| > I don't understand why Schmidhuber continues to ignore this crucial point. It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it. But wait a minute, you might say, facts are facts. And if everyone had the time and resources to discover and digest every fact, your understanding would be the end of it. But everyone doesn't have time and resources. To compensate, we rely on others to curate facts for us. When we encounter an internally consistent subset of facts that suits our ideals and our interests, we adopt that point of view. There are infinitely many subsets of curated facts that can be presented as internally consistent. That's why there are so many different points of view. What bearing does this have on Turing's role in computer science, and his latter day fame in a society which came to be defined by silicone logic? The First Computers Were Human (and Mostly Women) https://mjosefweber.medium.com/the-first-computers-were-huma... Turing, in addition to stating an ontology of computing, dared to invite the question, what is the difference between a computer and a human? |
I cringe when I read ill-researched essays like these because it informs a relationship between women and computing that back then genuinely did not exist.
For the vast, vast majority of women in the field of computing at this time, they were nothing more than glorified calculators. Yes, there were a few women scientists and mathematicians (by few, I mean literally handfuls). Yes, it was a male dominated field.
But the overwhelming majority of women working in this industry at this time did secretarial style busywork. It wasn't glorious. It was underappreciated. It sucked.
These types of essays are a genuine attempt to rewrite a history that did not exist. It is literary gaslighting the likes of which the article we are discussing right now is attempting to rectify.