Egas Moniz, cited in the list, got a Nobel for inventing lobotomy to cure mental illness.
He did not really embrace some weird idea once he got a Nobel: the weird itself was the reason for the Nobel prize.
Nobel Disease
101–110 of 139 posts
Re: Nobel Disease
#102One of the beautiful things about coding is the immediacy of the feedback. Screw up and your program crashes. Get it right and the machine does what you want. Tests turn green - that's nice. Subtle bugs can be deceptive, you might be thinking. True, but lots of bugs are not at all subtle.
When you get good at coding, you get a lot of positive reinforcement coming from a machine rather than other people. What that does to our psychology seems worth considering. Might we also have the same feeling of "I'm usually right!" and might that feeling transfer to domains where it's not backed up by any real learning?
Re: Nobel Disease
#103> an informal term for the embrace of strange or scientifically unsound ideas by some Nobel Prize winners, usually later in life. It has been argued that the effect results, in part, from a tendency for Nobel winners to feel empowered by the award to speak on topics outside their specific area of expertise Sounds pretty much like every founder out there who strike gold once in the past now believing their genius now…
Angela Collier has a terrific video about this : billionaires want you to know they could have done physics.
Funny I just saw a video of Jeff Bezos saying this exact thing: https://m.youtube.com/shorts/g3_WSzLNTAw
Re: Nobel Disease
#104> an informal term for the embrace of strange or scientifically unsound ideas by some Nobel Prize winners, usually later in life. It has been argued that the effect results, in part, from a tendency for Nobel winners to feel empowered by the award to speak on topics outside their specific area of expertise Sounds pretty much like every founder out there who strike gold once in the past now believing their genius now…
Like making a payments platform and then 30 years later telling everyone the anti-christ is coming?
I don't think this phenomenon has anything to do with nobel laureates' tendency to be a bit erratic. This pretend to be stupid thing became common around the 90s....
Re: Nobel Disease
#105The first entries are a bit weird to me. They are mostly about eugenics for people who got their Nobel prices in the early 1900s. The thing is that in those days even the state of California promoted eugenics [1]. And according to Wikipedia, so much so that they might have even played a role in influencing Germany [2]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics_in_California [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_e…
It then rips on scientists who believed that COVID19 was the result of a lab leak.
The whole page is poor.
Re: Nobel Disease
#106> In his autobiography, Mullis professed a belief in astrology and wrote about an encounter with a fluorescent, talking raccoon that he suggested might have been an extraterrestrial alien. Absolutely wild shit whoa
You don’t need a Nobel prize to see talking raccoon aliens. Just take a heroic dose of hallucinogens.
Isn't that how Kary Mullis got his nobel prize to begin with?
Re: Nobel Disease
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean, if we wanted every human on Earth to be over 6' tall, we could just cull the short ones (or stop them from reproducing), and this is scientifically valid, but, of course, evil. As far as lobotomy, I don't know, but it seems to be widely discredited inasmuch as it didn't achieve its aims (or if it did, the aims themselves were highly questionable) Given the title, lobotomy is an apt reference "The originator o…
> I mean, if we wanted every human on Earth to be over 6' tall, we could just cull the short ones (or stop them from reproducing), and this is scientifically valid, but, of course, evil. What's scientifically valid about that? What part of the scientific process is being utilized? What hypothesis is being tested? If you're implying that people would start to be taller because we are culling short people, then you're…
> if we wanted every human on Earth to be over 6' tall, we could just cull the short ones (or stop them from reproducing)
This is a testable hypotheses.
What's actually stopping us? Science is not the issue here.
Re: Nobel Disease
#108> an informal term for the embrace of strange or scientifically unsound ideas by some Nobel Prize winners, usually later in life. It has been argued that the effect results, in part, from a tendency for Nobel winners to feel empowered by the award to speak on topics outside their specific area of expertise Sounds pretty much like every founder out there who strike gold once in the past now believing their genius now…
Which comes first; the fraud or the title of 30 under 30?
Re: Nobel Disease
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
That just means you can't call Africans one "race" because they hold all the genetic diversity on the planet. But it doesn't mean there's not some meaningful genetic grouping of populations that splintered out of Africa. Or, concretely, I'm struggling to square what you're saying with the fact that I tell my doctor I'm Hispanic because that means a higher genetic predisposition to things like diabetes.
Hispanic is probably the perfect example for this. A blonde Argentinian is probably not predisposed to diabetes. What I’m trying to say is racial categorizations don’t follow any rules based in our biology or genetics. For it to be scientific you would need to be able to categorize any given individual 100% based on some unchanging rule that is based on underlying biology. We cannot currently do that and what I’m say…
I was under the impression doctors do this exact categorization all the time?
Given an individual's race (looking at them and asking) and the medical literature they change their treatments if need be.
Skin color and place of origin is a pretty rough but decent way to do this?
If need be they could just sequence your genes, afterall isn't that exactly how they connect and learn about hereditary diseases or know that certain races of people are predisposed to certain diseases?
"This man looks x and is from y and is complaining about z" I thought this was like basic medicine?
You're acting like gentics is a failed research field or something kinda confused on your point here.
Re: Nobel Disease
#110This has always felt like such a weird quirk in human behavior. Imagine a 5 year old who is good at basketball. His parents notice it and enroll him in a class. Coaches recognize his talent and dedicate special time to him. He trains every morning, every night and entire weekends through primary, middle and high school. Gets barely any time for classes, but he anyways just needs a passing grade (which teachers are ha…
lol true, actors are probally the most visible as well on this.
I think it's partly because fame also brings a large number of "yes man" around people. If you let your ego get to you you'll believe it.
Kinda a common and real problem amoung the ruling classes of history forever now. It's also why some of the best rules have lower egos because it's less effective.