With actual war criminals winning peace prizes I do wonder what is the point of it. The value of an award is in the company it puts you in, now it looks like the peace Nobel is just worth its dollar value and its value on the TED circuit.

The value in awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to warmongers is — and the awarding committee is very conscious of it — that it has enough cachet to actually motivate warmongers to stop warmonging and go for the prize (and a relatively well-off, safe and calm retirement).

It may not be fair, but the people who don't die because of that effect won't complain.

Do you have any examples of this happening?

There are multiple instances of violent people who stopped being violent and got the prize. Arafat is one example.

Whether the prize played a role in their decision is something only they can say (and then you might not believe them).

So I find this question useless, because it cannot be answered. The mechanism I sketched is generally plausible, though.

There are also instances of relatively peaceful people who got the prize and became warmongers, e.g. a certain president of the us, who sent 500 drone strikes into Libya in a single year after winning the prize (among other military adventures)

How does that relate to the question in this sub thread?

Do you actually propose that they did violent things because they got the prize?

If there are as many examples of people receiving the peace prize then going on to be warmongers as there are the reverse, it suggests that the peace prize isn't really doing anything here and we're just looking at the base rate of leaders switching between peaceful and warlike actions.

No, that's a fallacy, unless you can credibly argue for a causal link, i.e. because of the prize people feel they can get away with violence.

I find that not impossible to argue, but incredible, and would want to see supporting evidence.

Yes, but that cuts both ways.

I only argue that there is a plausible mechanism, you argued in quantitative terms.

The prize may have given them political cover that let their violence go on longer

They only get the prize after stopping, so you're arguing for something more complicated: violence, then non-violence, then violence.

Possible, but not terribly plausible, IMO. And the examples proffered so far (Obama or Kissinger) certainly don't fit that pattern.

Do you talk about war criminals being awarded the Nobel peace prize or about Nobel peace prize laureates turning into war criminals? This is an important difference in my opinion. Since you seem to follow this more closely than I do, would you mind giving an example?

Obama pursued policies that arguably (https://www.amnestyusa.org/the-obama-bush-doctrine/) amount to war crimes, and refused to allow the obvious war crimes of the preceding administration to be investigated. He got a Nobel peace prize essentially for being less terrible on that front than his predecessor, George W Bush.

> But does the drone program amount to a war crime as Marc Thiessen suggests? That is a complicated question to answer. Unlike the use of torture, there are circumstances in international law and under the laws of war in which the use of lethal force can be lawful. Much depends on where, how and with what intent such force is used. We do not, as yet, have sufficient evidence to make a determination regarding the legality of the US drones program. It has been conducted in secret and in places where it is very difficult to mount an effective investigation.

Also there was a 1,200+ page Senate investigation into the use of torture by the previous administration.

It’s not more complicated. The same flawed intelligence apparatus which provided the lists of people to capture and interrogate during the Bush administration also compiled Obama’s kill list.

Neither method really provides any useful intelligence. The difference is victims of torture can go on ‘60 Minutes’, victims of targeted drone strikes can’t.

> Do you talk about war criminals being awarded the Nobel peace prize or about Nobel peace prize laureates turning into war criminals?

For the former, Henry Kissinger.

There are examples of the latter, as well.

Holy hell, Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize?! I'm was familiar enough with him to know he's disgustingly immoral, and never imagined people back then would have been stupid enough to give him that award.

With 2 members of the committee resigning in protest, it seems not everyone with power to award it was so morally corrupt.

Gorbatschow sent tanks on civilians in Vilnius just one month after being awarded the Peace Nobel

Aung San Suu Kyi is probably the most recent example with a very dubious legacy.

Obama certainly did not deserve his Peace prize by the time he was elected and continued violence in the Middle East, started new wars (such as Libya) and expanded the (secret) drone strikes.

Well to be fair he did most of those things after winning the Nobel.

Which makes it even worse.

Well humans are human. Mistakes happen and as long as they aren't increasing over time, it's all cool.

Awards don't just exist to award the individual.

In polarizing times, where the instinct is to create more conflict as a path to resolving conflict, what many of the Peace Prize winners have done, is to remind everyone that alternate non-obvious paths exist.

Would you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and/or flamebait to HN? You've been doing it a lot, unfortunately, and it is not what this site is for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

They are not unsubstantiated comments. They are well based in fact. https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/ezj3km/gandhi-was-a-racis...

I'm not arguing about Gandhi facts. Your comment was flamebait. By unsubstantive I mean comments that add more noise than signal to a thread.

It's also against HN's rules to use it primarily for political or ideological battle. Would you mind taking the spirit of this site more to heart, as described at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html? We're here for curious conversation, not to smite enemies, and those two things can't coexist. For example, if you jump from a topic like "Disproved discoveries that won Nobel Prizes" to "Gandhi was a horrific racist", you're taking the thread in the sort of hellish direction from which the internet never returns.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

If you are looking for any figure that is pure like snow and more saint than Saints, then nobody can reasonably win any kind of Award ever - you can find faults with absolutely every single one person in the Universe.

well, people do portray Gandhi and Mother Teresa as saints whereas the reality turned out that both of them were horrible individuals.

What basis do you have for saying that Gandhi was a 'horrible individual'? And I take it from the way you said that, that you see yourself as a far finer human being, is that right? (Maybe that second question is an improper one, but it does seem raised by how and what you wrote.)

> What basis do you have for saying that Gandhi was a 'horrible individual'

I'm surprised this is not more well known.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/ezj3km/gandhi-was-a-racis...

> you see yourself as a far finer human being, is that right

Yes. I do as I believe most people are better than Gandhi, simply by virtue of not abusing children the way Gandhi did, and numerous other crimes that he committed.

There is no Nobel prize in economics.

> The five real Nobel Prizes—physics, chemistry, literature, peace, and medicine/physiology—were set up in the will left by the dynamite magnate when he died in 1895. The economics prize is a bit different. It was created by Sweden’s Central Bank in 1969, nearly 75 years later. The award’s real name is the “Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel.” It was not established by Nobel, but supposedly in memory of Nobel. It’s a ruse and a PR trick, and I mean that literally. And it was done completely against the wishes of the Nobel family.

> “The Economics Prize has nestled itself in and is awarded as if it were a Nobel Prize. But it’s a PR coup by economists to improve their reputation,” Nobel’s great great nephew Peter Nobel told AFP in 2005, adding that “It’s most often awarded to stock market speculators …. There is nothing to indicate that [Alfred Nobel] would have wanted such a prize.”

https://www.alternet.org/2012/10/there-no-nobel-prize-econom...

> There is no Nobel prize in economics

The Nobel Foundation [1] disagrees. That bank donated the money to establish the prize, but it is awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the same organization that awards the physics and chemistry prizes, using the the same procedures.

[1] https://www.nobelprize.org/

> It was created by Sweden’s Central Bank in 1969,

Well that will probably rule out any economist opposed to central banking systems.

Except it won't - for the same reason why Nobel donating the prizes for the other subjects doesn't rule out opponents of dynamite or high-explosives for the Peace prize. (I.e. the Royal Academy in Sweden gives out both prizes, the Nobel family and the Rijksbank are not involved.)

Huh? Wasn’t Nobel opposed to (many uses of) high explosives? Wasn’t that the point?

Milton Friedman won a Nobel prize. He didn't like central banks at all.

Of course the Nobel prize for economics is a ruse and at least semi-fraudulent. That's the least surprising thing I think I've ever learned.