Blog Credo

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

H.L. Mencken

Saturday, April 13, 2019

How Broken Are We?

When I read this story about the bullshit posturing over who gets "credit" for the first images of a black hole, it's difficult to think of anything but how broken we are as a society.  It's understandable  -given how underrepresented women are in the STEM fields - to see Katie Bouman held up as a nice example of the contributions women make to science and technology.  However, it was wrong to say that she "did it."  It was even more wrong to denigrate her important contributions out of some peevish whine about male grievance. 

The most important advancements in human history have almost always been collaborations.  Or they have been the product of work that comes to fruition at the same time.  That's why Liebnitz and Newton both invented calculus at the same time, and two different people invented the telephone at roughly the same time. 

Some of this is the myth of the solitary genius, which has always warped our understanding of human achievement.  Edison ran a factory full of inventors, but he gets the credit for their work.

Now, of course, the internet allows us to force every single goddamned story through a political filter.  Every event is thrust forward to advance some political agenda - usually a shitty one.  My guess is that these opinions were always out there, but now they are amplified by being shared. 

It's exhausting.

It's not going to get any better.

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