• charles@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    Well if it’s real, it will be a no brainer Nobel prize, so it certainly won’t be the last we hear of it in that case.

    • Dept@lemmy.sdf.org
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      6 months ago

      strong competition with the teeth regrowing guy

      but i think diabetes is more important than missing teeth lol

    • FiniteBanjo
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      6 months ago

      Nobel Prizes are more about who you know than what you know. Basically you get considered for the prize through a series of recommendations to the board.

      • njm1314@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        That’s kind of how all Awards work, you get nominated and then there’s a group that decides who wins. Don’t see how else you could ever have a winner in a subjective contest. Also the pool of people who can nominate you for a prize is massive. So much so that a nomination is rather meaningless.

        • FiniteBanjo
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          6 months ago

          Yeah I just wanted to point out that whether they do or don’t receive the prize it has no real impact on the validity of their work. The ultimate goal of research should never be the Nobel Prize.

          • njm1314@lemmy.world
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            6 months ago

            I wouldn’t say that at all. Getting nominated sure has no impact on the validity of their work. Absolutely agree on that. However, winning would typically mean your work has been heavily scrutinized by experts in your field. I’m not sure how that doesn’t lend validity. Certainly I can think of no example of a Nobel Prize being awarded for research that was then proven to be fraudulent.

            • FiniteBanjo
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              6 months ago

              Well I’m no expert, but just a few:

              • 2019 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, Gregg Semenza - found guilt of data fraud and digital photo manipulations.

              • Knut Ahnlund resigned over the 2004 Literature prize going to Elfriede Jelinek, claiming it caused “irreparable damage” to the reputation of the awards.

              • Peter Agre was awarded the 2003 Chemistry prize for the discovery of ion polarity water channels in cell membranes when it had already been discovered in 1986.

              • The 2008 Chemistry prize went to three people for work on a green flourescent protein as a biological tracer, the first sample of which was cloned and distributed by Douglas Prasher 2 decades earlier who was excluded from the prize recipients.

              • Wangari Maathai was given a Nobel Peace Price in 2004 despite her beliefs that HIV was a bioweapon used on Africa.

              • Multiple Economics winners have directly opposing theories of Economics so no matter how you slice it at least one of them is just wrong.

              And keep in mind, these only include winners not just nominations. In an ideal world all science is vetted and peer reviewed responsibly and the Award is meaningless. In a slightly better world than the one we live in at least the Nobel Prize nominations would be vetted pretty strictly and be without controversy.

              • njm1314@lemmy.world
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                6 months ago

                The first one it should be pointed out was not the Nobel Prize data. It was from a separate project. I’ve never seen a single article about about that in which that’s not the first paragraph by the way so I can’t believe you missed it.

                Every other thing you’ve listed is not a matter of falsifying data. I mean I’m not going to comment on the economics and literature ones cuz that’s clearly is nothing to do what we’re talking about, and discussions about people’s political beliefs and whether or not more people should have been credited for them about prize is again nothing to do with the data.

                I am pleased that you kept it to Winners though, since that was very clearly the criteria of our discussion. And as we pointed out here all these prizes are very heavily vetted.

      • thrawn@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        Curing diabetes would get it even if prizes were otherwise 100% based on who you know. A corrupt board would need to maintain the facade of legitimacy.

        • FiniteBanjo
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          6 months ago

          Meh, I’ve seen cooler things not get any Nobel Prizes.

          • thrawn@lemmy.world
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            6 months ago

            Please elaborate. It’s difficult to imagine something better than a cure that would positively affect hundreds of millions of people and would have prevented countless deaths before.

            • FiniteBanjo
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              6 months ago

              Fact of the matter is that Diabetes is a manageable illness.

              • thrawn@lemmy.world
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                6 months ago

                Yeah I’m not gonna get into that line of thinking when there are literally millions of diabetes attributed deaths every year [or two if you take the lower end stats]. Please just elaborate on these alleged superior inventions that did not receive a Nobel, that’s all I was asking.

                  • thrawn@lemmy.world
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                    6 months ago

                    It’s okay, I obviously didn’t expect you to be able to answer that. The og comment gave off old reddit vibes, and the classic redditor wouldn’t be able to name a Nobel winning invention. I also expect you didn’t really think the Nobel committee was particularly corrupt, either you applied your worldview to it automatically or heard it somewhere unsourced and just kept repeating it without checking (possibly from a prof tho). Probably the former.

                    This was one of the interactions I enjoyed on old reddit before from-the-hip-bullshitting started getting buried, deleted, or too well written to be noticed. Tangentially, I wonder if reddit’s now too full of convincingly written AI bullshit for real users to bother commenting on.