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The Absurdity of Nobel Prizes in Science

theatlantic.com

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Re: The Absurdity of Nobel Prizes in Science

#101

Post by vacri »

throwawayknecht wrote: post #34
mmanfrin wrote: post #15

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…

The efforts of the EU (and other things, of course) have helped the major powers in Europe avoid war for over half a century now, a rarity in European history. Why wouldn't that be worth recognising?

I mean hell, on this page we have people complaining that the prize "only goes to three people when thousands were involved", and here you're complaining that "a group of people are awarded instead of a few individual". Damned if you do, damned if you don't...

Re: The Absurdity of Nobel Prizes in Science

#106

Post by saiya-jin »

vacri wrote: post #100
fatjokes wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. Nobel laureates in peace are basically bullshit. Look at Obama---good president, but how many drone strikes did he order, and Aung San Suu Kyi--currently accused of genocide. The Nobel laureates in science indisputably pushed forth the frontiers of human understanding. Frankly, I think the Nobel prizes in the sciences are carrying the name.

Perhaps look at it another way - assigning a Nobel peace prize is a way of putting wider attention onto someone, and maybe works as a soft pressure to keep them behaving a little? For half a year or so after you get awarded a peace prize, your profile in the world is a lot higher than normal, perhaps giving you a bit more of a nudge in the right direction. Also, Aung San Suu Kyi won her Nobel Peace Prize in 1991 , 26…

This all just illustrates how fickle this price is. Cold, hard facts of science won't likely twist in such a way.

And what about Obama? He was kind of a joke of a president, didn't do a thing for world security apart from nice speeches, kept all the evil things going strong and stronger (meaningless wars, guantanamo, spying on whole world including YOU). Maybe he was just a good guy but weak and powerless. Who cares, results are what matters. Why the fuck should he be given such a thing? It casts shame on whole 'nobel' effort.

And I can go on and on and on - Mother Theresa is very controversial, so is Arafat, so is Kissinger. Al Gore, seriously?? Most of these people would pass a test as a good person when looking back, and definitely none deserved it. Now look back at scientific nobels, they stand the test of time extremely well.

Peace nobel price should be cancelled. I understand if you are norwegian you might not like it, but this price just doesn't make sense and is beyond pathetic.

Re: The Absurdity of Nobel Prizes in Science

#107

Post by usrusr »

yyyyip wrote: post #83
VHRanger wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but he was trying to delegitimize the highest honor in a field of study. The economics Nobel is functionally equivalent to the Fields medal or Turing award, regardless of Alfred Nobel's original intent. The point is the poster above was trying to diminish the field of study's legitimacy. Reading between the lines of his post he was doing so because of his political leanings, not because he disagreed with any pa…

Why can't he, or I, diminishing the legitimacy of economics? If someone had made up a fake Nobel prize in psychology I would diminishing the legitimacy of that too. The field of economics is far, far less rigorous than any of the hard sciences for which Nobel prizes are awarded. The fake Nobel prize for economics is strongly disputed by much of the Nobel family, Keynes, and it makes economists act more blowhard, self…

Even if you were to completely deny any scientific nature of economics, it would not be reason to lessen the "memorial price", as there is no implication that "Nobel price" means science. 40% of the original five have nothing at all to do with science and even if you dismissed the peace price for being the odd one with all the norwegianness and questionable recipients, there would still be literature . Just think of the memorial price as "the Nobel for economic literature", you won't find a hair in that.

(Also I suspect that there might be some linguistic misunderstanding here, maybe some participants are used to think in a language where the most common translation of "science" does not include the subset of social sciences?),

Re: The Absurdity of Nobel Prizes in Science

#108

Post by SEMW »

cooper12 wrote: post #74
adekok wrote: post #14

I was a collaborator on the SNO project. I worked with Art McDonald, who co-won the 2015 Nobel prize in physics for the project. There were hundreds of people involved. We couldn't have done it without the hundreds of people. While Art was a fantastic guy and a tireless worker, a good chunk of his contribution was management. i.e. A competent manager. He not only understood all of the physics involved, but a good chu…

> On top of that, the Nobel committee is limited by the rules of their foundation The article address this argument though and says that the Foundation has already stretched the rules.

> The article address this argument though and says that the Foundation has already stretched the rules.

That bit of the article is arguably misleading. The foundation is not stretching its rules in awarding it to three people. That stretching (from one to three) was done immediately after Nobel's death as part of the settlement of his Will, and enshrined in the statutes of the foundation ("nor shall it be divided into more than three prizes at most")[0].

Whether it's possible to change it now to allow more than three is a question for someone who knows Swedish Trust law.

[0] https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_organizations/nobelfoundati...

Re: The Absurdity of Nobel Prizes in Science

#109

Post by felipelemos »

vacri wrote: post #100
fatjokes wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. Nobel laureates in peace are basically bullshit. Look at Obama---good president, but how many drone strikes did he order, and Aung San Suu Kyi--currently accused of genocide. The Nobel laureates in science indisputably pushed forth the frontiers of human understanding. Frankly, I think the Nobel prizes in the sciences are carrying the name.

Perhaps look at it another way - assigning a Nobel peace prize is a way of putting wider attention onto someone, and maybe works as a soft pressure to keep them behaving a little? For half a year or so after you get awarded a peace prize, your profile in the world is a lot higher than normal, perhaps giving you a bit more of a nudge in the right direction. Also, Aung San Suu Kyi won her Nobel Peace Prize in 1991 , 26…

Maybe we should only award Nobel Peace Prize posthumously.

Re: The Absurdity of Nobel Prizes in Science

#110

Post by usrusr »

alkonaut wrote: post #94

It would be interesting to know what the prizes would be awarded for if they considered only individual efforts, no huge projects with decade long collaborations of thousands of people. The effect would likely just be that a few theoretical advances could be nominated while experiments, even those that confirm the theories in question (Higgs, or this years prize) would go unawarded.

It might end up looking like a random "employee of the month". There are thousands of individuals working on their own little puzzle piece of these large cooperations, singling out some individual contributors "down in the trenches" for an award would be a lot more disrespectful to their peers than awarding some shared head figures who implicitly represent their entire extended teams.
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