Meet the Ig Nobel Prize Winners
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
> IG NOBEL ECONOMICS PRIZE 2026 [USA, MEXICO, CANADA] Paul Piff, Daniel Stancato, Stéphane Côté, Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton, and Dacher Keltner, for amassing evidence that upper class people are more likely to snatch from a children’s supply of candy, and engage in other kinds of unethical behavior. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 109, no. 11, 2012, pp. 4086-4091. <doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1118373109>
This is the correct direction of causation in this case, imho.
Then Jesus said to his disciples, “Truly I tell you, it is hard for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of heaven. [I]t is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.”
That's at least one sector of the Christian world that ignores that line. I don't think they're alone. You also have other etymological canaries like "fortune" meaning both "wealth" and "blessing". The thinking is that good things happen to good people, with "good things" including "coming into money". But, as we see, that seems to be erroneous. Just because good things happen to a person doesn't mean that they're good.
(And by the way, you are using a severely outdated translation.)
"Noble" means "known". "Aristos" means "best" (best fit). The "noble" (the notables) are empowered ("-cracy") for being the best ("aristos").
Moral qualities, practical abilities, enabling the exercise of a role in society.
How does "ancient people consider the wealthy virtuous" cancel out "selfish people tend to make more money"?
They may have used the word "noble", but very probably did not link that to wealth.
Support your statements, show it. Most people alive would have not been informed on basic ethics, nor basic language?!
Not your initial claim: the claim of the median human not being aware of basic dictionary and ethics.
Of course psychopathy as lack of restraint facilitates amassing riches.
To state the absence of family and schools and contact with books for a majority indicates a weird world view, or an impossibility to put heterogeneous populations in the same basket.
To be clear, I am saying that the link these words connote is wrong, and that it's indeed logical to expect a wealthy person to be selfish. I'm just saying that something drove our culture to forego that logic and make the erroneous link described, and it's written in our language. I can't tell you where that link comes from.
I can go along with us having the tendency to determine the value of things in terms of money, but not with determining how virtuous somebody in terms of wealth. The former is morally neutral (even though it does pull society away from thinking in terms of what actually matters to wellbeing etc.), the latter isn't.
None of the examples you mentioned equate wealth with virtue/ethical behavior. "Nobility" does to an extent.
With regard to modern day connotations of wealth: I'd say that most people associate it with either luck or being savvy in some way; definitely not with ethical behavior.
Man, I'm so ashamed of my field (experimental psychology). Maybe ~60% of publications are literally worse than useless (that is, they are outright intentional lies).
That's why, even though it's incredibly sad to see, I can hardly begrudge the current administration their "defund anything and everything using keyword search". Since they can't trust the experts, that's really about the best that can be done from their perspective.
Disclosure: PhD
There are many reasons why peer review doesn't work including but not limited to (1) motivated reasoning AKA complicity in whatever lie is being pushed (2) no real incentive to put effort into peer review (3) laziness and irresponsibility, see also point 2 (4) the "somewhat" qualifier I put in my original comment.
I'm being critical of peer reviewers here, but it's a genuinely very difficult job that takes massive effort to do well.
And then there's actual malpractice like editing data, which is functionally impossible to catch in peer review if the authors are clever. The whole system replies on trust, and trust is completely underserved.
Strangely, this idea has at least a small amount of merit... The idea that an organic, carbon-based structure (in the above case, a mosquito proboscis -- but it could have been a separate, non-living individually 3D printed from organic materials, organic part) would make a good 3D print head with exceedingly fine resolution, is not a terrible idea!
(Note that for the record, I do not endorse killing mosquitos, or any other insect to make 3D print heads, or really, anything else!)
Over the years they went from being a prize for joke science to a prize for serious science that is funny.
THAT invention deserves its own ignoble category for contribution to public discord.
In addition to having the correct angle to minimize splash, it also fits a wide range of heights and is easier to clean than some of the other designs they tried.
Another loss for the US thanks to Trump.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ig_Nobel_Prize
Also, every political speech needs a "Miss Sweetie Poo".
> Unno used a pair of pneumotachometers (instruments to measure volume flow of respired gases) in parallel for his experiments to determine the velocity, volume, and time scale of blowing through each side of the nose over 60 trials.