Comment by anjc | Hacker News Reader

Comment by anjc | Hacker News Reader

I'm confused about this. People said her code contribution on the repo was minimal. Others in the field came out and said "yes but her algorithm was key here, not lines of code". Fine. Her own statement then says that "no one algorithm was key, it was a group effort", but her colleagues say her algorithm wasn't used at all. The obfuscation doesn't seem accidental at all.

Why is a person sexist and homophobic [1] for wondering why two major news articles say the opposite thing [1,2]:

[1]: "Katherine Bouman, a 29-year-old postdoctoral researcher who developed an algorithm that was key to capturing the stunning visual." https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/04/12/trolls-hija...

[2]: "While she led the development of an algorithm to take a picture of a black hole, an effort that was the subject of a TED Talk she gave in 2016, her colleagues said that technique was not ultimately used to create this particular image." https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/11/science/katie-bouman-blac...

The quote that you included as part of [1] doesn't seem to be present in the article you linked.

Getting down to your question I am not sure the fault lies with those who are wondering about the difference between two opposing statements in the media. The piece I take issue is that as soon as the picture of her with the image of the black hole started to go viral the first thing many people did was check her contributions to a repo on github to quantify the code that she wrote for the project as a way to measure her which ultimately seems like something someone would do out of feelings of inadequacy.

My mistake, it was in the other article I linked to.

Her current/future employers, her colleagues, and every academic's employers and colleagues, want to know contributions. Some fields make you explicitly list them for each paper. No doubt feelings of inadequacy feed into this at some point, but it's part of the job and isn't saved for just measuring women.

Thanks for clearing that up. To my point about contributions, I was more speaking about how people went directly to look at the code contributions in lines of code measured by github in order to measure her specifically. I agree that it is important to appropriately assess and acknowledge contributions in academic work but pure volume of code written (which doesn't always correlate with what github counts) doesn't necessarily quantify the contributions to an academic work.

"which ultimately seems like something someone would do out of feelings of inadequacy."

Given that those who counted LoC ultimately had the correct view -- that the initial viral story was not accurate -- perhaps they deserve a little more credit than that. It's kind of a 'low blow' to suggest the critics could only care because they don't 'measure up' -- if you know what I mean. You seem to have a rather ironic notion of the source of virtue, given the present controversy.

I agree though, that LoC is a lousy metric. This is a case where a concise algorithm might still have been essential.

Rather than wonder, why not read the tweet thread from the man who supposedly did all the work, which is linked from the Post article?

https://twitter.com/thisgreyspirit/status/111651854496183091...

TL;DR: “the repo” in question was one of multiple imaging libraries that were used, and the lines-of-code count was vastly inflated by counting machine-generated files, so the original claim was basically nonsense. In terms of Bouman’s contributions, she was the primary author of “the imaging framework that rigorously tested all three codes”, so she did play a meaningful role, as one of many different people involved in the collaboration. On the other hand, assuming the Post article’s mention of an “algorithm” is meant to refer to CHIRP, it is in error, since CHIRP was not used to create the current images:

> Data from the EHT was analysed by four separate teams to verify the findings. Two teams relied on a tried-and-true computational imaging method called CLEAN, while the other two used a newer technique called regularised maximum likelihood (RML), which had been honed by Bouman, astrophysicist Andrew Chael from Harvard (who has also been celebrated for this work), and colleagues for the needs of the black hole imaging project.

- https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/PT.6.1.2019041...

> On the other hand, assuming the Post article’s mention of an “algorithm” is meant to refer to CHIRP, it is in error, since CHIRP was not used to create the current images.

Yeah? You wouldn't find this confusing as a lay person? Many articles said she created the algorithm. As I said, she didn't "accidentally" become the face of the image. It's due to these journalistic errors.

Confusing? I said it was in error. Unfortunate, for an article written to debunk others' errors. But it is still a lot closer to the truth than what it debunks. In particular, both of the articles you linked make clear that (a) she was a meaningful participant in the project but (b) it was a large team effort and the credit doesn't belong to any one person, while (c) people on social media have created the exaggerated impression that she was solely responsible.

I'm not going to blame "the media" for the existence of an exaggerated impression based on two articles that explicitly debunk that impression, even if one of them has an error.

Also, while false impressions are one thing, I don't really regret that she became the face of the black hole image, per se. People fundamentally want to praise other people rather than abstract entities, and if it was going to be anyone, it might as well be the subject of such a great photo – the juxtaposition of the laptop (with black hole image visible) and the look on her face really captures the idea and emotion of scientific accomplishment.

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