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The Absurdity of Nobel Prizes in Science

theatlantic.com

31–40 of 149 posts

Re: The Absurdity of Nobel Prizes in Science

#31
post #19

Want to briefly hijack this thread to quickly point out that there is no such thing as a Nobel Prize in Economics. Literally a Swiss bank made it upon the 70’s and dubiously said their prize was to “honor Alfred Nobel”. They were very forceful and never backed down from the prize, ultimately winning the PR battle and forcing the real Nobel org to sort-of acknowledge them. They did this to originally award distinction…

> Literally a Swiss bank made it upon the 70’s and dubiously said their prize was to “honor Alfred Nobel”. They were very forceful and never backed down from the prize, ultimately winning the PR battle and forcing the real Nobel org to sort-of acknowledge them.

1. Swedish, not Swiss. Both start with “Sw”, but, still, completely different countries.

2. And not just some random Swedish Bank, but the Swedish central bank (equivalent to the US Federal Reserve.)

3. And the first award was in 1969, which would be hard if it was made up in the 1970s.

4. The “real Nobel org”, as relevant to this discussion (there's actually four different ones) is the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (which awards the Nobel Prizes in Physics and Chemistry.) Which don't just sort-of acknowledge the Economics prize, they are the ones who award it.

5. And, as requested by the bank which both endowed the prize and pays for administrative expenses related to it, the Academy awards it using the same standards as associated with the prizes funded by Nobel’s endowment.

6. While Hayek and Friedman did win the prizes in the 1970s, neither earlier nor later laureates were consistently identify with conservatism.

The idea that you seem to be pushing, that it's a right-wing propaganda tool issued by some other organization unrelated to the prizes endowed by Alfred Nobel that is merely “sort-of acknowledged” by “the real Nobel org” is simply not supported by the facts.

Re: The Absurdity of Nobel Prizes in Science

#32
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> uses I am not sure if the discovery of gravitation waves can be of any use to us (other than perhaps stimulate funding for further astrophysics research, that is).

That's a rather narrow view. Can you imagine what went into building the gravitational wave observatories? Don't you think that's advanced the state of the art with respect to the different kinds of technology, manufacturing, and construction techniques involved? I support biomedical research. We're adopting scientific collaboration tools developed by the high energy physics community and specifically LIGO. These too…

[deleted]

Re: The Absurdity of Nobel Prizes in Science

#33
post #16
post #9

Personally I find peace prizes abominable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_Peace_Prize_laur... They just got way too political.

It's supposed to be political, that's the point. I like both the EU and Obama, but don't think they deserve them.

I think that's part of the point though. Politics is the way by which you achieve peace. So the Peace prize is also a political tool. "We're giving you this prize and now you have to live up to it.".

Re: The Absurdity of Nobel Prizes in Science

#34
post #9

Personally I find peace prizes abominable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_Peace_Prize_laur... They just got way too political.

How is it abominable ? And how do you propose advocation of peace to be divorced from politics? It is necessarily intertwined.

"Moral revulsion" seems reasonable to feel at Kissinger's win.

Obama's is meaningless, even if you believe he did contribute materially to international peace (he didn't) he hadn't done so yet, with less than a year in office.

Giving it to the EU is just farce, in the same sense as "corporations are people." The EU is the result of the process the prize is supposed to encourage. It should be going to the people responsible for that institution's functioning - but good luck convincing anyone that its leaders have done a particularly good job navigating post-sovereign-debt-crisis, the period the prize would usually be awarding.

(I agree the award is necessarily political. I think it's better to say many recent awards have been tactical - moves in an attempt to bring about better relations, mostly unsuccessfully, rather than recognizing those who do really encourage them.)

Re: The Absurdity of Nobel Prizes in Science

#35
The abstract of the 5,154-author paper that this article mentions:

https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.11...

I first thought it was this one

http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2008JInst...3S8003A

which is also by Aad et al., but that one has a mere 2,926 authors (because it includes only the ATLAS collaboration and not the CMS collaboration).

Seeing all of these people listed definitely lends some weight to the "it's kind of unreasonable for only 1-3 people to win a Nobel for this sort of work" view for me.

Re: The Absurdity of Nobel Prizes in Science

#37
post #35

The abstract of the 5,154-author paper that this article mentions: https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.11... I first thought it was this one http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2008JInst...3S8003A which is also by Aad et al., but that one has a mere 2,926 authors (because it includes only the ATLAS collaboration and not the CMS collaboration). Seeing all of these people listed definitely lends some we…

Is it just alphabetical at that point, or is Aad both special and alphabetically advantaged?

(If I want to go into physics, should I first change my name to Aaalweachter?)

Re: The Absurdity of Nobel Prizes in Science

#38

This seems like less of an issue with the Nobel Prizes and more that the author doesn't like prizes in general. Not everyone that contributes to a movie gets to go up on stage to collect the Oscar. There are always going to be problems with subjective awards in terms of leaving people out, people being overshadowed who would have won in other years, etc. I think the award does a good job of celebrating achievements t…

Sport/Media are ripe with awards and top personalities are paid a salary directly proportional to their recognition.

Science powers the whole world, yet scientist receives a very minimal recognition for it, either in salary or prizes. Nobel Prizes are basically the only way that scientists achieve a bit of that.

Re: The Absurdity of Nobel Prizes in Science

#39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is it abominable ? And how do you propose advocation of peace to be divorced from politics? It is necessarily intertwined.

"Moral revulsion" seems reasonable to feel at Kissinger's win. Obama's is meaningless, even if you believe he did contribute materially to international peace (he didn't) he hadn't done so yet, with less than a year in office. Giving it to the EU is just farce, in the same sense as "corporations are people." The EU is the result of the process the prize is supposed to encourage. It should be going to the people respo…

If Obama got the Peace Prize simply because he wasn't Bush, I can't wait to see what Trump's successor will get!

Re: The Absurdity of Nobel Prizes in Science

#40
post #19

Want to briefly hijack this thread to quickly point out that there is no such thing as a Nobel Prize in Economics. Literally a Swiss bank made it upon the 70’s and dubiously said their prize was to “honor Alfred Nobel”. They were very forceful and never backed down from the prize, ultimately winning the PR battle and forcing the real Nobel org to sort-of acknowledge them. They did this to originally award distinction…

I don't think there's enough evidence to say they did it to promote a particular branch of economics. More likely just to promote the credentials of economics as sound science.

But yes, it was founded in a rather dubious way, and of course there's no obligation on the public to accept it as a Nobel prize.

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