HN Gopher Feed (2017-10-03) - page 1 of 10 ___________________________________________________________________
The Absurdity of Nobel Prizes in Science
105 points by gfredtech
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/10/the-absurdit...___________________________________________________________________
dna_polymerase - 54 minutes ago
Typical competitive thinking from everyone here. Just see the Nobel
Prize as a little gem alongside the road to greater goals. Focus on
the work to come instead of arguing about a procedure older than
any human alive.It doesn't matter who gets a shiny medal, the only
thing that matters is that we push science to next level. To help
our understanding of the world and to help the people.
bjourne - 7 minutes ago
I think that there is a similar problem in the software world when
it comes to free software projects. Who created Python? Linux?
Perl? Wikipedia? If your answer is Guido van Rossum, Linus
Torvalds, Larry Wall and Jimmy Wales you are about as wrong as the
Nobel Prize committee. But sometimes there are a single guy who is
responsible for a lot of the project even if that person is almost
never credited, like Tom Lane or Fabricio Bellard.I don't know
about what to do about this unfair distribution of credit. Probably
nothing.
adekok - 2 hours ago
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 chunk of the engineering, along
with having decent managerial skills. No one with skills solely in
an MBA, or theoretical physicist, or civil engineer could have done
it.Even if he didn't win based on something he mathematically
proved, there's no question he's one of the top physicists
around.If you look at the Nobel prizes as the "best of" awards, and
not "the guy who invented something all alone", it becomes a bit
more palatable.On top of that, the Nobel committee is limited by
the rules of their foundation. Even assigning Nobels for something
done 5 years ago is arguably outside of the directions of the
trust.So yeah, the article isn't theoretically wrong, but it's
wrong for practical purposes.
[deleted]
Blackthorn - 2 hours ago
This is a fabulous article. Touches on everything from large groups
of people, obviously missing attributions due to death, and even
the sexist outcomes.
lutorm - 2 hours ago
Alfred Nobel only wanted to reward people for making discoveries.
There are many reasons one can argue that this is counterproductive
(Like this article points out, science is not a single-person
endeavor, but even more importantly is that it invokes a huge
survivorship bias: You only get the prize for being correct, so
someone else who did just as important work on another theory that
showed that it was not correct will never be rewarded.)But in the
end, it was Nobel's prerogative to do what he wanted with his
money. We can argue whether it would have been better if he had
done something different, but it is what it is. It's not a reward
by a government or any community or democratically elected
organization where we really have standing to argue that it should
be different, it's just a committee trying to follow the century-
plus old will of a single person. If we don't like what it does, we
don't have to pay attention.
ordu - 1 hours ago
Hmm... Should we follow his idea how to reach his goals, or maybe
we should follow his goals with our best? Nobel idea how to
invest his money is based on the understanding science as it was
at XIX century. But now science is different and is changing
further constantly. So if we follow Nobel last will, than Nobel
Prize would become irrelevant, having zero influence on science,
just some tradition from the past to give money for good managers
or for respectable elderly scientists choosed from hundreds of
other equally respectable and elderly scientists by some
qualities having nothing to productivity in science or
revolutionary ideas. Alternatively we can try to adapt the Nobel
Prize to new reality, allowing it to reflect current state of
affairs and to hold its influence on science.I'm not a lawer, so
I don't know is it possible to change Nobel Prize principles. All
I want is to point to futility of blind following the old rule.
Top19 - 2 hours ago
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 distinctions to conservative economists like
Milton Friedman, though today they?re a little bit sneakier and
will every now and then sneak an award to someone like Joseph
Stieglitz.You can read more about it in the somewhat sanitized
Wikipedia article which only hints at the dispute that lies
beneath: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Memorial_Prize_in_Econ
om...EDIT: I understand the downvotes for the incorrect factual
background. I want my main point to be the issue of economics not
doing a great job over the last 30-40 years when these awards were
begun / the general retreat of Keynesian economics in favor of
Neoliberalism. That being said it?s sometimes mentioned that the
peak of a scientist?s productivity is right before he or she gets
the Nobel (Memorial) Prize due to the resulting fame, so perhaps
other economists are to blame.
throwa_way_ - 2 hours ago
Nonsense conspiracy theory contradicted by your own wikipedia
link.
mjw1007 - 1 hours ago
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.
dragonwriter - 1 hours ago
> 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.
gozur88 - 1 hours ago
Yeah, I'm so angry they awarded it to that notorious right wing
professor Paul Krugman.
yahelc - 2 hours ago
You're close.The bank isn't "a" bank, it's a Central Bank.And
it's Swedish, not Swiss.
Top19 - 2 hours ago
You know I briefly wondered as I was writing whether it was
Swedish or Swiss but then I was like, ?aren?t all the bad banks
from Switzerland, aren?t they also just famous for their
banks??.Thanks for the correction or else I would have been
misstating this fact for years, probably in less friendly
forums than HackerNews too.
icebraining - 2 hours ago
You could have read your own link, though.Also, no, not all
the bad banks are from Switzerland, that's just prejudice.
[deleted]
nerfhammer - 2 hours ago
It was the central bank of Sweden, not some random Swiss bank.
It's always been administered by the same Nobel organization. The
central bank of Sweden does not have an editorial say in who
wins.
SubiculumCode - 32 minutes ago
Oh My! What a ghastly notion. Of course the prize won't go to THEM,
darling. Give the slaves notions, Why! Who'd crunch my numbers?
Make my tables done up all pretty; clean and polish my figures?
Besides, [Slavery] was established by decree of Almighty
Tenure...it is sanctioned by the Journal, from Nature Genetics to
Nature Neuroscience...it has existed in all disciplines, has been
found among the labs of the highest prestige, and in labs of the
highest proficiency. It is the natural order, and without us,
they'd be lost and wayward. Goodness, it really is a lot to bear
sometimes. I think I need some air.
SubiculumCode - 25 minutes ago
Really? Down votes for some crafted satire and an adaption of
Confederate Jefferson Davis's famous quote on slavery?
empath75 - 2 hours ago
I think the prizes are important as a means of drawing the
attention of the general public to certain important discoveries.
I do think they should do more to recognize more contributors to
various discoveries, even if they have to limit the number of
people who receive the monetary award.
bkcreate - 2 hours ago
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 that otherwise wouldn't be nearly as
widely recognized.
gutnor - 1 hours ago
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.
jessriedel - 1 hours ago
This is because most people care about pop musicians much more
than about scientists, regardless of lip service to the
contrary. You can't make them care by creating more awards.
There are already an uncountable number of awards in physics
(e.g., the Dirac medal, the Sakurai prize, the Wolf prize, the
Newton medal, the Breakthrough prize, etc., etc.).
EGreg - 3 hours ago
Why not start a website where scientific discoveries can be linked
to their uses on the one side, and on the other side to their
contributors and former discoveries it is based on? Could be a
wiki.
Koshkin - 3 hours ago
> usesI 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).
dpcx - 3 hours ago
Not yet, maybe. But eventually, I'm sure they'll be used
directly in some other scientific discovery.
davesque - 2 hours ago
I'm sure many of the early discoveries regarding the sub-
molecular structure of matter seemed pretty abstract at first.
Then came the atomic bomb.
Koshkin - 2 hours ago
Speaking of atoms, indeed, as far as the ancient philosophy
was concerned, atomism was a rather abstract idea. But the
discoveries that confirmed the existence of atoms had been
directly stimulated by the chemical research, and further
advances in chemistry as well as the industry and medicine
critically depended on it. (The atomic bomb, on the other
hand, required the discovery of the atomic nucleus - which is
a completely different object of study, and nothing about it
was "abstract", either.)
firethief - 2 hours ago
It seems early to conclude that. No one had a use for X-rays
until over a century after people started messing around with
them.
colemannugent - 2 hours ago
As I understand it there are four fundamental forces in
physics: strong and weak nuclear forces, the electromagnetic
force, and gravitational force.This discovery of gravitational
waves is similar to the discovery of electromagnetic waves that
has touched almost every aspect of our lives.I'm sure there
will be ways to use this information. Maybe not now, but it
certainly might help when humanity eventually looks to
permanently slip the surly bonds of earth.
openasocket - 1 hours ago
Not really, gravitational waves are distortions in space-time
caused by gravity. They just confirmed something that was
predicted by general relativity a century ago. That's a big
deal, and I don't mean to sully that achievement, but saying
it's as big a deal as the discovery of electromagnetism is
really overselling it. Gravitational waves are profoundly
difficult to detect and can only be created by monumental
celestial events (colliding black holes), it's not going to
spark an energy revolution like the study of electromagnetism
did.
xenophonf - 2 hours ago
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 tools
make it possible for large-scale, multi-institution,
transnational collaborations to readily and securely share data
worldwide. I'm really excited about what has become
possible.Admittedly, that has nothing to do with the detection
of gravitational waves themselves. Still, these projects (and
others) have improved the state of the art, and while it might
not lead to something you can buy at Walmart any time soon, it
might make a malaria cure happen sooner, or improve the quality
of care for tuberculosis patients, or reduce the rate of breast
cancer---little stuff that over time adds up to hundreds of
thousands of people alive and well who, without all those
little things adding up, wouldn't be alive today.
dekhn - 1 hours ago
any ancillary benefits that occur as side effects of funding
a physics project, could almost certainly have been achieved,
without the funding of the physics project. for example,
direct investment into disease research is much more likely
to have short-term impact.that's not to say ancillary
discoveries with impact outside the original domain don't
occur- they're just not as cost effective.
[deleted]
gonewest - 2 hours ago
Are you nuts? Without gravity waves how am I supposed to move
the hand of my kid's watch in morse code, and transmit critical
scientific data from beyond the event horizon of a black hole?
And that's just the practical stuff we already know about...
who knows what we'll come up with in a few years? :)
jlg23 - 1 hours ago
A heretic thought: Maybe the Nobel Prize only manages to ~"distort
our perception of science" because the reporting about it can fill
the void created by incredibly bad, superficial science journalism?
melling - 1 hours ago
If companies and universities tried to win Nobel Prizes like teams
try to win the Super Bowl, the Olympics, America?s Cup, etc it
would be more useful.It does give visibility to science, which
hopefully, motivates a few more people to grow up to want that
achievement.Personally, I think we need more prizes and ?sports?
for these endeavors:https://www.xprize.orghttp://roborace.com
d33 - 2 hours ago
Personally I find peace prizes abominable:https://en.wikipedia.org/
wiki/List_of_Nobel_Peace_Prize_laur...They just got way too
political.
rhcom2 - 2 hours ago
Because it can't be awarded posthumously I think it is impossible
to divorce it from politics.
dragonwriter - 2 hours ago
Because it's fundamentally about a political objective, I think
it's nonsense to even talk about it being divorced from
politics, even if it could be awarded posthumously.
gggdvnkhmbgjvbn - 2 hours ago
It would be funny if the distinction between politics and
history was explicitly whether the subjects' life was over.
Id love to pedantically say to someone "osama bin laden is
part of history now, not politics"
mmanfrin - 2 hours ago
How is it abominable? And how do you propose advocation of peace
to be divorced from politics? It is necessarily intertwined.
throwawayknecht - 1 hours ago
"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.)
[deleted]
1ris - 2 hours ago
It's supposed to be political, that's the point.I like both the
EU and Obama, but don't think they deserve them.
2muchcoffeeman - 1 hours ago
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.".
QAPereo - 48 minutes ago
Hopefully the drone programs under president Obama disabused
them of that particularly odious and arrogant fallacy.
gozur88 - 1 hours ago
Yeah, the peace prize has become a joke. I have to disagree with
the author about the science prizes, though - I think it's pretty
reasonable to award people for moving the ball forward even if
they didn't do it all themselves.
WalterBright - 11 minutes ago
I would have given it to Kennedy and Khrushchev for avoiding
nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
schoen - 1 hours ago
The abstract of the 5,154-author paper that this article mentions:h
ttps://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.11...I
first thought it was this
onehttp://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2008JInst...3S8003Awhich 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.
saalweachter - 1 hours ago
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?)
schoen - 1 hours ago
Evidently ATLAS listed its members alphabetically and CMS
listed them by some other criterion (maybe seniority?).
However, I would guess that ATLAS got its member list first in
the paper by being the alphabetically prior of the two
collaborations (!).So, that suggests that you should not only
change your name to Aaalweachter, but also be sure to work on
the AARDVARK research collaboration. (Or found one if it
doesn't already exist.)
thiagotomei - 12 minutes ago
Hi, member of CMS collaboration here. The author list is
ordered: by country name (in English), by town name, by
institute name, by author name, by author first name. So, as
of this writing, the list starts with authors from Armenia.
Glyptodon - 1 hours ago
I keep hoping they'll give one to SciHub.
dyukqu - 1 hours ago
..or to Alexandra Elbakyan; for a lifetime? achievement (in
supporting hundreds of thousands of scientists/researchers around
the globe).?since she has helped so many researchers, affected
their lives, it shall count as well-beyond-lifetime
pipio21 - 14 minutes ago
For me Nobel prices in Science are one of the things that work
better the way they are that most alternatives.Nobel prices in
peace are ridiculous. Not talking about (fake) Nobel prices of
Economy that do not exist but have managed to buy themselves some
recognition because the money printing of central bankers.For me
this article is absurd. If you have a better way of giving to
science, create your own price with your own money.
sleavey - 12 minutes ago
I agree with parts of the article, that big breakthroughs are
rarely these days individual efforts, and that praising only the
ones at the top is misleading and potentially damaging; however, as
a member of the LIGO collaboration, I think these three guys really
do deserve credit for what they've driven over the past 50 (!)
years, and all of the work we've been able to do over the years has
only been enabled by their drive. While choosing three from
thousands is never fair, it's probably more fair than distributing
the award equally among anyone who's ever played a part in
gravitational wave science.The recipients have been at pains to
make the collaborative effort clear. One of the first things Rai
Weiss (winner this year) said on the phone to the Nobel press
conference today was that he saw this as an award for the 1000+
scientists in the (LIGO) collaboration. When a special Breakthrough
Prize was awarded to all of us last year, with large prize money
being given to Rai, Kip and Ron Drever (who died earlier this year
and who otherwise might have been one of the three Nobel laureates
today), Rai and other senior scientists spent the money funding
grad students and other science activities [1]. They have given
ample credit to the people that helped in their success, and
they've shared their knowledge and resources with the newer
generations.Today, we're celebrating this as a recognition foremost
for the three new Nobel laureates, but also to the other pioneers
who didn't make the "final three", the diverse collaboration of
scientists past and present who've been involved around the world
in gravitational wave physics, and all the technicians and students
that did the grunt work building the machines and lab experiments.
While our names aren't all stamped on the medals, I for one am
deeply satisfied to have played some (tiny) part in it all
alongside these greats.[1] http://www.ligo.org/magazine/LIGO-
magazine-issue-11.pdf#page...