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The Absurdity of the Nobel Prizes in Science (theatlantic.com)
An anonymous reader shares an article: Every year, when Nobel Prizes are awarded in physics, chemistry, and physiology or medicine, critics note that they are an absurd and anachronistic way of recognizing scientists for their work. Instead of honoring science, they distort its nature, rewrite its history, and overlook many of its important contributors. There are assuredly good things about the prizes. Scientific discoveries should be recognized for the vital part they play in the human enterprise. The Nobel Prize website is an educational treasure trove, full of rich historical details that are largely missing from published papers. And it is churlish to be overly cynical about any event that, year after year, offers science the same kind of whetted anticipation that's usually reserved for Oscar or Emmy nominees. But the fact that the scientific Nobels have drawn controversy since their very inception hints at deep-rooted problems. [...] The wider problem, beyond who should have received the prize and who should not, is that the Nobels reward individuals -- three at most, for each of the scientific prizes, in any given year. And modern science, as Ivan Oransky and Adam Marcus write in Stat, is "the teamiest of team sports." Yes, researchers sometimes make solo breakthroughs, but that's increasingly rare. Even within a single research group, a platoon of postdocs, students, and technicians will typically be involved in a discovery that gets hitched to a single investigator's name. And more often than not, many groups collaborate on a single project. The paper in which the LIGO team announced their discovery has an author list that runs to three pages. Another recent paper, which precisely estimated the mass of the elusive Higgs boson, has 5,154 authors.
The Peace prize isn't even awarded by the Nobel committee. It's just a way for Norway to make a political statement.
No, that's not really true. The peace prize is one of the original prizes set forth in Nobel's will. It further stipulates that it should be awarded by the parliament of Norway. So it's legitimate.
If you're looking for "fake" prizes, it's the economics prize "in memory of Alfred Nobel" that's the smoking gun. That was put in place by the Swedish central bank in the sixties (1968).
So, even though I as a swede wouldn't miss an opportunity to take the piss out of the Norwegians, this isn't one such opportunity.
Stefan Axelsson
The Nobel Prize has isn't supposed to honor achievement in bringing peace. Their explicit goal is to give publicity/support a person/project to make a worthy goal more likely to happen. It's specifically and uniquely aspirational.
Which, frankly, makes sense. An award for "most promising person/project to change the world for the better soon" is more useful than a retroactive award afterwards. Because, frankly the cash could be used to further those goals, and the publicity makes it more likely.
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Arafat received that together with Perez and Rabin for creating the Oslo Accords, an attempt to work towards peace in the Middle east, for which each of those three had to weather an enormous amount of resistance and criticism from their respective peoples. If the Prize is as much an encouragement to keep up the good work as it is an award for past achievements (the excuse they gave when awarding it to Obama), then I'd say it was well given. Giving the Prize to Obama was bullcrap, giving it to Gore even more so.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...