Ask HN: How long until a social media influencer wins a Nobel Prize? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How long until a social media influencer wins a Nobel Prize?

3 pointsarunsupe6 comments

The Nobel Committee has shown a tendency to award prizes not just for meaningful technical contributions, but also for work with just contemporary relevance. This could be seen as an attempt to maintain their own relevance in the modern world. Given this trend, is it inevitable that a social media influencer with a large following but no original scientific work will receive a Nobel Prize? If so, how soon might this happen?

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I see no reason to think that the science prizes have any interest in "social relevance".

The peace and literature prizes do, because those subjects are defined by their contemporary relevance. The peace prize is frequently controversial, and I'd say that it's best suited to bring attention to somebody who isn't already famous.

Most of the Peace prizes that people do widely agree on are already "influencers", and have been since the beginning. Their influence usually requires physical presence and a lot of effort, but I see no reason it couldn't go to somebody who was effective just by being on social media.

A literature prize could conceivably be given for a social media account, but it seems unlikely to be soon. Even a controversial choice like Bob Dylan got it for a lifetime of highly enduring work.

I say 25+ years. The prize committee has to be used to the idea of influencers, so once Gen Z dominates the committee, we'll see one. Of course, the influencer will need to do something worthy —maybe an influencer who aids in world peace. Or one who uses their followers to aid in a world-changing study or experiment.

I'm more interested in knowing what an influencer will need to do to get the price.

My question was tongue-in-cheek. I feel the Nobel committee, like every other organization, is also trying to stay relevant and topical. Hard to do this by giving out prizes to old scientists from obscure fields, no matter how important their findings. Hence, a congratulatory prize for the first black president of the USA, a consolation prize for another for losing to Bush, now prizes for computer scientists at the center of the AI fad... An influencer is the logical endpoint for this trend. Other examples of such slipping-down-the-slope: "Time's person of the year" is always a person in the limelight, Oscars favor blockbusters rather than movies with great acting, ditto with music awards, companies that rebranded to the .com fad or the iDevice fad...

Social media influencers aren't going away. They will evolve over time and become more ingrained into our society. It wouldn't surprise me if an economist with a large following got a Nobel. Using social media will just become part of many people's careers. It's part of the future.

Barack Obama already did.

:-)

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