Very cool project, and also reveals buggy data to fix.
One note if the creator is here: it looks like deprecated locations are included. https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q596717 includes both Indiana (deprecated) and Linton, Indiana, and he shows up on the map near the center of Indiana apparently as its most notable person, which is clearly not the case.
Crazy how little women there are, it's like for our entire recorded history we have been ignoring 50% of our potential. Let's hope it gets a lot more mixed!
There is an option in the top left that allows you to show city names. Unfortunately, you cannot see the city names and the people names at the same time.
And sisters and daughters... But somehow they never had the same opportunities to get on this "Famous People" list. Last week I told my Daughter she can be a knight (although granted she usually wants to be a princess), and I felt weird and then I felt extra weird.
> I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.
But without the enticement of membership in the elite, with a greater share of society's wealth, power and privileges, no one would bother working hard to become doctors, lawyers, software developers and CEOs. We need a stratified society to have all these things the modern world gives us. It is only the desire to escape the cotton fields and sweatshops that spurs people to work. It is the only reason that our world has seen amazing advancements in science, technology and business. Capitalism depends on inequality, and we depend on capitalism.
This is logic of capitalism. This is our society's justification for incredible differences in pay and wealth.
> It is only the desire to escape the cotton fields and sweatshops that spurs people to work.
Why do rich people work?
They don't need to escape the cotton fields and sweatshops.
Slaves worked the American cotton fields - why did they work with no chance of membership in the elite?
I'm pretty sure people in 1860 justified slavery with the same argument "It is the only reason that our world has seen amazing advancements in science, technology and business."
Einstein had to flee his country to save his life. From the "Encyclopedia Britannica":
> In December 1932 Einstein decided to leave Germany forever (he would never go back). It became obvious to Einstein that his life was in danger. A Nazi organization published a magazine with Einstein's picture and the caption “Not Yet Hanged” on the cover. There was even a price on his head.
He certainly had an uphill struggle and wasn't simply handed everything because of some innate privilege.
If you look at the list for the most famous people of all time, and especially for men[1], a large majority seem to have originated (and even remained all their life) outside what most people would consider the "privileged elite". Notably absent are some of the wealthiest individuals of all time, Crassus, Jakob Fugger, Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller.
Of course, it doesn't disprove being born in favourable circumstances can and will affect your quality of life. But this list seems largely indifferent to how much money or power daddy has.
How many potential geniuses ended up herding yaks, or becoming chemical process workers, or died in some pointless war as cannon fodder, or in some hospital due to substandard care?
Potential is cheap and abundant. Using it is what changes the world.
This is a conversation and people are allowed to bring their knowledge, experience and opinions to the table. This thread started from a map showing the apparent locations of famous persons' birthplaces. I don't see how its any less relevant to steer the conversation towards economic inequality than it is towards gender inequality.
If you'd rather talk about "children in trailer parks", then go ahead - it's the same point.
No, "boys in trailer parks" is decidedly not the same point as women being ignored.
The fact that they are both equally relevant makes it utterly stupid that they are being talked about in the same place. If a separate top level comment were made about how poor people aren't on the map then I wouldn't be arguing that. But as a reply to a point about how women aren't on the map, you aren't doing much other than making it about men, by talking about how some men aren't on the map either. It's some "all lives matter" bullshit and should be recognized as such.
As the person responding to you said, this is a conversation. It's not here for you to dictate the proper direction of. It's for people who are curious to share ideas back and forth. I personally find the responses significantly more interesting that your insults. If you are only interested in shutting down conversations that don't fit your preferred narrative, perhaps you are the problem.
Imagine being a girl on HN. You see this cool map and see wow, not a lot of women I can look up to it seems. And you go to the comments and see someone agrees with you. OK cool, maybe people would start replying with some important women who should be more famous.
Nope. Turns out it doesn't matter, because there are poor people who aren't famous either. You're actually priveleged to want to look up to women when there are poor people you could look up to.
>I personally find the responses significantly more interesting that your insults.
Have you considered that I'm not responding for the benefit of the enjoyment of some disinterested reader?
>If you are only interested in shutting down conversations that don't fit your preferred narrative, perhaps you are the problem.
And isn't this in and of itself shutting down a narrative? Aren't you just admitting that you would prefer if there wasn't all this unpleasantry, and that I'm a problem for not fitting that preference?
I'm not a moderator. I can't "dictate" anything. What I did was point out the problem inherent in a statement. If you got so offended by that and equate it to shutting down conversation, maybe you should examine your biases.
> If a separate top level comment were made about how poor people aren't on the map then I wouldn't be arguing that.
Well that's precisely one of the point I was making: that people only care more about VISIBLE inequalities (the gender) which are, in my opinion which you can disagree with, a lower factor of actual inequalities in societies.
At the end of the day I'm not the one who brought "inequalities for women" about a cool map which had a priori no political message. Everyone is free to make their own point of discussion, and you didn't jump out of your seat when this first point about women was made to say it was out of context as you are doing now.
And as a french person it's insane that your culture is so confrontational and tribal that "all lives matters" has to be a divisive statement. Hope you guys will heal at some point.
>a lower factor of actual inequalities in societies.
You can't, and shouldn't compare independent circumstances. You can be poor and a man, you can be rich and a woman.
>and you didn't jump out of your seat when this first point about women
Imagine being a girl on HN. You see this cool map and see wow, not a lot of women I can look up to it seems. And you go to the comments and see someone agrees with you. OK cool, maybe people would start replying with some important women who should be more famous.
Nope. Turns out it doesn't matter, because there are poor people who aren't famous either. You're actually priveleged to want to look up to women when there are poor people you could look up to.
>And as a french person it's insane that your culture is so confrontational and tribal that "all lives matters"
As a French person you don't know the context and therefore the depth of the idiocy of what you just wrote.
There is a concept, you know, of cultural difference. Where if I say something and you react differently than I would, it makes sense because what I said means something different to you. Obviously "all lives matter" doesn't literally mean "all lives matter" in this context. People started saying that in the US because others were saying "black lives matter". But you know who gets disproportionately killed in police confrontations? Not "all people", but black people. So the meaning of "all lives matter" really is "I need to make this about me as well"/"You're talking about something I don't like, so I'm going to make it about something else."
Sure it's tribal. One tribe wants the other to shut up about how people are getting murdered for no reason.
Don't worry Ill allow you to replace "boys in trailer parks" by "humans in trailer parks" in my argument if you want to go make the EXACT SAME POINT somewhere else.
Yes, I would much rather be a rich woman than a poor man. But I'd rather be a poor man than a poor woman. I'd rather be a poor white man than a poor black man. I'd rather be a poor black man than a poor black woman.
I don't think it helps to have a contest about which forms of discrimination are more impactful, because they all add up.
Gender, race, social class, within which nation's borders one is born... they all add up, and it gets worse if you "lose" in more than one category.
But there are cases when the comparison should be made, and I hint at it in my first sentence. We do spend more effort on gender equality than racial equality because, frankly, white women have more power and value in our society than black men or women. For example the #MeToo movement was triggered and driven by the injustices done to powerful, privileged white women.
Sadly, social justice is driven too often by self-serving interests rather than social justice itself.
>I don't think it helps to have a contest about which forms of discrimination are more impactful, because they all add up.
But it often seems like some are easily overlooked.
When I was born into a poor working family in Poland, my father's monthly salary was worth 15$.
When I was studying I had to carefully plan things like bread in my budget, and I was eating with homeless people regularly.
Yet, I have preserved, got a job as a programmer and life has been relatively easy from that point.
On the grand scale of things I consider myself lucky.
But it's tilting when I hear German doctor raised in upper middle class loudly complaining about how underprivilaged she is compared to me because I'm a man.
Intersectionality a soooo american because it's like your whole society is so much about fighthing for you own class / race / gender AGAINST the other that someone had to make a new word recently to explain what European nations have defined by "universality" in their constitutions for centuries.
For example in france there was a real movement to make school accessible for "every citizen regarding of race, gender and class" during the 3rd republic. But still the new trend now in america is to promote "black-only school". WTF.
Sorry for trolling especially since we don't disagree but sometimes reading american forums is a constant facepalms i just cant' help.
They weren’t ignored. For most of recorded history the basic unit was the family.
The men were in charge of public affairs of the family, while women were in charge of private and domestic affairs.
It was only recently the basic unit has been further subdivided into individuals, which required many to rely on institutional support on matters that used to be within the family, eg education, pensions, restaurants, clothing shops, apartment complexes, birth control.
The truly ignored throughout history were the peasants and serfs. Most men of significance were from aristocratic or upper class upbringings.
The divide is not between men and women, but haves vs have nots.
The life of women in the upper class were objectively better than the male serfs.
The major form of oppression back then was by class, then by gender.
It is of course better to be a male aristocrat than a female aristocrat (measured from today’s individualism values ie domestic duties have zero value), but both lived vastly better lives than serfs. Being a lower class woman was an extremely oppressed state, illustrated vividly by books from Victor Hugo.
Nobody is arguing that being rich doesn't entail privelege. So why are you pointing that out? What purpose does it serve other than to distract from the original statement?
I think Ada Lovelace is actually the perfect example of what the OP is talking about. There are fewer famous women in history because women were given less opportunity to excel (and sometimes had achievements they did make stifled or their contribution hidden). Ada Lovelace was both an extraordinary person, and in a very privileged position. Had she just been extraordinary, she wouldn't have had the tools to leverage her abilities. Her pedigree and circumstances allowed her access to the private education and social circle that allowed her to apply her abilities and excel. The issue is that so fewer women were ever given the opportunity to excel, and that still remains the case!
I felt this was an interesting article about how women were stripped of the opportunities to get into software in the 80s to much the same effect as likely many women were stripped of their opportunities during Ada's time: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when...
> Intersectionality opposes analytical systems that treat each axis of oppression in isolation.
Edit: I am not saying that explains all the complexity, and there has been a lot of criticism, justified or not. However, it is at least a good starting point.
> Being a lower class woman was an extremely oppressed state, illustrated vividly by books from Victor Hugo.
This is true, but also read The Road To Wigan Pier to see the lives of lower class men in England. Go to work, crawl 2 miles underground (unpaid) to get to your work site, work for hours in a small space mining coal, crawl back, get home, scrub off as best you can, eat, sleep, repeat. Almost nothing that wasn't either a crime or being sent to war was as bad as that nightmare of a life.
> Honestly this comment was a very long winded way of saying "women aren't oppressed"
Important discussions ought to have more nuance than a assigning a binary value of being oppressed or not. One step towards this direction will have to be to abandon the notion that you can say X is "more oppressed" than Y, especially when talking about different categories, societies and historical periods. There is nothing to be gained from these comparisons, except for infighting and wasting opportunities to improve one's understanding of the issues that are being dealt with.
This isn't a nuanced important discussion rife with opportunities to learn or some such BS
If the conversation was about how this map doesn't have a lot of women on it, how open and nuanced are you being when the first thing you say is "women aren't being ignored"?
Talk about assigning binary values. I'm not the one denying anything. I'm just pointing our the non sequitur
They are saying that you have to look at the past from the perspective of the people who lived in the past, and not from the perspective of the present.
While from your perspective as someone living in an individualist culture in 2022 there are few women, someone in the past would not have perceived it from that viewpoint as modern individualism had not yet been developed.
The history of our culture and in fact all of humanity is the history of kin groups, that then developed into families, then into individualism (in some places).
If you look at the past from the perspective of the people who lived in in, then it's plain fact that many cultures oppressed women and that women were often seen as less strong, able, smart, etc. which led to reduced opportunities for whatever education existed at the time, learning specialized skills, or ability to hold positions of power.
All of these circumstances existed because of how people in the past thought and acted. This has a direct impact on the map we're looking at, which has mostly famous men. Men who had education, learned specialized skills, ascended to positions of power, etc.
So again like GP said, it's a bad-faith argument to try and shift to talking about class issues when the original point was simply about the gender inequality. They are different issues.
It's somewhat of a misconception that women did not work to produce food as men did. They did and do. An idle pair of hands was a luxury that only the rich could afford. The only reason that we think that there was such a disparity between the sexes is because our history is distorted by the perspective of the rich and privileged classes, who created an entirely separate world for themselves, while also contributing the most accounts of their time. We only remember those who were so well off that they had free time to indulge in the arts and sciences.
Before mechanized agriculture and the green revolution, the vast majority of society was involved in the act of producing food. It had to be that way. People lived in a position of abject food insecurity. Failed harvests killed, and in particularly bad cases such as the great Irish Famine, wiped out vast quarters of the population.
Beliefs are technologies. Just as an iPhone wouldn't work if you took it back in time (no electricity to charge it), most of our beliefs about how the world ought to be wouldn't work either (no food security to sustain them).
We're not talking about making food, we're talking about notable people on the map that OP shared. None of those people are notable for 'producing food', they advanced science, culture, sports, etc. What are you even talking about?
It's not really fair to put words into people's mouths like that. It's a pithy thing to do in places like reddit to get laughs and "gotcha" moments but I think HN prefers to give people the chance to explain themselves, and the benefit of the doubt.
If you think that's what they believe, then if you ask questions instead you give them the opportunity to explain it better. When you tell someone what they're saying rather than letting them say it, they have to spend time defending themselves against things they never said.
When, as a reaction to the simple statement that there are less women on this map than there could be, someone says "[women] aren't being ignored, poor people are being ignored", I don't need to assume good faith in that individual. The goal of downplaying doesn't have to be stated to be obvious.
If they wanted open and constructive discussion, they shouldn't start out with a destructive statement.
Your apologetics are frankly worrying. If you really think lines of reasoning that downplay the importance of taking note of women and shoehorn male victimhood into those discussions should be given a chance to breathe, I don't think we can have a productive conversation.
> When, as a reaction to the simple statement that there are less women on this map than there could be, someone says "[women] aren't being ignored, poor people are being ignored", I don't need to assume good faith in that individual. The goal of downplaying doesn't have to be stated to be obvious.
Fair enough, I'm not going to argue too hard on that matter since I do agree with your original statement that there could be more women on the map.
> Your apologetics are frankly worrying. If you really think lines of reasoning that downplay the importance of taking note of women and shoehorn male victimhood into those discussions, I don't think we can have a productive conversation.
You're assuming a position I don't have. I was pointing out that your discussion style is counter-productive, that doesn't mean I side with the other commenter, or yourself. But since your point wasn't to engage in discussion, I guess it doesn't matter.
Fame is such a bizarre and frankly perplexing concept. It does not
equate to achievement, to competence or success per se. It says
nothing of the goodness or value of a person, the wealth they created,
the families they raised, the hearts they broke, and very little of
the suffering and joy they experienced as actual people. It's an
ever-fading trace left in the (mostly) written records of
institutions, where the narrow spotlight of social consciousness shone
at some time.
What I find most interesting as I explore history and civilisation is
the marginal web that supports what is "notable". Almost every
breakthough has a "revisionist" version of someone else who made a
simultaneous advance. Or allegedly had the limelight stolen from them.
Every Crick and Watson have their Rosalind Franklin. For every Charles
Babbage and Alan Turing there's an Ada Lovelace or Mavis Batey. And
yet those are at least "noted". Who and what lies behind those figures
in the third and fourth rows of history's group photograph, "fame"?
When people used to live in small villages and interacted with no more than 50-100 people in a life time, what was valued is completely different from what is valued today.
Back then they valued honor and integrity. Now what matters is first impressions, “clout”/fame, and
standing above the crowd.
In today’s society we no longer value things like domestic affairs, honor, integrity, and humbleness. Now we try to maximise visibility, fame, and brand.
There is probably a huge forgotten mass of people who humbly did their work, improved their local communities as they needed, and raised the next generation. Those who specifically seek fame will easily outcompete these humble people.
> Back then they valued honor and integrity. Now what matters is first
impressions, "clout"/fame, and standing above the crowd.
I think you're right about all those things J7ke. Values have really
shifted. Yet that still leaves strange unanswered questions that
puzzle me.
Most all of the intelligent people I know are deeply unhappy about
it. And I've worked with a good few "famous" people. They were all
unhappy too. Now we're all older, and great levellers like health,
children and life fulfilment have come into play those that survived
(drugs and more money than they could handle) are happier being
"nobody" again (or at least getting recognised occasionally on the bus
by strangers who say "Didn't you used to be...?"). I actually think
many who were "successful" and had their 15 minutes feel tricked.
Even though they "made it", in the sense of "Being there", they were
never there. The cake was a lie.
By contrast, my father and grandfather's generation lived through
awful, awful times, in wars, rationing, brothers and sisters died, and
they were certainly never "on" the TV or Internet. If they had
recognition it was a medal and a parade. However they seemed to go to
their graves with a sense of having lived.
What does it mean then, when we talk about "what matters"?
Is "what matters" a cruel trick and illusion? Perhaps a way to rob us
of the ordinary well-lived life that really does matter?
you say this as a linear progression, but you're only paying attention to certain written histories and ignoring a lot of anthro/archaelogical research of (large-scale post discovery of agriculture societies) cases where it was otherwise
Or maybe men don't have high expectations of women, or because they benefit from women having a subservient position, aren't very inclined to change society.
I went looking to see who the entry was for the nearest town to where I live expecting it to be Mary Somerville and was rather disappointed to find it was some chap I'd never heard of.
Current estimates are that around 100 billion people have ever lived. So that's a lot more than 50% that have been "ignored".
It turns out that if you look for notability or exceptional attributes you will get mostly men. This is due to biology and essentially the whole reason males and sexual reproduction exists.
This doesn't mean that being male will give you a better chance of being exceptional or notable, though. Quite the opposite, in fact. The bar is lower for women because simply being a woman is considered notable precisely because there are so few notable women.
>it's like for our entire recorded history we have been ignoring 50% of our potential. Let's hope it gets a lot more mixed!
I'm so sick of shit like this. It's so intellectually offensive, I can't be polite any longer.
It's so incredibly rude to dismiss so many great women just because you didn't hear about them, as if being famous is the ultimate test of potential. As if being a famous author or famous SOMETHING is the ultimate goal in this life.
I'll use my mother as an example. She's a truly great woman. She'll never be famous to you (she has no such vain desires anyway), but she's a great human being, much greater than you'll ever be, for she rejects DEMOGRAPHIC quotas, she's honest, and compassionate, and pious, and loving, and fun, and courageous, and every day she lives up to her potential and more, and she inspires her family and friends to do the same. She does what she does and she loves doing it and she does it well.
And how willfully ignorant it is to ignore the different powers and motivations unique to men and to women.
If you think there's a problem with so few famous women, then that's a personal problem, that's a you problem. You are the problem, because you are imposing your own personal beliefs and personal standards onto women.
If your criteria is "Wikipedia notability", we have been ignoring more like 98 per cent of our potential since antiquity. By far the most people who lived and died were subsistence farmers, most of them not even personally free (either serfs or slaves), and good luck making it to Wikipedia as a serf boy from Upper Nowhere, rural Campania of 635 AD.
Sometimes I wonder whether the entire contemporary American obsession with race and gender has been deliberately and cynically manufactured or at least blown up beyond all proportion to keep everyone's eyes away from class, the most formidable societal barrier almost everywhere, including societies that are ethnically fairly homogenous.
Creator here. I've restricted the access token for the data to only incoming traffic from that specific domain (tjukanovt.github.io), so maybe Firefox is doing something weird there. As if you can't access the tileset, you only get that blue ball.
The difference between the EU and US is wild. EU is mostly historical figures, Picasso, Da Vinci, Erasmus, Van Gogh, and of course Adolf. But US, even though some old presidents, it's mostly pop & movie stars.
Does Pablo Escobar belong in that conversation? Or am I like many others who have just been exposed to the show Narcos which makes up the entirety of our Colombian experience?
This is wonderful. I just learnt that a composer I love the music of was born where I currently live (Michael Nyman) and that some of my favourite actors come from where I grew up (UK South coast).
Great idea, good way to learn more about people and places.
She shows up under culture. I'd have thought that Pushkin would have outranked her there, certainly outside the Anglosphere. Or one could make a case for Anna Akhmatova.
Answering a question I had looking at this amazing work, the data set has a heavy English influence, but they are aware of it and also worked toward mitigating the effect. From the source:
> This strategy results in a cross-verified database of 2.29 million unique individuals (an elite of 1/43,000 of human being having ever lived) among which 30% come from the 6 non-English editions of Wikipedia, a significant improvement over earlier works that have only focused on English Wikipedia only.
That's because both Sean Connery and Maxwell have their birthplace as just "Edinburgh", and Connery's notability rank is 261, while Maxwell's is 683. So Connery is shown instead of Maxwell.
Lots of surprises (to me) scrolling around. J.R.R.Tolkien and Freddie Mercury from Africa. George Orwell and Cliff Richard from India. Some wrongs, though. I see JP Sartre in South America, but the link says Paris.
351 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 286 ms ] threadOne note if the creator is here: it looks like deprecated locations are included. https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q596717 includes both Indiana (deprecated) and Linton, Indiana, and he shows up on the map near the center of Indiana apparently as its most notable person, which is clearly not the case.
Also was surprised to find that Audrey Hepburn is from Belgium (rank 158)...
Demi Lovato: 226.5
Demi Moore: 825, Tommy Lee Jones: 829, Dennis Hopper: 977.5, Woody Harrelson: 1319
Wait, what? Who the heck is Demi Lovato? I never even heard of her until I browsed her Wikipedia page.
Crazy how little women there are, it's like for our entire recorded history we have been ignoring 50% of our potential. Let's hope it gets a lot more mixed!
https://ideas.ted.com/you-can-help-fix-wikipedias-gender-imb...
https://www.wikiloveswomen.org/
There must be other initiatives if others have links to share in this thread.
Well, most all had a mom...
Off topic: I imagine parenting must feel extra weird. :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_bias_on_Wikipedia
> I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.
This is logic of capitalism. This is our society's justification for incredible differences in pay and wealth.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10793226 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15659455 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14282791 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10451733
Why do rich people work?
They don't need to escape the cotton fields and sweatshops.
Slaves worked the American cotton fields - why did they work with no chance of membership in the elite?
I'm pretty sure people in 1860 justified slavery with the same argument "It is the only reason that our world has seen amazing advancements in science, technology and business."
> In December 1932 Einstein decided to leave Germany forever (he would never go back). It became obvious to Einstein that his life was in danger. A Nazi organization published a magazine with Einstein's picture and the caption “Not Yet Hanged” on the cover. There was even a price on his head.
He certainly had an uphill struggle and wasn't simply handed everything because of some innate privilege.
Of course, it doesn't disprove being born in favourable circumstances can and will affect your quality of life. But this list seems largely indifferent to how much money or power daddy has.
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-022-01369-4/tables/3
Potential is cheap and abundant. Using it is what changes the world.
Being recognized for it is what changes the world.
Virtually no-one knows who came up with the paperclip (Johan Vaaler), and still it is one of the world-changing inventions.
Way harder to fix because no one wants to do affirmative action for young boys born in trailer parks.
If you'd rather talk about "children in trailer parks", then go ahead - it's the same point.
The fact that they are both equally relevant makes it utterly stupid that they are being talked about in the same place. If a separate top level comment were made about how poor people aren't on the map then I wouldn't be arguing that. But as a reply to a point about how women aren't on the map, you aren't doing much other than making it about men, by talking about how some men aren't on the map either. It's some "all lives matter" bullshit and should be recognized as such.
Nope. Turns out it doesn't matter, because there are poor people who aren't famous either. You're actually priveleged to want to look up to women when there are poor people you could look up to.
>I personally find the responses significantly more interesting that your insults.
Have you considered that I'm not responding for the benefit of the enjoyment of some disinterested reader?
>If you are only interested in shutting down conversations that don't fit your preferred narrative, perhaps you are the problem.
And isn't this in and of itself shutting down a narrative? Aren't you just admitting that you would prefer if there wasn't all this unpleasantry, and that I'm a problem for not fitting that preference?
I'm not a moderator. I can't "dictate" anything. What I did was point out the problem inherent in a statement. If you got so offended by that and equate it to shutting down conversation, maybe you should examine your biases.
Well that's precisely one of the point I was making: that people only care more about VISIBLE inequalities (the gender) which are, in my opinion which you can disagree with, a lower factor of actual inequalities in societies.
At the end of the day I'm not the one who brought "inequalities for women" about a cool map which had a priori no political message. Everyone is free to make their own point of discussion, and you didn't jump out of your seat when this first point about women was made to say it was out of context as you are doing now.
And as a french person it's insane that your culture is so confrontational and tribal that "all lives matters" has to be a divisive statement. Hope you guys will heal at some point.
You can't, and shouldn't compare independent circumstances. You can be poor and a man, you can be rich and a woman.
>and you didn't jump out of your seat when this first point about women
Imagine being a girl on HN. You see this cool map and see wow, not a lot of women I can look up to it seems. And you go to the comments and see someone agrees with you. OK cool, maybe people would start replying with some important women who should be more famous.
Nope. Turns out it doesn't matter, because there are poor people who aren't famous either. You're actually priveleged to want to look up to women when there are poor people you could look up to.
>And as a french person it's insane that your culture is so confrontational and tribal that "all lives matters"
As a French person you don't know the context and therefore the depth of the idiocy of what you just wrote.
There is a concept, you know, of cultural difference. Where if I say something and you react differently than I would, it makes sense because what I said means something different to you. Obviously "all lives matter" doesn't literally mean "all lives matter" in this context. People started saying that in the US because others were saying "black lives matter". But you know who gets disproportionately killed in police confrontations? Not "all people", but black people. So the meaning of "all lives matter" really is "I need to make this about me as well"/"You're talking about something I don't like, so I'm going to make it about something else."
Sure it's tribal. One tribe wants the other to shut up about how people are getting murdered for no reason.
I don't think it helps to have a contest about which forms of discrimination are more impactful, because they all add up.
Gender, race, social class, within which nation's borders one is born... they all add up, and it gets worse if you "lose" in more than one category.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersectionality
But there are cases when the comparison should be made, and I hint at it in my first sentence. We do spend more effort on gender equality than racial equality because, frankly, white women have more power and value in our society than black men or women. For example the #MeToo movement was triggered and driven by the injustices done to powerful, privileged white women.
Sadly, social justice is driven too often by self-serving interests rather than social justice itself.
But it often seems like some are easily overlooked. When I was born into a poor working family in Poland, my father's monthly salary was worth 15$.
When I was studying I had to carefully plan things like bread in my budget, and I was eating with homeless people regularly. Yet, I have preserved, got a job as a programmer and life has been relatively easy from that point.
On the grand scale of things I consider myself lucky. But it's tilting when I hear German doctor raised in upper middle class loudly complaining about how underprivilaged she is compared to me because I'm a man.
For example in france there was a real movement to make school accessible for "every citizen regarding of race, gender and class" during the 3rd republic. But still the new trend now in america is to promote "black-only school". WTF.
Sorry for trolling especially since we don't disagree but sometimes reading american forums is a constant facepalms i just cant' help.
The men were in charge of public affairs of the family, while women were in charge of private and domestic affairs.
It was only recently the basic unit has been further subdivided into individuals, which required many to rely on institutional support on matters that used to be within the family, eg education, pensions, restaurants, clothing shops, apartment complexes, birth control.
The truly ignored throughout history were the peasants and serfs. Most men of significance were from aristocratic or upper class upbringings.
The divide is not between men and women, but haves vs have nots.
The major form of oppression back then was by class, then by gender.
It is of course better to be a male aristocrat than a female aristocrat (measured from today’s individualism values ie domestic duties have zero value), but both lived vastly better lives than serfs. Being a lower class woman was an extremely oppressed state, illustrated vividly by books from Victor Hugo.
To that point I'll not get distracted.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace
Did you know that the world's first programmer was a woman? She published the first algorithm for the Analytical Engine.
I felt this was an interesting article about how women were stripped of the opportunities to get into software in the 80s to much the same effect as likely many women were stripped of their opportunities during Ada's time: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when...
> Intersectionality opposes analytical systems that treat each axis of oppression in isolation.
Edit: I am not saying that explains all the complexity, and there has been a lot of criticism, justified or not. However, it is at least a good starting point.
This is true, but also read The Road To Wigan Pier to see the lives of lower class men in England. Go to work, crawl 2 miles underground (unpaid) to get to your work site, work for hours in a small space mining coal, crawl back, get home, scrub off as best you can, eat, sleep, repeat. Almost nothing that wasn't either a crime or being sent to war was as bad as that nightmare of a life.
Important discussions ought to have more nuance than a assigning a binary value of being oppressed or not. One step towards this direction will have to be to abandon the notion that you can say X is "more oppressed" than Y, especially when talking about different categories, societies and historical periods. There is nothing to be gained from these comparisons, except for infighting and wasting opportunities to improve one's understanding of the issues that are being dealt with.
If the conversation was about how this map doesn't have a lot of women on it, how open and nuanced are you being when the first thing you say is "women aren't being ignored"?
Talk about assigning binary values. I'm not the one denying anything. I'm just pointing our the non sequitur
While from your perspective as someone living in an individualist culture in 2022 there are few women, someone in the past would not have perceived it from that viewpoint as modern individualism had not yet been developed.
The history of our culture and in fact all of humanity is the history of kin groups, that then developed into families, then into individualism (in some places).
All of these circumstances existed because of how people in the past thought and acted. This has a direct impact on the map we're looking at, which has mostly famous men. Men who had education, learned specialized skills, ascended to positions of power, etc.
So again like GP said, it's a bad-faith argument to try and shift to talking about class issues when the original point was simply about the gender inequality. They are different issues.
Before mechanized agriculture and the green revolution, the vast majority of society was involved in the act of producing food. It had to be that way. People lived in a position of abject food insecurity. Failed harvests killed, and in particularly bad cases such as the great Irish Famine, wiped out vast quarters of the population.
Beliefs are technologies. Just as an iPhone wouldn't work if you took it back in time (no electricity to charge it), most of our beliefs about how the world ought to be wouldn't work either (no food security to sustain them).
If you think that's what they believe, then if you ask questions instead you give them the opportunity to explain it better. When you tell someone what they're saying rather than letting them say it, they have to spend time defending themselves against things they never said.
If they wanted open and constructive discussion, they shouldn't start out with a destructive statement.
Your apologetics are frankly worrying. If you really think lines of reasoning that downplay the importance of taking note of women and shoehorn male victimhood into those discussions should be given a chance to breathe, I don't think we can have a productive conversation.
Fair enough, I'm not going to argue too hard on that matter since I do agree with your original statement that there could be more women on the map.
> Your apologetics are frankly worrying. If you really think lines of reasoning that downplay the importance of taking note of women and shoehorn male victimhood into those discussions, I don't think we can have a productive conversation.
You're assuming a position I don't have. I was pointing out that your discussion style is counter-productive, that doesn't mean I side with the other commenter, or yourself. But since your point wasn't to engage in discussion, I guess it doesn't matter.
What I find most interesting as I explore history and civilisation is the marginal web that supports what is "notable". Almost every breakthough has a "revisionist" version of someone else who made a simultaneous advance. Or allegedly had the limelight stolen from them. Every Crick and Watson have their Rosalind Franklin. For every Charles Babbage and Alan Turing there's an Ada Lovelace or Mavis Batey. And yet those are at least "noted". Who and what lies behind those figures in the third and fourth rows of history's group photograph, "fame"?
Back then they valued honor and integrity. Now what matters is first impressions, “clout”/fame, and standing above the crowd.
In today’s society we no longer value things like domestic affairs, honor, integrity, and humbleness. Now we try to maximise visibility, fame, and brand.
There is probably a huge forgotten mass of people who humbly did their work, improved their local communities as they needed, and raised the next generation. Those who specifically seek fame will easily outcompete these humble people.
I think you're right about all those things J7ke. Values have really shifted. Yet that still leaves strange unanswered questions that puzzle me.
Most all of the intelligent people I know are deeply unhappy about it. And I've worked with a good few "famous" people. They were all unhappy too. Now we're all older, and great levellers like health, children and life fulfilment have come into play those that survived (drugs and more money than they could handle) are happier being "nobody" again (or at least getting recognised occasionally on the bus by strangers who say "Didn't you used to be...?"). I actually think many who were "successful" and had their 15 minutes feel tricked. Even though they "made it", in the sense of "Being there", they were never there. The cake was a lie.
By contrast, my father and grandfather's generation lived through awful, awful times, in wars, rationing, brothers and sisters died, and they were certainly never "on" the TV or Internet. If they had recognition it was a medal and a parade. However they seemed to go to their graves with a sense of having lived.
What does it mean then, when we talk about "what matters"?
Is "what matters" a cruel trick and illusion? Perhaps a way to rob us of the ordinary well-lived life that really does matter?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Somerville
Worth noting:
"In 1834 she became the first person to be described in print as a 'scientist'"
It turns out that if you look for notability or exceptional attributes you will get mostly men. This is due to biology and essentially the whole reason males and sexual reproduction exists.
This doesn't mean that being male will give you a better chance of being exceptional or notable, though. Quite the opposite, in fact. The bar is lower for women because simply being a woman is considered notable precisely because there are so few notable women.
I'm so sick of shit like this. It's so intellectually offensive, I can't be polite any longer.
It's so incredibly rude to dismiss so many great women just because you didn't hear about them, as if being famous is the ultimate test of potential. As if being a famous author or famous SOMETHING is the ultimate goal in this life.
I'll use my mother as an example. She's a truly great woman. She'll never be famous to you (she has no such vain desires anyway), but she's a great human being, much greater than you'll ever be, for she rejects DEMOGRAPHIC quotas, she's honest, and compassionate, and pious, and loving, and fun, and courageous, and every day she lives up to her potential and more, and she inspires her family and friends to do the same. She does what she does and she loves doing it and she does it well.
And how willfully ignorant it is to ignore the different powers and motivations unique to men and to women.
If you think there's a problem with so few famous women, then that's a personal problem, that's a you problem. You are the problem, because you are imposing your own personal beliefs and personal standards onto women.
But definitely not 50%.
Sometimes I wonder whether the entire contemporary American obsession with race and gender has been deliberately and cynically manufactured or at least blown up beyond all proportion to keep everyone's eyes away from class, the most formidable societal barrier almost everywhere, including societies that are ethnically fairly homogenous.
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q9036
I looked at Santa Fe, since I thought George R. R. Martin would be the most famous person there.
This says Anna Gunn is the most famous person from Santa Fe.
Okay, so perhaps Martin's a transplant, while Gunn was born there? The map legend says "birthplaces", after all.
Nope. At least, Wikipedia and IMDB says she was born in Cleveland, and her family moved to Santa Fe when she was young.
Though ... other sources say she was born in Santa Fe, like https://patch.com/new-mexico/albuquerque/3-celebrities-who-l... ?
But the source paper at https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-022-01369-4 uses Wikipedia and Wikidata - both of which list Cleveland.
... Ah-ah! The place of birth entry for Wikidata changed on 3 August 2020 from Cleveland to Santa Fe. https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?title=Q271050&oldid=124...
And the Wikipedia entry changed on 31 August 2018 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Anna_Gunn&diff=86...
And the data from the paper was from 2018.
I wonder how bad the data is in the rest of the data set.
Go over the Levant and you start seeing Paul the Apostle, Diogenes, Ptolemy, etc. which makes Voltaire look like a modern political commentator.
And that it hasn't done so with philosophers, artists, scientist or dictators. But mostly with entertainers.
And Keanu Reeves! I had no idea.
> We document an Anglo-Saxon bias present in the English edition of Wikipedia, and document when it matters and when not.
Regardless of these biases, Europe has much more historical background than the US.
Finally, this data is based upon Wikipedia and Wikidata. I gather datasets from India or China would provide much different results.
Interesting project nonetheless!
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-022-01369-4
I think Simon Bolivar or Shakira or Gabriel Garcia Marquez or many others have a better claim to the title
Especially since Jean-Paul Sartre was born in Paris
What's weird is that wikidata has the correct info https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q9364
Change back to Paris on 22 December 2018.
On 17 March 2019 2a01:e35:8ab4:ac00:75c3:3673:f22b:4a45 changed to Tokyo.
On 30 September 2019 201.187.105.154 changed to Chile.
On 16 January 2020 changed to Efflamm.
On 16 January 2020 changed to Paris, where it's been ever since.
This signature tells us the dataset for the paper was extracted in November or December of 2018.
Various other bits of high-schooler sabotage:
30 September 2019 201.187.105.154 changed place of death to Easter Island.
29 November 2018 190.247.191.178 changed place of burial to Bikini Bottom.
7 March 2019 201.164.233.103 changed cause of death (P509) to cocaine.
I understand that everyone consume different things :P
Great idea, good way to learn more about people and places.
But even tho not born in Lastrup, Özlem Türeci [2] who helped develop the Biontech Corona vaccine grew up here.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludger_Gerdes
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96zlem_T%C3%BCreci
Hmm, I would have guessed Putin would out rank her, but maybe name changes affect things?
> This strategy results in a cross-verified database of 2.29 million unique individuals (an elite of 1/43,000 of human being having ever lived) among which 30% come from the 6 non-English editions of Wikipedia, a significant improvement over earlier works that have only focused on English Wikipedia only.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-022-01369-4
How does it know when it's appropriate to cut the dataset a little bit finer? I'm amazed how appropriate the names are that it turns up.
Notability rank: 78172.5
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Czochralski
wow, very low
Fantastic site nonetheless.
Important to note it was British India at the time both were born.
95% of the population don't know who he was, his profession or are able to cite any of his work.
Everybody knows who Hitler is.
Mona Lisa vs. Hitler that I could see being a close one with maybe Mona Lisa ending up ahead. Still it would be Hitler IMHO.
But I don't think it's fair to attribute Mona Lisa fame to Leonardo