[pyentropy]

The average person has no clue what theoretical computer science is.

But science fields do need marketing. All children have heroes they look up to. Putting focus on Turing's achievements is merely creating a pop star figure in the mainstream, which I think is a good thing: a smart dude works on a problem that saves World War 2 and now powers your phone and your TikTok app. Once you are actually interested in the field you can work out the nuances and the falsehoods in that claim.

Evaluating earlier work in some field throughout history always leads to a complex graph of achievements, but you cannot put that graph in the name of an annual prize. Do we change "Turing Award" to "Frege-Cantor-Godel-Church-Turing"?

[OneEyedRobot]

>All children have heroes they look up to.

After reading that I sat here for a minute and racked my brain as to who my childhood 'hero' might be. I can't remember a single person.

It's amusing to me how much of intellectual work deals in a currency of status. Getting/giving credit for things appears to be the Prime Directive, at least among the observers. We've now graduated to not only stressing who is responsible but what demographic groups they are a part of.

Now, it could be that the real deal groundbreaking folks don't give a damn. Tip o' the hat to those people.

[Banana699]

>a smart dude works on a problem that saves World War 2 and now powers your phone and your TikTok app.

The vast majority of people working anywhere near mathematics, physical sciences or electrical engineering (the 3 founding pillars of CS) in the 1920s and 1930s probably worked on problems related to WW2 during WW2. You can equally state that motivating claim for a lot of other people.

I think Turing gets the Media Treatment^TM because there's a lot of Tragic Hero Energy in his story:

<A gay man in an era that summarily rejected him [and we tell this story in an era that is extremely oversensitive and hyper-reactive to this particular sort of injustice]; a smart, shy pupil whose closest childhood friend (and suspected lover) died early of a now-extinct illness; a mathematician who dreamed of how numbers and lookup tables could hold a conversation, saw them used and counter-used to destroy cities and murder millions, then was finally rewarded with prison and humiliation by the people he fought for.>

Turing himself off course deserves all praise and glory and the righteous anger for how he was treated in his last years, but I think our era's affinity for him is just the old mechanism of people digging the past for battles that reflect the moral values they're currently (fighting for|winning|losing), see also the misguided claim that Ada Lovelace is the first "computer programmer", usually followed by a looong screed about Women In Tech.

We just like a good story to exaggerate and make it reflect our current moral memes, and the idea of a Man|Woman Ahead Of Their Times is a catch by this standard.

[UncleMeat]

Oversensitive and hyper-reactive?

Jailing or sterilizing gay people for having sex is evil. End of story. It has only been 20 years since this was the law in some US states. I see no reason why vigorous rejection of this sort of policy as monstrous can possibly be seen as "oversensitive and hyper-reactive".

[Banana699]

You missed the entire point.

The point isn't that this oversensitivity is misplaced, the point is that it's moral outrage porn that the tellers of the story use in a smart way to get a reaction from you.

This isn't necessarily a bad thing if it's just one or two story among others, after all the purpose of art is to get strong reactions out of its audience. But when every such story has to lean hard into the moral aspect to the exclusion of all else it becomes a trite children story told for nothing else but feel-good points.

Consider the amount of articles on trump during his presidency. How much of it was high-quality investigative journalism telling you things you don't know, and how much was "Trump tweeted something shockingly stupid, here are a list of experts you don't need telling you this is shockingly stupid, this means End Of Democracy (EOD)" ? The latter articles are technically true, but it's trite and accomplishes nothing but pulling on your memetic levers to get you to like/share/feel-bad|good-all-day.

[OneEyedRobot]

>a smart dude works on a problem that saves World War 2 and now powers your phone and your TikTok app.

So much for the Polish Cipher Bureau. Not so many tragic hero opportunities there.

[tialaramex]

Also, this is a confusing mess anyway. Turing worked on the Bombe, but that's not a computer at all. Bletchley has one you can see in operation. It's a very complicated machine, but today a child looking at it can't help but wonder if this wouldn't be much easier for a computer.

The Bombe helps break Enigma, and thus is an early part of Ultra and arguably does "save World War 2" but it has no more relevance to your phone or your TikTok app than does the Rubik's cube or the slide rule.

Colossus isn't very far from the Bombe today, you might likely visit both on the same trip, but Turing didn't build it, and although it's clearly in some sense a computer, it is critically lacking in some features you'd want from a general purpose computer since it had a single purpose, to break Tunny in the mid 1940s.

In some sense Colossus is relevant to your phone and TikTok, because it is a computer, but, Turing didn't work on it and it isn't their direct ancestor by any means at all.