It is Nobel Prize week.
The only remotely good thing about the Nobel Prize is that it gets the media to cover some science. The Prize, however, should be abandoned. It does not reflect how science is done, it gives very weird incentives for researchers and, most importantly it spreads a very very wrong idea about science and scientists to the general public.
@harcel Well, then you need to abolish all prizes. And I happen to know, not just from personal experience, but also from colleagues, that a prize can be a warm shower sometimes and an encouragement after a lot of hard work. By now there are also prizes for teams as well and there are lots of prizes - it is up to the media what they report. While I hear about several literature/arts prizes in the media, in science it seems exclusively Nobel.
@hfalcke Prizes for teams: totally fine. In arts and literature, work is (more often) more individual.
I can see how prizes feel good. Perhaps even when it's someone from your team, as it can feel like a reward for you, too. Still, many sub-fields of science rarely get a big prize, as the science isn't popular enough, which discourages people from going those ways. I don't think that's good. For those who don't get prizes, continued streams of prizes to others feel very different, I bet.
@harcel Sure, I certainly can’t complain about lack of prizes, but do like to think that I would have done what I did no matter what. On the other hand, I was certainly inspired by those stories about prize winners and the prizes I got certainly helped my career. As with every success in life you never do it alone. That is also very true. I am pretty sure that the system is imperfect and sometimes unfair (Jocelyn Bell), but is that reason enough to abolish them all together?
@hfalcke In the unfairness I wasn't thinking of Jocelyn Bell-like cases, but more of things like the Matthew effect. I have no doubt that basically all winners are deserving, and that many would have done what they did either way. My main issue is in the people who never get a prize. Are they undeserving? Are they worse scientists? The answer is that there is no way to tell. That is unfair treatment, IMHO. No need to abolish all prizes, but we do need to think about how they are awarded.
@harcel
You cannot highlight everything, if you fund everyone at the same level you're likely to not give useful amounts to each, if you hire all applicants you'll run out of space before you've seated all.
Whatever the amount of resources, we'll always find ambitions that strain them, and prioritisation becomes necessary: again you'll have losers that end up on the outside.
I think fairness here will be down to how the judgment is done, to object to the exclusion itself is to oppose the ambition that drives the selection: in this case the ambition to highlight good work.
@hfalcke
@tobychev I am not talking about hiring, funding and such issues.