Nobel Disease
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
Sounds pretty much like every founder out there who strike gold once in the past now believing their genius now clearly applies to everything everywhere, including country governance, economics and sociology. It probably doesn't help that others around them are affected in similar ways and become more sycophantic because of the "award" these two types of people win.
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GmJI6qIqURA>
Thanks for some coffeetime thoughts.
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Something I have in common with Ms. Collier is that we both interpreted Atlas Shrugged as satirical, when in fact Author Rand was dead serious on her "objectivist" theories within her book.
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My Twin and I approach life almost entirely different, akin to his opposite enjoyment of Shrugged as "aspirational utopia."
Even with identical DNA, our brains differ on such fundamental outlook of the elites' motivations (vs *almost everybody elses').
Mathematicians believe we're lucky to have been spared the Nobel Prize. While some repeat a discredited story this was because Gösta Mittag-Leffler was sleeping with Nobel's wife, it is generally felt that mixing ego and the possibility of a Nobel Prize has toxic effects on a field.
We now have both the Fields Medal and the Abel Prize, but both pass over the midlife period when ego eclipses talent.
'Biologically speaking', wouldn't that 'just' be something like breeds?
Given an individual's race (looking at them and asking) and the medical literature they change their treatments if need be.
Skin color and place of origin is a pretty rough but decent way to do this?
If need be they could just sequence your genes, afterall isn't that exactly how they connect and learn about hereditary diseases or know that certain races of people are predisposed to certain diseases?
"This man looks x and is from y and is complaining about z" I thought this was like basic medicine?
You're acting like gentics is a failed research field or something kinda confused on your point here.
How, exactly, would we know it's a decent way?
I suspect it's not really about "race" which is full of wrong meanings; it's just that "race" in the US mostly also means genetically close populations, like black people originally coming through slave trade from one of a few places in Africa and therefore sharing some similar traits. But if you scaled research to a representative sample of all "black" or "asian" (etc) people, any advantage this gives you would evaporate
It's not "science" but don't doctors do this stuff like every single day?
Certainly very fast, but is that conclusion correct? Is it really more common for "black" people, and even if so does that apply in this case? I have my doubts, having a bit of an experience with how doctors operate.
> For instance, you cannot use genetic studies to define a race
is weak. For millennia we had phenomena that science couldn't describe. For many different reasons. One can now say that due to this the phenomena simply don't exists, since they didn't had a sound scientific understanding base. But that was obviously wrong.
To give you one of thousands example, think of how long it took science e.g. to understand lightnings. You could analyze the lightnings by form, and you ended up with thousands of forms. And then you could just say "Oh, this is so unscientific (because by some arbitrary limit reached), in reality lightning doesn't exist".
If some phenomena 1) isn't yet 100% scientifically described, then this is perhaps just a sign that science isn't far enough, hasn't used the proper methodology?
This is BTW a reason why I like the german word for science better than the english one. In german, it's "Wissenschaft" -> "knowledge creation". It's not "Wissenhab" -> "knowledge having". The word itself, unlike the english one, transports the idea that our knowledge is still limited. And that science is a process, not some achieved state.
1) "race" isn't just some old-white-man western concept. If you go to China, then you see that they also has such a concept --- and a quite strong one about "Han chinese". Or some african tribes, they even thought wars (Tuts & Hutu in Ruanda). Maybe race isn't a genetic concept, but a sociology one, e.g. because humans for whatever reason want to have an "us and they" thingy. In such a case searching for race genetics is simply the wrong methodology. Rendering the approach invalid, but nothing else.
Whole science is racist ... it's totally inaccessible to people with IQ 2 standard deviations below average.
Keep downvoting my comment because reality offends you. I really love the "level of thinking" that this will somehow hurt me.
Thank you for proving my point.
Imagine a 5 year old who is good at basketball. His parents notice it and enroll him in a class. Coaches recognize his talent and dedicate special time to him. He trains every morning, every night and entire weekends through primary, middle and high school. Gets barely any time for classes, but he anyways just needs a passing grade (which teachers are happy to help him with). He joins advanced youth academies, travels for tournaments across the country. No time for distractions. No TV, no parties, barely any social time at all. He gets a sports scholarship in college. Finally goes pro. Continues training hard for every waking minute. Plays hard for years and is considered one of the best players in the world. Absolute peak of achievement in his field.
Then the night he wins a championship a reporter shoves a microphone in his face and asks "what are your thoughts on the geopolitical crisis developing in the East China sea?" And whatever he says will make the front page, generate countless social media clips and will undoubtedly influence the opinions of millions.
And this applies to every field. Look at all the VCs who make a lucky bet and then sit on a hundred podcasts proclaiming "world peace is easy, actually".
Is this actually true, based on just one statement?
Usually the ones who change their minds so easily, are following a person like a cult almost, and go with whatever they say, whenever they say.
There aren't huge masses of millions of people idly watching TV, coming across an interview with some random baseball star and trusts his opinion on stuff.
Personally, I think in generally the problem is "celebrity worship", and all the related things, rather than just about the specific person who said something, or even about the platform. People are so quick to just go "Well, I like that person, so whatever they say, is what I think more or less" which is absolutely bananas to me.
I think it's partly because fame also brings a large number of "yes man" around people. If you let your ego get to you you'll believe it.
Kinda a common and real problem amoung the ruling classes of history forever now. It's also why some of the best rules have lower egos because it's less effective.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_effect
More generally, if someone is good at something (here, basketball), or even just because he is tall, attractive,... we instinctively assume that he is good at everything (like here, geopolitics).
Or rather, I see no attempt to make an argument that Nobel laureates are statistically _more_ likely than other "well-known" non-politicians to hold non-majoritarian ideas... nor any attempt to argue that the ideas followed rather than preceded the award.
As an (almost retired) anthropologist with background in genetics, I do certainly nurture yet unverified and pretty unorthodox convictions, if only as a matter of hypothesis. Looking around me among colleagues who have a wealth of experience, cultivating strange ideas seems to be very common and indeed part of the discovery process.
How can one find new insight without erring ?
Nobel Prize winners won the prize because they had unorthodox ways of thinking that led them to an actual discovery. I'd think that it's quite normal that 1 out of 10000 unorthodox beliefs ends up being a scientific reality of high impact.
i.e. ~1 out of 10000 unorthodox thinkers will win the Nobel Prize, 9999/10000 of those thinkers you will never hear about. For the one who won, it's likely they will have continued unorthodox ideas, 9999/10000 of which will not lead to a second Nobel Prize.
I agree that the share of unorthodox thinkers should all in all be higher among those winners. This is indeed what made them advanced in their field. But the main bias remains: looking at those whose voice reaches even when they venture out of their field rather than the full pull of (good) scientists.
A lot of discoveries are made by someone who "imported" insights from one field to another.
This is precisely what I meant to say (and seemingly failed) and why I upvote you!
For all I know, they all could have been racists, psylocibe users, etc. long before they received any prizes and the associated attention.
In fact, it could even be possible that they had much worse and radical beliefs earlier in life which were tempered by the burden of being a thought leader.
I'd go as far as to say that this is a good example of an article that should be removed from Wikipedia.
It's literally the second sentence of the article.
Take any other award, list people who got it and had "incorrect beliefs", add an article about it and preamble it with "it is unclear whether it is an effect of the award". What purpose does it serve? Do you think there should be articles for all of those "diseases"?
Nebula award disease
Crossword Book award disease
Turing award disease
Pulitzer award disease
Fields medalist disease
et cetera?
That is not to say that the theory holds water. Flat Earth theory is also notable and has a wiki page, even if blatantly wrong. There is no hyperboloid Earth theory wiki page.
Among mathematicians, I wouldn't claim that "Fields medalist disease" is an unusual term, though this term is typically meant to mean "some mathematician got a Fields medal, but did not prove any other deep mathematical result afterwards". There also exists the much more derogatory term "dead wood" for mathematicians who once proved highly celebrated results, but after they got tenured, no they didn't manage to prove anything deep anymore."
Concerning the "crackpot undertone" of "Nobel Disease": lots of mathematicians know the names of achieved mathematicians who got into some eccentric ideas ("eccentric" in the sense of "outside the Overton window") once they got older.
Famous examples for the latter point are Serge Lang
> https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Serge_Lang&oldid=...
or Anatoly Fomenko
> https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Anatoly_Fomenko&o...
We don’t do that with Fields medal winners. Mainly because most people don’t even know what a Fields medal is. I can’t write a headline that relies on Elizabeth Moon’s or Stanislav Smirnov’s borrowed authority because the average joe doesn’t know who they are. But that definitely happened with multiple Nobel prize winners because the Nobel prize is that well known. A Nobel prize winners opinion on race science is inherently newsworthy.
You know how we know the Nobel is in a different league to these other awards? Because when you explain what a Fields Medal is to someone who hasn’t heard of it, you say “it’s the Nobel prize for math”.
And the fame of the prize leads to attention, which in the words of Milton Friedman, is “flattering but also corrupting”.
"Let the cobbler not judge beyond the shoe"
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=ultracrepidari...
It cannot be good for you for everyone to assume that you are somehow omniscient all of a sudden.
At either extreme, it isn't good. You start believing it and overestimating yourself more and ore, or you are buried under an ever increasing sense of impostor syndrome.
He did not really embrace some weird idea once he got a Nobel: the weird itself was the reason for the Nobel prize.
I think that once people achieve a certain level of success, they start to think, 'I can get away with this much.'
That's why I'm not successful. I'm trying not to lose my critical perspective. I consider that critical perspective my treasure.
That's actually the premise of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. If you actually read the book there is no Mr. Hyde, it was Jekyll all along. It was a commentary on the times it was written in where the rich elite would behave horribly in "private" while maintaining a social standing in public suited to their supposed stature. They believed they were above the law.
> During the COVID-19 pandemic, Montagnier promoted the idea that SARS-CoV-2 was deliberately created and escaped from a laboratory
My understanding is that quite some researchers think that the lab leak hypothesis is possible, but unprovable at this point. I know Wikipedia treats it as some fringe hoax, but to me it seems almost religious. In the sense that the idea has been marked as a conspiracy theory at the very beginning and nothing can change that stance anymore. When a scientist supports it, it discredits the scientist instead of supporting the theory.
(For transparency, my personal opinion on covid origin is that I find it difficult to believe either side of the debate when it claims it is 100% sure.)
https://theintercept.com/2021/09/23/coronavirus-research-gra...
That said, Montagnier appears to have speculated that SARS-CoV-2 contains genetic information from HIV. That seems almost surely false, since the sequences he cited occur frequently in many organisms.
https://apnews.com/article/conspiracy-theories-iran-only-on-...
When you get good at coding, you get a lot of positive reinforcement coming from a machine rather than other people. What that does to our psychology seems worth considering. Might we also have the same feeling of "I'm usually right!" and might that feeling transfer to domains where it's not backed up by any real learning?
Scientific and political beliefs often do not stand the test of time, but is it fair to blame the people of past eras for their misjudgements using the values of today?
How do we know for sure when we're right about something?
the problem with this reasoning is that it assumes or tries to imply that people "back then" all held such backwards beliefs, which far too often is not the case. For instance, see how Morse's diatribes on slavery and racism are presented - but the state he was born and operated in already abolished slavery about a decade before his birth.
The whole page is poor.
-An expectation that because a scientist is incredibly good at one thing, they must be good at another, entirely different type of thing. This seems to uniquely apply to scientists.
We don't judge a phenomenal football player for not being an incredible archer, but then we do judge a Nobel prize-winning physicist for believing in astrology.
-I think this can sometimes be two sides of the same coin: The same divergent thinking that helps you make revolutionary discoveries (you're unwilling to take the status quo for granted) also makes you explore "strange" ideas.
The deeper issue here I think is that they are being treated as gods after they are awarded this prize. And that's mostly a media/journalism problem and their values.
“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself.” - Richard Feynman
Absolutely wild shit whoa
See Musk, whom believes that if he's done A or B right, makes him an expert on the entire alphabet.
That doesn't make him an expert in physics, computing, politics, economy, etc, etc.
Has he had anything to do with the "success" of his companies other than as a fundraiser, i.e., grifter? Have people forgot about his tunnel company, his solar company, the fact that he was kicked out of PayPal, someone else actually runs SpaceX, his ridiculous $40+ billion dollar purchase of Twitter, and his recent grifts to basically rid himself of the massive debt and risk of his Twitter purchase by forming pyramid companies?
The dude is a joke of an entrepreneur. He is a grifter and nothing more. Grifters can be "successful", unfortunately.
Further, this post is discussing intellectuals and not entrepreneurs.
Nobel prize winners are the smartest people on the planet, people go out of their way to extend them a carpet everywhere they go, we are supposed to do that, but then are we also supposed not supposed to believe what they say?
I'm truly confused, this part of the training definitely needs a review.
The problem seems to be that they are asked - and often answer - questions on topics unrelated to that topic, in the belief they're just, y'know, really smart.
I think the economics prize must be the worst banana skin for the recipients - popular economics science books like Freakonomics have cemented in the public's (and journalists'), minds, that economics has applicability to a number of different parts of life. And it does! However that does not mean they have any authority to speak on anything outside of their published work.
I wouldn't go that far. They are not dumb and they like to promote their ideas. They can probably give an above-average take on most things.
There are millions of other not-dumb people who will give their opinions on anything. If you ask them their opinions on everything a lot of them will say crazy stuff, but a Nobel laureate says it it makes more headlines.
We probably shouldn't be treating Nobel prize winners as the smartest people generally, just specifically in the field of their discovery. Very common fallacy to fall for though, and when everyone treats you like a general genius, of course you're going to give your opinions.