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Discussion (58 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
Imagine a 5 year old who is good at football. 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, countless social media clips and will undoubtedly influence the opinions of millions.
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.
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.
Never heard it expressed like that, but I guess you could apply it to tons of stuff?
> Lobotomy is not scientifically unsound, as aswegs8 proves, it's just completely outside of today's Overton window.
THAT SAID, "Eugenics" as espoused and understood over the past two centuries isn't that at all. It's 100%, every time, a pretty face for racism. Human social and ancestry divisions ARE NOT the product of deliberate selection, never have been, and any attempt to conflate the ideas is, yeah, pretty fucking unsound. And horrifying.
'Biologically speaking', wouldn't that 'just' be something like breeds?
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dog_breeds
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.
-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.
"Let the cobbler not judge beyond the shoe"
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.
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.
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”.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics_in_California
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_eugenics
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_rot
“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself.” - Richard Feynman
Absolutely wild shit whoa
> 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.)
See Musk, whom believes that if he's done A or B right, makes him an expert on the entire alphabet.
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.
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.
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.
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.