teams are credited and how they have always been credited, by personifying the collective work through the persona of the leader of the team. There is nothing new here except the application of misogyny.

[daenz]

>There is nothing new here except the application of misogyny.

No, the new thing here is pretending that this only happens to women: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Prize_controversies

Look at how many of those controversies are over people not being recognized for the credit, specifically in Physics and Chemistry. Women experiencing this phenomenon is not "misogyny", it's par for the course.

[yodon]

Of course controversy over credit exists. Please post links to the high traffic outraged threads on HN in connection with those controversies.

I've known and worked with perhaps half a dozen Nobel Prize winners, and dozens of their students, collaborators, and post docs, including some cases where the list of names on the Prize has been at best debatabely correct. That is the reality of large science. It always has been. What is new is the weaponization of misogyny.

[blub]

Having missed the main discussion, and getting the chance to see additional info become available, it seems that the critics were right, even if they perhaps had ignoble reasons to complain, as you claim.

There were apparently 30 people involved, four algorithms, one of which belonged to the main character of our story and in the end that algorithm was not used, according to one of her colleagues :)

[yodon]

All I can say is I am sorry you have fallen prey to that narrative. It is not uncommon for large science to involve not 30 people but hundreds, and not four algorithms but dozens. In the end, science still talks about the work as having been done by an individual, just as we say that Steve Jobs created the iPhone. Everyone involved understands that Steve Jobs didn't solder the battery connectors or write the display driver. What he did was make the project happen. The same is true in science, particularly in large science. There is nothing new here except misogyny. Your favorite male experimental Nobel Prize winners of the past 50 years also worked with large teams and also didn't write all the code on their projects. That's how large projects work and how large research efforts are personified.

[daenz]

>Please post links to the high traffic outraged threads on HN in connection with those controversies.

Honestly, take the time and read the comments and see how similar they are to the Katie Bouman "outrage": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15395347

[yodon]

First, I know Art McDonald, the scientist in question in that thread, and I do consider leading a large project to be a critical element of the project's success. Second, the quality of the discussion in that thread was much higher and the level of angry, punitive downvoting much lower (elsewhere in this thread I was downvoted currently to -2 for asserting that trolling != misogyny, an assertion that I think would be supported by every online and offline dictionary definition of the terms and is a measure of the emotional rather than rational factors driving much of this debate). Controversy over credit is not new. Weaponized misogyny driven outrage is. [edit added: Also thanks for finding and posting that link, it is a relevant component to include for comparison, even if we disagree on the conclusions to be drawn from it]

[brianpgordon]

My guess is that what most people are instinctively turned off by is the clickbaity element that they see as implicitly in play when a headline reads "meet the woman behind X" instead of something more generic like "meet the researcher behind X." In the former case, the headline writer is going beyond the standard obnoxious media spin that likes to oversimplify the research process and also apparently hitching their wagon onto the "women in STEM" angle to get more clicks. It's just even more over-the-top than normal, and people are put in an especially critical, even dismissive, frame of mind right off the bat.

That said, I think it's fairly uncharitable to read the headline that way, and we shouldn't jump to conclusions about the author's intent when it's so ambiguous. But it's also uncharitable to read some kind of sinister latent misogyny into HN reactions critical of the headline.

[matt4077]

Care to find any example among the myriad of „meet the man behind...“ stories where the same thing happened?

[adventured]

Sure, there are several famous examples that everyone is aware of.

Steve Jobs with the iPhone or iPod. Elon Musk with both SpaceX and Tesla. Jeff Bezos with AWS and Amazon's success generally.

In every thread (or media article) in which those people are given opulent credit for the thing in question, it's persistently pointed out that in fact the teams, designers, employees, engineers, leadership, etc. behind those things deserve enormous credit, while the famous person at the front is getting the credit as a visionary genius. Why? Because it sells better to put Bezos on the cover (with his head in a box).

State in an HN thread that Elon Musk founded Tesla sometime, see what response you get 100% of the time. I've been watching that specific response play out over and over for the better part of a decade here as one example. Musk persistently gets given overwhelming credit by the media, and he persistently gets torn down for it.

You also constantly see it when it comes to team efforts generally to take this further. For example when NASA and ESA work on something together and then NASA gets blanket credit. The more famous team will get the overwhelming credit, because it sells. That last part is what it's all about.

[throwawaysea]

While I think it is important to recognize that Jobs/Musk/Bezos all had large organizations working on things they are often credited with, I think it is more reasonable to credit them in this way because they were explicitly the leaders and founders of their companies. They envisioned, created, and led the organizations that produced all those products.

I don't think that is an apples-to-apples comparison with this story. The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) is a collaboration between numerous organizations (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Event_Horizon_Telescope#Collab...) and it does have a leadership team (see https://eventhorizontelescope.org/organization). But in this story, we did not discuss the leaders of this effort. We discussed one contributing engineer/scientist who was elevated above the rest, when her algorithm was not even used in the production of the final image (which is the underlying scientific milestone that is being recognized here).

I find it bizarre because from all that I've seen, Bouman was not in a leadership position but was a peer-contributor alongside many others. Her contributions matter, and are important (as credited by Andrew Chael), but it is bizarre to recognize her alone and not everyone else who is on equal footing in terms of their contribution (or even greater footing, for those who came up with the algorithms that were used for the final image).

[faissaloo]

Literally any time someone brings up Steve Jobs

[plemer]

Good question.

In the first 20 results of searching HN for "the man behind"(https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22the%20man%20behind%22&sort=...):

* The Man Behind AMD's Zen Microarchitecture: Jim Keller (wikipedia.org) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14989551

>Zen is the work of a huge team of talented engineers. To single one out as "the man behind Zen" seems very wrong. I don't know what Jim Keller's contribution to Zen was (and without a blog or autobiography or similar from someone well placed inside the team, then neither do most commentators), but if he did work on the Zen architecture, it's hard to believe that he would have accomplished much without the help of a good team. Keller is the main AMD engineer singled out for praise on The Internet, while the hard work (and given that Zen is such a success, it's surely the result of a mountain of hard work) of everyone else is mostly ignored.

* Never give up: The story of the man behind Tetris. (mixergy.com) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=830679

> This story is not about "the man behind Tetris" and I am dubious of several of the claims made. >"Henk didn't invent Tetris, but he's the entrepreneur who went into the Soviet Union to win the rights to the game, and he's the man who made it a world-wide phenomenon" >The three statements above are true, dubious and false in that order.

Granted, that's only 2 out of 20. Other posts: * a few generally critical (e.g., The Man Behind Windows Powershell - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15250349), so there wasn't any esteem to be divvied up, * many projects that realistically wouldn't have existed but for the work or leadership of one man (e.g., Kim Peek with Mega, Dread Pirate Roberts with the Silk Road, Christopher Steele with the Steele Dossier), and * many projects where I'm not familiar enough with the subject matter to say if the man was a "but for" influence (e.g., Brad Cox and Objective C).

Also interesting are the results for searching "the woman behind" (https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22the%20woman%20behind%22&sor...). Everything after the first three results has either no comments or only one. The discussion on the first three are positive to very positive though.

On the specific question of how much credit Bouman deserves, without being intimately familiar with the project, I'd guess that Bouman herself gets it right: "No one of us could've done it alone. It came together because of lots of different people from many backgrounds." (https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/10/us/katie-bouman-mit-black-hol...). I personally find her an intelligent and likable ambassador for her team.

[0815test]

What stories - the one about PowerShell? Do you think it makes sense to compare the EHT (a literally worldwide effort) to PowerShell?

[abunner]

No. The summary is that by tearing down the woman lead, women everywhere see what will happen to them if they achieve a measure of recognition on the internet.