I think what they're saying is that current scientific achievements are usually the result of huge swaths of scientists from all manner of disciplines working together, and giving an award to a single researcher is usually just a popularity contest or publicity stunt that ignores the work of everyone else.
> It has now been a while, that achievements are rarely done in trios, duos or in solitude. It is a farce to all other hard working scientists.
Achievements in modern science are usually seen as incremental, done as part of a larger team and based on a substantial body of prior work. I think the author is trying to say that behind these successes, there are people who may have committed as much to the field but achieved no recognition. In my experience the larger teams / collaborations thing seems to be more of a Particle Physics thing.
> This recognition is for those, who successfully appropriate the spirit of a given time. Aside from the propaganda/marketing stunt.
The author, I believe, is saying that success is more to do with luck. I'm not sure I agree -- there tends to be a network effect with science that people who have proven themselves get offered better opportunities and so can in some cases have a cluster of successes, but I have heard similar sentiments and they're not so easily dismissed.
>laureates include first woman in 55 years
Completely irrelevant information, yet it has to be in the title. Are there any statistics on how many left-handed people, or vegans are laureates?
I'm not a fan of pointing these things out so heavy-handedly either but I don't think it's productive to go out of my way to point them out, if you think it's irrelevant then ignore it and focus on what you do find interesting in this news. I mean, think about it, what kind of constructive discussion could possibly come out of your comment?
I'm willing to sacifrice some of my karma, if it helps people to start considering others achievements equally awesome regardless of what's between their legs or what is their skin tone.
I don't deny that, but I believe the best way to stop it, is to stop giving so much attention to gender/race of people. That's why so-called "diversity" reports of companies make me sick. If you believe that all races/genders are equally capable to achieve greatness (as I do), then you should hire the best, give awards to the best and never spend a second thinking about their biological background. If we stop making big deal of these things, it won't matter anymore.
Given how short your comment is, I am not quite certain what you are trying to say. However, in my experience, whenever somebody complains about "equality of opportunity vs equality of outcome", they willfully overlook a lot of factors that would be playing into the "opportunity" part of the equation.
This is exactly the problem. You think in terms of "balancing a seesaw", but there is no reason to believe that in the complete absence of discrimination, the gender ratio will be 50:50.
Until we find any evidence that says there's something intrinsic in women that stops them from working and/or performing at the same level as men in physics research I think it's safe to assume the ratio will tend to that.
That is hopelessly naive. Someone has to decide who is "the best", or, at the very least, someone has to decide on the quality metric that will be used to make this assessment. That inevitably leads to politics and gamesmanship.
Not at all naive. Asians used to face prejudice arguably as severe as that faced by blacks. Once discriminatory laws were lifted, they began a remarkable ascendancy--one that was in large part [1] due to the market re-pricing the value of Asian labor: " One explanation for rapid Asian upward mobility is, therefore, that earnings gaps driven by prejudice rather than productivity could not persist in a post-war labor market that eliminated most forms of legal discrimination against non-white workers"
Well, not that I agree with the grandparent comment, but in many parts of the world left-handers are indeed discriminated and forcefully trained to become right-handed, which leads to all sorts of problems. This was also commmonplace in Europe until not long ago.
A relative of mine, currently in their 50's, was forced to write right handed while growing up in New York. They still do to this day, though they do everything else left handed.
Lefthanders tend to suffer a higher rate of accidents and lower lifespan, typically attributed to having to operate machinery optimized for the right-handed.
If you look at the distribution of gender in the field, it is very heavily skewed towards men. One can argue about why this is the case, but if you don't believe that women are inherently "dumber" or less capable of doing scientific work then celebrating one of them reaching such success is a great way of inspiring other women and girls of attempting the same.
In practical terms, imagine all humans have similar potential. If this is the case, then you must realize that the potential of nearly half the population is completely wasted. Indeed an entire gender is underrepresented in the tech & science field. Thus your best way of action should be to alleviate the issue and normalize the gender distribution. Inspiring younger women to enter the field is a step towards this goal.
Of course, if you cling to the notion that women are not capable enough of doing this demanding intellectual work and should rather stick to doing menial labor surely it must be a fantastically rare statistical anomaly to have a woman win the most prestigious scientific accolade, and thus mentioning it in the title makes complete sense.
This is hackernews, does something "non-STEM" even exist? :)
But seriously, of course other fields than STEM exist. And of course they are important too. But if you believe that the underrepresentation in STEM is not entirely due to beneficial reasons and that remedying that would be beneficial, then the above mentioned still holds true.
This is rather simplistic way to summarize the article. From the link you provided:
> In this study, the percentage of girls who did excel in science or math was still larger than the number of women who were graduating with STEM degrees. That means there’s something in even the most liberal societies that’s nudging women away from math and science, even when those are their best subjects. The women-in-STEM advocates could, for starters, focus their efforts on those would-be STEM stars.
There are two takeaways for me:
- If people do not feel economic pressure (the need to find a high paying job) they might follow a non-STEM passion (the article exemplifies this in the case of women, who usually are not expected to be the breadwinner)
- Even in liberal societies (and I find it amusing that the US is taken as a beacon in this example) there is difference between "what percentage perform well in STEM" and "what percentage pursue STEM". It would be instructive to study why, not just assume why.
> In practical terms, imagine all humans have similar potential.
We should imagine all humans have the same rights, but not the same potential. If we all had similar potential, then we would all have the same shot at being top physicists, NBA players or chess grandmasters. But we don't.
We know that all humans don't have similar potential because there are women only sporting events. We created women's soccer and women's tennis and women's golf precisely because we acknowledge that all humans don't have similar potential.
> Of course, if you cling to the notion that women are not capable enough of doing this demanding intellectual work and should rather stick to doing menial labor
But most menial labor is done by males - especially the dangerous ones? Why are you so fixated on physics? Why aren't you demanding women go into garbage collecting, logging, steel work, etc which are some of the most dangerous and most male fields?
> surely it must be a fantastically rare statistical anomaly to have a woman win the most prestigious scientific accolade, and thus mentioning it in the title makes complete sense.
Can you please not do this? This type of feminism ( especially coming from a male ) comes off just as badly as chauvanism and extremely patronizing.
If you truly believe what you say, why aren't you out there protesting women's world cup or any women specific sporting event? All humans have the same potential right?
Also your argument would make sense if the west still discriminated against women. We haven't for quite a long time. As a matter of fact, we have had programs and scholarships specifically to encourage women to go into male dominated fields for generations. And yet, women choose not to? Should we force women to go into these fields since encouraging and giving them a choice certainly isn't working.
> In practical terms, imagine all humans have similar potential.
This is evidently false. The intelligence trait is at least partly inheritable, and not all humans are equally intelligent, so not all humans have the same potential.
Now, if what you actually meant was "both genders have the same potential in general" (as opposed to every individual human being), then it's not as simple as that. There's some evidence that although men and women are equally intelligent on average, the distribution is flatter and wider for men. This means that there are more men than women at the extreme high and low ends of the distribution. This is part of the reason (though probably not the only reason) why men are more strongly represented among the extreme overachievers in STEM fields.
I am surprised that one of them got a nobel prize for work that was done during PhD. Often times the boss would take all the credit, including the prizes.
For example, Jules Hoffmann in 2011 won the prize but not Lemaitre, the postdoc in the lab who did the work.
I guess the Nobel committee are acutely aware of the injustice they served to Jocelyn Bell Burnell in the prize awarded for the discovery of pulsars. She did most of the work and analysis as the student, and her supervisors got the credit.
He supervisor said something that sticks with me: “The person in the crows nest shouting “land ho!” Doesn’t get the credit, it’s the captain of the ship”.
While there’s some truth to that, it’s certainly the case that many people who work hard do not get their deserved recognition.
Thanks for the pointer, the Lemaitre case looks pretty bad. There seem to be several similar cases that were brought to light in recent years, maybe the committee has learned from such mistakes.
Especially for PhD scientists it is inspiring and motivating that you can make nobel prize-worthy discoveries at this level. This should not be hidden for keeping up power hierarchies.
Physics has some history of PhD work being recognized. Abrikosov won for his very first paper, if I recall correctly. Wilczek also won for a paper he published as a grad student (albeit with his advisor). And de Broglie essentially won for his thesis, which was only a few pages long.
On the other hand, one need only think of Jocelyn Bell-Burnell to find an instance where a grad student got totally screwed.
Not pointed out in the article is the fact that Strickland is still an "associate" professor at Waterloo -- something sure to be rectified asap -- indicating that the department there wasn't super keen on promoting her to full professor, for some reason. Oops!
Do you know whether she was super keen on being promoted or are you just assuming she was being pushed down “for some reason”? (I have no idea, myself.)
I have no idea either, but it's probably worth pointing out that, for better or worse, promotion to full will entail a certain degree of bean counting. Thus, there are a number of perfectly respectable ways to not meet those metrics. For example, someone who decides to tackle a very hard problem with very high risk of failure is likely to look less productive on paper.
I think it varies by department and university, but I know that one of the professors in my grad school department had to take on more committee work when she got promoted.
In many top universities in Canada, promotion to Full Professor doesn't confer any particular benefits. No salary raises (unless your Faculty are unionized, and you are below the mandated "floor" salary for Full Professor ... which is very unlikely, because it's so low, by design). Same workload. If anything it's worse because you might be asked to serve on more departmental and faculty committees.
Sure but it still means something to the rest of the community, which is important. My parents are professors, and I can assure you that there is at the least a psychological difference.
And she was elected as a fellow of the Optical Society of America in 2008. In CS and AI, such an election typically happens years after attaining full professionship. If her subfield is anything like CS, it is yet another anomaly.
Academic evaluations are very imperfect and are biased toward "what have you done lately?" Major breakthroughs do not count for as much as sustained research output. For tenure and promotion, typically work done before joining the institution is not used in the evaluation, and the prize winning work was done during her PhD research. This is in the US, but I assume Canada is reasonably similar.
I don't know about Canada but "Full Professor" means something different in most Commonwealth countries than in the US. Typically a University dept will have a single professor who likely is head of dept, if there's an endowment there might be a second one
(and if you get a Nobel I suspect there's lee-way to confer one)
Please get the facts before spreading wrong ideas. She has said that she never applied. Also some people are commenting (I don't know if this is true) that a professor has more paperwork etc to do for the same salary so she may want to focus on pure research.
Oh, lord. Please stop the assumptions and do a little digging before you post. She was on the radio today saying that she just never bothered to go through the paperwork.
But if it makes you feel better, I'm sure it was a huge conspiracy.
+ Arthur Ashkin, at 96, is the oldest nobel prize laureate ever ( https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/lists/nobel-laureates-by-a... ), and declined an interview this morning because he is "busy doing research". He did much of is research at Bell Labs and has his own lab at home now.
Though note that at least according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Curie#Nobel_Prizes it took Pierre Curie objecting Marie being excluded from the nomination to get the Nobel committee of the time to acknowledge Marie Curie's work...
+ This nobel prize is basically about a real life microscopic tractor beam, which already appeared in the original Star Trek in the 60s. Could be another invention inspired by science fiction.
Cool! She taught me 2nd year E&M in 2000 or 2001, although truth be told I remember it being one of my least favourite classes during my physics degree. I had no idea at the time the calibre of physicist she was.
I'm glad Ashkin won. Many felt he had been deprived a Nobel in 1997, when his former colleague Steven Chu won it (the cooling and trapping of atoms with laser light). I believe Chu worked with Ashkin, or Ashkin was his mentor, or something like that.
Absolutely. There are attempts in other fields. For instance it's encouraging to find that no one (I believe and hope) has complained that 82 per cent of obstetrics and gynaecology medical residents in the US in 2016 were female.
The slightly ambiguous headline might make some think that no woman has won ANY Nobel prize in the last 55 years. That only applies to the Physics prize, many women have won Nobels in other categories.
It's such a crime that Emmy Noether never got the Nobel Prize in physics. I wonder how many of the physics prizes were for discoveries that would never have happened if not for Noether's theorem.
Problem is, the prize is usually awarded for experimental work, or for theoretical work whose predictions are validated by experiment. Noether's theorem is a purely mathematical result.
78 comments
[ 1.8 ms ] story [ 154 ms ] threadIt has now been a while, that achievements are rarely done in trios, duos or in solitude. It is a farce to all other hard working scientists.
This recognition is for those, who successfully appropriate the spirit of a given time. Aside from the propaganda/marketing stunt.
Achievements in modern science are usually seen as incremental, done as part of a larger team and based on a substantial body of prior work. I think the author is trying to say that behind these successes, there are people who may have committed as much to the field but achieved no recognition. In my experience the larger teams / collaborations thing seems to be more of a Particle Physics thing.
> This recognition is for those, who successfully appropriate the spirit of a given time. Aside from the propaganda/marketing stunt.
The author, I believe, is saying that success is more to do with luck. I'm not sure I agree -- there tends to be a network effect with science that people who have proven themselves get offered better opportunities and so can in some cases have a cluster of successes, but I have heard similar sentiments and they're not so easily dismissed.
What makes you think this?
Anything else is just enforcing some ideaology or another.
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/02/race-ec...
https://academic.oup.com/socpro/article/64/2/219/3058571
That is hopelessly naive. Someone has to decide who is "the best", or, at the very least, someone has to decide on the quality metric that will be used to make this assessment. That inevitably leads to politics and gamesmanship.
[1] http://www.nber.org/papers/w22748
https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Bias_against_left-handed_people#...
https://www.nytimes.com/1991/04/04/us/being-left-handed-may-...
In practical terms, imagine all humans have similar potential. If this is the case, then you must realize that the potential of nearly half the population is completely wasted. Indeed an entire gender is underrepresented in the tech & science field. Thus your best way of action should be to alleviate the issue and normalize the gender distribution. Inspiring younger women to enter the field is a step towards this goal.
Of course, if you cling to the notion that women are not capable enough of doing this demanding intellectual work and should rather stick to doing menial labor surely it must be a fantastically rare statistical anomaly to have a woman win the most prestigious scientific accolade, and thus mentioning it in the title makes complete sense.
Umm you do realize there are important roles outside of STEM right?
But seriously, of course other fields than STEM exist. And of course they are important too. But if you believe that the underrepresentation in STEM is not entirely due to beneficial reasons and that remedying that would be beneficial, then the above mentioned still holds true.
(Edit: for the record, the "simplistic summary" is not mine. It's the title of the article.)
> In this study, the percentage of girls who did excel in science or math was still larger than the number of women who were graduating with STEM degrees. That means there’s something in even the most liberal societies that’s nudging women away from math and science, even when those are their best subjects. The women-in-STEM advocates could, for starters, focus their efforts on those would-be STEM stars.
There are two takeaways for me:
- If people do not feel economic pressure (the need to find a high paying job) they might follow a non-STEM passion (the article exemplifies this in the case of women, who usually are not expected to be the breadwinner)
- Even in liberal societies (and I find it amusing that the US is taken as a beacon in this example) there is difference between "what percentage perform well in STEM" and "what percentage pursue STEM". It would be instructive to study why, not just assume why.
We should imagine all humans have the same rights, but not the same potential. If we all had similar potential, then we would all have the same shot at being top physicists, NBA players or chess grandmasters. But we don't.
We know that all humans don't have similar potential because there are women only sporting events. We created women's soccer and women's tennis and women's golf precisely because we acknowledge that all humans don't have similar potential.
> Of course, if you cling to the notion that women are not capable enough of doing this demanding intellectual work and should rather stick to doing menial labor
But most menial labor is done by males - especially the dangerous ones? Why are you so fixated on physics? Why aren't you demanding women go into garbage collecting, logging, steel work, etc which are some of the most dangerous and most male fields?
> surely it must be a fantastically rare statistical anomaly to have a woman win the most prestigious scientific accolade, and thus mentioning it in the title makes complete sense.
Can you please not do this? This type of feminism ( especially coming from a male ) comes off just as badly as chauvanism and extremely patronizing.
If you truly believe what you say, why aren't you out there protesting women's world cup or any women specific sporting event? All humans have the same potential right?
Also your argument would make sense if the west still discriminated against women. We haven't for quite a long time. As a matter of fact, we have had programs and scholarships specifically to encourage women to go into male dominated fields for generations. And yet, women choose not to? Should we force women to go into these fields since encouraging and giving them a choice certainly isn't working.
Even if we all did "have the same shot at being top physicists", some people may prefer to be something else.
This is evidently false. The intelligence trait is at least partly inheritable, and not all humans are equally intelligent, so not all humans have the same potential.
Now, if what you actually meant was "both genders have the same potential in general" (as opposed to every individual human being), then it's not as simple as that. There's some evidence that although men and women are equally intelligent on average, the distribution is flatter and wider for men. This means that there are more men than women at the extreme high and low ends of the distribution. This is part of the reason (though probably not the only reason) why men are more strongly represented among the extreme overachievers in STEM fields.
For example, Jules Hoffmann in 2011 won the prize but not Lemaitre, the postdoc in the lab who did the work.
While there’s some truth to that, it’s certainly the case that many people who work hard do not get their deserved recognition.
Especially for PhD scientists it is inspiring and motivating that you can make nobel prize-worthy discoveries at this level. This should not be hidden for keeping up power hierarchies.
On the other hand, one need only think of Jocelyn Bell-Burnell to find an instance where a grad student got totally screwed.
This is the central problem with today's academic research environment.
Also, see this article by Peter Higgs complaining about the need to "keep churning out papers": https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/06/peter-higgs-...
(and if you get a Nobel I suspect there's lee-way to confer one)
But if it makes you feel better, I'm sure it was a huge conspiracy.
+ The most cited Strickland / Mourou paper is this one: Compression of amplified chirped optical pulses. http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.673... It has a humble length of 3 pages and has collected 4600 citations in 23 years.
+ This is a good time to remember Lise Meitner: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lise_Meitner#Nobel_Prize_for_n... and check out James Watson's 'opinion' of Rosalind Franklin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fBWPzdyyPic But also note that Marie Curie was one of very few nobel laureates who got awarded twice, and she got her awards very early on in the history of the nobel prize ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Nobel_laureates_with_... ).
Well, to be fair I had a packed schedule that semester...
Incidentally, Arthur's paper is very readable.
https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.24...