Lady Ranelagh: The Incomparable Life of Robert Boyle’s Sister | Hacker News Reader

Lady Ranelagh: The Incomparable Life of Robert Boyle’s Sister

nature.com

101 pointssohkamyung75 comments

I’ve always wondered the true number of Einsteins, Ramanujans, Lovelaces, etc who were forced into a life of physical exploitation, turned into mechanical machines because of life’s and humanity’s brutality. Even in modern times... (not that forcing anyone, even non-geniuses into a life of manual servitude or exploitation is ever ok)

>I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.

Stephen Jay Gould, "Wide hats and narrow minds" New Scientist 8 March 1979, p. 777. Reprinted in The Panda's Thumb, p. 151.

Consider also that until the 20th century around half of the people born died before adulthood and around a quarter did so before the age of one [0]. Those geniuses didn't even get the chance to be the smartest uneducated subsistence farmer in the fiefdom, the most intelligent 15 year old to bleed out after childbirth, or the brainiest starving war refugee.

[0] https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality-in-the-past

If you have the chance to research your genealogy, do so. You get to experience history (and see the actual implications of this statistic) for yourself, but also how resilient and resourceful your ancestors had to be.

Or, there's even the Mozarts who were just never put in front of a piano. Maybe they had parents who were really into sports and signed them up for every sport and they never got exposed.

But the piano created Mozart. What I'm suggesting is that the limiting factor is the number of pianos and musical cultural environments, rather than the amount of potential musical geniuses.

"Imagine that you’ve got a million people farming in Antarctica. They’re eking out this bare subsistence in agriculture in the snow,"

"Obviously, if you let those farmers leave Antarctica and go someplace else to farm, the farmers are better off. But isn’t it also better for the world if you let people stop eking out this existence, contributing nothing to the world, and go someplace where they could actually use their skills and not just feed themselves, but produce something for the world economy?"

The failure of the developed world to enable all of humanity to realize their potential is a huge, huge problem for everyone.

Imagine you had been transplanted to Haiti or Equatorial Guinea at basically any point in your life, and you weren't given an education, you weren't allowed or able to move to anywhere else etc etc. It would be a huge loss not just to you but to everyone else that your potential went unrealized.

This exactly is the purpose of my branch of feminism! To be liberated from social systems of oppression of all kinds. It's refreshing to see a genial discussion here on HN, challenges aside.

Except oppression isn't necessarily an end and allowing certain groups to define oppression or deriving it from immutable historical fact simply creates another privileged class and gives one a stick to beat oppressors who may not even intentionally participate in so called "oppressive acts" with.

I argue fighting oppression is only useful insofar as it presents a utilitarian good for society and that certain levels of structural violence is necessary for nation states to function. At the end of the day, there always needs to be a (large) class of street sweepers, accountants and restaurant workers for the benefit of the rest of society.

We don't get robots?

Eventually, but currently 7.50 an hour is much cheaper than a state of the art burger flipping machine. Once that changes, I assume the unemployment rate will rise and legislation against inequality will be needed.

> At the end of the day, there always needs to be a (large) class of street sweepers, accountants and restaurant workers for the benefit of the rest of society.

As long as they're not you.

Furthermore the argument is't "nobody should have to be a garbageman", it's "perhaps garbagemen deserve more than 1/3500th the pay of a CEO"

But ‘deserve’ is something you can analyze to death and make no progress on except to justify violence or implied threats to make things ‘fair’.

A peaceful way to analyze problems and arrive at solutions looks at what positive actions (violence or implied threat in law) create that condition, and remove those, or devise solutions to make those actions obsolete. For instance, in most places there is a law against competition in the garbage business. There are also laws requiring a whole host of hugely expensive and complicated business operation and employee benefit costs and liabilities to running a small garbage business. There’s little natural reason why the benefits of operational scale should extend much beyond the truck, but all our efforts at social justice have somehow increased this benefit. We also have numerous policies that encourage the growth and import of a massive under-skilled lower class that all competes for these jobs for lack of options at their abilities, and discourages high-skilled labor in the middle classes by positive action, forcing the latter to pay for the former. In 1000 years, this system will not be distinguishable from serfdom, and the justifications for it will be just as peculiar as the ones we look back on today. And finally, we come to skill acquisition, the primary means of which teaches an utterly useless narrative of historical victimization and justified violence, instead of skills for useful work and peaceful technical solutions to structural problems.

  Full many a gem of purest ray serene  
  The dark unfathom'd caves of ocean bear:  
  Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,  
  And waste its sweetness on the desert air.  
 
  Some village Hampden that with dauntless breast  
  The little tyrant of his fields withstood,  
  Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest,  
  Some Cromwell guiltless of his country's blood.

"Elegy written in a Country Churchyard", Thomas Gray https://www.bartleby.com/101/453.html

(Ironically time itself has pushed Hampden https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Hampden out of the list of names that one may reasonably expect English people to recognise, while Milton and Cromwell still remain)

That's "Odysseus of Ithaca" in "A Perfect Vacuum"[1], by Stanislav Lem.

Ad 1: https://stanislaw-lem.fandom.com/wiki/A_Perfect_Vacuum

Publish or perish, right? This was when much scientific process was young, so she may not have framed things that way. It is also possible that she was more concerned about making progress than taking credit for it or monetizing it.

Arguments like this make me suspicious. Essentially, we've got no way of knowing how much Lady Ranelagh would have achieved if... so that leaves us free to speculate about how she was an unknown genius. There's an infinite supply of these figures for feminist academics to make hay with. Meanwhile, how many people can name an achievement of Robert Boyle, who actually was the greatest English scientist before Newton?

Maybe I'm wrong, and if I read the book I'd find convincing proof that she was a brilliant mind who could have made great discoveries. What's in the article doesn't seem much: she tested a cure for rickets, paid for her brother's lab, and wrote down somebody's experiment.

as a man, how insecure does one have to be to take offense at a book that celebrates the achievement of a woman, and to question the accuracy of it without having actually read it?

Seems a bit of a straw man no? I don't see how the parent comment expressed having taken offense, nor particular insecurity, and surely not enough to infer their gender, or any such grounds for "motives".

The comment you are responding to also explicitly points out the basis being just the article in question, and being open to the possibility of a better argument posed in the book. So, I honestly do not see the issue here.

edit: As is evident from the response they got, the book seems to give better insights, which must be a win for everyone?

It is not win. It is simply assuming and claiming she is getting unfair credit without bothering to look at the case -- on the basis of her gender. The comment did not asked for tldr, the comment literally made claims about her lack of achievements.

Admitting that you did not checked it and being theoretically open to change if you would bothered does not change all that much. Plus, this is just how bias works. In assumptions claim when you don't check evidence.

Having bias but being open to change one's mind is a correct application of the Bayes' theorem, isn't it?

(I agree the root comment was a bit... weird, let's put it that way, but the author themselves acknowledged that)

I mean ... who cares. Having bias, then calling it as win or acting like no one is allowed to point out it is bias is not correct application of the Bayes' theorem.

I did not flagged the comment nor downvoted it. I responded to claim that it was win. Which responded to claim that the comment took offense.

I laid out why I thought this book might be overclaiming for the status of its subject. I said "I might be wrong", and then gave evidence from the fact that the achievements mentioned in the review don't seem huge. This is a "dog didn't bark in the night" argument: if Lady R had amazing achievements, the review would have mentioned them. But again, maybe I'm wrong! Feel free to read the book, or other sources, and rebut me with evidence. I'll happily hold my hands up. That would be a much more effective argument than accusing me of bias.

Because such books have an agenda behind them, unfortunately.

Please don't break the site guidelines like this. It helps nothing. It just takes the thread further into flamewar and makes everything worse.

Thoughtful critique is welcome of course. It's cheap flamewar rhetoric that we don't want here. If you feel that another comment is a shallow dismissal, a substantive reply showing how that is the case can be quite helpful.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

This from the book's description [1] implies that she did much more that that.

> Philosophers, mathematicians, politicians, and religious authorities sought her opinion on everything from decimalizing the currency to producing Hebrew grammars. She practiced medicine alongside distinguished male physicians, treating some of the most elite patients in London. Her medical recipes, political commentaries, and testimony concerning the philosophers’ stone gained international circulation. She was an important influence on Boyle and a formidable thinker in her own right.

[1] https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/L/bo592598...

So she was popular and so - that probably was true for many, many people throughout history.

Not saying she wasn't a formidable thinker, but many people were and are. Only a few become famous because their inventions have long lasting effects.

> So she was popular and so - that probably was true for many, many people throughout history.

The weird thing is that she seems to have been popular, yet she isn't mentioned (so far as I can tell) in the main sources of pre-20th c. biography (e.g. the DNB). Uncovering such minor but influential figures that hadn't yet been comprehensively described has always been a main interest of historians and antiquarians, so I think this author's work can be described as a very real accomplishment.

Even describing the lives of normal people would be interesting. The problem is that "feminist scholarship" carries a very real risk of history revisionism.

I think this is a much better argument than all the overheated comments about how I'm a misogynist pig. But still. Here's a comparison. This person:

* Discussed refraction with the brilliant philosopher Thomas Hobbes

* Computed the first table of antilogarithms

* Wrote manuscripts on the circulation of the blood - and may have anticipated Harvey

* Also wrote on psychology, and the size of the universe

* Conducted some of the first experimental research on medicine

This is Walter Warner (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Warner). Probably way more distinguished than you or I will ever be, but not quite an unknown genius - just the first name I saw on the Wikipedia list of 17th century scientists. So, in terms of actual achievements, is this less than Lady Ranelagh?

To be clear, I have zero problem with people writing books on unknown female thinkers. I'm sure I'd find this an interesting book! What I think is bad is the overclaiming that sometimes goes along with it - giving inflated importance to historical figures based on what they might have done, if only society had been fairer. I think this comes from two reasons: a sense of historical injustice, and a desire to have historical female role models for scientists today. (OK, and maybe a third, the desire to sell one's book.) But however laudable those reasons are, we should not distort history in their service.

Literally no one said you are misogynist pig. One called it "taking offense at a book that celebrates the achievement of a woman, and to question the accuracy of it without having actually read it". I said "bias" in response to someone who called your comment win.

You grossly exaggerate reactions and what people said.

And you are in fact taking offense on her having freaking article about her. That is it, the article exists is the issue here.

Not just an article, an assertion of an "incomparable intellectual". That means an intellectual "without equal". It is fair to question such hyperbole, given that the editors of Nature are surely well acquainted with the English language.

But speaking of cracks in history, note how all these notables are aristocrats. Let's ponder all the "incomparable intellectuals" who were not to manor born, male or female.

You're right, nobody said I was a misogynist pig. I was exaggerating! But only in fun. And I really don't think I took offense at anything.

Just a protip, that kind of exaggeration is poorly received on the Internet because there’s no context to base it in. Even offline, it’s taken as a sign of immaturity and usually met with eye rolls. Probably best to remove it from your rhetorical toolkit if being clearly understood is a goal.

To be fair, three people have called me a misogynist, and one suggested my comment should be flagged. Nobody has called me a pig yet, though.

Kinda proves the point though; your meaning got lost in your rhetoric.

assuming there is greater difficulty to achieve things as someone with a particular quality than the difficulties others face in achieving similar things leads one to naturally consider that without those difficulties perhaps they would have achieved much more.

Harrison Bergeron once removed of his obstacles would surely have conquered the world and been the greatest dancer and thinker of his generation, were it not for Diana Moon Glampers and her ten-gauge double-barreled shotgun.

If this lady's achievements were on a par with Walter Warner's, then we should discuss how much more difficult was it for her to do these things as a woman. It might not have been as difficult as we assume, as we compare the misogyny of her era with those of eras that we know better. I would think poverty was more of a hindrance than gender in her time, but I do also suppose gender was some sort of hindrance.

on edit: changed thinking to thinker, changed difficult to difficulty

> assuming there is greater difficulty to achieve things as someone with a particular quality than the difficulties others face in achieving similar things leads one to naturally consider that without those difficulties perhaps they would have achieved much more.

This might apply to Warner just as well, since it seems that his work was dispersed and then likely destroyed after his death. It just goes to prove that minor and largely unacknowledged figures are pretty much ubiquitous in history. Many of these figures could have valuable books written about them; it's just a matter of doing the work.

good point, and while I do not think she should be classified as an incomparable intellectual given what little we know it would seem reasonable to think she probably had greater unrealized potential based on her gender in the same way that I look at someone like George Washington Carver and think what could he have achieved unobstructed by racism.

You raise a good point. My take on this is similar to yours in that if we can wax lyrical about an aristocrat who happens to be a woman, what about the genuises not even afforded the opportunity to engage with the high minds of the time. Literature like this tends to hyperfocus without context and that makes it uncomfortable to read as a fellow learned individual.

My point is Im not going to cry a river over some aristocrat who rubbed shoulders with the greats as compared to someone who had nothing but worked their way into recognition and forgotten by history.

I agree so much with that first paragraph. All these "women geniuses snubbed by 18th century sexism" are aristocrats (which makes sense because all the men geniuses are also aristocrats). The lack of discussion of people who didn't have the opportunities that, for instance, Ada Lovelace did, is a pretty big misstep imo.

Yeah, I think that's absolutely true and fair. It's possible that Lady R might have been a truly awesome scientist in a different world, and it's a good idea to remember all those "flowers born to blush unseen". And, in any case, maybe Lady R is just a really interesting person! You don't have to be a (drumroll) Great Scientist to be an interesting biography subject. My objection is to overestimating someone's actual achievements in the interests of a political agenda, no matter how well-meaning.

> I think this is a much better argument than all the overheated comments about how I'm a misogynist pig.

What is the purpose of this kind of victimisation? Nobody said such a thing. Or do you simply want to let everyone know how brave you are to voice such an opinion knowing full well the PC firing squad will be knocking down your door at any minute and yadda yadda?

I don't find this kind of flame-baiting productive at all.

Yeah there’s always this strawman (strawwoman?) argument against feminists for questioning the male-dominated status quo. Misogyny is deeply embedded in society and it’s not productive to go around blaming men for every problem; but neither should we accept that history is a complete telling of the world as it was.

History is dialectical, meaning its interpretation changes over time according to the norms of the times. Many historical accounts themselves are not contemporaneous with their subjects, some coming hundreds of years later. When understood this way, this drive to uncover feminist history is entirely in line with the historical narrativizing process.

Curiously, what articles like these do, the more they accumulate, is to discredit the notion of a dark, "misogynistic" arc of history (where "misogyny" is understood in the erroneous categories of our day; the false notion that for men and women to be equal as persons and in dignity, they must be the same). After all, the more of these women you find, the more it undermines this narrative according to its own criteria.

When you say "nobody said such a thing", are you perhaps not aware of

> But the fact that this is the top comment and gets defended (instead of flagged for the misogyny it is) says enough.

So, it a response and reaction to the very same sentiment and detraction as you're objecting to. You just missed the in-between where their comment was in fact referred to as misogynistic.

I think most of us here would prefer to avoid the discussions going in that direction. But it should be allowed to reference such a thing.

> Philosophers, mathematicians, politicians, and religious authorities sought her opinion on everything

By this logic, Ja Rule is the smartest man alive.

https://youtu.be/XYfKzzyWQjM

Sounds like she was a woman of letters. That used to be more of a thing, someone who corresponded a lot and had an influence on a lot of notable people, one person at a time. It seems that while she would have had a tremendous impact on the intellectual life of her time, it would have been all through personal relationships that wouldn't have left much of a trace when both parties died.

And we have no way of knowing that she'd have wanted it any other way - she clearly had the respect of the people who mattered to her.

I think there is no real way to measure it, but I suspect we would be surprised to see how many smart people is there who just inspire other famous people to do something and are not so much famous themselves.

It really depends on your worldview, whether it is more individualist, or collectivist, if you want to count their accomplishments.

Complicating the matter there is also a tradition of an invisible college, people who are very active in the intellectual tradition of their time but seek to remain obscure rather than feted for their accomplishments.

Yes, and with the Internet, and instant communication, this concept can actually become much more pronounced. I think we are yet to realize how much we are intelectually influenced by other random people (in the sense unknown to us, people from which we read or see something on the Internet) today compared to just few decades ago.

I know of one very interesting example - I got into my current line of work, which I've been in for the past 7 years, because of one conversation on a message board where I was complaining about the difficulty of finding work and got advice as to a specific place to look. That throwaway comment from a stranger has had an incredibly significant impact on the course my life has taken, something that person will never know.

Given the butterfly effect, it seems reasonably likely that the greatest change I'll make to how the future develops will be a similar throwaway comment in a forum like this one.

> The foundation of the Royal Society of London in 1660 [...] The society did not admit female fellows until 1945.

Withholding education from women for centuries was a profoundly stupid social and religious convention that harmed the progress of civilisation.

Now now. Let's not start that ephemeral idea of progress as being tied to peoples genitalia. Men and women (read People) have contributed enormously to said "progress"

Yeah, historically men more than women have contributed more to society's intellectual progress because institutions literally didn't let women get an education.

Now now. Calm down. Such broad statements diminish womens contributions to society up to this point. I have 2 problems with your statement.

1) Which women are you talking about specifically? Be clear. Over generalizing is a weak argument.

2) have you considered other factors and situations. Wealth, race, social status etc? Or are genitals of particular intrigue to you?

3) This one is weak but I'll add it anyway. War has been a constant, ever-present threat to all communities. Dont you think that it may have had an impact?

Your view in this matter doesn't strike me as well thought out. More like a knee-jerk reaction fueled by some loopy narrative you've read or heard somewhere. Things are rarely black and white.

> Meanwhile, how many people can name an achievement of Robert Boyle, who actually was the greatest English scientist before Newton?

Surely Boyle's law is well taught in high schools?

At my high school it was kind of lumped into the Ideal Gas Law; Boyle's name didn't get much mention.

It certainly used to be!

I searched the article for "genius" and couldn't find it - are we looking at the same piece?

"Incomparable" is used in the headline but that was used of her by some of her contemporaries.

Seems like you're knocking down a straw man here. For me article simply says that Lady R played an influential role within the constraints that Society imposed on her and maybe deserves to be remembered for that?

Your argument makes no sense to me.

Article: “We don’t know much about this woman because she was overshadowed by her famous brother.”

You: “How do we know she was a great scientist? We don’t even know much about her, but everyone in science knows of her brother!”

Yeah... that’s literally what the article is about.

My point was that the article describes few achievements that would merit that description.

The argument makes sense if you take this question seriously:

> How do we know she was a great scientist?

> how many people can name an achievement of Robert Boyle

Boyle's law, I presume? Having important physical laws named in your honour is a good indication of your level of achievement... But I do agree with your point, contrafactual praise is just not the same.

Reminds me of something I noticed in the discussion about Hedy Lamarr. It's not uncommon to hear people say, "If she was a man, you'd hear about her being a great inventor." But her co-inventor, George Antheil, gets talked about much less , and often only in conjunction with her (search for discussions about either of them on Reddit, Hacker News or the like to see examples of this).

Sometimes I see absurd claims being passed around, such as that Hedy Lamarr invented wifi. It is, perhaps, possible to go to far in rectifying the injustices of history.

I don't take too much offense at that one; frequency hopping is a hard enough thing to explain to a lay-person, but it is an enabling technology for wifi. It's like saying Albert Einstein invented the atom bomb... wrong, but not an absurd misunderstanding.

I get it as an innocent misunderstanding. Certainly the role of enabling technologies is often underplayed in lay understanding of technological advancements.

I'm a bit more skeptical when it's a deliberate misrepresentation. You can claim with equal credibility that Guglielmo Marconi invented wifi.

I guess the moral of the story is that most modern technologies don't lend themselves well to the popular narrative of a solo inventor, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't recognize the contributions of people who had the good ideas that made them possible.

None of Charles Babbage, Alan Turing, Claude Shannon or William Shockley really invented the modern computer, but they all helped quite a bit.

I think you've put your finger on the most reasonable point to take away. The notion of a sole inventor is rarely congruent with how modern invention works.

These are weird stories.

I was curious what Katherine Jones, Lady Ranelagh, may've been known for, so checked out [their Wikipedia page](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katherine_Jones,_Viscountess_R...).

The most substantial-looking claim was at the start of the "Science" section:

> Jones is known for her genius in medicine. In a letter to her brother, Lord Burlington, she described a friend of hers, Lady Clarendon, having “fits” and how she attended to her even when the doctors had given up on her. Jones used her own concoction and that seemed to be the only thing that helped Lady Clarendon.

What "concoction" did they invent? Following the source, there seems to be a [PDF dissertation about them](http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/3146/1/WRAP_THESIS_DiMeo_2009.pdf), PDF-page 79 (printed-page 67):

> Lady Ranelagh’s critique of the doctors’ treatment plan continues in this letter, where she maintains that her Spirit of Hartshorn was the most effective treatment. She then says that the doctors agreed with her (though perhaps somewhat hesitantly) that her remedy was a suitable choice, and she takes the opportunity to suggest it to her brother in his treatment for his own sick wife, telling him where he can find it and recommending the appropriate dose.

Appears that the "spirit of hartshorn" Jones was using and advocated would today be known as smelling-salts, basically emitting ammonia that'd wake someone up (if I'm reading the history correctly).

It's really weird for Wikipedia to start off by saying that someone was "known for her genius in medicine", after reading a Nature.com page describing them as an "incomparable intellectual", only to then see the first actual example of what they did being use of some smelling-salt.

I'm not normally one to nitpick but Robert Boyle was Anglo-Irish, not English :)

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