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Comment by meister0 | Hacker News Reader

Luboš Motl, "Global warming: Nobel Prize in Physics has become a joke, too" https://motls.blogspot.com/2021/10/global-warming-nobel-priz...

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Does anyone really care about Luboš Motl's ramblings any more? He seems to be the prime example of a smart person who gets too attached to his ideas and beliefs so he just digs deeper.

Yes for string theory and all related topics, with the exception of interpretation of quantum mechanics. In which his adoption of the Copenhagen interpretation is very reasonable as praxis, but doesn't make sense to me as metaphysics.

He’ll be the last string theorist when everyone else finally understood it was a dead end, thereby proving my point.

Who is this lunatic and why should I care about his ramblings about Al Gore' Marxist eco-terrorism camps?

He was a very promising theoretical physicist who was well respected for his fundamental physics knowledge (including useful public service like his contributions to the physics stackexchange and a very informative science blog). Then he became very zealous in his non-scientific beliefs (the current link being a good example). If anything, it is good to know about him as a cautionary tale.

Right. Also informative is the tale of Billy Cottrell, but that's getting way off topic.

As a physicist primarily working in complex systems and machine learning, I was happy that complex systems were finally getting recognition.

From the get-go this article was definitely the opposite of my opinions but I wanted to see what other people who obviously don’t like the field don’t like about it. His posturing using a Feynman anecdote left me confused but this quote just made me realize that it’s not complex systems he doesn’t like, it’s the message of the study:

> The other types of Nobel Prizes, especially those for peace and perhaps literature, have a track record featuring lots of terrorists and communists who got their award for something disgusting that was however popular among some leftists or haters of the Western world and similar folks. The late terrorist Arafat had to get one because he was a darling of many such people. Obama got a prize for peace before he did anything of substance and before he started dozens of wars (Trump would have deserved the Nobel Prize in Peace about 50 times more than Obama but for obvious political reasons, he didn't get one). Al Gore got his one-half of a Nobel Prize for a fraudulent PowerPoint presentation about the catastrophic global warming because tons of dishonest leftists loved these kinds of anti-scientific lies.

It is terrible when people who posture themselves as thinking scientifically suddenly throw out all logic when the results don’t fit their narrative.

Pretty obvious that Motl has an axe to grind when he mentions Arafat's peace prize but forgets to mention that he had to share it with two Israeli war criminals. Or that the architect of the Vietnam War, Henry Kissinger, also has received the prize. Certainly, some recipients of the prize have been controversial but it is not true that only leftists' darlings are awarded the prize.

I’m also a physicist and (also?) a leftist and I don’t think Motl is particularly wrong in your quote. Exaggerated, but I do think the Nobel prizes have a leftist/progressist tendency, and his examples are not that far off.

So in the context of this years prize, I think it’s fair criticism, albeit somewhat carelessly delivered and unrigorous.

There's a neoliberal bias where the peace prize is given out to Kissenger, Obama, Arafat/Perez/Rabin.

But if you only gave it out to actually peaceful people there would probably be a massive leftist/progressive slant (which makes no sense to the people in the crowd who think the CCP is leftist, but that is their problem).

I believe it is wiser to assume that bias exists everywhere and to choose whether you accept it or not. You accept it, Motl does not

A link to a substantive critique of this prize by a working theoretical physicist should not be downvoted.

> The explanation of the award involving the "interplay" is incredibly vague. What is the precise discovery or the paper that is being appreciated here?

Nobel award explanations are directed at the general public. Prizes themselves are awarded for a lifetime contribution to the field and/or to the society through the work in the field.

> I reserve the right to ban any commenter who mentions the Nobel Prize in a positive sense.

A substantive critique?

As far as I understood the post, the main weakness of the laureates' research is that it was not "hard" enough. And that the contribution of their research to the society should not matter. I am watching some lectures from laureates on YT now and I already wrote down a favourite quote from Syukuro Manabe: "You can never win, competing with nature in complexity".

As it's published within an hour of the announcement, you will allow me a measure of scepticism that this is really something "substantive" as opposed to merely "wordy".

Not a substantive critique by a working physicist, a rant by a blogger who thrives on controversy.

A climate change denier rent about a Nobel prize awarded for work on climate change can be safely downvoted. Nothing of value is lost.

I think we disagree about the "substantive" part.

From the post:

“Obama got a prize for peace before he did anything of substance and before he started dozens of wars (Trump would have deserved the Nobel Prize in Peace about 50 times more than Obama but for obvious political reasons, he didn't get one).”

Not suggesting that Obama deserved the Nobel prize, but to suggest that Trump deserved it “50 times more” is a ridiculous thing to say no matter how you slice it.

It is also not the same body that selects for the Peace Prize as the Physics one (different body in a different country), so I don't see how that could be used in any way as an argument against these ones.

Fifty times zero is still zero.

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