Blue Collar Scientist

I have previously reported on Anatoly Perminov, head of Roskosmos (the Russian space program), caving in to superstitious people when it came to the numbering of missions.

After today’s Soyuz TMA-11 mission landed 400 km (250 miles) off course, with astronauts returning from the International Space Station aboard, Anatoly Perminov is at is again:

Perminov referred to a naval superstition that having women aboard a ship was bad luck when asked about the presence of two women on the Soyuz.

“You know in Russia, there are certain bad omens about this sort of thing, but thank God that everything worked out successfully,” he said. “Of course in the future, we will work somehow to ensure that the number of women will not surpass” the number of men.

Challenged by a reporter, Perminov responded: “This isn’t discrimination. I’m just saying that when a majority (of the crew) is female, sometimes certain kinds of unsanctioned behavior or something else occurs, that’s what I’m talking about.” He did not elaborate.

I guess it would just be too much trouble to engineer your vehicles to work right, and accept the occasional malfunction as both a design certainty¹ and a cost of doing business. I guess it is far easier to just blame the women.

Hat tip to Jeff Foust on the Space Politics blog.

1. One would, of course, expect the malfunctions to be held to a certain acceptable frequency, that critical systems have redundancy, etc. [↩]

Because honestly, I have no clue, and from what I’ve read, I really don’t want to. I’m sure I heard about this from Pharyngula and Skepchick and a bunch of others, but it was Orac, who I read religiously, that compelled me to consume some of his material, through quotations.

Apparently this Vox person wrote (please steel yourself for some gut-wrenching misogyny):

The idea of biology classes being taught by lesbian professors who believe that heterosexual procreation is a myth or calculus courses being taught by women who can’t do long division may sound impossible today, but tell that to any software developer, and he’ll be able to provide you with plenty of current examples of computer science engineers, some with advanced CS degrees, who have no idea how to even begin writing a computer program.

The crap about women there is something I completely and utterly reject as false, reprehensible, and uncivilized, and I’m going to ignore it, as it has been adequately discussed elsewhere. I’d like to remark on the bold material, if you please.

Yes, there are plenty of current examples of computer scientists who can’t write a computer program, as the term “computer program” is popularly conceived. To oversimplify a bit, computer science is a special case of math. Basically, computer scientists are mathematicians with a peculiar focus. There’s nothing about being a computer scientist per se that requires you be able to write computer programs.

I’m not sure what a computer science engineer is. My understanding is that someone is either a computer scientist or an engineer. Not that there isn’t overlap, and not that there aren’t developers who are highly qualified computer scientists. But someone who is making their living in the engineering of computer software probably can write a computer program.

I say “probably” because some computer scientists are algorithmic specialists, or design specialists. Some of them don’t actually know any languages and don’t have any experience with an integrated development environment. These people nevertheless have an important function.

Now, I’m in this business. I know some computer science types who got hired as developers and couldn’t really do the work. Development requires some vocational education, it doesn’t spring full-blown from the rarified academics of computer science theory. We all understand this.

But - and pay attention, because this is important: None of these people couldn’t code because their teacher was a woman.

The flip side of this: My own career at one time involved solving what some computer scientists tell me is a difficult computational problem. I solved it with a really simple piece of code. I didn’t know any better at the time, so I sat down to solve my problem, wrote out a little flow chart of what had to be done, then coded it.

Voila - hard problem solved in a way nobody else had done it before.

Is this really a big deal? Does it make me some kind of coding god? No. It is barely an exaggeration to say that a howler monkey could have coded the problem the way I did it.

I had no formal computing science education, or development education, when I sat down to solve that little problem. Does this mean that qualified computer scientists are superfluous?

No. One of them sat down with me and my heuristic one day and showed me about fifty ways to make it simpler, better, easier, faster to solve, etc. It was a humbling experience. I had written spaghetti and didn’t know it. Although I didn’t have any illusions about my competence before the meeting, afterward I had a better understanding of my limitations. And although these days I’m more formally credentialed, I can still present empirical evidence that I’m not god’s gift to computer science.

The point: Vox Day is a real idiot. There’s a lot more than a credential that goes into ability, and most people understand this. Credentials may contribute to a preponderance of evidence that someone is capable, but it isn’t the sole risk factor.

Hell, Michael Behe even has a doctorate.

Anyway, take this ramble as saying that not only does Vox Day not know anything about biology, or women, or calculus, or long division, he also knows nothing about computer science.