ESR: Abusing Alan Turing

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4422

by spindritf • 14 years ago

78 78 14 years ago

esr.ibiblio.org

jgrahamc2• 14 years ago

"The centennial of Alan Turing’s birth brings us the news that Alan Turing probably did not commit suicide by eating a poisoned apple, was not depressed at the time of his death, and that the hormone treatments intended to suppress his homosexual urges had been discontinued a year before he died."

Raymond is referring to this BBC article: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-18561092

It was (distastefully IMHO) published on the day of the centenary and makes a number of schoolboy errors about Turing and suicide:

1. It omits to mention that a significant amount of cyanide was found in his stomach in liquid form. But does mention the fact that the 'apple was not tested for cyanide'. If you omit the former and mention the latter it sounds suspicious. And why would you test the apple for cyanide?

2. The article makes great play of Turing's happiness shortly before his death. This misses the fact that many suicides are outwardly 'happy' before taking their own lives and is so basic that I'm amazed the BBC allowed it.

3. The article plays up Turing's mess in the house and mentions: "The electrolysis experiment was wired into the ceiling light socket.". This was a common practice in those days and I remember adapters wiring things into light sockets as a child in the UK.

4. The article also likes to try to downplay everything negative. For example, "It is often repeated that the chemicals caused him to grow breasts, though Turing is only known to have mentioned this once." The second clause seems to be the most important.

5. The article is rather ugly in that it engages in a bunch of speculation and then ends with the 'expert' saying it's best not to speculate.

But the worst part of the article is that it contains nothing new. The doubt about Turing's suicide is well known and documented by his mother, Hodges and Leavitt. There was nothing newsworthy in the story.

"More: behind much of today’s hagiography there seems to lurk a sort of perverse insistence that if Turing hadn’t been gay and a suicide he would be less apt for veneration, as a founder of computer science or anything else."

I'm not sure where Raymond gets this.

excuse-me• 14 years ago

the BBC piece is one of those tawdry - hype up a new conspiracy - pieces that 'journalists' use to try and add some interest to story where everybody has the same news. It was the same with all the new 'theories' around the Titanic sinking a few months ago.

ESR's point is perhaps best made by Einstein's quote:

"If I am proved correct,the Germans will call me a German, the Swiss will call me a Swiss citizen, and the French will call me a great scientist.

If relativity is proved wrong, the French will call me a Swiss, the Swiss will call me a German and the Germans will call me a Jew."

People who don't know an Entscheidungsproblem from a hole in the ground will latch onto this to claim Turing for their own team that: "He was great and English", "He was great and from Cambridge", "He was great and worked at Manchester", "He was great and at King's" , "He was great and gay:, "He was great and a marathon runner" ..etc...

zbuc3• 14 years ago

> 4. The article also likes to try to downplay everything negative. For example, "It is often repeated that the chemicals caused him to grow breasts, though Turing is only known to have mentioned this once." The second clause seems to be the most important.

Well, thank goodness, maybe he didn't actually grow breasts. Must not have actually have been that bad being forced to take hormones for no good reason.

There's also a very, uhm, disheartening tone that a lot of commenters on that blog post are taking -- what sort of people is ESR attracting? People are suggesting that Turing's castigation was a preventable result of his homosexuality he should have predicted and avoided. "Just stay in the closet and shut your mouth."

Gross. Really, really gross. ESR should be ashamed.

fusiongyro2• 14 years ago

> ESR should be ashamed.

For saying that Turing should be remembered for his accomplishments rather than for the circumstances of his death?

zorked• 14 years ago

Frankly, this article scores low on the list of things ESR should be ashamed of writing.

derleth2• 14 years ago

> Turing's castigation was a preventable result of his homosexuality he should have predicted and avoided. "Just stay in the closet and shut your mouth."

Given the results of coming out, what should Turing have done?

fluidcruft• 14 years ago

To corroborate #2: One of the things often said about depression and suicide is that severely depressed people are too depressed to have the energy to commit suicide. It's only when they start coming out of the pit and feel a little better that they'll get the nerves. That's why depressed people are (or at least should be) monitored like crazy when you start giving them antidepressants. It's a cruel irony, but making a depressed person feel better can actually make them more dangerous to themselves. Unfortunately, people see their friends and family starting to claw their way out from the pit of despair, so of course they seem "so happy" (comparatively).

Jtsummers• 14 years ago

Similarly, the acceptance of suicide as an out can cause them to feel happy. They won't tell anyone their plan, but they have one, and its removed a burden they felt.

The author of that article seems wholly unaware of the nature of depression. When forced into social situations, you learn to hide it. You act happy, tell jokes, disarm the situation if anyone sees you looking sad (I'm tired, have I told you I'm an insomniac?) or crying (allergies, contacts).

tresta• 14 years ago

Apart from that, a side effect that is common among antidepressants is (increased) suicidal ideation. This makes it doubly important to monitor people who are starting out on antidepressants.

gruseom• 14 years ago

I'm still a bit confused by #1.

why would you test the apple for cyanide?

I haven't read Hodges. The story I've always heard is that Turing killed himself by eating a cyanide-laced apple. If that were the theory, it's obvious why you'd test the apple. So you seem to be saying that the apple theory was always bogus: because the evidence was that he killed himself by drinking a cyanide solution, there was no need to test the apple for cyanide any more than anything else in the room. Am I getting your point?

(In which case it's odd that the apple story ever got going in the first place.)

jgrahamc2• 14 years ago

I meant that the coroner would have no need to test the apple given that he'd seen so much cyanide in liquid form in Turing's stomach.

gaius• 14 years ago

It's ESR, attention-seeking again. I'd say ignore him and he'll go away, but he hasn't yet...

sowhatquestion• 14 years ago

I'm pretty sure where he gets it. For comparison: Rush Limbaugh, a social conservative, is threatened by any narrative of history that attributes great misdeeds, e.g. the genocide of Native Americans, to the dominant social group (Christian white males of European descent). Any evidence for the narrative that Limbaugh disfavors must be due to a conspiracy of minorities--hence we end up hearing him claim that Native Americans should pay reparations to white people. ESR, a libertarian, is threatened by any narrative of history that decouples the outcomes of individuals' lives from their innate merits, and instead places emphasis on the role of background factors such as race/class/gender/sexuality (viz. Alan Turing's persecution for being gay leading to his suicide). Any evidence for the narrative that ESR disfavors must be due to a conspiracy of bleeding-heart liberals--hence he throws Turing as well as Ada Lovelace under the bus.

drzaiusapelord2• 14 years ago

Sadly, its all too common to see tech visionaries buy into this dog-eat-dog libertarianism. Heck, slashdot is unreadable and reddit is often a Ron Paul lovefest. Its ugly, but some people, especially those who have impressive achievements, seem to need to believe that everthing is fair in life and if you're not doing well its because you suck.

This is also why I don't read ESR or RMS or any ideologue. Last I heard, it took the product of a northern European leftist-socialist* society to produce a college kid with a "fuck it, lets write a kernel and dismiss the Ayn Rand politics" attitude to do anything with their philosophies.

*by American standands

adrianhoward• 14 years ago

I'd recommend everybody go read Jon maddog Hall's post http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4158627 instead/as well as ESR's piece.

mwd_• 14 years ago

I try to ignore this stuff. It doesn't really matter if he committed suicide or not, and the folk mythology is just silly.

If you want to learn more about Turing and the Entscheidungsproblem I recommend Charles Petzold's "The Annotated Turing". It has some great supplemental explanations to go along with Turing's paper plus interesting historical details. Petzold strikes a good balance between presenting the actual work and talking about Turing's personal life.

mithaler• 14 years ago

I must be missing something. Is there anyone who actually thinks Turing wouldn't be worth remembering if he hadn't been mistreated for being gay?

keithpeter2• 14 years ago

Yes. Turing, Church, Shannon, Kolmogorov, a whole section of thought, was started by these people. We forget that sometimes.

andrewcooke• 14 years ago

where by "yes", you mean "no". yes?

lmm• 14 years ago

Church (arguably) contributed as much or more to computer science, but is not idolised in the same way as Turing.

othermaciej• 14 years ago

I'd say that Turing's accomplishments as a whole were somewhat more notable, though of course Church is also a giant of the field.

nicolasmiller2• 14 years ago

"A figure of little consequence in [his] own time..." I thought of Raymond himself. Who decided that this guy deserved to be one of the lucky few with canonical hacker initials?

freshhawk• 14 years ago

He did.

pjscott2• 14 years ago

The main reason people know his initials is because he was one of the more influential people behind the "Open Source" concept and branding, as a distinct thing from the Free Software movement. He also wrote some fairly well-known books. His fame has declined since then, but his membership in the Three Initials Club has remained intact.

Here endeth the history lesson. Incidentally, you could have googled this if you were interested in hearing an answer rather than signaling indignation and/or contempt.

nicolasmiller2• 14 years ago

I'm well aware of the history. I was ironically posing the question in a probably slightly mean-spirited attempt to poke fun at him for not having written any notable software. I suppose he deserves credit for the philosophical contributions. The whole initials thing is ultimately pretty stupid. Maybe I was trying to get at why it's even become a convention. Why there is so much ego in the field in general.

papsosouid3• 14 years ago

Yes of course Eric, it's all just liberal propaganda. We should all hate gays just like you since a bullshit article claims Turing was pretty happy. Certainly people who advocate for basic human rights are just "partisans".

mhartl11• 14 years ago

Who would you have decide which rights are "basic human rights"? I'm guessing it's people like you, i.e., progressives. If that's not partisan, I don't know what is.

I also fear you've misunderstood ESR. See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4158468 for a clarification.

mediacrisis• 14 years ago

Its "partisan" to think things like forced hormone therapy (and in some countries, not excluding our own: corrective rape and systematic abuse) is a bad thing, and dare we say, a violation of basic human rights? I'm sorry, I don't care who you are or what your politics are, thats messed up.

Giving other people rights doesn't take them away from the people who already have them.

papsosouid3• 14 years ago

>I'm guessing it's people like you, i.e., progressives. If that's not partisan, I don't know what is.

Who is "progressives"? And who says I am one? You have a very warped view if you think basic human rights is partisan. The US may well have a fringe group of lunatics who feel that human rights are bad, but in the rest of the free world human rights is not a "depends on your political affiliation" deal.

>I also fear you've misunderstood ESR.

I fear you have no idea who Eric is. He is a bigot, hates gays, liberals, blacks, hispanics, and basically anyone who isn't part of his fringe group of lunatics. You are interpreting his nonsense in the least offensive way possible, but that doesn't mean it is the most accurate way.

mtraven2• 14 years ago

> "Yes, yes, repression, anti-gay prejudice, I know all right-thinking people are supposed to be horrified by such things"

You know, the academic jargon about "white male privilege" is kind of cliched, but this quote could serve as the poster child for what they are talking about. "yes, yes, repression, how tedious, how gauche to bring it up" when talking of homosexuals -- but try enacting some gun control legislation and then see if "repression" is something to be handwaved away.

Honestly, to see this guy as a spokesman for hacker culture makes me ashamed to be identified with it.

mhartl11• 14 years ago

My comment at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4158468 addresses some of your concerns.

jameshart• 14 years ago

ESR is wrong.

On his birthday, Letters of note published this letter from him on the eve of his trial: http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/06/yours-in-distress-alan..... Turing's own words:

"I'm afraid that the following syllogism may be used by some in the future.

Turing believes machines think Turing lies with men Therefore machines do not think

Yours in distress,

Alan"

This suggests Turing was greatly concerned with how society's attitude to his sexuality affected how he might be perceived by history, and how that might undermine even the impact of his ideas. That society has moved past those prejudices and is able to look back at his work with admiration, and shame for his treatment, is a gratifying refutation of his fears, not a convenient retelling of his story to fit modern agendas.

mhartl11• 14 years ago

It's evident from some of the comments that many HN readers have misunderstood ESR's points about Alan Turing. What ESR is saying is that "a homosexual who committed suicide because of anti-gay oppression" has become a key part of the Turing narrative, not because of the facts of the matter, but because it serves the political agenda of those who propagate the myth. This dynamic manifests itself both in the co-opting of genuine giants (Turing, Noether) and in the creation of false greats (Lovelace, Carver).

Not that ESR is not contradicting any of the following:

  * Alan Turing lived in a society generally intolerant of homosexuals
  * Anti-gay oppression is bad
  * Triumph over adversity is laudable

To see where ESR is coming from, imagine that people knew Einstein as "a physicist whose persevered in the face of antisemitism". ESR might say, "Yes, yes, antisemitism, etc., but the man helped lay the foundations of quantum mechanics and discovered both special and general relativity. His triumph over antisemitism is at most a footnote to his story." To which the HN commentariat might reply, "OMG, I can't believe that guy hates Jews!"

To ESR (and to many other non-progressives), this sort of politically motivated myth-making diminishes the object of the myth. When he writes "Yes, yes...", what he's saying is and it's just so damn tiresome.

scott_s6• 14 years ago

I read through some of the comments. Raymond is clearly arguing that Turing was not the victim of oppression. The mental gymnastics he contorts through to arrive at this conclusion are baffling.

mhartl11• 14 years ago

English law punished homosexuality with chemical castration, but (according to ESR) Turing could easily have avoided this fate. Was Turing thus a "victim" of "oppression"? We're quibbling about words. Your notions of "victim" and "oppression" are simply different from ESR's. (Note: I'm confident that ESR isn't in favor of chemical castration for homosexuals.)

filmgirlcw• 14 years ago

Exactly. The fact that he (and his equally obtuse commenters) are actually taking it that far is what truly disgusts me.

mikeash6• 14 years ago

If Einstein had been killed in the Holocaust I bet at least as much would be made of that as is made of Turing's homosexuality and the deadly consequences.

It is important that the British government, at the end, cared more about who he wanted to have sex with than his great mental capabilities, and thus destroyed this intellect well before his time.

Sure, it's not as important as Turing's important theoretical and practical work in computing. But that doesn't mean it's not important. It's a cautionary tale and one we should take to heart. How many potential geniuses are we stopping right now because of the unjust things in our society? What are we losing out on? It deserves some thought.

mhartl11• 14 years ago

The premise of your comment is one of the main points disputed in ESR's essay, namely, the claim that Turing's death was related to his oppression as a homosexual. It's as if, despite Einstein not dying in the Holocaust, for political purposes people continued to speak as if he did.

swa14• 14 years ago

Raymond, as is his wont, sets up a strawman and proceeds to set it on fire pitching himself as a champion of "the just side".

It's a strawman, because in truth the only important part about Turing's life in view of his accomplishments is that it was cut short. i.e. his genius could no longer produce progress. Whether this would have been due to suicide, an accident, or murder is not relevant. It is not relevant because for the people under which his work was meant to be dissipated (people in the same field), the circumstances in which the results are produced are of no importance.

Because of the progress he produced he became a people's hero to his country. People think about and tell tales about their heroes and their lives and circumstances. Irrespective of the direction these tales take, the accomplishments stand on their own among his peers, to wit, those who can actually understand the accomplishments.

Whether people appropriate a part of a life of a hero to underline certain aspects of it, or deny parts of it to underline other aspects of it, matters not one iota.

The facts of the matter are. "The work of Alan Turing was seminal to the entire field of computer science." The rest is history, and, as sometimes happens with history, can be rewritten by whomever needs the pageviews.

"this sort of politically motivated myth-making diminishes the object of the myth"

And any sort of tug of war between two sides who purport to propagate "the true story" is part of this myth. Pretending otherwise is just disingenuous.

mhartl11• 14 years ago

Dammit, I thought I copyedited this comment pretty thoroughly, but a stupid typo still slipped through:

    s/Not that/Note that/

earl• 14 years ago

So essentially ESR is butthurt that Turing is remembered for being gay. This somehow diminishes him. And Turing most definitely wasn't persecuted for being gay. It's just that he was prosecuted and forcibly treated with female hormones. In ESRs head, that's not persecution because he had the chance to get out of it, most likely by denying who he is, ie a gay man:

   Rather than confront Turing’s homosexuality, the British authorities
   from the arresting constable on up tried to look the other way and
   gave every easy out they could; Turing, through some combination of
   carelessness and self-destructiveness, took none of them.

Shorter esr:

   Silly queers should stay in the closet.

Has esr gone full mens' rights / misogynist while I haven't been paying attention?

zacharyvoase• 14 years ago

Yes, it matters that Turing was gay. Yes, it matters that he committed suicide after being forced to undergo hormone treatment. Children and adults still get bullied every day for being gay, and people still feel uncomfortable coming out of the closet. Countless governments around the world, including the United States, still don't recognise the civil rights of gay humans, which broadcasts an unequivocal message to me and others like me that we are unwelcome, abnormal, and should be ashamed of ourselves. Turing was a genius, doubtless, but the tragedy of his suffering because of an oppressive government is a harrowing case study in how absolutely screwed up things can get, no matter how smart or important you are. The brilliance of Turing, and the shocking circumstances of his death, do not detract from one another. I strongly disagree with the portrayal of this as some kind of zero-sum match between the two aspects of his life.

The LGBT community has been actively fighting oppression for nearly a century. 80 years ago, the Nazi party started ostracising and killing homosexuals. 43 years ago the Stonewall riots occurred, during which LGBT Americans staged an act of civil disobedience that is still remembered in Pride and Christopher Street events around the world (and yet it was only in 2003 that ‘sodomy’ laws were ruled unconstitutional). We're looking back on decades of an AIDS crisis where gay men in first-world countries have had to fight[1] for access to life-saving experimental drugs, and looking forward to a future (which may still be a long way off) where the United States, and other governments, recognise that gay people are people too.

So you know what? I think we're allowed one measly fucking ‘hero’ figure. And if you don't want our gay voices ruining your programming idols, here's a very simple solution: stop persecuting the gay ones.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIDS_Coalition_to_Unleash_Power...

ChristianMarks• 14 years ago

ESR's libertarian take is unimpressive as always. ESR has his own political reasons for minimizing the likely connection between Turing's suicide and his hormone treatment--as if hormone treatment weren't gruesome enough, and were completely free of psychological side effects. A logician would invoke Beth's theorem on unions of theories and ignore a math professor's tawdry speculation on the circumstances of Turing's death.

pjscott2• 14 years ago

How is this article at all related to libertarianism? Its theses are -- and here I'm summarizing rather than stating my own views --

1. That (according to the article he links) Alan Turing's persecution and death were heavily mythologized.

2. This is not surprising, considering the nature of the myth: a great person becomes a martyr of a persecuted minority group.

3. This is a shame, since it distracts from Turing's actual achievements, which were pretty amazing, and perpetuates the association between heroism and downtrodden martyrdom.

(As an aside, if #1 is true, then I can get behind #2. It seems to be a common enough pattern of folk-hero-making to raises suspicion. Not sure about #3.)

I don't see any libertarian ideology in here. Could you point it out for me?

seanmcq• 14 years ago

Can we just delete this entire meme before it gets started? This is pathetic.

Edit: To clarify, I mean everything said by ESR here. Yes Turings accomplishments are great. However, it's because of those great accomplishments that what the British government did is even more atrocious. Turing made key and irreplaceable contributions to the Allied war effort, and this was repaid by bigotry.

Also, when ESR blamed turing for his castration was just... bigoted.

mtraven2• 14 years ago

Here's a somewhat parallel effort by esr, where he attacks anti-torture activists because they don't adhere to some arbitry rules that he pulled out of his ass. The real evildoers, by the time he is done, are not the torture advocates and implementors in the Bush administration, but the people who opposed them.

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1742

Now with Turing, rather than condemn the people who hounded him to death, he is going after those who don't treat his life-story in exactly the manner that esr, lord of propriety, has decreed.

I can't believe anybody buys this crap, and I can't believe I am spending time on it, but esr is often taken to be a spokesman for the entire hacker community, so occasionally stopping to point out his nonsense seems to be a necessary thing to do.

SimHacker• 14 years ago

One theory is that he staged it to look like an accident to spare his mother the grief of his suicide. I may have read that in Hodge's book, but I can't remember.

ESR: Abusing Alan Turing

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