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Comment by em500 | Hacker News Reader

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I do think it's funny that the economics prize is the one that "bought" its way into this prestige.

Little to no opinion on what it should be called, personally. The asterisk associated with the name is just what comes to mind first.

I used to do the "it's not a real nobel" take as well when I was young and edgy, and then I realized that Alfred Nobel was just another rich guy buying his way post-mortem prestige*, not even doing so during his life. Even if "most of the applications were civil", with the economic devastation it brought and the undeniable military uses, I'm not sure the "merchant of death" moniker was unearned.

So by now, I think that the Sveriges riksbanks pris might have "better pedigree" and that Alfred Nobel is honored by the dedication, especially given the stellar research that it is often recognizing

The moral burden that Nobel's memory should bear is probably worth debating but we absolutely should take the opportunity to remind ourselves that the Nobel prize (whether the 'actual' one or this riksbanks thing) is one possible prize among many others much lesser known, and that there frequently is highly important research that never wins any notable prize at all. Examples: Freeman Dyson, Gilbert Lewis, Margaret Burbidge -- none of them won the Nobel but won other prizes for arguably equally important work. I'm not even suggesting going 'out there' and mentioning someone like Stephen Wolfram.

The way that the Nobel prize gets referred to in American media sometimes makes me feel like it is an almost religious invocation (except that they do not actually say the words "hallowed" or "blessed") -- if a Nobel laureate has said X is the case, who are you to say X is not the case, etc.

What economic devastation? Honest question I'm not sure what's the harm in civilian use of dynamite?

Economically, dynamite has been highly beneficial, as it can do a huge number of man hours of work in seconds.

If the ACM, instead of founding the Turing award, had attempted to pay to get a Nobel memorial prize in Computer Science, we would have easily recognized it for what it was - a pathetic play for respectability.

We could reasonably describe founding the prizes as a pathetic play for respectability on the behalf of Nobel himself.

Posthumous respectability perhaps. But as far as things go, I didn't like my leaked obituary so I decided to do something good is not pathetic IMHO.

The name Computer Science itself is a marketing ploy to convince people that it is a real science (and not just another branch of engineering). Seems to be working for CS, and I can easily imagine people on this forum would be happy to defend the legitimacy of the Swedish Institute of Sciences Nobel Memorial Prize in Computational Science.

I think the issue is not an objection to marketing but an objection to the inherently political nature of economics. The people who don't like the phrase Noble Prize in Economics generally don't agree with the political aspirations of neoliberal economists to shape and control global policy. There is something very troubling about the amount of power that central bankers and academics wield given how flimsy their methods are.

Historically Computer Science was often more associated with mathematics in academia than it was with electrical engineering--depending upon the school. Today, most people would probably agree that it's mostly an engineering discipline, albeit perhaps lacking some of the formal methods and practices that other branches of engineering tend to have. But it was presumably less clear when the term was coined in the early 1960s.

> albeit perhaps lacking some of the formal methods and practices that other branches of engineering tend to have.

I'd like to point out that this depends heavily on your institution. My CS program had a class literally called "Formal methods", and every student was required to learn formal proofs before their first programming-heavy class (namely, "Data Structures I").

> I'd like to point out that this depends heavily on your institution. My CS program had a class literally called "Formal methods", and every student was required to learn formal proofs before their first programming-heavy class (namely, "Data Structures I").

But compare usage of formal methods and practices in software engineers in a startup (or even well-established company) with engineers designing a bridge, for example.

My degree is in "Computer Science", NOT "Software engineering" and for that and other reasons I am against calling myself a "Software engineer"

I'm not an engineer. I am a subject matter expert employed as a generalist.

Much of theoretical computer science is math, like much of modern theoretical physics is also math. “Computational science” brings up images of computational complexity theory, computability, information theory, distributed consensus, type theory etc.

So maybe not a marketing ploy.

> Much of theoretical computer science is math, like much of modern theoretical physics is also math.

Math is not science - regardless of whether it’s masquerading as computer science or certain branches of theoretical physics.

This makes me sound down on mathematics which I’m certainly not. It’s both useful and can be profoundly beautiful. And it can be an integral tool in science — or studied on its own merits. But it’s not science.

>Much of theoretical computer science is math

Does that make it a science? I think nobody in this thread is using the same definition of science.

Isn't CS proper (not software engineering) much more a field of math?

> I think the issue is not an objection to marketing but an objection to the inherently political nature of economics. The people who don't like the phrase Noble Prize in Economics generally don't agree with the political aspirations of neoliberal economists to shape and control global policy. There is something very troubling about the amount of power that central bankers and academics wield given how flimsy their methods are.

Hmm, good point, I wonder if it's that or just good old internet "ackhuallyyy".

Or an acceptance of the fact that many orders of magnitude more people would recognize that a Nobel Prize in Computer Science represented a notable achievement than would have any idea what the Turing award is and why they should care.

(Obviously they didn't and there are many important awards in their respective fields that don't have Nobel in their titles but it's hard to dispute that the Nobel prizes carry a lot of brand recognition.)

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