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I'm left leaning but slate is garbage. Slate is like the stereotype of a liberal that yall hate.
Unfortunately as the OP noted a couple posts back, it's not just Slate but now Huffpo and others are running with it.
Here's the funny part, we already have TONS of initiatives ongoing to get more women and minorities into STEM fields because there are SO FEW IN IT.
But get this...despite knowing that the segment is grossly under-represented...the writer of this article is too stupid to realize that gee....maybe that's why so few have won the prize?
Unfortunately as the OP noted a couple posts back, it's not just Slate but now Huffpo and others are running with it.
A google news search for "Nobel prize science" shows close to half of the articles are complaining that only a few men win the prizes. Some of those are just arguing that credit should be shared more widely but most are also complaining about a lack of female winners.
Well, that didn't take long. The Swedes have caved to pressure and basically promised to start picking winners based on gender and ethnicity.
Quote:
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. Three of the prize committees are within the sciences academy. Hansson said he did not believe there was systemic gender discrimination, but “we are concerned; we are taking measures.”
...because men always win and usually they are old, white men. The selection process is flawed because it focuses only on physics, chemistry and medicine (ignoring environmental studies), often cautiously waits decades before awarding a breakthrough, and limits prizes to the 3 individuals that are judged to be the most important contributors. This usually results in awards going to older white men and that's just... wrong.
So let's end this embarrassment of white male success by ending the Nobel science prizes.
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.
...because men always win and usually they are old, white men. The selection process is flawed because it focuses only on physics, chemistry and medicine (ignoring environmental studies), often cautiously waits decades before awarding a breakthrough, and limits prizes to the 3 individuals that are judged to be the most important contributors. This usually results in awards going to older white men and that's just... wrong.
So let's end this embarrassment of white male success by ending the Nobel science prizes.
This first part at least, definitely makes sense. Why are we honoring one person but not all the others who contributed to their work?:
The problem starts with the number of prize-winners selected every year. The statutes governing the Nobel Prize limit it to just three winners in each category. This means that for every discovery awarded a Nobel, the vast majority of contributing scientists are ignored in favor of just three people selected by the Nobel committee (who also get to split the approximately $1 million in prize money between them).
But science has never been an individual endeavor. Isaac Newton stood on the “shoulders of giants” and Neil Armstrong’s “one small step” was a dream realized by hundreds of thousands of engineers and scientists. Science is, and always has been, an iterative process where individuals draw on discoveries made by others to advance the boundaries of human knowledge in minuscule increments. Yes, Albert Einstein famously won the Nobel Prize all by himself for a paper he alone authored, but he could not have made his discoveries without previous work by Max Planck, James Maxwell, and several others. The Nobel Prize does science a serious disservice.
This was also true of Monday’s medicine/physiology Nobel for the discovery of the circadian clock. The prize went to just three men while the prize announcement itself cited no less than seven publications authored by a total of 25 scientists. Typical of the Nobel Prizes, none of the three awardees was a first author on any of these papers. The first author of a scientific paper in biology/biomedicine is typically the person who did the hands-on laboratory work, usually a graduate student or young postdoctoral researcher. To make matters worse, it is precisely these early-career researchers who are in greater need of the Nobel prize money than their generally tenured supervisors. The Nobel Prize does science a serious disservice.
Regarding the rest of it that complains about a history of sexism/racism...they'd have to actually show if that sexism/racism is still going on. They haven't attempted to show why they believe that yet. Back in the old days, old white men were just about the only options so that wouldn't have been a issue for the most part.
This part actually sounds like a good idea to me, make multiple areas of scientific awards, perhaps one for medical technology, another for energy technology, another for humanitarian acts etc. Also, reward discoveries rather than scientists so the whole team gets credit:
Nobel Prize–winning discoveries are often some of the most covered scientific advances in the popular press. However, they can only be offered to scientists working in a particular set of disciplines. As a result, most of the public—and more importantly, budding scientists—have a skewed view of what constitutes “important” science. There is no Nobel for agricultural sciences, for instance, where advances during the Green Revolution saved millions of lives in the last century. (Norman Borlaug, one of the scientists behind the Green Revolution was, however, presented with a Nobel Peace Prize in 1970.) Nor is there one for ecology and studying the environment, or one for evolutionary biology. Formally, there isn’t even a prize for biology, though increasingly the prizes in chemistry and medicine are given out to biologists.
Any one of these reasons is sufficient to justify a retirement of the Nobel Prizes—or at least to reform them. The most fundamental change that must be enacted now is to present the science Nobels to teams of scientists, as some have been arguing for years, rather than to a few lucky men.
Here’s an even better idea: Award the Nobel Prizes not to researchers but for discoveries. Imagine that today’s Nobel in physics was awarded for the discovery of gravitational waves, with no list of awardees, instead of awarding it to just three scientists out of hundreds. What of the prize money? Donate it to an international science fund to promote further research in each year’s prize-winning field of research. The Nobel Prize does science a serious disservice.
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