Comment by torstenvl | Hacker News Reader

Comment by torstenvl | Hacker News Reader

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It's spelled "prestigious" because we all agree it's spelled "prestigious."

The word has meaning because we all agree it has meaning.

Corporations exist because we all agree that corporations exist.

Money has value because we all agree that it has value.

The United States of America exists because we all agree that it exists.

Yes, there is a difference between objective reality and intersubjective reality. But I think you're making too much of that difference.

A huge amount of our everyday world is based entirely off broad mass agreement. The vast majority of the things we interact with in modern life would immediately cease to exist if all the people who believed in them just vanished one day - if an extraterrestrial species arrived on Earth the day after, they would not be able to observe almost anything about our lives. That doesn't mean our reality is fake or that our interaction with it is arbitrary. It just means that it is geopolitically and/or culturally defined.

Bottom line: Yes, social science is hard, but lighten up.

Your comparison with corporations and nations is not entirely fitting. Money and words work out fine.

In the case of nations, we don't have to agree for them to be real. For example, China (the Peoples Republic of China) does not agree that Taiwan (the Republic of China) exists or vice versa, yet both are undeniably real. The same with Serbia and Kosovo.

Some things exist only because of convention or an agreement between people, like the value of a Nobel prize or money.

Other things exist because we can empirically prove that they exist, like protons and gravity. If we all agree that they don't exist, it doesn't make it so.

I think you're just splitting hairs here. You didn't invalidate the parent's point by finding a few counterexamples; on the contrary I think you just reinforced it by showing when it does and doesn't apply. The parent never claimed that all things in the world are subject to mass agreement.

> For example, China (the Peoples Republic of China) does not agree that Taiwan (the Republic of China) exists or vice versa

Yes, they do. The government calling itself the PRC denies the legitimacy of the ROC, and vice versa, but despite each claiming to be the sole legitimate government of the combined territory, each very clearly believes that the other exists, and reacts to the actions of the other and to third parties’ actions toward the other.

Since when does "broad mass agreement" have to mean "universal agreement"? The idea of intersubjectivity has never relied on there being zero dissent. Your argument is a straw man at best.

The prize isn’t terribly prestigious in the first place: they’ve been accused of swedish bias since day one, and it doesn’t have a great track record of acknowledging people who actually become loved and/or acclaimed.

Iirc my lit friends follow the Man Booker prize more closely; perhaps there are other non-english prizes that could also compete with the swedes.

The National Book Award is pretty prestigious in the States.

> it doesn’t have a great track record of acknowledging people who actually become loved and/or acclaimed

Why should they have? That's not what the statutes say should be awarded so that particular criticism is a bit unfair.

I'm only suggesting we could consider other awards more prestigious than the Nobel.

Keep in mind that the Nobel prize comes with an approximately $1 million USD cash award. It's not just a fancy gold medal.

And has been around for over 100 years with a pretty good track record of awarding the prize to innovations that have stood the test of time (with some notable exceptions when it comes to the peace prize).

You first. Then analyze the impact that has.

We can. I've never made a decision to read a book due to its author having won a Nobel prize, nor watched a film because of it being an Academy Award winner. The opinions of people in those particular insider-groups are not interesting to me (except indirectly, in how they affect broader society; that's quite interesting).

Actually sometimes after hearing about a book or film I think I might be interested in I'll go and read a load of 'normal people' reviews on Amazon or IMDb and they might sway me one way or the other. They may not be skilled reviewers but they use their own words and it helps me ascertain what kind of persons they are and whether their opinions are likely to be in tune with my own. Also I get a spread, rather than niche view.

So I suppose that means that for me, normal people's opinions hold more prestige than the Nobel Committee's.

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