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As I began mentioning more than a decade ago, the hard science Nobel Prizes have been an impressive hold0ut from the Cult of Diversity. But … from the Associated Press:
The Latest: For 2nd year, no women among Nobel winners
For the second consecutive year, there were no women among the 2017 Nobel prize laureates.
The head of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences says the committees that choose Nobel Prize winners will meet this winter to discuss gender and ethnic diversity issues in the prestigious awards.
Goran Hannsson said after the announcement of the economics prize on Monday that “I hope in five years, 10 years, we’ll see a very different distribution.”
Each of the six prizes is chosen by a different committee, three of which are currently headed by women. …
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Yeah, let’s have some Nobellcurve Prizes.
Btw, what does it matter? Race is just a social construct, and what’s a ‘man’ or ‘woman’? How about Nobel pretend that half the men are ‘women’. Fixed.
Don’t be ungallant.
Give the ladies a few more litt prizes (Pearl S Buck?). Most of the Peace prizes turn out bad anyways, so there’s that. And then there are the occasional hard science Nobels for women-especially medicine since most graduating MD’s are now female.
And as I said before, make up a few more like the econ.
What’s a good term for nagging?
An M.D.'s job is less intellectually demanding and carries less responsibility than a car mechanic's.
The only reason M.D.'s have an aura of respectability and mystery is vestigial medieval mumbo-jumbo mysticism. Nowadays 99% of the time all they do is just download formulaic recipes from the Internet.Replies: @dr kill, @AM, @Avery, @anon, @Bill
A gigantic raffle where every human being is eligible seems the fairest way to hand them out.
Religious fanaticism can only go on so long. Sooner or later it burns itself out in a given group. Then it either must find a new group to infect or the old group will turn on the fanatics.
However, Lysenkoism will live again before this evil is over.
Goran Hannsson: “Nobel Prizes for women? Mañana!”
We are unfortunately losing some of our better head nurses on the altar of equality. Male MDs and female nurses really do result in higher quality care overall.
At any rate, most women MD seem to want to work with people and then get married, get pregnant and drop their work week to 3 days a week.
I would not expect an amazing amount of output from female MDs.
The real factor in favor of women is their longer lifespans, as Nobels aren't awarded posthumously.Replies: @AM
Is it time to end the Nobel prize?
I for one, am looking forward to this brave new world where, as a female, I can earn a Nobel Prize for reading lots of books.
#NobelsTooWhite
National Geographic is wringing its hands that only 48 out of 881 Nobel prizes have been awarded to women.
After acknowledging the success of immigrants who have won Nobel prizes for the US, it was pointed out that the science laureates are getting older. (I did notice that this year’s recepients were rather elderly, only one under 70.) There were only about 1000 physicists a century ago but now there are hundreds of thousands creating a backlog of potential laureates, suggesting that prize winners will remain white and male far into the future. The recepients for the Literature and Economics prize haven’t aged as rapidly and the Peace prize recepients have actually gotten younger.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/10/nobel-prize-winners-laureates-charts-graphics-science/
It thus stands to reason that there is a big backlog of people whose prime was several decades ago to grant awards whose research has had a far more profound impact.Replies: @Steve Sailer, @The Anti-Gnostic
Give the ladies a few more litt prizes (Pearl S Buck?). Most of the Peace prizes turn out bad anyways, so there's that. And then there are the occasional hard science Nobels for women-especially medicine since most graduating MD's are now female.
And as I said before, make up a few more like the econ.
What's a good term for nagging?Replies: @Forbes, @Lurker, @anonymous coward
A Nobel Prize in Diversity & Inclusion.
They need to invent a few more categories that women can plausibly be given prizes in. Sociology, psychology, journalism, fashion. Those plus the occasional prize in Lit and Peace will make up for the lack of laureates in the hard sciences and Ec.
Much better than giving non-merit based hard science Nobels.
“What’s a good term for nagging?”
Womensplaining?
One would think something as subjective as selecting the year’s best scientific discovery would be extremely easy to tilt in the direction of a female winner IF there were any remotely close to being in contention.
If I were a researcher reading this I’d be sure to include a token diversity woman on my team. Calling it now, all groundbreaking scientific discoveries will soon be made by teams of white men “led” by a wise black woman.
Nobel Peace Prize, coming to a Ta-Nehisi Coates near you!
The table looked untouched. I couldn't resist commenting to the librarian, "Gee, they're flying off the table, huh?".
This shouldn’t take long. It’s Swedes we’re talking about. Swedes.
What, Hillary didn’t get the Literature Prize for her Deplorables speech?
Well she should have. It was influential.
Shortly after the hard-science Nobel prizes are diversified, the American legal system will get involved. Some female winner’s attorney will observe that male Nobel laureates get a big boost in pay after winning while the new crop of female Nobelists get much less, and gin up a sex discrimination lawsuit. The argument will be that universities should tie salary to the prize (the credential), not the great (or not-so-great but very diverse) work which prompted it and which causes (or doesn’t cause) students to respect the winner. It’s the same argument that says businesses should offer the same positions and pay to applicants-of-diversity with Grievance Studies degrees as they do to vanilla applicants with STEM degrees. (That’s what “diversity testing” is all about– sociology grad students send various fake resumes to job advertisements with supposedly “equal” qualifications, then write their theses and jump-start their expert-witness careers by documenting that applicants-of-diversity with imaginary Harvard degrees in diversity-nonsense get fewer invitations to interview, because of systemic “racism.”)
Oh, who am I kidding? America’s colleges and universities will give large pay increases to those who win Nobel Diversity Prizes, just like they give large pay packets to the staff in their Grievance Studies departments.
Will the trans-diverse get a boost under the new regime?
They should troll their critics by finding a hard-charging, alpha-dog male-to-female tranny in the hard sciences and award “her” a Nobel…then double down on it when they make the announcement and play it up as a “great triumph for feminism.”
Break out the popcorn for that one!
This is absolutely incredibly unfortunate. The entire Nobel Prize system and awards will be granted much less credibility. Much less credibility for those WHO DESERVED IT.
I have only read newspaper reviews of what these scientists apparently accomplished. But I would imagine that it is very important in the medical field to spread the ideas of the great men who wins science nobels. Now, we lose that valuable positive addition to our understanding and manipulation of nature.
So not only will they ruin the Future Nobels, they will retroactively ruin all of the deservant winners up until today.
It might be an opportunity for some organization with more sense and a bit more balls to take the top spot.
Sounds to me like some diversity is needed among the committee heads. Time for MRA’s to #marchonStockholm
Seriously, it’s probably a good safe play. Why wait until radicals start a viral #NobellesNow, or riot in Stockholm.
OT:
This might be a good article published elsewhere to comment upon here at Unz.com.
Birth of a White Supremacist
Mike Enoch’s transformation from leftist contrarian to nationalist shock jock.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/10/16/birth-of-a-white-supremacist
Yeah, this reminds me of how much rueful, half-a-loaf laughter I’ll get if the Left wins, because Central Americans will ethnically cleanse blacks from the majority of America, and almost assuredly remove affirmative action for them and probably attempt some new Jim Crow laws.
Trannies taking female affirmative action slots will also generate from me some laughter if we don’t ban this nonsense.
Hillary get the literature prize for her Deplorables speech
Well she should have. It was influential.
I am guessing that most comments here will be making jokes about this, I however don’t see these things as funny anymore. When will this all end, unlike in the past, people still had the option to escape somewhere if they were living in system that was really holding them back. In this current global world system, there seems there is no escape from this SJW ideology, absolutely everything (and I mean everything) and everybody is to be subjugated.
But on the bright side, Leftism has a huge Achilles heel, which is that it discourages people from reproducing.
Deirdre McCloskey.
dumbing down cultural institutions doesn’t work–eg, Harvard will pay a price for admitting the likes of Malia Obama, just as the MacArthur Foundation has paid a price for anointing lightweights like T Coates. That’s reality
File under unintended effects:
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences is basically granting permission, in advance, to dismiss any future Nobel awarded to women or minorities as an Affirmative Action sop.
That is going to happen – the tranny winner! In fact, I have already heard Millennial boys chattering that they may use the tranny ticket for many situations….or go the gender dysphoria way to up their chances for whatever. All this grievance collecting, slicing ever narrower pieces off the identity pie-charts, all this identitarian focus..calls for survival skills to emerge. Males are natural competitors, so they will naturally move the goal posts.
I’ve heard boomer men (the suddenly laid-off ones) say jokingly, that they should just identify as a woman in order to be re-hired in their field…2008+ was a tough time of many lay-offs. However, Millennial males just say: “ok, gotta figure out a way to compete and stay relevant” – their cynicism is their strength.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences is basically granting permission, in advance, to dismiss any future Nobel awarded to women or minorities as an Affirmative Action sop.Replies: @Polynikes
Basically. They’re just begging to be ignored in the future. Done and done.
Look at it this way: considering it’s Sweden, it’s amazing they’ve held out this long.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DLu0kqkXcAAScrw.jpg
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DLr1TSsW4AE7dyQ.jpgReplies: @Father O'Hara
Actually, maybe it’s fortunate that Sweden rather than the UK is handling this:
PS: Whatever happened to Bob Dylan getting his Nobel?
Of course, call for Nobel prize for blacks can’t be far behind, followed by Nobel prize for Muslims. Affirmative Action has finally arrived for Nobel prize. What do you expect? The dang thing is run by Swedes, the biggest cucks in the western world.
Only kinda off topic — file under “vibrant”:
In his Columbus Day proclamation, President Trump wrote,
“There can be no doubt that American culture, business, and civic life would all be much less vibrant in the absence of the Italian American community.”
Italians are vibrant! The president says so right there!
Until they have Affirmative Action Nobels for people with Downs Syndrome, they are bigots who should be shamed.
We definitely need more “diverse” Nobel prizes. How about prizes for buggery, carpetmunching, getting YT, and advanced miscegenation?
Give the ladies a few more litt prizes (Pearl S Buck?). Most of the Peace prizes turn out bad anyways, so there's that. And then there are the occasional hard science Nobels for women-especially medicine since most graduating MD's are now female.
And as I said before, make up a few more like the econ.
What's a good term for nagging?Replies: @Forbes, @Lurker, @anonymous coward
Undocumented criticism?
Oh, who am I kidding? America's colleges and universities will give large pay increases to those who win Nobel Diversity Prizes, just like they give large pay packets to the staff in their Grievance Studies departments.
Will the trans-diverse get a boost under the new regime?Replies: @Anonymous
You point toward something which will soon become real, I predict: the Nobel Prize for Diversity. Just think of the possibilities!
For one thing, to make up for centuries of racism and sexism, the decent thing to do would make the Diversity Prizes the only prizes awarded for the next few thousand years. We’re well on our way already.
woman nobels? make me a samwich!!11!!
Great news. Let them destroy their own franchise with SJW poison.
At least some future breakthroughs will likely hinge on artificial neural networks trained on ridiculously large datasets using millions of computer-years and not a single human being around who actually understands why the results happen to work.
In that light, the Academy might just as well just give the price to the most physically attractive human on the relevant paper’s endless author list.
Will there be Nobel Casting Couch scandals? Who will be the Weinstein of Science?
Science and engineering has an intense contraceptive effect on females.
It should come as no surprise that there are so few females capable of rational and systemized thought. Who would their mothers be? How would they have been made and by whom? How would a line of descent ever form from such an infertile conception?
The female of your species is inclined to extract resources from males. The male produces resources for the purpose of gaining a female. And so has it ever been.
Before our era of modern electrically run appliances there was plenty of household labor and logistics for the wife and daughters to perform. Such as washing clothes manually and taking care of food logistics when you do not have a modern refrigerator/freezer. Childbearing and raising young children. Traditionally the man-woman resource extraction equation was a net wash. What has really blown up male-female roles are the major household appliances and modern birth control.
Refrigerator-freezers
Washers-Dryers
Stoves- gas and electric that go on-off instantly
Indoor Running water
http://www.tabletmag.com/scroll/246724/the-specifically-jewy-perviness-of-harvey-weinstein
Indeed, what’s sauce for the NFL goose should be sauce for the Nobel gander!
They’ve got one quasi-Nobel in the social sciences, Economics, which is male-dominated. It wouldn’t be unreasonable to have another one for social sciences with more women, such as psychology.
Similarly, if they want more women to win Oscars, they could create an Oscar for casting directors.
In a Francoist-style dictator scenario – the rosiest possible outcome for Sweden at this point – the Nobel Prizes would boycott the National Movement in protest and accordingly be summarily dissolved. One of course must hope that the committee leaders would be placed under house arrest and not permitted to go into exile.
It is already one of the biggest open secrets at the upper echelons that there are really two Harvard degrees: a white Harvard degree and a black/Hispanic Harvard degree, with the latter falling generally under the rubric of Derbyshire’s IWSMs useful to hire as cover for one’s pasty Silicon Valley/Wall Street arse but scarcely superstar material.
“The head of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences says the committees that choose Nobel Prize winners will meet this winter to discuss gender and ethnic diversity issues in the prestigious awards.”
As Steve says ‘no surprise here’. Of course selection should be on merit ONLY.
IWSM?
Intelligent Well-Socialized Minority
No, the institutions do not pay a price. Today a MacArthur grant awardee still commands massive prestige among the elites and the establishment (where it truly matters, plebs are irrelevant).
If I were a researcher reading this I'd be sure to include a token diversity woman on my team. Calling it now, all groundbreaking scientific discoveries will soon be made by teams of white men "led" by a wise black woman.
Nobel Peace Prize, coming to a Ta-Nehisi Coates near you!Replies: @Clyde, @Brutusale
We must nominate him for the Noble Peace Prize and Nobel Literature Prize. TNC is bound to win one or both.
In most of human history it also worked the other way around too. As far as extracting resources.
Before our era of modern electrically run appliances there was plenty of household labor and logistics for the wife and daughters to perform. Such as washing clothes manually and taking care of food logistics when you do not have a modern refrigerator/freezer. Childbearing and raising young children. Traditionally the man-woman resource extraction equation was a net wash. What has really blown up male-female roles are the major household appliances and modern birth control.
Refrigerator-freezers
Washers-Dryers
Stoves- gas and electric that go on-off instantly
Indoor Running water
My cousin married into a family with three doctor children, two sisters and a brother. One sister has given up work, one works part time. Only the brother works full time.
OT, there might be some iSteve fodder when this report comes out later
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/oct/09/audit-lays-bare-racial-disparities-in-uk-schools-courts-and-workplaces
Apparently Chinese kids do better in school, too. Who knew?
“If these disparities cannot be explained then they must be changed” says Mrs May. But the explanation is politically unacceptable, so stand by for affirmative action in sentencing. I think they’ll have more of a problem with affirmative action in exam marking.
Give the ladies a few more litt prizes (Pearl S Buck?). Most of the Peace prizes turn out bad anyways, so there's that. And then there are the occasional hard science Nobels for women-especially medicine since most graduating MD's are now female.
And as I said before, make up a few more like the econ.
What's a good term for nagging?Replies: @Forbes, @Lurker, @anonymous coward
Medicine is not a science at all, much less ‘hard science’.
An M.D.’s job is less intellectually demanding and carries less responsibility than a car mechanic’s.
The only reason M.D.’s have an aura of respectability and mystery is vestigial medieval mumbo-jumbo mysticism. Nowadays 99% of the time all they do is just download formulaic recipes from the Internet.
Anyway, in a typical private practice until about the 1970's, an MD would take care of all sorts of people from birth (including delivery of babies) to death, do surgeries, and come to your house if you couldn't make it to his office.
The problem is that modern primary MDs want banker's hours, banker's responsibility (paperwork, even though they complain about it), and banker's pay but want the respect that went with a lifestyle that was more minister than professional.
There's nothing about what happens in primary care today that warrants the respect for or the need for training of an MD. Most of the work is the rough equivalent of public health nurse.Replies: @Patrick Harris
You are correct as far as diagnosis of diseases and such is concerned.
However, you are wrong when it comes to surgery.
US doctors are lousy at diagnosis, but surgeons are very good.
Yes, there are very bad surgeons too, that kill patients due to negligence or incompetence.
But majority are competent and save broken up (car accidents), shot, stabbed, etc patients that by all rights should have died, if not for the surgical intervention.
Cars, even today's rolling server rooms, are tinker toys compared to the complexity of the human organism. While it helps to be smart and good at pattern recognition to be a good car mechanic, just as it does in medicine, the realities of the selection process, at least in the U.S., are that you can be a successful mechanic with no education and a modest IQ, but you never even get to become an MD without a high IQ, strong work ethic, the ability to deal with a lot of drama involving gravely ill and dying people and their families etc. etc.Replies: @Bill, @AM
In that light, the Academy might just as well just give the price to the most physically attractive human on the relevant paper's endless author list.
Will there be Nobel Casting Couch scandals? Who will be the Weinstein of Science?Replies: @anonymous coward
There’s nothing there to understand. A so-called ‘neural network’ is just a fancy way of saying ‘logistic regression curve fitting’. It doesn’t think or reason, it merely matches a smooth curve to a set of data points. The basic math was invented in the 1930’s by boring old statisticians.
Miss Medicine doesn't know how to visualize or interpret smooth curves in five gazillion dimensional space. They say people have trouble following Trump's lowly 4D chess moves...
I’ve been quite happy with part-time-working-mother GPs who have sound practical advice to give about caring for children. I would bet money that letting people choose for themselves what kind of work they want to do and how much of it, rather than imposing some a priori quotas, whether of the “progressive” or “reactionary” type, achieves optimal results given the constraints.
I remember very distinctly being in a group of Moms and one of them saying about infant care, in an exasperated voice: "Nobody told me that noone listens to their MDs"
At any rate, this is a massive waste of training. In the US, it takes 12-13 years to become an MD start to finish. The level of care they're providing could be achieved in 6 years with a masters in nursing or PA. (Plus PA and nursing training front loads clinical time, so people can discover if they really want to be doing this before they've invested years in school.)
If the AMA insists on making medical school spots rare, then a female part time GP is a massive allocations of resources and it hurts us all.That's nice. Women are far susceptible to peer pressure and group think then men. The school system and society makes it perfectly clear that women should be high achievers. It's a "win" (somehow) if a woman becomes an MD. It's not okay to "settle" for a masters in nursing and to do the jobs they actually want to do. That's for loser women who couldn't cut it.
Thus, the quality of nursing care and primary care goes down because society funnels women to do jobs that they don't really want nor on the balance, as a group, are they all that good at.
Oh right, I forgot, how would command high fees and prestige? Because that's what women really need, in addition to working three days a week.
I have only read newspaper reviews of what these scientists apparently accomplished. But I would imagine that it is very important in the medical field to spread the ideas of the great men who wins science nobels. Now, we lose that valuable positive addition to our understanding and manipulation of nature.
So not only will they ruin the Future Nobels, they will retroactively ruin all of the deservant winners up until today.Replies: @Pericles
I seem to recall similar discussions (“more awards to women!”) prior to when Barbara McClintock won the Medicine Prize, but these days the Overton window has moved far enough to the left that it’s uncontroversial to award skin and pussy instead of merit. (I hope a bit of vulgarity is okay since we already have pussy hats in the comments.)
It might be an opportunity for some organization with more sense and a bit more balls to take the top spot.
> A so-called ‘neural network’ … merely matches a smooth curve to a set of data points.
Miss Medicine doesn’t know how to visualize or interpret smooth curves in five gazillion dimensional space. They say people have trouble following Trump’s lowly 4D chess moves…
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DLu0kqkXcAAScrw.jpg
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DLr1TSsW4AE7dyQ.jpgReplies: @Father O'Hara
Death Squads?
PS: Whatever happened to Bob Dylan getting his Nobel?
From now on research teams working on “Nobel-worthy” problems will have to include a woman and/or non-white person to increase their chances of winning.
An M.D.'s job is less intellectually demanding and carries less responsibility than a car mechanic's.
The only reason M.D.'s have an aura of respectability and mystery is vestigial medieval mumbo-jumbo mysticism. Nowadays 99% of the time all they do is just download formulaic recipes from the Internet.Replies: @dr kill, @AM, @Avery, @anon, @Bill
Settle down.
Unfortunately, someone else is taking care of their children part time, so it’s not ideal. They also tend to weirdly uptight about all sorts of things that experienced parents ignore. I even go so far as to assume that my children can be out in the sun for a couple of hours without sunscreen without dieing of skin cancer. (Imagine!)
I remember very distinctly being in a group of Moms and one of them saying about infant care, in an exasperated voice: “Nobody told me that noone listens to their MDs”
At any rate, this is a massive waste of training. In the US, it takes 12-13 years to become an MD start to finish. The level of care they’re providing could be achieved in 6 years with a masters in nursing or PA. (Plus PA and nursing training front loads clinical time, so people can discover if they really want to be doing this before they’ve invested years in school.)
If the AMA insists on making medical school spots rare, then a female part time GP is a massive allocations of resources and it hurts us all.
That’s nice. Women are far susceptible to peer pressure and group think then men. The school system and society makes it perfectly clear that women should be high achievers. It’s a “win” (somehow) if a woman becomes an MD. It’s not okay to “settle” for a masters in nursing and to do the jobs they actually want to do. That’s for loser women who couldn’t cut it.
Thus, the quality of nursing care and primary care goes down because society funnels women to do jobs that they don’t really want nor on the balance, as a group, are they all that good at.
An M.D.'s job is less intellectually demanding and carries less responsibility than a car mechanic's.
The only reason M.D.'s have an aura of respectability and mystery is vestigial medieval mumbo-jumbo mysticism. Nowadays 99% of the time all they do is just download formulaic recipes from the Internet.Replies: @dr kill, @AM, @Avery, @anon, @Bill
Back in the golden era of medicine, a Doctor of Medicine had a lot of more responsibility and intellectual stimulation than a car mechanic. You’re correct about primary MDs now. Specialists, depending on their specialty might however, make good car mechanics. 🙂
Anyway, in a typical private practice until about the 1970’s, an MD would take care of all sorts of people from birth (including delivery of babies) to death, do surgeries, and come to your house if you couldn’t make it to his office.
The problem is that modern primary MDs want banker’s hours, banker’s responsibility (paperwork, even though they complain about it), and banker’s pay but want the respect that went with a lifestyle that was more minister than professional.
There’s nothing about what happens in primary care today that warrants the respect for or the need for training of an MD. Most of the work is the rough equivalent of public health nurse.
What’s a “hold0ut”? Do we write words with zeroes now?
An M.D.'s job is less intellectually demanding and carries less responsibility than a car mechanic's.
The only reason M.D.'s have an aura of respectability and mystery is vestigial medieval mumbo-jumbo mysticism. Nowadays 99% of the time all they do is just download formulaic recipes from the Internet.Replies: @dr kill, @AM, @Avery, @anon, @Bill
{An M.D.’s job is less intellectually demanding and carries less responsibility than a car mechanic’s.}
You are correct as far as diagnosis of diseases and such is concerned.
However, you are wrong when it comes to surgery.
US doctors are lousy at diagnosis, but surgeons are very good.
Yes, there are very bad surgeons too, that kill patients due to negligence or incompetence.
But majority are competent and save broken up (car accidents), shot, stabbed, etc patients that by all rights should have died, if not for the surgical intervention.
After acknowledging the success of immigrants who have won Nobel prizes for the US, it was pointed out that the science laureates are getting older. (I did notice that this year's recepients were rather elderly, only one under 70.) There were only about 1000 physicists a century ago but now there are hundreds of thousands creating a backlog of potential laureates, suggesting that prize winners will remain white and male far into the future. The recepients for the Literature and Economics prize haven't aged as rapidly and the Peace prize recepients have actually gotten younger.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/10/nobel-prize-winners-laureates-charts-graphics-science/Replies: @Altai
It depends on the field, the 20th century was a time of huge explosions of discovery and massive increase in the number of scientists and the complexity of their research. Following this, things become more and more complex to investigate. Larger teams, longer research periods, more specialists examinations have become the trend. Not absolute, some areas are always opening up, but the trend is for most to have cooled off (Comparatively) or become more specialised at the moment, perhaps waiting for some new mathematical or physics insight to change the way things are done allowing some heroic discoveries again.
It thus stands to reason that there is a big backlog of people whose prime was several decades ago to grant awards whose research has had a far more profound impact.
It thus stands to reason that there is a big backlog of people whose prime was several decades ago to grant awards whose research has had a far more profound impact.Replies: @Steve Sailer, @The Anti-Gnostic
Also, a minor reason for what I imagine is an increased time lag between discoveries and Nobel Prizes is that scientists tend to live longer now, so fewer die unawarded.
But, yeah, it could turn out that people who made their big breakthroughs around 2000 or 2005 or so are less likely to get a Nobel because of all Nobels going to big breakthroughs a few decades ago.
People have come to accept Nobels as a kind of lifetime achievement award.
Anyway, in a typical private practice until about the 1970's, an MD would take care of all sorts of people from birth (including delivery of babies) to death, do surgeries, and come to your house if you couldn't make it to his office.
The problem is that modern primary MDs want banker's hours, banker's responsibility (paperwork, even though they complain about it), and banker's pay but want the respect that went with a lifestyle that was more minister than professional.
There's nothing about what happens in primary care today that warrants the respect for or the need for training of an MD. Most of the work is the rough equivalent of public health nurse.Replies: @Patrick Harris
Most of what primary care or emergency physicians do on a daily basis can be done by a competent nurse… up until something unusual or unexpected happens, and then those extra years of training do actually make quite a bit of difference.
Any primary care MD who has office hours will simply call an ambulance in a real emergency. It's over training and waste.
Plus, it's not like training confers the ability to troubleshoot or diagnosis. The Real MD (TM) my Mom had, a woman from India (or Pakistan?) did not diagnosis her stroke because it didn't fall into a checklist. (The damage later turned up on an MRI.)
If anything the credential might make the worst of the lot way over confident in their skills.
An M.D.'s job is less intellectually demanding and carries less responsibility than a car mechanic's.
The only reason M.D.'s have an aura of respectability and mystery is vestigial medieval mumbo-jumbo mysticism. Nowadays 99% of the time all they do is just download formulaic recipes from the Internet.Replies: @dr kill, @AM, @Avery, @anon, @Bill
You don’t know much about medicine. My wife holds the life of her patients in her hands every single day, keeping them alive during surgery. While medicine is indeed not a science (by definition and purpose), that doesn’t make it easier, it makes it harder.
Cars, even today’s rolling server rooms, are tinker toys compared to the complexity of the human organism. While it helps to be smart and good at pattern recognition to be a good car mechanic, just as it does in medicine, the realities of the selection process, at least in the U.S., are that you can be a successful mechanic with no education and a modest IQ, but you never even get to become an MD without a high IQ, strong work ethic, the ability to deal with a lot of drama involving gravely ill and dying people and their families etc. etc.
The difference between what your wife does and most of the interactions I've ever had with a primary MD is the difference between night and day.
Most of what a primary MD does, I really can look up on the Internet or even try for myself if I'm feeling frisky. There primary purpose appears to be gate keepers for the specialists. The person who made the point about the car mechanic is absolutely dead on about who has better troubleshooting skills on average.
That a primary MD and your wife would have the same credential in this day and age is almost absurd. Primary MDs ride on the rep of on the specialists like your wife. I've almost always been underwhelmed with almost every primary MD I met. Likewise, I'm generally impressed with the few specialists I've met.
Yes, it’s useful to think of Leftism as a religion which is trying to conquer the entire world and subjugate all of us with its ridiculous beliefs and policies, one crazier than the next.
But on the bright side, Leftism has a huge Achilles heel, which is that it discourages people from reproducing.
It thus stands to reason that there is a big backlog of people whose prime was several decades ago to grant awards whose research has had a far more profound impact.Replies: @Steve Sailer, @The Anti-Gnostic
This supports Tyler’s ‘low-hanging fruit’ thesis. New discoveries are increasingly arcane and practically inconsequential to the lives of most people. What’s left in physics and chemistry? Quantum mechanics are completely abstruse. The nuclear physicists who crack the fusion problem will get a Nobel but what’s left after that? I’m non-STEM so I’m happy to be proved wrong.
Cancer, aging, genetics, and the mind/brain have a lot of undiscovered country, but now we get to that awful counter-trend of the reigning culture making certain questions off-limits. Even jovial old-school liberal Daniel Dennett gets savaged for daring to suggest the mind-brain dichotomy is a false model. As somebody else mentioned, there are a lot of baked-in premises now. Everybody believes anybody can be anything they want, and they pass laws to enforce the ideal. Nobody wants to believe the who in you depends a great deal on the wetware, because that gets us into Here-Be-Dragons territory. We’re looking at a future of awarding grants to dindu scientists to unlock the secrets of White Man Tricknology.
Cancer and damaged neural tissue present unique challenges. I got about halfway through Emperor of Maladies and gave up because it was too depressing: nobody has figured out that “switch” to flip to turn off metastasis. I got the impression the author avoided some grim conclusions. ALS, brain injury and paralysis are appalling but I don’t see where anybody’s even getting close to repairing neural tissue. Again, happy to be proved wrong.
Regardless, I think investments in molecular nanotechnology which could conceivably rewrite any kind of cell would be more worthwhile than anything currently being discussed.
Is that you, Prof Minsky?
I think “Hold0ut” is one of the lost recordings by Prince Nelson we will doubtless all be able to buy in a special deluxe edition in a few more years. It will of course be about a coquettish ingenue resisting the suave advances of Prince himself, or, perhaps, Morris Day (if it is an older track).
The Physiology or Medicine prize is typically awarded for basic research in the life sciences, and most often goes to biochemists and geneticists. As such, the demographic composition of pure MDs is not terribly relevant.
The real factor in favor of women is their longer lifespans, as Nobels aren’t awarded posthumously.
I want some more!
I forgot to add that a particular discovery, technique or development takes time to actually become influential. It takes the hindsight of time to see the effect or significance of something. There’s also a lot of other awards that could be termed more active, early and mid career accolades.
People have come to accept Nobels as a kind of lifetime achievement award.
Cars, even today's rolling server rooms, are tinker toys compared to the complexity of the human organism. While it helps to be smart and good at pattern recognition to be a good car mechanic, just as it does in medicine, the realities of the selection process, at least in the U.S., are that you can be a successful mechanic with no education and a modest IQ, but you never even get to become an MD without a high IQ, strong work ethic, the ability to deal with a lot of drama involving gravely ill and dying people and their families etc. etc.Replies: @Bill, @AM
Cars don’t heal themselves. You are clueless.
An M.D.'s job is less intellectually demanding and carries less responsibility than a car mechanic's.
The only reason M.D.'s have an aura of respectability and mystery is vestigial medieval mumbo-jumbo mysticism. Nowadays 99% of the time all they do is just download formulaic recipes from the Internet.Replies: @dr kill, @AM, @Avery, @anon, @Bill
Yeah, but you’re assuming that this mumbo-jumbo mysticism has no purpose. You can only be right about that if 1) the placebo effect isn’t real and also 2) you place no value on the purely psychological benefits of patients’ believing their heroic, genius doctor is taking care of them in the best way possible. I don’t think either of these is a good assumption.
I’m not sure how arch you are being here, but what you are describing has already happened in universities. Women have prevailed in sex discrimination suits in which they argue “I have as many publications as X, but X gets tenure/paid more.” This has caused tenure and pay decisions to become more and more tied to mindless publication-counting exercises. Needless to say, this is absolutely toxic. Bruce Charlton talks about this, though he doesn’t emphasize the sex discrimination lawsuit aspect of it.
Why on earth would one need a medical degree to give “sound practical advice” on childcare?
Oh right, I forgot, how would command high fees and prestige? Because that’s what women really need, in addition to working three days a week.
As a general rule of thumb I don’t trust Indians.
Regardless, I think investments in molecular nanotechnology which could conceivably rewrite any kind of cell would be more worthwhile than anything currently being discussed.
I would expect there to be an emergency physician on call who could handle the oddities of an emergency room.
Any primary care MD who has office hours will simply call an ambulance in a real emergency. It’s over training and waste.
Plus, it’s not like training confers the ability to troubleshoot or diagnosis. The Real MD (TM) my Mom had, a woman from India (or Pakistan?) did not diagnosis her stroke because it didn’t fall into a checklist. (The damage later turned up on an MRI.)
If anything the credential might make the worst of the lot way over confident in their skills.
The real factor in favor of women is their longer lifespans, as Nobels aren't awarded posthumously.Replies: @AM
Right. And how many of those are women? Women want to work with people, not off an lab doing experiment #4,521 in hopes that this one is different.
…who themselves were honest enough to admit that no qualifiying women could be found.
Give them the Jeannette Rankin Award. She voted against sending our boys into WWII because she wasn’t going herself.
Cars, even today's rolling server rooms, are tinker toys compared to the complexity of the human organism. While it helps to be smart and good at pattern recognition to be a good car mechanic, just as it does in medicine, the realities of the selection process, at least in the U.S., are that you can be a successful mechanic with no education and a modest IQ, but you never even get to become an MD without a high IQ, strong work ethic, the ability to deal with a lot of drama involving gravely ill and dying people and their families etc. etc.Replies: @Bill, @AM
I assume she’s an anesthesiologist or a surgeon ? Both are highly technical fields and yes, it’s easy to kill someone.
The difference between what your wife does and most of the interactions I’ve ever had with a primary MD is the difference between night and day.
Most of what a primary MD does, I really can look up on the Internet or even try for myself if I’m feeling frisky. There primary purpose appears to be gate keepers for the specialists. The person who made the point about the car mechanic is absolutely dead on about who has better troubleshooting skills on average.
That a primary MD and your wife would have the same credential in this day and age is almost absurd. Primary MDs ride on the rep of on the specialists like your wife. I’ve almost always been underwhelmed with almost every primary MD I met. Likewise, I’m generally impressed with the few specialists I’ve met.
I guarantee that within the next few years the Nobels, like the Academy Awards, will miraculously become diverse.
Of course “diverse” means black. Awarding Nobel prizes to East Indian and Asian scientists will not be sufficient to appease leftists.
Immunotherapy is one area in medicine that is showing strong promise, even in such things as weight loss. There are a lot of cool avenues in bio-medical sciences and genetics. Like I said, some areas are opening up, some are bobbing along, but the macro trend is one of fewer big paradigm shifts at the present.
Science progresses usually most quickly through the introduction of new tools and methods which allow either the examination or discovery of things at a faster level or at all. A prominent contemporary example of this is genotyping, sequencing and assembling of genomic data which allows for all the association studies that are flooding out right now. The 20th century was truly remarkable in this regard and it also represented a major burst in the university educated population who could then go on to be working scientists. There are far more scientists alive today than have ever lived and died before.
They really should go with the nonsense soft sciences, such as Sociology and the new, growing field that was noted in an earlier comment, Diversity. Nonsense, yes, but obviously so is the Peace Prize as another earlier comment implies. So they don’t mind tossing them around as a favor. So truly, Gents, just make a couple of new ones up, and with both of my suggestions, you get a smorgasbord of ethnic and gender choices. Thus every year you can ponder the palette of bodies and choose the race and gender of the two new winners so as to absolve you of the accusation of all the new “isms.”
Much better than giving non-merit based hard science Nobels.
I swap issues of Lapham’s Quarterly with a friend who sends me her London Review of Books.
Imagine my surprise when I saw the article about Hypatia in the issue of 17 August 2017….
Someone might conclude that not only did the arsehole who thought a Bishop was around 450 BC was stupid but maybe was reliant on other people for his info…
Have heard more than one first-hand horror story about bleary-eyed doctors committing gross errors (of course hushed up by the white line).
High IQ is very important in specialties like psychiatry–I was examined by an African female psych who was so stupid I was dumbfounded. Complained to hosp and my $ was refunded
How about adding 3 new Nobel prizes, one for Advancing Women’s Rights, one for Advancing Gay Rights, and one for Advancing Blacks’ Rights.
Problem solved.
The left is rapidly losing interest in transsexuals, now they realise that a lot of them are troublesome libertarians. Unless it’s a transsexual of colour, or a “gender queer” female with purple hair, the left isn’t going to be too excited. In political terms, trannies are a bit like atheists – an eccentric, libertarian-leaning group that are disliked by both religious conservatives and far left activists.
Somewhat OT but not really.
I notice that in the 2017 list of MacArthur Foundation Fellowships, none of the fellows have names that are recognizably Chinese or South Asian Indian. This is a pattern in previous years, too. I wonder what gives?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/macarthur-genius-grant-winners-step-into-the-spotlight-is-this-really-happening/2017/10/10/7a4837ce-ad0a-11e7-a908-a3470754bbb9_story.html?utm_term=.8993c89db23e
2017 Asian Genius Grant Winners-
Sunil Amrith - ethnic Tamil Indian and historian (south and southeast Asia)
Viet Thanh Nguyen - Vietnamese American and fiction writer and cultural critic
There were three Asians last year, but this year they picked a Jordanian Muslim activist, Rami Nashashibi, so he might have nabbed an Asian slot. Nashashibi's wife is a a pulmonologist at Chicago's Northwestern Memorial Hospital which puts us nicely back on topic.
If the DLC is to be believed you’ve already got plenty of them in the DREAMers. Here are some future doctors and rocket scientists for your visual gratification.
Join Oprah’s Book Club. What better way for a woman to earn her Nobel Prize in Reading Literature than by reading all the books a black woman tells her to read?
If I were a researcher reading this I'd be sure to include a token diversity woman on my team. Calling it now, all groundbreaking scientific discoveries will soon be made by teams of white men "led" by a wise black woman.
Nobel Peace Prize, coming to a Ta-Nehisi Coates near you!Replies: @Clyde, @Brutusale
I almost busted a gut laughing at my local library last night. I stopped by to pick up a book I had ordered, and the librarians had a table set up across from the check-out desk with three alternating rows each of TeSneezie’s latest opus and Timmeh Boy Wise’s White Like Me.
The table looked untouched. I couldn’t resist commenting to the librarian, “Gee, they’re flying off the table, huh?”.
I could have sworn they just handed out that award a few months ago. Time flies.
2017 Asian Genius Grant Winners-
Sunil Amrith – ethnic Tamil Indian and historian (south and southeast Asia)
Viet Thanh Nguyen – Vietnamese American and fiction writer and cultural critic
There were three Asians last year, but this year they picked a Jordanian Muslim activist, Rami Nashashibi, so he might have nabbed an Asian slot. Nashashibi’s wife is a a pulmonologist at Chicago’s Northwestern Memorial Hospital which puts us nicely back on topic.