Careful — nothing has yet been done towards denuclearization except a non-committing promise by Kim to halt further tests for now. The regime has made similar promises several times over the past 25 years.
Well NK has committed to denuclearization[1], while the US also talk about denuclearization[2].
In general, that is what makes half of foreign policy reporting semi-useless, newspapers rarely report in which sense diplomats use the words. (Compare "fighting terrorist" as claimed by everybody, in general terrorist is just defined by threatening the interests of the speaker.)
[1] Likely meaning a mutual, synchronous and long term reduction of nuclear weapons towards a global zero goal. (Like the stated US nuclear policy of the Obama administration.)
[2] Meaning a prompt and unilateral abolishment of the NK nuclear program, as in Libya.
Yet Kim Dae Jung won in 2000 because of similar promises. And Obama won for absolutely nothing. So there is definitely precedent for prizes awarded with minimal lasting results. Knowing the Nobel Committee though, Kim Jung Un is more likely to win.
I wish the Norwegians would adopt a strict rule against awarding any politicians before they're retired from public service. Obama's prize was pointless and actively damaged the perception of the Peace Prize in the United States.
There are so many worthy recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize that are virtually unknown outside their specific non-profit niches — focus on those instead, and use the prize to highlight their work.
> My good friends, for the second time in our history, an American President has returned from Korea bringing peace with honour. I believe it is peace for our time. We thank you from the bottom of our hearts. Go home and get a nice quiet sleep.
He first called him Rocket Man, which was an ingenious way of telling him "OK, you have achieved what you wanted" and praising him in a way. He pulled Kim into the eye of the public in a non-humiliating way (the "short and fat" was a response to Kim calling him senile first).
World leaders have learned that they need to stroke Trump's ego in public by now, but the peace talks in Korea is probably more due to Xi Jinping than Trump. The Chinese just chose to not do it over Twitter. Remember that Kim Jong Un took a train to Beijing, yet no gloating tweets have been made about how successful the meeting was. The results speak for themselves.
I continue to think it's silly when people assume Trump just tweets his thoughts directly with no regard for results. That might have happened in the past during his campaign, but multiple people have handled that account. I can see no way that the people working high-level jobs in the White House would ever continue to do that work without some idea of and input into his thought processes. It's too important, and the people there are too credentialed. I'm inclined to believe that when he writes a tweet that people can't seem to interpret, it's because it's aimed at achieving a specific result with specific people.
Unlike the Nobel laureates in literature and sciences, the peace prize is not awarded by the Swedish Academy (in Stockholm). It's awarded by the Norwegian Nobel Committee (in Oslo).
I do think a lot of those tweets are a work of fiction, quite original and influential. And unlike a lot of Nobel worthy literature they are also quite entertaining and reach a wide audience.
So it's not entirely impossible that he might one day receive it ;-)
> Unlike the Nobel laureates in literature and sciences the peace prize is not awarded by the Swedish Academy (in Stockholm).
Note that the Swedish Academy only awards the Literature prize. Nobels in Physics and Chemistry are awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, and the Karolinska Institutet awards the Nobel in Physiology or Medicine. Thus, only the Literature prize is impacted by this.
Its name is "Karolinska Institutet", so you can't reasonably translate it to "the Karolinska Institute", because at that point the first part if its name is just an untranslated adjective. And if you arrive at "the Carolean Institute" people no longer understand what you're referring to.
That's not accurate: the Swedish Academy only selects the Literature prize. The medicine prize is selected by the Karolinska Institute and the physics/chemistry/economics prizes are selected by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (which is an entirely different organization from "the Swedish Academy").
Technically, non of these organizations "award" the prizes, the prizes are awarded by the Nobel Foundation and the Swedish National Bank, the Riksbank (only the economics prize). They just select the winners.
"The Art of the Deal" was written by Tony Schwartz. He's said that getting Trump to sit down for interviews for more than five minutes was practically impossible [1].
It's well known that Trump doesn't enjoy reading. It seems unlikely that Trump has read "The Art of the Deal" even though he's credited as a co-author on the cover.
Yes, probably. Personally, I always use uMatrix and block all cookies by default (except for some specific websites which I manually whitelist). So I have no idea what happens if you use this extension without blocking cookies.
Or under the submission you can click the "web" link which sends you to a google search and through that you'll have non-paywalled access. (JFYI, since that link is there on HN, and it's periodically forgotten)
Fools! Failing to fulfill their most important duty because one member brought a lecherous boor to some of their events and may not have been impartial in the vote on some awards.
At this point the number of Academy members that have resigned has has left the Academy with fewer members than what is required to make an Nobel prize decision.
Currently there are 10 members, and 11 members is the minimum required.
So it isn't really about choice at this point.
Secondly the reasons for the resignations and turmoil is the unwillingness of some, the majority, of the Academy members to recognize and properly handle the _alleged_ sexual harassment by Jean-Claude Arnault.
To make this matter worse Jean-Claude Arnault is married to an Academy member and the two of them together run a 'culture' organization which is funded and closely related to the Academy.
Nothing has been brought to the police in terms of sexual assault reports. The police report the academy has let go forward is about the corruption/financial issues.
Continuing to give funding to someone credibly accused to sexual harassment is a very bad look. Especially when that person is also married to a committee member. That is absolutely something to talk about.
They could've made it up just so he they can kick him out.
He's not and never has been on the committee. His wife is. And no one has been kicked off the committee.
If it's credible, why hasn't he been convicted.
Because building a case strong enough to stand up in court in situations like these is really hard and the police/prosecutors have decided not to priorities it.
But the core of the matter isn't really the sexual harassment, it's the fact that the Academy apparently knew about several cases of both sexual harassment and, more importantly, possible financial fraud/corruption involving this individual and instead of dealing with it, decided to protect him. The sexual harassment charges are just the events that brought these more serious charges to light.
Primarily because he is accused of improperly getting funding from the Academy and she was accused of enabling and profiting from this as well as blocking any further investigation into the matter.
There are also accusations that she prevented the Academy from looking into earlier accusation of sexual harassment against her husband, but that is secondary.
>Because building a case strong enough to stand up in court in situations like these is really hard and the police/prosecutors have decided not to priorities it.
So it's the ideal ground for character assassinations?
Especially since society doesn't blame/shame the victims anymore (which is good) -- so someone wrongfully accusing has all the upside and no downsides (which is bad).
From the legal perspective, the factual aspect is that the academy should have acted on the corruption where one family member made a decision to grant funding to an other family member. This is classic nepotism and in Sweden a actually crime (Jäv) and a problem which international anti-corruption agency has highlighted to be an issue in Sweden. Its a common theme for the nation funded investigating journalism program called Uppdrag Granskning, through sadly rarely recognized in the public discussions around corruption.
When the Academy issued an internal investigation by a lawyer firm, the report they got back had very little to say about the alleged sexual harassments. It did however recommend that they should report the corruption and for some reason the Academy decide against it. After some major public outcry covering mostly the alleged sexual harassments, the Academy suddenly turned about and are now following the recommendation and has reported the corruption to the police.
What I would like to think is that the corruption charges would have come up to light regardless of the sexual harassment accusations, but I guess thats the current political climate in Sweden. Now it is being used as a proxy to address the sexual harassment accusations which is extremely suboptimal.
>Secondly the reasons for the resignations and turmoil is the unwillingness of some, the majority, of the Academy members to recognize and properly handle the _alleged_ sexual harassment by Jean-Claude Arnault.
How about their don't recognize or handle anything?
If Jean-Claude Arnault is guilty of sexual harassment, let him legally go to jail / pay a fine / serve community service or whatever.
That's for the law to decide.
They can then take them off the academy (or not) -- if he is convicted.
Otherwise, it's not their business to do anything about it, and even less so for something "alleged".
Otherwise, it's not their business to do anything about it
I guess we'll have to agree to disagree here. If a company or organization receives multiple independent accusations against someone, it is absolutely their business to look into it and decide if this is a person they want to keep being involved with, completely separate from any police involvement. It may even be their business to bring this information to the police and provide any evidence they may have if the accusations are serious enough.
At most companies just the serious suspicion of financial fraud, repeated sexual harassment or the covering up of these is plenty enough to get you fired.
Organizations, especially ones in the public eye, have to set a higher bar for acceptable behavior than the criminal justice system. Lots of bad behaviors aren't criminal, or aren't usually prosecuted, but should still be grounds for removal.
because one member brought a lecherous boor to some of their events
Despite that being the part of the scandal that kicked off the investigation and has been getting the most focus, it's not the core of the scandal. The other parts of the scandal is that a venue owned by the above mentioned "lecherous boor" in question (who is married to an academy member) had possibly been getting improper funding from the Academy and that he might have leaked previous winners to his friends in advance.
I say the core of the scandal is that the Academy has been protecting its members and him from outside consequences even though it has been clear from a long time he was behaving improperly and even when their own investigation recommended that they should file charges for corruption a majority seems to have resisted taking action.
Agreed. Had the case simply been that the spouse of one of the committee members was accused of sexual harassment then it would never have ended up like this. It's the financial aspect and the academies continued refusal to deal with the problem that caused this. Sexual harassment was mainly the catalyst.
Uh no, you learning about a scandal for the first time is not what makes it a scandal. This crisis been an ever increasing scandal since last year, and reports that the Nobel foundation were considering cancelling the Literature prize this year started surfacing at the start of April.
The academy themselves announcing that there will be no prize this year is a way to avoid the humiliation of being kicked out from that role by the Nobel foundation.
That's just too bad. I was hoping if Trump don't get the peace price, at least they could give him a belated literature price for "The art of the deal", seeing he had Swedish background back then.
I’ve been hoping for Cormac McCarthy to win the Nobel Prize in literature for a number of years. I still think he deserves it, but I’m starting to lose hope.
I don't think he hangs out with the right crowds in the right places to garner literary awards. From the little he's spoken to the press, it sounds like he spends most of his time chillin' with scientists and eating huevos rancheros in New Mexico:
Someone that also deserves is Lobo Antunes [1]. Also a Portuguese like José Saramago, but IMHO, is way more interesting: a psychiatrist that served in Colonial War.
Cormac McCarthy has written some truly excellent work (though I find his output rather more inconsistent than some of his passionate fans on the internet are prepared to allow). However, his treatment of female characters (or lack thereof) is already notorious, and with current trends, I believe that this makes it less likely with each year that he will be recognized with this prize.
I don't understand why the Nobel prize is so prestigious. It's the same with the Oscars: it's just some arbitrary committee of people somewhere that decide who wins it. It's not like your peers decide if you win. So why does anyone actually care about the award? It's prestigious because we all agree it's prestigious.
> It's just some arbitrary committee of people somewhere that decide who wins it.
The committee for the literature prize has contained some prestigious literary figures themselves, so it is to a slight degree a judgement of peers. Secondly, the membership of the committee has historically represented a high society that many authors have been members of themselves, or who hoped to have that high society among their audience. Go through the Nobel ceremony archives and you can see some writers getting quite emotional that they are there among the committee and the invited guests.
I agree that the deciding committee isn't completely incompetent. As you know, there are plenty of other intelligentsia that could also award prizes but they aren't deemed as prestigious. E.g. why the Swedish academy instead of the Royal Society? I think it is a bit strange how we fetisihize the Nobel above all others.
So you've answered your own questions as to why this isn't strange at all - it's just how social capital works.
Why else would the premier restaurant review have been started by a tire company? It's all path dependence, and once you get enough momentum behind one choice it becomes self reinforcing.
> E.g. why the Swedish academy instead of the Royal Society?
Because a rich Swede endowed it over a century ago, and its had that time to build up prestige.
It's sort of like why Harvard is so prestigious: it was the first American University, its existed continuously, and has always ran itself like it was elite.
> I think it is a bit strange how we fetisihize the Nobel above all others.
My guess it's one of the oldest extant awards of its kind, if not the oldest.
This scandal (and the hiatus) might allow a competitor to emerge as the most prestigious award in the field of literature, but I doubt such award will have the same popular awareness, because the Nobel's breadth helps a lot with it's fame.
I'm not interested in looking it up and linking here, but there are several quora answers about how Leo wasn't really "robbed". He was unfortunate that every year he had a great movie, something was better.
I have recently gone back through Kubrick’s entire filmography from Paths of Glory on, the first time I had seen many of these films since I was a teenager. It was... underwhelming. I am now able to sympathize with Kubrick critics.
With regard to Borges, he shares the same problem in terms of female characters as Cormac McCarthy as mentioned above. Plus, there is a real lack of emotional depth to Borges’ work. His themes may interest anoraks like ourselves, but I don’t think he is a truly universal figure.
Timeliness is what made Kubrick “great” — the social commentary aspect of his films. As far as directing quality, I am simply whelmed rather than over or underwhelmed.
IMHO "Barry Lyndon" is one of the best movies ever-made, and I say that as a cinephile who also thinks that Kubrick is slightly (but just slightly) over-rated.
A literature prize like the Nobel is by definition a thing targeted towards literature buffs, and Borges is a god among gods for those kind of people (of which I'm a part of), with or without female characters (come to think of it, I can't remember that many male characters in his books either).
Anyway, I stopped taking the Nobel literature prizes all that seriously the moment when I realized that they hadn't given it to Proust (his duchesse de Guermantes is one of the most important female characters in the history of literature) and Kafka.
While we can discuss the prestige of the Nobel price, please don't associate with the Oscar.
The first is an actual prize for scientist works.
The second is a fictional prize created to let Americans have prizes too.
I'm not saying that the prizes have equal merit. I'm saying that they're both similarly famous prizes that are judged as prestigious even though the award process isn't based on peer review.
The Oscars are absolutely based on peer review. You have to be a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and you have to be a member within the category of the award being voted upon, except for Best Picture for which all members can vote.
Sound Editing is voted on by Sound Editor members. There is more peer review in terms of number of peers at the Academy than your average Nature article.
This is insulting. The Nobel Prize is “fictional” too. While the article is discussing literature, let’s unpack “fictional” prizes: Yassir Arafat wins a peace prize relating to a war in which he was a primary beligerant. Obama wins the prize before he actually did anything — he won the prize for what he might do rather than for anything he did.
Douglas Prasher getting snubbed for the 2008 Prize in Chemistry while the other three who won that year won because of Prasher’s discovery!
Somorjai getting snubbed in 2007 despite his research partner winning.
Eyring didn’t win because he was a Mormon.
Fritz Haber helped developed poison gas used in World War I, yet he won in 1918, despite the entire raison d’être of Nobel’s mandate.
If we want to talk about Literature, more Swedes have won than the entirety of Asia! Talk about creating a “fictional prize” so that a particular nationality can have prizes too.
The Oscars do have merit and they don’t purport to be international. It’s the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, recognizing excellence in American film; they don’t claim to be an international award, yet Nobel — they explicitly are international oriented. You’re going to say Tolstoy and Mark Twain are less accomplished than Selma Lagerlöf? Really? James Joyce never won a Nobel but Frans Sillanpää did?
Let's not forget bob dylan won(and almost snubbed) the nobel prize in literature. Don't get me wrong the dude's a great song writer, but that's not literature.
I disagree. Song lyrics absolutely count as literature to me, as does the other poetry he was recognized for. He's not the first one to receive the Nobel for poetry either, and his themes and influence line up well with the stated goals of the prize itself.
Irrelevant sidetrack: The word "literature" is also applied to music without lyrics. Try googling for "keyboard literature" or "violin literature", for example. In English, at least. Don't know about Swedish!
We agree a Olympic gold is prestigious even though it’s just a sport. We agree Lawrence Olivier was great even though he was just acting. We praise Alan Turing even though he was just a mathematician.
Olympic gold in most sports are based on excellence measured objectively. It's not a human judgment. You either did race 100m in 9.5 seconds or you didn't. There are some sports where asthetics are included in scoring (like synchronized swimming).
Ok, but that only tells you how to win it, not how or why it’s more prestigious than other gold medals. That’s the point of the parent I think, that prestige is part of humanity and not always easily defined.
I think the Olympics are prestigious because it is such a large competition. Every nation pretty much competes in a large spectacle. So if you win, it means you're the best in the world. The Olympics has more eyeballs on it than the world championship for most sports. And as said, it's objectively measured (although some sports like diving, boxing and gymnastics are determined by subjective scoring to some extent). The only sport I can think of which has more viewers is the Fifa World Cup, and indeed in football/soccer the Fifa World Cup is considered more prestigious than the Olympics.
And as you know, Alan Turing pioneered computer science and helped saved millions of lives, so he deserves our respect :-) Perhaps prestige is like natural snowball kind of effect, like how the rich will naturally get richer. A prestigious event becomes somewhat prestigious, so people want to win it. Then more people want to win it. Then it becomes more prestigious, etc.
>> in football/soccer the Fifa World Cup is considered more prestigious than the Olympics
That has nothing to do with number of viewers though. It is just a dirty trick from FIFA to eliminate competition: national teams in Olympics are junior (U-23) teams because FIFA does not allow senior teams to participate.
Prestige is often fickle... it’s kind of a truism that the most prestigious artists (painters, writers, sculptors, etc) never enjoy success in their lifetimes, but rather find audiences well after they have passed.
In a hundred years, the olympics and the nobel prize could be seen as quaint reminders of an earlier time — entirely without prestige, leaving the observer wondering why we cared so much in the first place.
It's irrelevant to the point, things are prestigious because enough people decide they are. The longest breath holder gets an entry in the Guinness Book and a cocktail icebreaker, a Synchronized Swimming Gold Medalist is always a gold medalist.
>Olympic gold in most sports are based on excellence measured objectively.
Just because something involves a measurement doesn't mean it's completely objective. All the medal tells you objectively is who ran fastest in that particular race, on that particular day, out of the people participating.
There are many subjective factors contributing to that result, and any "excellence" we infer from it is still highly subjective. Indeed, the very notion that running the fastest is something worthy of prestige is a subjective one.
So ? There is little value for a human being to be able to do so. Or humanity. We just decided that this particular challenge was worth a huge deal.
We don't give a gold medal for the fastest people to write from memory an algo for reversing a binary tree, or for the person capable of feeding the most children in a day.
The GP's point was about "it's just some arbitrary committee of people somewhere that decide who wins it". That's not the case for at least some Olympic sports.
You can't make a blanket statement about all Olympic medals like that. Ironically, some of the most prestigious gold medals are indeed the product of human judgement: figure skating and gymnastics.
Maybe prestigious from a mass market perspective; but IMO that’s just because both sports feature very young girls in various states of undress (simulated or not).
Both sports trade on the sexualization of young girls. Why do we even have a sport where the main criteria are older men passing judgment on young girls? The scoring system is vague/complex enough that the “victory” game in both sports is highly rigged anyway, so it’s more about politics than skill when deciding between the top few spots.
Do men’s gymnastics and figure skating draw the same prestige? My comment is simply about the prestige of the sports, not the merit of the sport itself.
That’s just bizzare. Most men don’t watch figure skating or gymnastics, the audience is mostly female. So I’m not sure why they would be sexualized or how they would “trade” on the sexualization; there’s no money in it.
In fact at one time figure skating was objective. They would take a clean sheet of ice, the skater would skate a figure 8 ( or whatever) then the judges would measure it. Not fun to watch.
> Olympic gold in most sports are based on excellence measured objectively.
Athletes may value Olympic Gold more so than gold at a smaller, regional competitions, even when posting better results at the smaller venues ...
Society at large has been "tuned" to regard Olympic Gold as the "gold standard" regardless of whether the athlete performed better at other competitions.
> We praise Alan Turing even though he was just a mathematician.
A mathematician that changed the world to a huge degree. No actor or athlete performance drives the greatest innovations of today or wins wars. They are merely entertainers. Useful, but that's it.
Because the Globes are voted on by the film press and not actual film practitioners. As an analog, it would be like patients at a hospital voting for the Nobel Prize in Medicine. Still a nice award but much different in the electorate.
Also, the voting members don't necessarily actually decide their own vote. Often if they have no opinion on a category they will ask a relative or friend, who may or may not actually be involved in the industry.
This happens a lot in the voting for best animated feature. It is fairly common for an older voter to have seen none of the nominees. He asks his grandchildren what "cartoon" they liked best that year, or remembers which movie's merchandise they frequently wear, and that's the one he votes for.
I remember seeing a couple article at animation publications where they asked a bunch of voters how they voted and why in years where the winner differed from what the majority of people working in animation expected, and found that the "my grandchildren liked it" factor was the main reason.
I wonder how it works for the more technical categories, like best sound editing? Asking your grandchildren "what movie's sound editing did you like this year?" is probably not going to get a useful response.
Here's a video that talks about one of the categories (best Foreign movie). FWIW, I don't dislike the Oscars much, I sometimes even watch the whole thing if I think the host will be funny in a way that pisses off Meryl Streep.
Sorry about non-English words being sprinkled in though.
The nobel prize committee is far from "an arbitrary commmittee" as far as I know.
At least for the nobel prize in physics I know it's peers who decide and I'd assume it's the same for the other subjects, and it's not just "arbitrary people who have PhDs within the subject" either, it's a few selected ones who are well known in their fields.
I agree that they're not totally arbitrary and there is probably some correlation between broad peer review acceptance of the genius of some work and a Nobel prize. However, there are also plenty of other committees which could award prizes but which don't carry the same prestige for seemingly arbitrary reasons: e.g. the Royal Society.
It's spelled "prestigious" because we all agree it's spelled "prestigious."
The word has meaning because we all agree it has meaning.
Corporations exist because we all agree that corporations exist.
Money has value because we all agree that it has value.
The United States of America exists because we all agree that it exists.
Yes, there is a difference between objective reality and intersubjective reality. But I think you're making too much of that difference.
A huge amount of our everyday world is based entirely off broad mass agreement. The vast majority of the things we interact with in modern life would immediately cease to exist if all the people who believed in them just vanished one day - if an extraterrestrial species arrived on Earth the day after, they would not be able to observe almost anything about our lives. That doesn't mean our reality is fake or that our interaction with it is arbitrary. It just means that it is geopolitically and/or culturally defined.
Bottom line: Yes, social science is hard, but lighten up.
And has been around for over 100 years with a pretty good track record of awarding the prize to innovations that have stood the test of time (with some notable exceptions when it comes to the peace prize).
We can. I've never made a decision to read a book due to its author having won a Nobel prize, nor watched a film because of it being an Academy Award winner. The opinions of people in those particular insider-groups are not interesting to me (except indirectly, in how they affect broader society; that's quite interesting).
Actually sometimes after hearing about a book or film I think I might be interested in I'll go and read a load of 'normal people' reviews on Amazon or IMDb and they might sway me one way or the other. They may not be skilled reviewers but they use their own words and it helps me ascertain what kind of persons they are and whether their opinions are likely to be in tune with my own. Also I get a spread, rather than niche view.
So I suppose that means that for me, normal people's opinions hold more prestige than the Nobel Committee's.
The prize isn’t terribly prestigious in the first place: they’ve been accused of swedish bias since day one, and it doesn’t have a great track record of acknowledging people who actually become loved and/or acclaimed.
Iirc my lit friends follow the Man Booker prize more closely; perhaps there are other non-english prizes that could also compete with the swedes.
Your comparison with corporations and nations is not entirely fitting. Money and words work out fine.
In the case of nations, we don't have to agree for them to be real. For example, China (the Peoples Republic of China) does not agree that Taiwan (the Republic of China) exists or vice versa, yet both are undeniably real. The same with Serbia and Kosovo.
Some things exist only because of convention or an agreement between people, like the value of a Nobel prize or money.
Other things exist because we can empirically prove that they exist, like protons and gravity. If we all agree that they don't exist, it doesn't make it so.
I think you're just splitting hairs here. You didn't invalidate the parent's point by finding a few counterexamples; on the contrary I think you just reinforced it by showing when it does and doesn't apply. The parent never claimed that all things in the world are subject to mass agreement.
> For example, China (the Peoples Republic of China) does not agree that Taiwan (the Republic of China) exists or vice versa
Yes, they do. The government calling itself the PRC denies the legitimacy of the ROC, and vice versa, but despite each claiming to be the sole legitimate government of the combined territory, each very clearly believes that the other exists, and reacts to the actions of the other and to third parties’ actions toward the other.
Since when does "broad mass agreement" have to mean "universal agreement"? The idea of intersubjectivity has never relied on there being zero dissent. Your argument is a straw man at best.
The Nobel committee, at least in Physics, consistently selects people who have had a tremendous impact on the field. There are hundreds of people who may qualify who don't get selected, but those who are selected have done something important.
Ergo, a prize winner has a powerful social signal that they have done something important. Scarcity does the rest, as there are three or fewer of them every year in a world with perhaps a few hundred thousand practicing physicists.
The reason the Oscars and Nobel are the only two major awards that I care about is because in the past the winners are usually (though not always) worthy, so that indicates their selection process has value. Certainly more value than a conceited waste of time like the Grammys.
Part of it is the committee, Nobel prize selection committee is filled with some of the most prestigious people in that field. In addition, their selection process is very good.
Part of it is their long history of very good selections.
I know it will sound really anty-semitic but when majority of Nobel prizes is awarded to people with Jewish inheritage or estate supporters it all just looks like a political tool of Israel - and a pretty badly disguised one.
There is a difference between the actions of the criminal justice system and of civil society. People routinely lose jobs and experience other consequences without being convicted of a crime or even without committing a crime. Indeed, the vast majority of job firings, for example, do not even involve criminal behavior.
Agree, but when firing is because supposed criminal behaviour, then it's only fair to mention that he was fired because of involvement in such case against him, that it puts commitee in bad light etc. Otherwise it's just passing sentence without tribunal.
No, that's not how this works. Firing is for behavior, and an org can decide on its own what standards it wants to set on proof, evidence, etc. of that behavior, and this is completely independent of whether that behavior is legal as well as the outcome of any prosecution for that behavior. There are legal remedies for "injustices" such as being expelled from a school, being excluded from an organization, being fired from a job, being libeled/slandered or defamed, and so on. This is the way society works and has always worked for thousands of years. The idea that this is "passing sentence without a tribunal" is bunk, these people are not serving sentences, society is choosing how it wants to interact with these individuals, just as it does in countless of other examples.
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 254 ms ] threadEDIT: Thinking about it, that would actually be a really classy and fnord-y move.
Still, judged by the outcome, it's kind of impressive. ;-)
In general, that is what makes half of foreign policy reporting semi-useless, newspapers rarely report in which sense diplomats use the words. (Compare "fighting terrorist" as claimed by everybody, in general terrorist is just defined by threatening the interests of the speaker.)
[1] Likely meaning a mutual, synchronous and long term reduction of nuclear weapons towards a global zero goal. (Like the stated US nuclear policy of the Obama administration.)
[2] Meaning a prompt and unilateral abolishment of the NK nuclear program, as in Libya.
There are so many worthy recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize that are virtually unknown outside their specific non-profit niches — focus on those instead, and use the prize to highlight their work.
He first called him Rocket Man, which was an ingenious way of telling him "OK, you have achieved what you wanted" and praising him in a way. He pulled Kim into the eye of the public in a non-humiliating way (the "short and fat" was a response to Kim calling him senile first).
So it's not entirely impossible that he might one day receive it ;-)
https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/The_Beautiful_Poetry_...
Note that the Swedish Academy only awards the Literature prize. Nobels in Physics and Chemistry are awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, and the Karolinska Institutet awards the Nobel in Physiology or Medicine. Thus, only the Literature prize is impacted by this.
The 't' at the end of 'Institutet' is the article, so you can write 'Karolinska Institutet' or 'the Karolinska Institute'.
</pedant>
Sorry for furthering the pedantry.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karolinska_Institute
Technically, non of these organizations "award" the prizes, the prizes are awarded by the Nobel Foundation and the Swedish National Bank, the Riksbank (only the economics prize). They just select the winners.
It's well known that Trump doesn't enjoy reading. It seems unlikely that Trump has read "The Art of the Deal" even though he's credited as a co-author on the cover.
[1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/07/25/donald-trumps-...
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/read-ft-wsj/
On github: https://github.com/JoaoAparicio/read-ft-wsj/
Now it's really a scandal.
So it isn't really about choice at this point.
Secondly the reasons for the resignations and turmoil is the unwillingness of some, the majority, of the Academy members to recognize and properly handle the _alleged_ sexual harassment by Jean-Claude Arnault.
To make this matter worse Jean-Claude Arnault is married to an Academy member and the two of them together run a 'culture' organization which is funded and closely related to the Academy.
everyone is innocent until proven guilty.
Nothing has been brought to the police in terms of sexual assault reports. The police report the academy has let go forward is about the corruption/financial issues.
But this guy was given money to run an organization in which I think 14 counts of alleged sexual harassment has been reported.
It would be grossly negligent to continue to sponsor this.
They could've made it up just so he they can kick him out.
Kick him out of what?
He's not and never has been on the committee. His wife is. And no one has been kicked off the committee.
If it's credible, why hasn't he been convicted.
Because building a case strong enough to stand up in court in situations like these is really hard and the police/prosecutors have decided not to priorities it.
But the core of the matter isn't really the sexual harassment, it's the fact that the Academy apparently knew about several cases of both sexual harassment and, more importantly, possible financial fraud/corruption involving this individual and instead of dealing with it, decided to protect him. The sexual harassment charges are just the events that brought these more serious charges to light.
Primarily because he is accused of improperly getting funding from the Academy and she was accused of enabling and profiting from this as well as blocking any further investigation into the matter.
There are also accusations that she prevented the Academy from looking into earlier accusation of sexual harassment against her husband, but that is secondary.
So it's the ideal ground for character assassinations?
Especially since society doesn't blame/shame the victims anymore (which is good) -- so someone wrongfully accusing has all the upside and no downsides (which is bad).
When the Academy issued an internal investigation by a lawyer firm, the report they got back had very little to say about the alleged sexual harassments. It did however recommend that they should report the corruption and for some reason the Academy decide against it. After some major public outcry covering mostly the alleged sexual harassments, the Academy suddenly turned about and are now following the recommendation and has reported the corruption to the police.
What I would like to think is that the corruption charges would have come up to light regardless of the sexual harassment accusations, but I guess thats the current political climate in Sweden. Now it is being used as a proxy to address the sexual harassment accusations which is extremely suboptimal.
How about their don't recognize or handle anything?
If Jean-Claude Arnault is guilty of sexual harassment, let him legally go to jail / pay a fine / serve community service or whatever.
That's for the law to decide.
They can then take them off the academy (or not) -- if he is convicted.
Otherwise, it's not their business to do anything about it, and even less so for something "alleged".
I guess we'll have to agree to disagree here. If a company or organization receives multiple independent accusations against someone, it is absolutely their business to look into it and decide if this is a person they want to keep being involved with, completely separate from any police involvement. It may even be their business to bring this information to the police and provide any evidence they may have if the accusations are serious enough.
At most companies just the serious suspicion of financial fraud, repeated sexual harassment or the covering up of these is plenty enough to get you fired.
Not really, and not their job. If we wanted that, we could always set a higher bar for the criminal justice system.
>Lots of bad behaviors aren't criminal, or aren't usually prosecuted, but should still be grounds for removal.
In this case we're not talking about chewing gum on a board meeting, or treating employees bad (e.g. shouting at them) or something like that.
We're talking about actual criminal behaviors -- but only "alleged" ones. Those should be handled legally or not at all.
Else not a point in having a legal system, if any accusation can lead to "mob justice" or ad-hoc measures against someone.
Despite that being the part of the scandal that kicked off the investigation and has been getting the most focus, it's not the core of the scandal. The other parts of the scandal is that a venue owned by the above mentioned "lecherous boor" in question (who is married to an academy member) had possibly been getting improper funding from the Academy and that he might have leaked previous winners to his friends in advance.
The academy themselves announcing that there will be no prize this year is a way to avoid the humiliation of being kicked out from that role by the Nobel foundation.
Non Paywall Coverage
BBC : http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-43999240
Guardian : https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/may/04/nobel-prize-fo...
CNN: https://edition.cnn.com/2018/05/04/europe/nobel-prize-for-li...
I’ve been hoping for Cormac McCarthy to win the Nobel Prize in literature for a number of years. I still think he deserves it, but I’m starting to lose hope.
https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2005/08/cormac-mccarthy-i...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant%C3%B3nio_Lobo_Antunes
his book "The Double" is brilliant.
The committee for the literature prize has contained some prestigious literary figures themselves, so it is to a slight degree a judgement of peers. Secondly, the membership of the committee has historically represented a high society that many authors have been members of themselves, or who hoped to have that high society among their audience. Go through the Nobel ceremony archives and you can see some writers getting quite emotional that they are there among the committee and the invited guests.
This book has an interesting but slightly reductive take on how prestige works in the arts: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/artworld-prestige-97...
Why else would the premier restaurant review have been started by a tire company? It's all path dependence, and once you get enough momentum behind one choice it becomes self reinforcing.
Yes, I am trying to.
Because a rich Swede endowed it over a century ago, and its had that time to build up prestige.
It's sort of like why Harvard is so prestigious: it was the first American University, its existed continuously, and has always ran itself like it was elite.
> I think it is a bit strange how we fetisihize the Nobel above all others.
My guess it's one of the oldest extant awards of its kind, if not the oldest.
This scandal (and the hiatus) might allow a competitor to emerge as the most prestigious award in the field of literature, but I doubt such award will have the same popular awareness, because the Nobel's breadth helps a lot with it's fame.
These awards systems with arbitrary judges are far from fair.
With regard to Borges, he shares the same problem in terms of female characters as Cormac McCarthy as mentioned above. Plus, there is a real lack of emotional depth to Borges’ work. His themes may interest anoraks like ourselves, but I don’t think he is a truly universal figure.
A literature prize like the Nobel is by definition a thing targeted towards literature buffs, and Borges is a god among gods for those kind of people (of which I'm a part of), with or without female characters (come to think of it, I can't remember that many male characters in his books either).
Anyway, I stopped taking the Nobel literature prizes all that seriously the moment when I realized that they hadn't given it to Proust (his duchesse de Guermantes is one of the most important female characters in the history of literature) and Kafka.
Sound Editing is voted on by Sound Editor members. There is more peer review in terms of number of peers at the Academy than your average Nature article.
Huh? Doesn't the U.S. have more Nobel laureates than any other country?
This article is about the Nobel prize for literature.
Douglas Prasher getting snubbed for the 2008 Prize in Chemistry while the other three who won that year won because of Prasher’s discovery!
Somorjai getting snubbed in 2007 despite his research partner winning.
Eyring didn’t win because he was a Mormon.
Fritz Haber helped developed poison gas used in World War I, yet he won in 1918, despite the entire raison d’être of Nobel’s mandate.
If we want to talk about Literature, more Swedes have won than the entirety of Asia! Talk about creating a “fictional prize” so that a particular nationality can have prizes too.
The Oscars do have merit and they don’t purport to be international. It’s the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, recognizing excellence in American film; they don’t claim to be an international award, yet Nobel — they explicitly are international oriented. You’re going to say Tolstoy and Mark Twain are less accomplished than Selma Lagerlöf? Really? James Joyce never won a Nobel but Frans Sillanpää did?
Come now.
We agree a Olympic gold is prestigious even though it’s just a sport. We agree Lawrence Olivier was great even though he was just acting. We praise Alan Turing even though he was just a mathematician.
And as you know, Alan Turing pioneered computer science and helped saved millions of lives, so he deserves our respect :-) Perhaps prestige is like natural snowball kind of effect, like how the rich will naturally get richer. A prestigious event becomes somewhat prestigious, so people want to win it. Then more people want to win it. Then it becomes more prestigious, etc.
That has nothing to do with number of viewers though. It is just a dirty trick from FIFA to eliminate competition: national teams in Olympics are junior (U-23) teams because FIFA does not allow senior teams to participate.
In a hundred years, the olympics and the nobel prize could be seen as quaint reminders of an earlier time — entirely without prestige, leaving the observer wondering why we cared so much in the first place.
It's irrelevant to the point, things are prestigious because enough people decide they are. The longest breath holder gets an entry in the Guinness Book and a cocktail icebreaker, a Synchronized Swimming Gold Medalist is always a gold medalist.
Just because something involves a measurement doesn't mean it's completely objective. All the medal tells you objectively is who ran fastest in that particular race, on that particular day, out of the people participating.
There are many subjective factors contributing to that result, and any "excellence" we infer from it is still highly subjective. Indeed, the very notion that running the fastest is something worthy of prestige is a subjective one.
We don't give a gold medal for the fastest people to write from memory an algo for reversing a binary tree, or for the person capable of feeding the most children in a day.
It's completely arbitrary.
Both sports trade on the sexualization of young girls. Why do we even have a sport where the main criteria are older men passing judgment on young girls? The scoring system is vague/complex enough that the “victory” game in both sports is highly rigged anyway, so it’s more about politics than skill when deciding between the top few spots.
Obviously that's not the case.
Athletes may value Olympic Gold more so than gold at a smaller, regional competitions, even when posting better results at the smaller venues ...
Society at large has been "tuned" to regard Olympic Gold as the "gold standard" regardless of whether the athlete performed better at other competitions.
A mathematician that changed the world to a huge degree. No actor or athlete performance drives the greatest innovations of today or wins wars. They are merely entertainers. Useful, but that's it.
This happens a lot in the voting for best animated feature. It is fairly common for an older voter to have seen none of the nominees. He asks his grandchildren what "cartoon" they liked best that year, or remembers which movie's merchandise they frequently wear, and that's the one he votes for.
I remember seeing a couple article at animation publications where they asked a bunch of voters how they voted and why in years where the winner differed from what the majority of people working in animation expected, and found that the "my grandchildren liked it" factor was the main reason.
I wonder how it works for the more technical categories, like best sound editing? Asking your grandchildren "what movie's sound editing did you like this year?" is probably not going to get a useful response.
Sorry about non-English words being sprinkled in though.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OWizRledAr8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFENw9T7qUw
At least for the nobel prize in physics I know it's peers who decide and I'd assume it's the same for the other subjects, and it's not just "arbitrary people who have PhDs within the subject" either, it's a few selected ones who are well known in their fields.
The word has meaning because we all agree it has meaning.
Corporations exist because we all agree that corporations exist.
Money has value because we all agree that it has value.
The United States of America exists because we all agree that it exists.
Yes, there is a difference between objective reality and intersubjective reality. But I think you're making too much of that difference.
A huge amount of our everyday world is based entirely off broad mass agreement. The vast majority of the things we interact with in modern life would immediately cease to exist if all the people who believed in them just vanished one day - if an extraterrestrial species arrived on Earth the day after, they would not be able to observe almost anything about our lives. That doesn't mean our reality is fake or that our interaction with it is arbitrary. It just means that it is geopolitically and/or culturally defined.
Bottom line: Yes, social science is hard, but lighten up.
Actually sometimes after hearing about a book or film I think I might be interested in I'll go and read a load of 'normal people' reviews on Amazon or IMDb and they might sway me one way or the other. They may not be skilled reviewers but they use their own words and it helps me ascertain what kind of persons they are and whether their opinions are likely to be in tune with my own. Also I get a spread, rather than niche view.
So I suppose that means that for me, normal people's opinions hold more prestige than the Nobel Committee's.
Iirc my lit friends follow the Man Booker prize more closely; perhaps there are other non-english prizes that could also compete with the swedes.
Why should they have? That's not what the statutes say should be awarded so that particular criticism is a bit unfair.
In the case of nations, we don't have to agree for them to be real. For example, China (the Peoples Republic of China) does not agree that Taiwan (the Republic of China) exists or vice versa, yet both are undeniably real. The same with Serbia and Kosovo.
Some things exist only because of convention or an agreement between people, like the value of a Nobel prize or money.
Other things exist because we can empirically prove that they exist, like protons and gravity. If we all agree that they don't exist, it doesn't make it so.
Yes, they do. The government calling itself the PRC denies the legitimacy of the ROC, and vice versa, but despite each claiming to be the sole legitimate government of the combined territory, each very clearly believes that the other exists, and reacts to the actions of the other and to third parties’ actions toward the other.
Ergo, a prize winner has a powerful social signal that they have done something important. Scarcity does the rest, as there are three or fewer of them every year in a world with perhaps a few hundred thousand practicing physicists.
Part of it is their long history of very good selections.
Part of it is the one million dollar reward.
http://freakonomics.com/podcast/how-to-win-a-nobel-prize-a-n...