Yeah ,what he said!
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Yeah ,what he said!
I think the Nobel Peace Prize and frankly literature, are disconnected from the other awards where at least for the other awards there are some objective criteria by which a winner can be evaluated. That doesn't mean that the awards in the hard sciences or economics don't involve the injection of some opinion but at least you know the recipient has made a major contribution to the advancement of their discipline. I also think the Fields Medal for mathematics is useful.
I don't think the awards provide the real incentive to achievement but they do provide recognition and show respect to people who have invested a great deal of their time and in many cases achieved something extraordinary.
I also want to address the gender gap argument. The fact there is a gender gap does not mean that women are not as good at science as men or that women are discriminated at when the prize is awarded. The gender gap could reflect discrimination upstream in primary and secondary education as well as the prevalence of outmoded gender stereotyping that lowers female participation rates in the hard sciences.
That some people will use the prevalence of male nobel prize winners to argue that men are better at science than women is not a reason not to award the prize. Those people are idiots. Discrimination should be rooted out at its source in the institutions in which it's found.
Would Albert Einstein have won a Nobel Prize if he had been severely malnourished during his entire childhood and never had a basic education? Of course not. But that does not mean that his discovery of the photoelectric effect (I think that's what it is) was not worthy of recognition. The Nobel Prize recognizes achievement in a particular field...it is not an award that quantifies native aptitude or adjusts for all of the systematic disadvantages people face based on a variety of factors. No doubt those disadvantages should be rooted out...but that doesn't mean somebody who has discovered something magnificent should be denied recognition because somebody else never had the opportunity.
I am also not saying that such an award will be free from bias at the award stage, but I have a feeling that any disadvantage someone faces on account of class membership will be encountered very far from the Nobel Committee.
I think I veered away from the main topic. I forgot we're talking mostly about the Peace Prize. As Stavros pointed out it can be awarded to bad people who have amended their ways or decent seeming people to encourage them to do something they haven't yet done. The ironic thing about it is that in promoting peace someone might have to make unpopular choices; but then how do you get recognition if you do something that is unpopular? The fact that Henry Kissinger won the award means that we are light years away from developing intelligible standards for when such a prize should be bestowed on someone.
But my point about the Peace Prize was that it does have a specific remit, namely, that it be awarded to a person/persons who has done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses -Kissinger was part of the US administration which agreed to the conferences in Paris which ended the Vietnam war; Sadat and Begin agreed to the sequences of formal talks that ended the state of war between Egypt and Israel, so that even though all of those people had waged war, they also sought to end it, and that was the basis on which they were awarded the prize. I am not sure anyone in recent history has disbanded their armed forces, so the remit is quite limited.
The irony is that Malala is both a more inspiring figure than any of the aforementioned men, has shown considerably more courage than them, but has done nothing to advance the cause of peace in Pakistan and Afghanistan where, I regret to say, she continues to face a potentially lethal opposition to everything she stands for.
I agree with what you wrote here but I think that leads to the conclusion that the Nobel Peace Prize needs a new remit. If not abolished, maybe it should go to the person who makes the greatest personal sacrifice in aid of the lives of others. It could then be named the Nobel Altruism Prize (NAP) or the Nobel Prize for Courage.
It would then be less of an award for leaders and celebrities, but there to recognize personal acts of heroism that contribute to peace because the actor has set an example for humanity (not because the actor controls a standing army and has decided not to use it). Again, I don't think it's an incentive...because I don't think people really act on incentives like that...but I like the idea of people who make great sacrifices being recognized. Maybe there's a reason people like pageantry that is natural, a little frivolous, a little vain but mainly benign and somewhat hopeful.
When the Nobel is awarded on a sensible basis to someone whose efforts have been previously unnoticed it can be inspiring. I think Malala Yousafzai is a deserving winner although not given the specific remit but some other hypothetical one.
Nothing you have posted justifies a prize. There are hundreds if not thousands of unknown people around the world doing amazing things for others -who are they? Where are they? We need to stop thinking in terms of prizes, medals or other baubles to validate the human experience.
Here are some infamous Peace Prize winners.
Cordell Hull, 1945 was US politician and given the prize for his role in establishing the United Nations.
He is a controversial winner because of an incident in 1939 when he was President Roosevelt's Secretary of State. The President was amenable to helping 950 Jewish refugees aboard a ship called the SS St Louis settle in America. But Hull and a group of Democrats from the American South voiced "strong opposition", threatening to withdraw support for Roosevelt if he let the ship dock. The president buckled, the SS St Louis was turned around and many of its passengers became victims of the Holocaust.
Henry Kissinger, 1973: When President Nixon's Secretary of State was handed the prize in 1973, American satirist Tom Lehrer observed that political satire was dead.
Kissinger accepted the award "with humility". As his critics point out that the US was still carpet-bombing Cambodia the year he picked up the prize. He's also been accused of war crimes.
Yasser Arafat, 1994: One man's freedom fighter is another man's terrorist. Arafat, who led the Palestinian Liberation Organisation for three decades, was handed the award alongside Israeli PM Yitzhak Rabin and his foreign minister Shimon Peres. A very nice trio!
Supporters compared Arafat to Nelson Mandela. Opponents called him an "unrepentant terrorist with a long legacy of promoting violence".
Wangari Maathai, 2004: The first African woman to win a Nobel Peace prize died in 2011 at the age of 71. She had likened Aids to a "biological weapon" and told participants in an Aids workshop that the disease was "a tool" to control Africans "designed by some evil-minded scientists."
Barack Obama, 2009: Depends on your political views!!!
For some good fun, take a watch/listen to this take on the Obama peace prize from back in 09: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnLqoRtUAVg
Don't try to frame it as a political thing... any rational person will acknowledge what a joke Obama's awarding was as it wasn't for something he'd done or tried to do... but for what people hoped he would do.
I'll try not to frame your post as a "political thing" and just see it as a joke.