I’d heard it differently from some at Apple at the time.
The three code names were all in the category of “bogus science,” and the association of Sagan with Piltdown Man and Cold Fusion was more of a jab turned insult. The “billions and billions” rationale sounds like an attempt to walk things back.
Purely a guess, but a lot of people whose pride stems from understanding complex subjects are the same people who will gatekeep that subject. Sagan, making astronomy more accessible to lay people, would be a grave offense to someone like that.
This is true (source: worked at NASA and heard other astronomers opinion of Sagan). The other chief aspects were (1) some had professional disagreements with Sagan and resented that he still won academic battles for mindshare just by being Sagan, and (2) resentment of his success by academics who were just as good but didn’t get fame and the grant wins or lucrative work that came from it.
This sort of stuff makes me happy I worked on open source research rather than try to get a PHD. Same thing is playing out with LeCun. The excessive, perhaps egotistical need for attribution in academia is in strict opposition to what I consider “good science”.
I don't think this comparison is fair to LeCun. He has literally been at the forefront of ML for over 40 years, starting with his PhD thesis and continuing to the present, and his public fame is entirely a byproduct of the awareness of the impact of his work. (Disclaimer: I've known Yann for decades and worked down the hall from him during his NEC years.)
To be clear, I’m not accusing LeCun of trying to “hoard credit”, rather I’m accusing others of having petty squabbles (often surrounding his published works) around who was “first” and thus “actually” deserves credit. To them, I say “Get over yourself” - progress doesn’t tend to be made when we’re busy trying to win imaginary races for “mindshare”. And LeCun has done more than enough to prove himself in the field (with all the hard work that entails) to have to deal with that sort of thing.
Neither of the things described in the parent comment have to do with ego, they have everything to do with career opportunities and outcomes.
The ability to have your research funded is a practical and existential problem for scientists. And I find it quite natural having issues with someone being able to achieve better outcomes through marketing and fame rather than through the quality of their work.
It's something I find aggravating with Google, OpenAI, and cie in the field of machine learning for example. The amount of marketing they benefit from, before their papers are even published, is unfair and anti-meritocratic. I don't want to have to do SEO to be able to stand on even ground with these people.
(And that's not to say Sagan wasn't a good scientist, or that his work communicating science wasn't useful.)
Ref #2, I wonder if scientists feel similarly to Neil deGrasse Tyson today.
He doesn’t seem likely to be wildly better as a scientist than his peers, but being wildly better as a communicator has incredible differentiating value (and likely has a tailwind for the other scientists in terms of public support for science when it’s something they feel is almost within their grasp).
I find Neil deGrasse Tyson to be a terrible science communicator, especially since a few years back. Just look at the man's twitter. Putting him and Carl Sagan in the same sentence is almost insulting x)
Not to mention that I am fairly certain I've caught him being horribly wrong more than once. But for the life of me, I cannot seem to remember which times it was. I'm sure I'll come across those videos again sometime though, and when I do; I'll be sure to edit this comment. Knowing my luck, it will be in the next few days time.
Tyson once said on twitter “An airplane whose engine fails is a glider. A helicopter whose engine fails is a brick.” Now it's not at all obvious why that's not true. But that's why it's important to be humble about what you do and don't know.
In case anyone else is interested in the not-at-all-obvious-answer [1], I’ll save you the google: autorotation
> Autorotation is the ability of a helicopter to in some situations have its rotors powered by the flow of air rather than the engine. In short, as the helicopter descends, the upward directed flow of air pushes through the rotors, makes them rotate faster, which in turn provides lift.
a helicopter can "glide down" just like an airplane. if your engine fails, with the aid of the rotor as you descend you can turn the potential energy of being up in the air into forward motion, and that forward motion will generate lift over your rotor blades. You practice these techniques as part of getting a license.
I don't want to speak for all scientists, but I find Neil deGrasse Tyson utterly insufferable and cringe almost every time he makes a public statement. Like him or loath him, Carl Sagan was a scientist that wasn't afraid to apply scientific thinking to social and political issues. His positions were particularly reasoned and defensible with data and logical arguments.
Neil deGrasse Tyson, on the other hand, is an edgelord with a PhD. He takes contrarian positions for the sake of generating controversy, often without understanding the underlying issues or forming a cohesive, reasoned argument. He appeals to emotion rather than logic, and is politically partisan and divisive rather than unifying.
I suppose I'll need to check it out, I am not on Twitter so don't frequent it.
At the same time... If twitter existed back then, how would the famed scientists and communicators come out? Einstein, Feynman, Asimov, Clarke have all had pretty damming (defined at minimum as "unacceptable by modern cultural standards") behaviour come to light. Respected scientists and philosophers of 70s who are still alive have similarly gotten themselves into serious hot water on social media more recently.
NGT posts some pretty cringe science takes too, though. The kind of stuff you would expect someone in his position to put even the slightest bit of research before speaking.
The Apple engineers' unwillingness to back down but even pushing things further with their insulting second code name shows a degree of arrogance that's astonishing.
Arrogant is a strong word and I think carries too fine a point.
The industry was interesting (bizarre) at the time in that the engineers were more or less left to run their domain. Upper management might give the overall direction of what to work on but beyond that there was not a lot of middle or lower management that could tell engineers how to do that.
This left a lot of the responsibility (and authority if you will) in the hands of engineering to accomplish what the company wanted. And so engineers chose code names. To be sure too they were not meant for (sanitized by) the PR department — they were strictly at the whim of engineering.
Engineers don't want to have to put on a "marketing hat", or get marketing to sign off on a codename (for chrissakes).
That one of those code names leaked somehow and caused bad publicity for the company — that was management's/marketing's problem, not the engineer's.
We're in a more modern era now where the balance has shifted to a much more top-down model — diminishing the broader role engineers used to have.
GP asserts that what the engineers did is wrong. They didn't say that the public should get to decide what codenames to use or anything like that. They simply pointed out the arrogance of the engineers, and they are right.
It's like a straw man, but specific to issues of morality.
"X is wrong".
"Oh, so you want to jail every offender of X? You want to completely regulate Y in case it leads to X?"
Not sure about this case, but in general I find it to be the opposite, people love to teach others about the subjects they care about and have taken the time to learn in depth.
I am the same way, I tend to self censer because who wants to hear about the subtle intricacies of the bgp system. until they start to show interest, then you can't shut me up.
As someone who worked at a company that would do that AND engineers would reference that product by new or old code names, or class of products (yet another code name), or components of products (another name)…..by any number of code names…. that line made me shudder.
Not even just code names; I worked at a place that had rebranded both the company and products multiple times, so source code for com.companyA.productA was deployed to server production-productB-01 and served to customers as productC.companyC.com. They had dozens of products, many of which had been acquired from smaller companies over the years and intermittently rebranded. There was a spreadsheet that helpdesk used to try and route support tickets, listing as many names as they knew and who had last admitted to knowing anything about the product. The spreadsheet was nowhere near comprehensive. The whole thing was wild.
> One does not seriously attack the expertise of a scientist using the undefined phrase "butt-head."
But one does seriously attack the expertise of a scientist using the undefined phrases "crackpot" or "crank", which are not very far from "butt-head"
So while I think the ruling was correct in that the average person would not take the insult seriously, I can see why Sagan might have taken it seriously.
That was to do with the agreement they'd previously made with Apple (the Beatles' company) not to be involved in anything relating to sound/music (to preserve the differentiation between two companies with the same name), it was a kind of dare or challenge.
Seems like both sides are villains here. Apple is a villain for initially refusing to release a statement saying "Carl Sagan does not endorse our product". Carl Sagan is a villain for suing when they changed the codename to "Butt-Head Astronomer".
(Aw crap, am I going to be sued by the Carl Sagan estate for calling him a "villain"?)
Ah apple, often times thought incorrectly to be less evil than Microsoft or Google but has, in time been just as shameless as either in their own "apple-y" way
The malfeasance in Apple's case rests on a few engineers that were flipping the bird (perhaps just at much at Apple upper management as much as at Carl Sagan). A bit of a stretch to make this a "corporate policy" of the likes of Microsoft or Google.
four decades is a long time; there have been cultural shifts and economic changes.. some people at Apple just do their job, others are certainly comic book level obnoxious
For someone like Carl Sagan his name is his most valuable asset. His reputation was being toyed with without his consent by a much more powerful entitity than him. He used the only defensive that the US is providing to individuals like him, that's the legal system. Apple's reaction confirmed their total disregard for his reputation and thus his source of income.
I find it shameful to suggest the weaker opponent the one who has been wronged by a bigger corporation or celebrity should always shut up and leave the more powerful entitity do what they want. I find that disgraceful.
From TFA: “When these internal codenames were first revealed in a 1993 issue of MacWeek, Sagan was concerned that the use of his name might be misconstrued as an official endorsement.”
But then they refused to acknowledge that he had not endorsed their product and had not received compensation after the name was revealed. While probably not illegal, IMO that was still morally wrong.
For Carl Sagan to have learned the internal code name of a computer, it seems likely that the code name was leaked to the outside of Apple. According to the article, this happened in a 1993 issue of MacWeek.
Apple today is starting to remind me a bit of the Apple of the early 1990s.
Gone are the simple product portfolios where each model has a clear position and purpose within the line up. Now, the number of models is creeping up gradually with more and more overlap and less clarity of purpose between them.
The difference is that Apple today has the volume to support the (smaller amount of, let’s be clear) differentiation. And while it’s less clear than it was in, say, 2001, each of these things probably has an audience.
The whole iOS is becoming more Android Like with every version.
Tim Cook's Apple may be very successful, but I will argue it is not a better Apple. And as the Steve Jobs in Private of the Silicon Valley, being better matters.
Jobs famously pared the Macs down to laptop/desktop and pro/consumer to create a grid of four platforms (of course this predates phones, watches, ipads...).
I suspect Jobs was over-correcting because he had to, because Apple was floundering. But the model matrix for the Macs are not a lot bigger than Job's 2 x 2 minimalist stable.
I find it so interesting that most of these comments criticize Apple. For me, the article suggests that Carl Sagan deserved some of the scientific criticism he received -- that he was more of a showman than scientist. He certainly did not seem to have much of a sense of humor, a bad trait for someone with such a large but fragile ego. (If Apple had switched to TSA -- thin skinned astronomer -- rather than BHA, would he still have sued?)
The idea that his "name" was a "brand" that had some commercial value is a joke. I don't think Johnny Carson was dropping his invites because of an Apple internal code name.
The three code names were all in the category of “bogus science,” and the association of Sagan with Piltdown Man and Cold Fusion was more of a jab turned insult. The “billions and billions” rationale sounds like an attempt to walk things back.