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Science

The Absurdity of the Nobel Prizes in Science (theatlantic.com) 186

Posted by msmash from the thing-to-ponder dept.
An anonymous reader shares an article: Every year, when Nobel Prizes are awarded in physics, chemistry, and physiology or medicine, critics note that they are an absurd and anachronistic way of recognizing scientists for their work. Instead of honoring science, they distort its nature, rewrite its history, and overlook many of its important contributors. There are assuredly good things about the prizes. Scientific discoveries should be recognized for the vital part they play in the human enterprise. The Nobel Prize website is an educational treasure trove, full of rich historical details that are largely missing from published papers. And it is churlish to be overly cynical about any event that, year after year, offers science the same kind of whetted anticipation that's usually reserved for Oscar or Emmy nominees. But the fact that the scientific Nobels have drawn controversy since their very inception hints at deep-rooted problems. [...] The wider problem, beyond who should have received the prize and who should not, is that the Nobels reward individuals -- three at most, for each of the scientific prizes, in any given year. And modern science, as Ivan Oransky and Adam Marcus write in Stat, is "the teamiest of team sports." Yes, researchers sometimes make solo breakthroughs, but that's increasingly rare. Even within a single research group, a platoon of postdocs, students, and technicians will typically be involved in a discovery that gets hitched to a single investigator's name. And more often than not, many groups collaborate on a single project. The paper in which the LIGO team announced their discovery has an author list that runs to three pages. Another recent paper, which precisely estimated the mass of the elusive Higgs boson, has 5,154 authors.
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The Absurdity of the Nobel Prizes in Science More

The Absurdity of the Nobel Prizes in Science

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  • Nobels in Science Seem OK, It's Peace... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by xxxJonBoyxxx ( 565205 ) on Wednesday October 04, 2017 @09:09AM (#55307819)
    The Nobel prizes awarded for science always seem to make sense. The literature ones most of the time too. It's the peace prizes (e.g., Obama in first year as president...whaaa?) that often leave people shaking their heads.

    • Re:Nobels in Science Seem OK, It's Peace... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by tomhath ( 637240 ) on Wednesday October 04, 2017 @09:20AM (#55307909)
      The Peace prize isn't even awarded by the Nobel committee. It's just a way for Norway to make a political statement.

      • Re:Nobels in Science Seem OK, It's Peace... (Score:5, Informative)

        by lars_stefan_axelsson ( 236283 ) on Wednesday October 04, 2017 @11:00AM (#55308767) Homepage

        The Peace prize isn't even awarded by the Nobel committee. It's just a way for Norway to make a political statement.

        No, that's not really true. The peace prize is one of the original prizes set forth in Nobel's will. It further stipulates that it should be awarded by the parliament of Norway. So it's legitimate.

        If you're looking for "fake" prizes, it's the economics prize "in memory of Alfred Nobel" that's the smoking gun. That was put in place by the Swedish central bank in the sixties (1968).

        So, even though I as a swede wouldn't miss an opportunity to take the piss out of the Norwegians, this isn't one such opportunity.

      • So WTF did Obama actually _do_ that he got one?

        • It was the "Yay Geo. W. is gone!" prize. Regardless of how much Obama may have wanted to join in in that international slap in the face to Bush, he should have declined it as it is beneath the office of the president to do so.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by GNious ( 953874 )

          Being not-Bush

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by tsqr ( 808554 )

          "for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples," according to the Nobel folks. [nobelprize.org]

          Other Obama achievements that you might not be familiar with:

          • Obama has as President created a new climate in international politics.
          • Multilateral diplomacy has regained a central position, with emphasis on the role that the United Nations and other international institutions can play.
          • Dialogue and negotiations are preferred as instruments for resolving even the most difficult

    • Re:Nobels in Science Seem OK, It's Peace... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by MightyYar ( 622222 ) on Wednesday October 04, 2017 @09:28AM (#55307971)

      Obama was a weird choice, but so was Yassir Arafat... like, an actual terrorist. Al Gore had nothing whatsoever to do with peace.

      • Re:Nobels in Science Seem OK, It's Peace... (Score:4, Interesting)

        by alvinrod ( 889928 ) on Wednesday October 04, 2017 @10:07AM (#55308313)
        I think the reasoning behind giving one to Al Gore (whether you like the reasoning or not is another matter) was that climate change would lead to destruction of environments which would lead to migration and war over territory so preventing it would prevent wars.

        Realistically though it was just a "Your Not George Bush" prize, which was much the same for Obama. I imagine that after four (or god forbid eight) years of Trump, another Democrat will get one for much the same reason.
      • Agree, the Nobel peace prize in my eyes is close to hitting the bottom, it shows how little research is done and how media driven they decision is.
        BTW, the Russian guy who prevented WWIII should've gotten the Nobel peace prize in my opinion, but now it is too late.

      • Re:Nobels in Science Seem OK, It's Peace... (Score:5, Informative)

        by JaredOfEuropa ( 526365 ) on Wednesday October 04, 2017 @11:31AM (#55309031) Journal
        Arafat received that together with Perez and Rabin for creating the Oslo Accords, an attempt to work towards peace in the Middle east, for which each of those three had to weather an enormous amount of resistance and criticism from their respective peoples. If the Prize is as much an encouragement to keep up the good work as it is an award for past achievements (the excuse they gave when awarding it to Obama), then I'd say it was well given. Giving the Prize to Obama was bullcrap, giving it to Gore even more so.

      • Re:Nobels in Science Seem OK, It's Peace... (Score:4, Insightful)

        by FeelGood314 ( 2516288 ) on Wednesday October 04, 2017 @11:36AM (#55309067)
        The peace prize is awarded to someone who is alive and who has the potential to work towards peace. Gandi can't be awarded it posthumously because he can't campaign for peace anymore. The award goes to people like Yassir Arafat in the hope that giving them publicity that they will be able to accomplish more. Sometimes it doesn't work but for people like Juan Manuel Santos negotiating with the FARC in Columbia maybe it did.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Xest ( 935314 )

          A better example of the failure of the Nobel Peace Prize is Aung San Suu Kyi who has become an apologist for and enabler of ethnic cleansing, institutional rape, and mass murder.

          If ever there was an undeserving person in the world who deserves to have it revoked due to her failure to live up to it's name then it's her.

          You're right, in contrast, Juan Manuel Santos is one of the most deserving living people today.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Shinobi ( 19308 )

        If you want to complain about terrorists getting it, don't forget Menachim Begin, leader of Irgun, bomber of the King David hotel, equal partner in ethnical cleansing raids against arabs together with Lehi(more commonly known as the Stern gang)

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Dareth ( 47614 )

        Yassir Arafat had a chance to do some good in the world and make a huge difference to the Palestinian people. Instead he stole their aid money and left destitute and angry.

      • Back in the 60s, Tom Lehrer (math professor at MIT) was a well-known satirical pianist. After Kissinger got the Nobel Peace Prize, he felt completely inadequate as a satirist.

        • "Poisoning Pigeons in the Park"

          "Masochism Tango"

          My favorite quote:
          "Lacking exposure in the media, my songs spread slowly. Like herpes, rather than ebola."

    • I always wondered about that... He'd been in office for ~9 months? Really? The Peace Prize? For what? Promising to end a couple of wars (only one which he actually managed)?

      I wonder if they regret that choice? I'm guessing they don't.

    • Re:Nobels in Science Seem OK, It's Peace... (Score:5, Informative)

      by Actually, I do RTFA ( 1058596 ) on Wednesday October 04, 2017 @11:08AM (#55308845)

      The Nobel Prize has isn't supposed to honor achievement in bringing peace. Their explicit goal is to give publicity/support a person/project to make a worthy goal more likely to happen. It's specifically and uniquely aspirational.

      Which, frankly, makes sense. An award for "most promising person/project to change the world for the better soon" is more useful than a retroactive award afterwards. Because, frankly the cash could be used to further those goals, and the publicity makes it more likely.

    • The Nobel prizes awarded for science always seem to make sense. The literature ones most of the time too. It's the peace prizes (e.g., Obama in first year as president...whaaa?) that often leave people shaking their heads.

      Like the noble prize for physics in 1974 which went to two male colleagues of Jocelyn Bell Burnell who actually made the discovery because she dared to have the wrong bits between her legs?

      • Like the noble prize

        The winner gets a medieval English coin worth 1/3 of a pound?

        • I'll pay you a full pound for your "medieval english coin worth 1/3 of a pound". Hell I'll pay you 2. Good deal right?

    • I lost all respect for the Nobel Peace Prize when Yasser Arafat won it...

  • An easy solution (Score:5, Insightful)

    by petes_PoV ( 912422 ) on Wednesday October 04, 2017 @09:11AM (#55307837)

    But the fact that the scientific Nobels have drawn controversy since their very inception hints at deep-rooted problems

    Well, why don't you start a company, make a few $$$$ Billion and then you can establish science-based prizes according to your wishes?

    Seriously. They seem to me to be a great way of acknowledging some aspects of scientific endeavour. They probably aren't perfect, but what is?
    To gripe on about them sounds like an easy, lazy, route. Either that or sour grapes from the people who missed out. Especially when the alternative is nothing compared to the publicity and financial rewards the Nobels offer.

    I suspect that whatever changes were proposed, there would be someone, somewhere, who would find reasons to complain about that, too. But since no scientists (or nominees in other fields) actually starts out with the intention to win a Nobel, it's just a nice little extra if or when the phone call comes.

    Try to be a little more easy-going and less discontented with the world.

    • Re:An easy solution (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 04, 2017 @11:06AM (#55308825)

      As a tenured professor at an R1 institution, I had the same reaction to this year's Nobel Prizes as in the article. The article is spot-on. It's not about discontentment, it's about a scientific culture gone awry and in denial about its problems.

      I've had similar thoughts in the past, but every year they get more and more pressing, and it becomes difficult to ignore. For some reason, this year, it was the very first reaction I had. I was relieved to see the Atlantic piece, to confirm I wasn't just losing my mind.

      The science the Nobels celebrate is indeed worth celebrating. But that's not the point, because the Nobels aren't awarded for an idea or discovery, they're awarded to individuals as proxies. In the process, it ends up reinforcing a lie about how science works that has destructive consequences for everyone, and might lead to its downfall in the long run if nothing is done to change anything.

      What many here and elsewhere don't realize is that the current socially conservative rejection of science and the problems with science are two sides of the same coin. Social conservatives are correct that science *is* political, and full of fads. It's cutthroat, and even as I type this I know there are many, many postdocs and grad students out there slaving for pennies on the dollar they deserve to prop up some PI who deserves a sliver of the recognition they get, even if they themselves mean no harm. I've suffered this myself, and see it referenced between the lines at talks. I've heard heads of massive research divisions discuss the exodus of students from research. The reproducibility crisis is almost everywhere, especially in biomedical research, and it gets ignored. Predatory journals exist because there's no stability in research. Tenure has been crippled of any teeth, even though people act as if it is the problem, and the federal grant system as it is is making things worse, being underfunded, faddish, and nepotistic, and whitewashing state underfunding of universities by compensating through "indirect funds."

      Problems are getting worse.

      I've always loved the Nobel prizes, but this time, for whatever reason, they struck me as a slap in the face of every researcher who doesn't get the credit they deserve. I feel like science has turned into a cult of TED-talk personalities. It's not what it once was.

      • Sorry if this veers just a tad off your extremely valid observations, but today - more often than not - the output of all of the remarkable research done by a vast collective of largely under-appreciated and incredibly hard-working people - is then "acquired" by some publishing "agency" that has struck a deal with a university or college and... presto! Work which was often funded by the public purse is suddenly pay-walled and access is denied to all but subscribing academic centres or the extremely wealthy.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Shinobi ( 19308 )

        And for all those observations, you are speaking out of ignorance.

        The reason the Nobel prizes are awarded as they are, is because the strictures for the foundation, as laid out in his will, were based on how science was conducted when he was alive. Those strictures are upheld by Swedish law, and are incredibly difficult to change. For the Nobel Foundation to change how they award prizes/recognize scientists would be a crime, with serious jail time.

        Yes, those laws mean that we have, as a conservative estimat

  • But it never is, for two reasons:

    a) you can't generally get a good feel for the importance of an achievement in that short a timeframe
    b) there's a backlog. They can't give it to the person who deserves it this year because they need to give to the guy who deserved ten years ago--who didn't get it then because at that time they needed to give it to the guy who deserved it ten years before that, who didn't get it then for the same reason, etc., etc.

  • More of a problem for physics than other fields (Score:4, Insightful)

    by JoshuaZ ( 1134087 ) on Wednesday October 04, 2017 @09:15AM (#55307865) Homepage

    This is much more of a problem for physics than other fields. While there are physics papers with massive numbers of authors, even in biology one won't see more than about 30 authors. And in math it is rare for a paper to have more than 3 or 4 authors- so the equivalent award there, the Fields Medal, is completely reasonable. In some of the physical sciences such as physics one has these very large author lists, and it isn't always completely clear how much actual work was done by some of the people on the collaborations; astronomy seems to be in a similar situation (but since astronomy doesn't have its own famous award, it doesn't come up in this context).

    Note also that Nobel's original will did not have the restriction to 3 people, although it actually had an intent of it going to a single person https://www.nobelprize.org/alfred_nobel/will/will-full.html [nobelprize.org], so if we're going to allow it to go to multiple, why stop at 3? On the other hand, it seems that people understand that when someone like the director of LIGO gets the prize that they are functionally getting it for the project as a whole.

    • I'd say to modernize you could award the Nobel to the paper, and let the researchers figure out who their figurehead should be.

      Why do you need to choose 1-3 humans when it's the discovery you're celebrating?

    • This is much more of a problem for physics than other fields.

      I'm sorry - why is it a problem?

      What does anyone care what other people do with their money? They have implemented their own vision of trying to help, and it's not the same as *your* vision, so you want to change theirs?

      People seem to feel that the point of the Nobels is the science, there's a sizeable psychological benefit. It's something to strive for, something to dream about, and it's a sort of lottery for geeks. Similar to an athlete's $10m salary.

      For evenly-distributed awards for everyone who does wor

      • This seems like a very angry response for what was a rather well-thought out concern.
      • As somebody who as applied for a government grant before, I can tell you that there is plenty of excitement throughout the entire process. When your request is denied there is a feeling of loss, which can galvanize a redoubled effort, or just languish in resentment. Just because a goal seems more pedestrian doesn't mean that it can't be a romantic dream to work towards, at least in the eyes of the person doing the work.

  • When Nobel Prizes became irrelevant (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Nobel Prizes became irrelevant in 2007. That's when the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded jointly to Al Gore and the 676 authors of the fourth IPCC assessment report. There was a time when the Nobel Peace Prize was a significant award. Apparently now you can get one for writing a small piece of a highly politicized work of fiction. Nobel Prizes should be reserved for those who make significant and useful accomplishments, not for creating propaganda.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by IHateFatCashews ( 5103867 )
      The prize became irrelevant in 2009 when they gave it to Barack Obama on the expectations that he would be the anti-war president. Except Obama continued George W.'s foreign policy in Afghanistan and Iraq.

    • IMO it was already over when Theodore Roosevelt got it in 1906. Certainly no later than 1973 when Kissinger got his.

    • Giving the Peace Prize to unworthy recipients didn't start in 2007, youngster.

  • Of course it's subjective, biased, and controversial.

    Celebrity imposed on science, what could go wrong?

  • Totally correct (Score:5, Insightful)

    by quietwalker ( 969769 ) <pdughi@gmail.com> on Wednesday October 04, 2017 @09:26AM (#55307945)

    What we need to do is make sure that everyone who does science gets a nobel participation trophy, to show that we value their work too. That will ensure the awards retain their meaning and value that so far has only been managed by exclusivity and competitive merit.

  • Listen - there's plenty of flaws with the Nobel prizes - historically, lots of prizes that logically should have gone to women were given to their nearest male colleague, and lots of other reflections of the time they lived in. Lots of real heroes forgotten if that's all you go by.

    But that's not really a a big deal in the scope of things. Why?

    Because, the Nobel prizes are a story. A story about a guy involved in the creation of TNT, who started a big fund that pays folks to recognize the advancement of s

  • Instead of complaining do as follows:
    1.) Invent some amazing stuff, or write the great american novel.
    2.) Make a shitload of money.
    3.) When you die, set up a foundation to recognize human achievement, scientific ones in particular, with better citeria than the novel.

    See? Is not that hard. You can do it. Focus your energy in these 3 simple steps, instead of using it to complain about what dear old anachronistic Alfred did way back when....

    PS: For those who did RTFA (the vast majority), Ed Yong is the author

  • "Precisely estimated"? How the hell do you precisely "estimate" something?

    • Precision and accuracy are different things; precision just means you used very small units.

      That being said, you can still estimate accurately, too. It means your error margin is very small.

      • Precision doesn't necessarily refer to the size of the units, but can also be a reference to how closely grouped a set of values are. Tightly grouped values are considered precise. For example, if you were to shoot arrows at a target and all of them were a low and to the left and had all of your shots hit the outermost ring of the target, but had them all hit within an almost impossibly small distance of each other, you would not be very accurate, but you would be quite precise. Whereas someone with a wider
  • It's cool, it's like watching a slow child realize the value of a light switch.

  • A paper has 5,154 "authors"? Did each one contribute two words to the paper? That's absurd!

    The truth is that the work described in the paper had 5154 contributors ranging from minor to major contributions. How were those split up? Were there three of them that provided the key breakthroughs/insights? Or was the paper instead primarily the product of the routine boring plodding work of 2000 of them? A workforce of 5000 people must need HR and catering and bureaucrats - should these be listed as authors too b

  • Nobel prize picking three per year or a paper with 5000 authors?

  • Look at the laureates of the peace prize. Especially in recent history.

  • The AC who posted this was nominated for chemistry Nobel prize, but didn't get it.
  • Should they put the name of the guys working at the power plant who supplied LIGO with power? The guys who championed LIGO have spent the last 40 years, basically their entire professional lives on something that could have been a complete dud. There is some value in that....

  • Now THERE's some scientific consensus for you. LOL

  • Ray Weiss has worked with incredible persistence against great odds to get LIGO to happen. He's also (based on my limited experience meeting him 40 years ago) a really nice, down-to-earth guy. I'm delighted that he won. He's absolutely deserves this award, and it's annoying to see a post on Slashdot carping about it instead of celebrating it.

  • So the person at the top of a scientific team gets the Nobel, and the people under that person get a solid career prospect and professional satisfaction. Sounds pretty good.

    At a company, the upper management gets paid more than the employees.

    In government, the president and other politicians get more credit than the career civil service and staffers.

    Tom Brady gets more attention and money than his lineman.

    I mean... this is how life works, organizations are powerful tools, and individuals get uneven rewards

  • Offer your own prize! (Score:3)

    by Tony Isaac ( 1301187 ) on Wednesday October 04, 2017 @12:54PM (#55309761) Homepage

    The Nobel foundation has a specific process designed to give awards in the way Mr. Nobel wanted them to be given. His methods won't please everybody. So if you want to reward something different, by all means establish your own prizes!

  • Yes, he earned that Nobel Prize.
    https://youtu.be/8gibAubnNcI [youtu.be]

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