News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on The Absurdity of Nobel Prizes in Science. Parent comment

Re:The Absurdity of Nobel Prizes in Science by vacri on Wednesday October 04, 2017 @03:15AM (#15398808)
Perhaps look at it another way - assigning a Nobel peace prize is a way of putting wider attention onto someone, and maybe works as a soft pressure to keep them behaving a little? For half a year or so after you get awarded a peace prize, your profile in the world is a lot higher than normal, perhaps giving you a bit more of a nudge in the right direction.

Also, Aung San Suu Kyi won her Nobel Peace Prize in 1991, 26 years ago. How old is that? Well, that was the year that the world-wide-web was born. Kurt Cobain was still alive. George Bush was in office and was just 'George Bush', not 'George Bush Sr' (and the first Bush war against Iraq started in January). The Soviet Union still existed, dissolved only in December of that year. Street Fighter II hit the arcades. The Rodney King beating sparked the LA riots. The war that gave us the term 'ethnic cleansing' started that year in Yugoslavia. Apartheid was still going on in South Africa, with a couple of years left to go. Linus Torvalds announces Linux on comp.os.minix.

Calling the Nobel Peace Prize bullshit because a recipient behaves differently-to-expected a generation later is itself bullshit.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:The Absurdity of Nobel Prizes in Science by felipelemos on Wednesday October 04, 2017 @05:01AM (#15399119)
Maybe we should only award Nobel Peace Prize posthumously.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:The Absurdity of Nobel Prizes in Science by vidarh on Wednesday October 04, 2017 @05:57AM (#15399313)
The rules prevent it other than in exceptional circumstances. See my comment above about the consideration of an award to Gandhi for example. Apart from wanting the candidate to continue to do good, there are also considerations such as practicalities of where the money should go as the money is awarded with the intent of using it to further the purposes of the prize, though the recipient has wide latitude, and so it is not a given that it'd be appropriate to just hand the money to someones estate for example.
[ Parent | on HN ]