Nobel is less noble than we'd hope.
Oct. 10th, 2009 01:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
serynI was kind of annoyed about the Nobel prizes this year. Well, secondarily annoyed, because everyone seemed so angry.
Friend with a used bookstore was upset because the book that won for literature is long out of print so no one has any, but of course that kind of win generates a lot of requests. The Nobel committee should have released a shortlist in advance so the publishers could run up copies of all of them (because it's not like being shortlisted by the Nobel committee is peanuts).
Then it was the medicine one which was for something from years ago. It's hard to admire that because most of the time the winners no longer do any actual experiments.
There was that huge kerfuffle about Obama winning the peace prize. It really angers me that the peace prize is given to people before they accomplish anything. There isn't even any real proof that the idea is sound because the work isn't even started. (This is true for all winners of the Nobel Peace Prize, I'm not just ragging on Obama.)
So for science and literature and economics, the winners wait decades, until a large fraction of them die unacknowledged because Nobels are not awarded posthumously, but the peace prizes are given to people whose plans will likely make things significantly worse but we can't tell. Peace prizes are incentives. Science prizes are after it's too late for the money to do any good.
It's screwed up. Obviously if we made the peace prize recipients wait a minimum of 10 years to see how well their ideas hold water in the real world, we wouldn't have to give it out as often since many of the recipients die rather early.
I have personally met more than my share of Nobel winners. All in physics or medicine categories. And every single one of them that won no longer did daily work in the lab or even theoretical work. All their time was taken up managing postdocs and getting grant money and putting together gladhanding materials or being on committees. It's hard to see the point in rewarding them at that point in their careers. But science has the back-assward personnel structure that guarantees the people who might make actual breakthroughs are mired in minutiae while the people who can barely find their own asses when they're handed to them are looking at experimental results. Literature is similar because the only people who get to write a second book are the ones who did their own self-promotion--- a skillset which is almost entirely disjoint from writing--- it almost creates a vacuum wherein nothing of value can possibly be published.
I haven't looked at a list of peace prize recipients, but since the world still has the same hot spots of political upheaval, it seems pretty likely that no one who won was actually successful.
Friend with a used bookstore was upset because the book that won for literature is long out of print so no one has any, but of course that kind of win generates a lot of requests. The Nobel committee should have released a shortlist in advance so the publishers could run up copies of all of them (because it's not like being shortlisted by the Nobel committee is peanuts).
Then it was the medicine one which was for something from years ago. It's hard to admire that because most of the time the winners no longer do any actual experiments.
There was that huge kerfuffle about Obama winning the peace prize. It really angers me that the peace prize is given to people before they accomplish anything. There isn't even any real proof that the idea is sound because the work isn't even started. (This is true for all winners of the Nobel Peace Prize, I'm not just ragging on Obama.)
So for science and literature and economics, the winners wait decades, until a large fraction of them die unacknowledged because Nobels are not awarded posthumously, but the peace prizes are given to people whose plans will likely make things significantly worse but we can't tell. Peace prizes are incentives. Science prizes are after it's too late for the money to do any good.
It's screwed up. Obviously if we made the peace prize recipients wait a minimum of 10 years to see how well their ideas hold water in the real world, we wouldn't have to give it out as often since many of the recipients die rather early.
I have personally met more than my share of Nobel winners. All in physics or medicine categories. And every single one of them that won no longer did daily work in the lab or even theoretical work. All their time was taken up managing postdocs and getting grant money and putting together gladhanding materials or being on committees. It's hard to see the point in rewarding them at that point in their careers. But science has the back-assward personnel structure that guarantees the people who might make actual breakthroughs are mired in minutiae while the people who can barely find their own asses when they're handed to them are looking at experimental results. Literature is similar because the only people who get to write a second book are the ones who did their own self-promotion--- a skillset which is almost entirely disjoint from writing--- it almost creates a vacuum wherein nothing of value can possibly be published.
I haven't looked at a list of peace prize recipients, but since the world still has the same hot spots of political upheaval, it seems pretty likely that no one who won was actually successful.
