I have mixed feelings on the pronoun use, but having read some of her autobiographical writing I don’t think she would have taken much issue with it. This piece is more focused on her work in computer engineering, so I felt it was appropriate to post here.
Because there’s several comment chains about the use of pronouns and I wasn’t quite sure where to add this, I decided to do a top level comment. She wrote an autobiographical retrospective of her transition on her University of Michigan faculty page twenty years ago about a transition that started long before that (and her main faculty page is a fascinating time capsule of trans history). When I came out as trans in 2012 her page was already a bit dated and the start of my transition, as I experienced it, was firmly in the bad old days. Conway was part of a much older generation of trans people, and there were narratives we had to force ourselves into in order to access healthcare, especially the ideas that we always knew and the idea of being born in the wrong body, and (in her generation but not mine) the idea that you had to be heterosexual post-transition. For some, it fit well enough, but for others it was an act for the doctors just to get life saving healthcare.
The obituary I posted reads like it was written twenty years ago and would have been incredibly respectful back then. It’s narratively in line with the framework of stories trans people had available to explain their lived experiences in the generation Lynn Conway was part of, and ones that Conway herself used extensively in her autobiographical work. I’m glad public understanding has grown and the narrative frameworks available have expanded. I feel like the obituary is in line with her own lived experiences as she understood them.
It’s an interesting question as far as dead naming as well. Normally it’s just a dick move or an accident because of old habits. But in the case of people who did important work that might be published under an old name it can be useful to get them the credit.
I’m a computer engineer so I looked up her work to see if I was familiar with it. I was wondering if I would need to lookup her dead name to find her important work. In her case her big book (which I recognized immediately and have on my shelf) was published after her transition so it wasn’t necessary.
If it had been written pre transition it would have been a shame to not know she was the author.
There’s some weirdness on that because she did some important but not-very-public work at IBM in the 60s with their ACS/“Project Y” effort that did what we later call superscalar/multi-issue processors like …20 years before those terms existed. As part of that she wrote a paper about “Dynamic Instruction Scheduling” in 1966 under her pre-transition identity that is a like retroactive first cause for a bunch of computer architecture ideas.
There was almost nothing about that work in public until Mark Smotherman was doing some history of computing work in the late 90s, put out a call for information about it, and she produced a huge trove of insider information after deciding it was worth exposing the provenance. There’s a neat long-form LATimes piece about the situation which is probably the primary source for the history in OP’s link.
The 2000 long-form piece and yesterday’s obituary posted by OP are written by the same person, Michael Hiltzik
I cite Conway’s Law (and it’s reverse corollary) multiple times a week. I’m sorry to hear this, but her contributions were many and 85 is not a bad run. I hope she was happy and fulfilled, in the end.
Well, TIL! Darn famous computer scientists sharing last names. This Conway is still an icon.
Fantastic! She was a huge part of the military-industrial complex in computing and her entire work has to be viewed through that lens. While her contributions to the field are numerous and incredibly meaningful, she also wanted to help the military develop machine intelligence and is every explicit way connected to modern conflicts where military misuses AI to murder children.
Sometimes you have to develop defensive or offensive capabilities, and how they’re used are the responsibility of politicians. You’ll have to accept that some citizens support the actions of the politicians to use defensive or offensive capabilities.
If the non-war side has convincing arguments other than shaming based on assumed moral superiority, then they should suggest alternatives for dealing with aggressive sociopaths (Putin attacking Ukraine, for example) or any number of examples of violent extremism in history from [insert your ideological enemy].
Humans are still operating on a primitive model to kill opponents instead of alternative ways to deal with them, and blaming one scientist for that ill of society doesn’t make sense. Her contributions to science are separate from the sociopolitical issues under which they came about.
Man makes fire and farming. Is subsequently responsible for every death known to man.
How dare they!
Did man write grants to show how said fire had military applications? If so, how dare they! If not your straw man is kinda lacking.
Fire cook food. Fire also kill…
So no, it’s really not lol. Most people smart enough to invent shit know that in can be used for evil. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t use nuclear energy. There is nuance behind advancing civilization.
The people intelligent enough to make these things are usually looking far beyond anyone else and the military’s money is just as good as anyones.
If you’re serious, please elaborate on your points. I genuinely don’t understand.
Going by Wikipedia here,
She was a huge part
Please define huge part. She was a “key architect” in the starting years of a project that fell short of its goals.
her entire work has to be viewed through that lens
Why? It was, relatively speaking, an almost small part of her career. She didn’t stay until the end of the project. You even admit that her contributions to the field were many and meaningful.
is every explicit way connected to modern conflicts where military misuses AI to murder children
This feels like such a huge leap, that I don’t even know where to begin tackling it. Is Tim Berners Lee in every explicit way connected to the modern privacy hellscape that is the modern internet?
Make no mistake, if she really did want to help develop artificial intelligence for the military’s sake, fuck her. I can respect someone’s achievements while also thinking they’re trash as a person.
But I don’t think that’s the case here, and I’m lost as to what point, exactly, you’re trying to make.
These are great questions! Rather than pull individual citations, I’ll point you at these books
- Surveillance Valley by Yasha Levine
- The Pentagon’s Brain by Annie Jacobson
- The Imagineers of War by Sharon Weinberg
Your last point, suggesting that it’s possible to take DARPA money without intentionally developing weapons, is part of the whitewashing we’ve done of computing that’s incredibly wrong. Make no mistake, I am directly saying a majority of computing pioneers in the US are trash people while respecting their achievements. Their work was done explicitly under the knowledge it was for military purposes. Levine has a few great anecdotes about engineers watching protestors and asking for extra security.
Your example of Berners-Lee is an interesting one. He’s trash for modern opinions. I don’t know much about the military history, if any, of CERN, so I don’t know their culpability. Conway took DARPA money and architected DARPA projects. That’s her culpability, unless you’re able to show she was coerced and didn’t know about the widely discussed military connections scientists had to know to write their grants for funding?
Edit: fixed the Weinberger link
I won’t know if any of the linked resources are any good until I have time to look them over, but if nothing else I appreciate you taking the time to answer.
Re: whitewashing, fair point. I’d already read about the issue, but maybe I still need to rethink how I look at computing history.
I have that textbook in a box somewhere
