To undermine Katherine Bouman's role in the black hole photo, trolls held up a white man as the real hero -- until he fought back

Thanks! Well yes, my reaction is part emotional, and we are all humans. We can all learn if we so desire. But IMHO, we do bear the responsibilities for what we don't learn.

I have sexist biases too. Stuff that years of participating in the society ingrained in my thought processes, like it did to anybody else. I am eliminating these biases as I encounter them. I know that, like everybody else, that is not a part of my nature, but something I have been taught, directly or in many cases indirectly.

I also understand the reasons behind these attacks when I empathise with the attackers. The change, the falling apart of the status quo... frightens them, I guess. And fear is human. They are furious, maybe subconsciously so, and that is human.

All these are human for a definition of human that is biological and maybe ontological, if I am using the term correctly there. When I include the word "human" in the insult of mine you quoted, in my use of the word, and probably in uses of it by others in similar context, it is meant to be attached certain virtues to it (here respect for science and a positive attitude towards equality of sexes and genders), or to stand in for them metaphorically. In that light, I don't know then if my comment should be considered too harsh. I can not accept that this sort of thing is merely a failure to contain emotions. That is when one feels angry, when one feels disbilef towards achivements of someone on the basis of some trait like sex, gender, race, ethnicity or whatnot. Starting a campaign to denigrate a scientist and dismiss her success because the media did not cover the story the way they liked... there is no excuse for such a thing; and while it is true that in the most basic sense that should not mean that one be dehumanised---for such attitude means our system of law falls apart, even when they are guilty of something---, this sort of behaviour can not be included within the confines of anything that is to be considered human in a sense that is not limited to a legal definition of human and contains in it even a trace of virtue. With a strict sense of the word human where it is the name of our species, I then hereby amend my use of the word "human" and replace it with "virtue" instead.

And it's obviously total bullshit. I'm a physics grad student specializing in lattice QCD. I'm admittedly a bit biased here, but I consider my field the epitome of computational physics; my field is effectively impossible without computers. State-of-the-art work usually require the use of a supercomputer. My advisor is -- surprise -- a woman. Women are certainly underrepresented in this field but not seemingly less than any other field of physics. It would be irresponsible to conflate that lack of presence with a lack of ability.

And all of this illustrates the fundamental irony of such claims intended to discredit minorities: people who are clearly not experts about the subject nevertheless make categorical claims about them. Take the quoted person:

I've spent fair amount of time doing hard science (applied physics) as well as computational physics

What does that even mean? Did they get a degree in applied physics? Simply take a few classes? Neither would be sufficient to know the who's-who of computational physics (which is already too broad of a discipline to talk about meaningfully). And that's assuming we can even take this person at face value.

Or take the claim that Chael "wrote 850,000 of the 900,000 lines of code". Let's ignore the fact that "lines of code" is not an especially useful metric. Nobody writes 850,000 lines of code in grad school. And unsurprisingly, neither did Chael -- most of those "lines of code" were uploaded data. Such a claim would be obviously suspicious to anybody familiar with computational physics (or even just programming in general), but knowledgeable people aren't the ones who make (or believe) these absurd claims.