The Nobel Peace Prize 2019
nobelprize.org
nobelprize.org
Does anyone have an explanation of why Obama deserved to receive it?
From a purely literary perspective, Handke is a great and influential writer, who was a hot candidate for a long time. For his work, I think the award is justified.
On a personal level, his ex-wife accused him of physical abuse, he held a eulogy for a war criminal, was known for cursing and berating his audience, ...
If he still should have received it regardless depends on a difficult value judgement: do you purely choose based on a writers work, or does his personality influence the decision?
There's plenty of amazing things written by non-white people. However, the Nobel prize for literature should remain a pure meritocracy as much as possible.
That's not to say that its a perfect system. If you point to any given year you can likely find examples of written works that didn't get the award but are arguably as good if not better.
If you intentionally limit the pool of potential awardees to people that are not white, you make a mockery of the award and it loses any sense of prestige or credibility, even if the non-white awardee was truly the best writer. Not only are you discriminating against certain people, you are also doing a disservice to the very people you want to help.
I think a better solution would be to try and make sure the people involved in the process aren't heavily biased towards any specific demographic of authors.
There are probably additional ways to improve the system, but I think if we want the award to mean anything they have to be focused on eliminating discrimination, rather than using it as a tool to generate an equality in outcomes.
Edit: I should note that this reflects my thoughts on prestigious awards being meritocracies, it doesn't reflect my thoughts anything else, there are lots of complicated issues such as affirmative action, university quotas, etc. That I am not making a comment about because I don't know what the optimal solution is to solving those problems.
I.e. If all your examples of good writing are written by a european for other europeans, you will likely associate some cultural practices that aren't required for good writing with your understanding of "good writing." The whole idea of developing taste is, of course, that it is somewhat subjective.
I think the idea of meritocracy is one worth pursuing, but I think modern advocates for it as a thing that actually exists today should engage more energetically with the critiques of it in practice.
> What do you think about the critiques of our understanding of merit - specifically the idea that our cultural experiences bias our understanding and perception of excellence?
I think everyone is biased and that objective thinking is a learned skill that you have to constantly re-evaluate. No one will ever be perfectly unbiased or anywhere near it. Even when you are practicing objective thinking honestly and correctly, there are undoubtedly deeply ingrained biases that you can't shake and you may not even be able to know what those biases are.
However, I think through effort we can improve and minimize the impact of bias. Furthermore, over long periods of time, if we adopt a culture of doing this, it may actually reduce bias overall in the generations to come.
The simple version is I think we are not going to be perfect, but surely we can be better than we are if we try. I think that's better than attempting to prevent bias by introducing extreme forms of bias in the opposite direction.
I don't think it's even remotely the case. If anything, just for the fact that literature cannot be measured independently of times, culture and circumstances. The idea of people in Oslo comparing the merits of an Italian poet with those of a playwright writing in Swahili is pretty ridiculous.
I have couple of free weekends coming up. which book should read ?
The nominations are just trying to signal something related to the functioning of committee. Let's pick man and a woman who signal we are better people now, somehow.
I respect the Nobels decision to award the prize to this peace broker. So many global issues that need attention.
The page you linked shows fossil CO2 emissions per capita:
China: 7.7t CO2/cap/yr
USA: 15.7t CO2/cap/yr
Denver seems like a good place to give a speech.
Of course, country size does matter, but it's unfair to simply compare total emissions when there's such a huge difference in population size.
It's important to reduce emissions everywhere, but China is the key player to watch.
I’m looking at the page I linked. Per-capita is basically irrelevant, the issue is the total emissions under the control of any one government. Or should China not act until they match the US per-capita but with 3-4x the population?
Further the US and European trends are already downwards. China’s is dramatically upwards.
US CO2 emission trends are downwards because the US stopped burning coal. In the same time, they've switched to natural gas produced by fracking. Fracking leaks methane. Taking methane and CO2 emissions together, US greenhouse gas trends are stable and not downward.
Source: https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-literal-gas...
I don't know about EU trends. I'm not very optimistic.
Total emissions definitely matter (no need to give speeches in Palau even if per-capita emissions are much greater than in the USA), but considering this number without regard to the population size is completely unrealistic and insensitive.
For China's overall emissions to get to the same level as the USA, that means a Chinese citizen would be expected, on average, to emit less than half of what a US citizen emits.
Would you expect a Chinese citizen to only eat half of what a US citizen eats, just because there are more people in their country ? Of course not.
China's trend is dramatically upwards because a big chunk of the population is still getting out of poverty. Of course CO2 emissions are increasing.
The ecosystem doesn’t actually care whose feelings are hurt, you know. It’s a weird argument to make. China is the single largest emitter of CO2, plastic waste in the oceans, etc etc. Yet we expect them to do nothing about it until 2030 at the earliest, but just stay on their upward trend. Which is about the same time as the ecosystem collapses entirely according to AOC. But we mustn’t be “insensitive” about it!
(Not that they'd be interested in that, but still.)
Climate change will very nearly directly cause war. It will and already is causing food shortages, flooding, drought, etc. This will cause mass migration and conflict for resources. It's about as close to directly causing war as a thing can be.
I fail to see what or why she is important, we are past good speech in terms of ecology, what actions does she recommends?
> what actions does she recommend
She recommends we listen to the science. Nothing more, nothing less.
Consensus is a probability distribution.
Greta talks about the 'findings' of approximately 4% of the IPCC scientists conclusions, on one extreme of the consensus.
Obviously none of the models are available to examine, so we'll take their word for it, like a child would.
I'm going on a limb here to be charitable despite the anti-credibility marker in your last sentence.
Even a 2°C average increase is very, very bad, with intense weather events every year, countries like India not being able to support their population density, tropical rainforests turning into savannahs. It is also a mass extinction scenario.
“Business-as-usual” is not the most likely outcome. It completely neglects technological development trajectories which make something like 2.5 deg absolutely achievable by simple market forces without radical action. But in any case...
> This is means billions of people migrating across national boundaries and/or dead, extinction of most species, a dramatic reduction in farm land, tropical rainforests ceasing to exist. I doubt humanity's technological advances can be sustained when we can't even feed ourselves.
All of that is rampant speculation. THIS is what I’m calling out as non-consensus.
> Even a 2°C average increase is very, very bad, with intense weather events every year, countries like India not being able to support their population density, tropical rainforests turning into savannahs. It is also a mass extinction scenario.
That’s a strange thing to say. How do you reconcile that statement with the fact that higher temperatures mean more rainfall, higher CO2 levels mean better plant growth, and geologic record which indicates that when the earth was previously that much warmer it was covered pole-to-pole with lush tropical rainforests?
Is she? I've only watched her "how dare you" speech and have read a couple of hit pieces about how she doesn't like Trump (granted, it's not necessarily her fault that journalists focus on this part), but I haven't been exposed to any actual content about climate change because of her.
At that time we had only 10 years to fix the problem, now scientists graciously give us 12 years.
Fortunately, we did something in those 10 years, as the article pleaded.
wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyoto_Protocol
Without wanting to say anything about this year’s winner (if only because of a lack of my personal knowledge which, to be honest, is probably embarrasing): The prize has sometimes been awarded in a very aspirational way, i.e. not so much for past work, but more as an encouragement based on not so much past work. I view giving the award to Obama in that way, for example.
I do think that’s a valid and potentially valuable approach to giving out the prize. I’m not sure giving the prize to someone decades after they did something important is very useful, especially for such an overtly political prize. I do think that the Nobel Peace Prize has to dare to be brave and also dare to be wrong. It should not pick safe choices where a wide consensus has already formed.
Of course I also can see the other side, too: If you are wrong too often you risk becoming a joke and irrelevant, all encouragement is for nothing. So this is a hard problem to solve. But still: overall I think being daring is the right approach for a prize such as this. That the goal is to say with the prize: “We want to support the great work this person is doing right now, right in this moment!”
In that light I’m quite tolerant to some missteps if the Peace Prize is willing to be brave and get right into the fray, also of things that are still hotly contested.
Obama's prize, for example, was clearly too early. Although it would have worked if it had been given to the American voter instead. To elect a black president in a country with such a history of extreme racism against black people, that's a fantastic step forward. But it was the voters who did that. Awarding it for getting elected, or even for that nice speech that Obama made, it feels like that's a bit of a thin reason.
Similarly, I know a lot of people would like to have seen it go to Greta Thunberg, and it would have been a lot more deserved than some other recipients, but I still think it's better to wait a year, to see the real impact she's had.
I also imagined that if Greta had gotten it, she might have given an angry speech that she doesn't want awards, she wants people to act, and I would have agreed.
But I can also see and understand your point of view. It’s just a different (and also valid) idea of what the Prize is supposed to be.
Expect a similar sigh of relief once Trump goes, though perhaps a bit more muted because we're more cynical about what will come next by now.