This has very little to do with the article. I think you are misreading what the author is saying, and just making the same point again.
Yes: that was my precise intention. There are already more than enough stereotypes out there (and mostly bad ones at that).
Like it or not, that statement by the author suggests yet another (possibly new) stereotype, which then risks being seen as further legitimising all other stereotypes.
The article is not that single statement.
Even in the first part of the series has some words by Heather Love that suggests not everything is cut and dried and that from the same biographical facts, many different conclusions can be reached.
I am reading part two and there are for sure some interesting facts about Wittgenstein. I don’t necessary agree with some of the research, nobody is forcing you to do so. Let’s keep an open mind.
2 Likes
It isn’t my mind you should be worried about - it’s (collectively) those of certain “other” minorities out there that will use (the making of) this particular stereotype to argue the legitimacy of their preferred stereotypes: “one in, all in”.
We all would like the world (and humanity in it) to be better that it is, but we cannot pretend that either are better - we must remain vigilant.
We are both off-topic to the OP.
I suggest we and anyone else take off-topic discussion to PM and leave this thread to people who have comments and thoughts specific to the series of articles.
3 Likes
Thanks for the links, quite an interesting read! From a footnote:
Turing is dealt with most explicitly as a queer subject in Jeremy Douglass’ Machine Writing and the Turing Test which explores the implications of the Turing test in terms of gender “passing.”
I would like to read “Machine Writing and the Turing Test” but, annoyingly, it doesn’t seem to available online.
I’ve sometimes wondered how the Turing Test could be understood the in the light of “performativity”, the concept developed by philosopher and gender theorist Judith Butler in her book Gender Trouble. I’ve found this YouTube video from 2013 about the possible connection.
5 Likes
I’m glad you enjoyed it!
I think I’ve tracked that down using the wayback machine: Untitled Document
Via the link from Grand Text Auto » Christopher Strachey: The first digital artist?
There’s also this from the same author as the series of posts: https://quod.lib.umich.edu/j/jcms/images/13_61.4gaboury.pdf
3 Likes
To be clear: I’d read (or at least skimmed) all of the posts before I made a response. I didn’t mention the later ones because they got even more biased and unrepresentative. That’s what prompted my “series is one-dimensional and wrong-headed” comment.
I find the proposed connection between Turings life experiences and their impact on his internal thinking bizarre, unless there’s evidence that Turing himself expressed this relationship. At least the article doesn’t provide such evidence.
I say this not because I find any of those experiences odd (quite the contrary… “The imitation game” made me cry, in fact). I say this because I doubt anyone without immense intimate knowledge about a person should make such statements.
When it comes to scientific and technological creations and discoveries, I prefer the approach of Karl Popper, who refused to care about the question of how an idea or theory came to be. He said handwavy something along the lines of “let’s just assume it was an ‘irrational’ moment”. It’s a sacred moment. We don’t have to understand it and we can much less reason about it. All that matters is the theory itself.
There is no need for the Queer movement to derive such interpretations. I believe the Haskell community and other tech communities are welcoming diversity.
The pain and horrors that Turing and other gay people experienced is in itself a stark reminder of why the cause matters. But that’s not really what the article is about. And I’m unable to find it insightful.
3 Likes
Surprisingly, there are few serious treatments of Turing as a queer figure,[ix] perhaps due to the difficulty in applying anachronistic language to historical figures such as Turing, or because in many ways Turing’s work does not immediately lend itself to a radical queering.
What does the phrase “radical queering” mean in this context?
wp has an article Queer radicalism. I strongly suspect (from the piece about E.M. Forster) it means forcibly ‘outing’ people (against their will or after their death/against their express wishes) to try to make their sexual orientation the most prominent fact about them. To put that another way: to belittle all their life’s achievements. My LGBT personal friends are horrified by the idea – even though there’s no longer any legal consequences. They have family who still wouldn’t cope with the shock.
You know how wp has all those lists:
- Hungarian mathematicians – such extraordinary insights, you’d think there must be something in the culture;
- Jewish mathematicians – ditto;
- Jewish American Computer Scientists even, incl John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Barbara Liskov and plenty other Turing award winners.
- John von Neumann manages to be not only Jewish but also a " Hungarian-American computer scientist, mathematician and economist" (and polyglot, twice married, two kids), and rightfully gets equal billing for the Turing-Von Neumann architecture.
Well for LGBT Mathematicians[**], wp has only a category not a list; and no LGBT computer scientists.
Like that.
[**] Including poor Richard Montague, originator of a kind of Combinator grammar, who features just as prominently in wp’s list of Unsolved Murders. Who I’m sure would much rather be remembered for (say) his contributions to ZFC Set Theory.
Clearly not considering that Turing was out.
I think the author means something like “being seen as connected to queerness in a fundamental (rather than superficial) way”. It’s a bit hard to tell exactly what he means though, I agree.
2 Likes
How strange to see such an anachronistic term (that is, anachronistic for his time). And past tense and stative (like it’s a permanent condition), not ‘was outed’. It may be that some of his close associates were aware. The 1952 prosecution and sentence was hushed up. Turing was ‘outed’ long after his death (not that I like using that term). Hence why I said “after their death/against their express wishes”. It’s not clear even his mother was aware – she was in denial about so much. (She and Morcom’s mother could easily have seen that relationship as ‘boyhood friendship’.)
If Turing’s nature somehow gave him special insight into notions of computability, we’d have to be talking about the 1936 work on the Entscheidungsproblem. If on encryption/‘Breaking the Code’, 1939 onwards. Would the military have allowed somebody with a known serious security liability to work on ciphers? [**] Who’d collaborated with Germans (Hilbert, Wittgenstein). Heck, they even regarded Jewish German-speaking refugees a security risk, and refused to let them work at Bletchley where they’d have far and away the best skills and strongest possible motive to contribute to the war effort [Peter Hilton, public lecture 2002].
I put it to you his orientation was not widely known in his lifetime. I put it to you even so late as 1947 it was not widely known: because I know someone who was working in the NPL Lab on the ACE.
Throughout Turing’s life, homosexuality was illegal. When do you think Turing’s status changed to ‘out’? And how do you think it ‘just happened’?
[**] British security suppressed all information about the code-breaking effort for decades [Peter Hilton, again]. Which is why it’s so widely thought that the Americans invented computers.
I don’t think this is productive to debate. The main point is that I feel like you aren’t being particularly charitable to this text
5 Likes
There’s another possibility here - throughout history, people of this and various other persecuted minorities have learned to keep those “persecuted attributes” very private. So what the rest of us might see as such individuals being “quick to understand” computational concepts like:
- isolation,
- modularity,
- abstraction,
…etc could in fact be due to their need to “practise” those concepts to (literally) survive in a frequently-hostile environment.
This post was flagged by the community and is temporarily hidden.
I say this not because I find any of those experiences odd (quite the contrary… “The imitation game” made me cry, in fact). I say this because I doubt anyone without immense intimate knowledge about a person should make such statements.
The movie is titled “The imitation game” and not “Genius mathematician builds computer to win WWII”. It’s using Turing’s philosophical work as a metaphor for his personal life, and also suggesting that it was inspired by it.
When it comes to scientific and technological creations and discoveries, I prefer the approach of Karl Popper, who refused to care about the question of how an idea or theory came to be. He said handwavy something along the lines of “let’s just assume it was an ‘irrational’ moment”. It’s a sacred moment. We don’t have to understand it and we can much less reason about it. All that matters is the theory itself.
That might ok from the internal point of view of the scientific method, of assessing the validity of theories according to evidence, and so on.
But from the point of view of cultural history, and of the history of ideas, it’s sweeping valuable personal, social and political context under the rug.
4 Likes
Statements about the origin of an individuals inner logic/thinking are pseudoscience at best.
Can you point me to credible science that has developed a framework under which we can make such statements reasonably?
No, those are random guesses. And such guesses can be misused too.
(most of cultural science is descriptive or experimental and doesn’t make statements about the state of mind of individuals)
1 Like
Then let me try to apply such concepts to their professional work:
- Turing practiced ‘modularity’, so a Turing machine separates executable code vs data;
- Church practiced monogamy(?), so there’s no such thing as data: even
BoolandNaturalare represented as lambda-terms. - Von Neumann practiced serial monogamy(?), so he realised applications like assemblers or compilers would need to produce object code as data then get the machine to execute as code – swings both ways?
- McCarthy (?), so he didn’t bother with isolation: everything’s just S-expressions; OTOH that makes execution so non-modular (married three times) he then needed to invent garbage collection.
- The inventors of Smalltalk (the first OOP language – but why did it take six of them?) needed to practice safe – errm – computing, so invented encapsulation and private state. Giving rise years later to the nostrum “There is nothing “simple” about reassigning state.”