> an informal term for the embrace of strange or scientifically unsound ideas by some Nobel Prize winners, usually later in life. It has been argued that the effect results, in part, from a tendency for Nobel winners to feel empowered by the award to speak on topics outside their specific area of expertise
Sounds pretty much like every founder out there who strike gold once in the past now believing their genius now clearly applies to everything everywhere, including country governance, economics and sociology. It probably doesn't help that others around them are affected in similar ways and become more sycophantic because of the "award" these two types of people win.
I thought this was how Nobel Prizes sickened fields.
Mathematicians believe we're lucky to have been spared the Nobel Prize. While some repeat a discredited story this was because Gösta Mittag-Leffler was sleeping with Nobel's wife, it is generally felt that mixing ego and the possibility of a Nobel Prize has toxic effects on a field.
We now have both the Fields Medal and the Abel Prize, but both pass over the midlife period when ego eclipses talent.
I am convinced that a similar proportion of non-prize winner scientists across all fields of natural sciences share "scientifically unsound ideas" or "scientifically unsupported or discredited beliefs", or however else we want to call them. I am not even confident that age may be a decisive factor.
As an (almost retired) anthropologist with background in genetics, I do certainly nurture yet unverified and pretty unorthodox convictions, if only as a matter of hypothesis. Looking around me among colleagues who have a wealth of experience, cultivating strange ideas seems to be very common and indeed part of the discovery process.
Nobel Prize winners won the prize because they had unorthodox ways of thinking that led them to an actual discovery. I'd think that it's quite normal that 1 out of 10000 unorthodox beliefs ends up being a scientific reality of high impact.
i.e. ~1 out of 10000 unorthodox thinkers will win the Nobel Prize, 9999/10000 of those thinkers you will never hear about. For the one who won, it's likely they will have continued unorthodox ideas, 9999/10000 of which will not lead to a second Nobel Prize.
The article lists an order some 10 of Nobel prize-winners later seen as "unsound" mostly in a field other than their main area of expertise. Making them 1 in 100. I won't be surprised that 1 in 100 senior scientist expresses unorthodox or even unsound ideas when foraging far away from their field, particularly on the kind of topics listed.
I agree that the share of unorthodox thinkers should all in all be higher among those winners. This is indeed what made them advanced in their field. But the main bias remains: looking at those whose voice reaches even when they venture out of their field rather than the full pull of (good) scientists.
Venturing outside your field is also part of what drives discovery itself, not a post-Nobel symptom, because you see the new field with a fresh set of eyes rather than textbook-brainwashed eyes.
A lot of discoveries are made by someone who "imported" insights from one field to another.
A lot of these aren't "strange or scientifically unsound ideas" but downright racism. Whether Nobel prize recipients are less or more racist than their contemporaries is debatable but I'm not sure they fit the same category as "believed in ghosts" or "claims to have talked to a fluorescent racoon".
Well in fairness so long as you describe the goal as "largely destroying the frontal cortex and all the functions that go along with it," then lobotomy is incredibly sound.
I mean, if we wanted every human on Earth to be over 6' tall, we could just cull the short ones (or stop them from reproducing), and this is scientifically valid, but, of course, evil.
As far as lobotomy, I don't know, but it seems to be widely discredited inasmuch as it didn't achieve its aims (or if it did, the aims themselves were highly questionable)
Given the title, lobotomy is an apt reference "The originator of the procedure, Portuguese neurologist António Egas Moniz, shared the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine of 1949 for the "discovery of the therapeutic value of leucotomy in certain psychoses"," - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lobotomy
It may not be possible to breed any trait to any distribution one would like.
For body size, maybe, also depending on maternal nutrition. But apparently there is (and anthropologists think always has been) a certain percentage of people with schizophrenia even though it carries a severe reproductive disadvantage.
Similarly, it may well be that personality always approaches a certain distribution like a random experiment.
The culling mechanism would work in any case, of course.
> I mean, if we wanted every human on Earth to be over 6' tall, we could just cull the short ones (or stop them from reproducing), and this is scientifically valid, but, of course, evil.
What's scientifically valid about that? What part of the scientific process is being utilized? What hypothesis is being tested?
If you're implying that people would start to be taller because we are culling short people, then you're talking about "artificial selection", not "eugenics". People who believe that there are groups of humans that are inferior or superior based on genetic differences would love for you to conflate the two concepts because that gets them closer to their political goals that have historically resulted in unimaginable human suffering.
"Ethics" is subjective, there is no such thing as an objective ethics (unless you are religious).
This is why thought experiments like the Trolley problems don't have a simple answer.. and they get even more complex with variations of the thought experiment.
Eugenics rejects the idea that all are created equal. Equality is supported by both Judeo-Christian theology and secular enlightenment philosophy.
I can think of little modern philosophy more regressive than the idea that a self-appointed superior can determine that another is inferior to the point that they (or their offspring) should be culled from existence. Eugenics and racism have been intertwined since the beginning and with a modern twist continue to target vulnerable populations.
For the most part they come out of emotions that evolution found useful for procreation (love, fear, anger), then extrapolated to people living in small groups, then to larger societies after the invention of agriculture via the "iterated prisoners dilemma".
I think that in this context it's more useful to pose the question in there other direction: which moral systems declare that the slave trade and the disenfranchisement of persons on the basis of skin colour is not ok?
Ethics is a field of study. I know some on this site loathe the humanities, but those same often don’t mind using language, psychology, and sociology to make a buck.
Oooph. I'm going to be charitable and make a (horrifying) steelman point for you: Eugenics can be understood as a subset of the ideas of plant and animal breeding that have been practiced for centuries. Those are scientifically sound, thus the idea that humans can be bred for certain traits should be too.
THAT SAID, "Eugenics" as espoused and understood over the past two centuries isn't that at all. It's 100%, every time, a pretty face for racism. Human social and ancestry divisions ARE NOT the product of deliberate selection, never have been, and any attempt to conflate the ideas is, yeah, pretty fucking unsound. And horrifying.
> Eugenics can be understood as a subset of the ideas of plant and animal breeding that have been practiced for centuries.
That's called "artificial selection", and people who believe that certain groups of humans are somehow superior or inferior to each other because of differences in genetics would love for you to conflate "artificial selection" and "eugenics".
There's no need to steelman a concept that has caused unimaginable human suffering.
Maybe you’re coming from a good place from this, so I’ll avoid tearing into you and just assume you haven’t really been exposed to people who challenge really shitty rightwing opinions.
A simple example for why “Eugenics”[1] isn’t simply a scientific concept (without severe bastardizing of the word “science”) are people born with Down Syndrome. Abortions for fetuses shown to have Down Syndrome is a contentious topic because many individuals with Down Syndrome have an extremely high quality of life, and many find it insulting to consider them any less human or worthy of life.
But from a genetic perspective, Down Syndrome is objectively bad because it reduces fertility. In the most objective sense, less fertility = less genetic utility. But aside from being fucking horrific, there’s nothing inherently “scientific” about that, just like there’s nothing “scientific” about choosing one chess opening over a different chess opening due to objective measurements like win percentage. We’re not challenging hypotheses in this hypothetical, we’re applying an arbitrary utility function.
[1] using a capital E here intentionally to refer to the idea that humans can be bred to be superior, and inferior humans can be culled (disgusted even typing that out).
Edit: “artificial selection” is a scientific concept; “eugenics” is what I can’t believe we’re still talking about in 2026 in supposed polite company. That’s what HN is supposed to be, right? Polite company? Jfc, “eugenics”.
I'm going to start over actually, here's what I should have said:
Get the fuck out of here saying anything remotely positive about "eugenics" while there are multiple genocides (and attempted genocides) happening across the globe right now due to racial and ethnic differences. Even if you're just being "devil's advocate", or "edgy", or if you genuinely believe that you're superior to other humans based on some deep personal inferiority complex that you're forced to externalize onto your political beliefs.
There's nothing "scientific" about eugenics, where the prefix "eu" implies "good" or "better" and the root "genics" refers to genetics. There is no objective utility function on which to base "good", they are all subjective. To imply that the scientific method can be twisted to create an "objective good" on which to measure human genetic utility against is pseudoscientific bullshit that should have been left behind 80 years ago. But it appears its a lesson we can never truly learn as a species.
The key point is it’s not just ethically wrong, but it’s not scientific because it’s subjective and has no basis in reality. For instance, you cannot use genetic studies to define a race because for instance, in Africa, you could have massive genetic diversity in people that are 200 miles apart. That doesn’t make them different races. If you did attempt to classify people into races based on something scientific like genetics, you would end up with hundreds of thousands of “races”. With even more fine tooth classification, you could subdivide those people into further sub groups that becomes indistinguishable from just classifying extended families.
That just means you can't call Africans one "race" because they hold all the genetic diversity on the planet. But it doesn't mean there's not some meaningful genetic grouping of populations that splintered out of Africa. Or, concretely, I'm struggling to square what you're saying with the fact that I tell my doctor I'm Hispanic because that means a higher genetic predisposition to things like diabetes.
Hispanic is probably the perfect example for this. A blonde Argentinian is probably not predisposed to diabetes. What I’m trying to say is racial categorizations don’t follow any rules based in our biology or genetics. For it to be scientific you would need to be able to categorize any given individual 100% based on some unchanging rule that is based on underlying biology. We cannot currently do that and what I’m saying is I don’t think you can come up with a rule like that without the result being hundreds of thousands of different categories of “races”.
> If you did attempt to classify people into races based on something scientific like genetics, you would end up with hundreds of thousands of “races”. With even more fine tooth classification, you could subdivide those people into further sub groups that becomes indistinguishable from just classifying extended families.
'Biologically speaking', wouldn't that 'just' be something like breeds?
Yeah, but at the end of the day, all of this classification is very arbitrary. Until you can come up with a measurable system like “8% genetic differences are defined as a different species” or “can successfully interbreed with viable non-sterile offspring” or something it’s all just a useful pneumonic to understand the world, but it’s not really objective science. Dog breeds are notoriously subjective and just depends on what the registry in the place wanted to do.
I'm surprised the article doesn't address the Occam's Razor probability that... _most people_ hold ideas that the (a?) majority does not... and that increased media attention is likely to "discover" these beliefs.
Or rather, I see no attempt to make an argument that Nobel laureates are statistically _more_ likely than other "well-known" non-politicians to hold non-majoritarian ideas... nor any attempt to argue that the ideas followed rather than preceded the award.
While he didn't win a Nobel prize, I'm reminded of Dr Henry Heimlich (inventor of the Heimlich maneuver), who went on to become a proponent of malariotherapy: the deliberate infection of people suffering from HIV, Lyme disease, and other ailments with malaria as a treatment. It goes without saying that malariotherapy is not a scientifically well-supported procedure.
This has always felt like such a weird quirk in human behavior.
Imagine a 5 year old who is good at basketball. His parents notice it and enroll him in a class. Coaches recognize his talent and dedicate special time to him. He trains every morning, every night and entire weekends through primary, middle and high school. Gets barely any time for classes, but he anyways just needs a passing grade (which teachers are happy to help him with). He joins advanced youth academies, travels for tournaments across the country. No time for distractions. No TV, no parties, barely any social time at all. He gets a sports scholarship in college. Finally goes pro. Continues training hard for every waking minute. Plays hard for years and is considered one of the best players in the world. Absolute peak of achievement in his field.
Then the night he wins a championship a reporter shoves a microphone in his face and asks "what are your thoughts on the geopolitical crisis developing in the East China sea?" And whatever he says will make the front page, generate countless social media clips and will undoubtedly influence the opinions of millions.
And this applies to every field. Look at all the VCs who make a lucky bet and then sit on a hundred podcasts proclaiming "world peace is easy, actually".
> will undoubtedly influence the opinions of millions.
Is this actually true, based on just one statement?
Usually the ones who change their minds so easily, are following a person like a cult almost, and go with whatever they say, whenever they say.
There aren't huge masses of millions of people idly watching TV, coming across an interview with some random baseball star and trusts his opinion on stuff.
Personally, I think in generally the problem is "celebrity worship", and all the related things, rather than just about the specific person who said something, or even about the platform. People are so quick to just go "Well, I like that person, so whatever they say, is what I think more or less" which is absolutely bananas to me.
From the examples given in this article it is absolutely impossible to tell whether the "incorrect beliefs" (be it racism, mushroom aliens, vitamins curing cancer, whatever) are in any way connected to the Nobel prize.
For all I know, they all could have been racists, psylocibe users, etc. long before they received any prizes and the associated attention.
In fact, it could even be possible that they had much worse and radical beliefs earlier in life which were tempered by the burden of being a thought leader.
I'd go as far as to say that this is a good example of an article that should be removed from Wikipedia.
Take any other award, list people who got it and had "incorrect beliefs", add an article about it and preamble it with "it is unclear whether it is an effect of the award". What purpose does it serve? Do you think there should be articles for all of those "diseases"?
The difference is notability, which is the criteria used whether a distinct Wikipedia article is warranted. There are multiple cited sources that use the "Noble disease" term, there are possibly much fewer similar publications with "Fields medalist disease".
That is not to say that the theory holds water. Flat Earth theory is also notable and has a wiki page, even if blatantly wrong. There is no hyperboloid Earth theory wiki page.
> there are possibly much fewer similar publications with "Fields medalist disease"
Among mathematicians, I wouldn't claim that "Fields medalist disease" is an unusual term, though this term is typically meant to mean "some mathematician got a Fields medal, but did not prove any other deep mathematical result afterwards". There also exists the much more derogatory term "dead wood" for mathematicians who once proved highly celebrated results, but after they got tenured, no they didn't manage to prove anything deep anymore."
Concerning the "crackpot undertone" of "Nobel Disease": lots of mathematicians know the names of achieved mathematicians who got into some eccentric ideas ("eccentric" in the sense of "outside the Overton window") once they got older.
Famous examples for the latter point are Serge Lang
Ok, notability is a good argument for having such an article (although I'm not too sure about it really being notable), but the current shape is absolutely misleading.
The article mentions it later - journalists and laymen end up asking Nobel Prize winners their opinion on matters outside their area of expertise.
We don’t do that with Fields medal winners. Mainly because most people don’t even know what a Fields medal is. I can’t write a headline that relies on Elizabeth Moon’s or Stanislav Smirnov’s borrowed authority because the average joe doesn’t know who they are. But that definitely happened with multiple Nobel prize winners because the Nobel prize is that well known. A Nobel prize winners opinion on race science is inherently newsworthy.
You know how we know the Nobel is in a different league to these other awards? Because when you explain what a Fields Medal is to someone who hasn’t heard of it, you say “it’s the Nobel prize for math”.
And the fame of the prize leads to attention, which in the words of Milton Friedman, is “flattering but also corrupting”.
In the article, Milton Friedman sums it up well I think by describing the attention is 'corrupting'.
It cannot be good for you for everyone to assume that you are somehow omniscient all of a sudden.
At either extreme, it isn't good. You start believing it and overestimating yourself more and ore, or you are buried under an ever increasing sense of impostor syndrome.
-An expectation that because a scientist is incredibly good at one thing, they must be good at another, entirely different type of thing. This seems to uniquely apply to scientists.
We don't judge a phenomenal football player for not being an incredible archer, but then we do judge a Nobel prize-winning physicist for believing in astrology.
-I think this can sometimes be two sides of the same coin: The same divergent thinking that helps you make revolutionary discoveries (you're unwilling to take the status quo for granted) also makes you explore "strange" ideas.
The first entries are a bit weird to me. They are mostly about eugenics for people who got their Nobel prices in the early 1900s. The thing is that in those days even the state of California promoted eugenics [1]. And according to Wikipedia, so much so that they might have even played a role in influencing Germany [2].
You've touched on the whole problem with the "cancel culture" of today.
Scientific and political beliefs often do not stand the test of time, but is it fair to blame the people of past eras for their misjudgements using the values of today?
How do we know for sure when we're right about something?
> During the COVID-19 pandemic, Montagnier promoted the idea that SARS-CoV-2 was deliberately created and escaped from a laboratory
My understanding is that quite some researchers think that the lab leak hypothesis is possible, but unprovable at this point. I know Wikipedia treats it as some fringe hoax, but to me it seems almost religious. In the sense that the idea has been marked as a conspiracy theory at the very beginning and nothing can change that stance anymore. When a scientist supports it, it discredits the scientist instead of supporting the theory.
(For transparency, my personal opinion on covid origin is that I find it difficult to believe either side of the debate when it claims it is 100% sure.)
It depends on personal interpretations of "deliberately created".
To wit, virology labs will deliberately breed up more virulent strains of viruses in order to study their effects.
I don't know what's Montagnier's position beyond that paragraph on Wikipedia, but a virus undergoing gain of function research could be I suppose described as "deliberately created" (obviously not from scratch and not deliberately released).
The most likely theory of artificial origin is that SARS-CoV-2 was deliberately created as a chimera of two natural sarbecoviruses with a human-designed furin cleavage site between them. The WIV proposed to undertake this research in collaboration with Ralph Baric in the DEFUSE proposal, as a step towards his goal of a pan-coronavirus vaccine. DARPA declined to fund the proposal, in part due to safety concerns. Zhengli Shi had the technical knowledge to perform the work alone at the WIV, although no specific evidence has yet emerged that she did so.
That said, Montagnier appears to have speculated that SARS-CoV-2 contains genetic information from HIV. That seems almost surely false, since the sequences he cited occur frequently in many organisms.
I think all ideas can be entertained without an association with how it manifested, we should be able to have any level of discussion (be it dismissive, reductive, or enriching and productive) about anything.
“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself.” - Richard Feynman
Milton Friedman being the main quoted figure in the article, and that he attempts to link it back to his own field, is a huge irony. He’s certainly one of the most “wild ideas beyond his domain” public intellectuals of his century.
> In his autobiography, Mullis professed a belief in astrology and wrote about an encounter with a fluorescent, talking raccoon that he suggested might have been an extraterrestrial alien.
> There's a statistic similar to this showing that socially successful people tend to think they're above the law.
That's actually the premise of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. If you actually read the book there is no Mr. Hyde, it was Jekyll all along. It was a commentary on the times it was written in where the rich elite would behave horribly in "private" while maintaining a social standing in public suited to their supposed stature. They believed they were above the law.
Most people are scared of voicing their heterodox views. It really is as simple as that. Once you are not dependent on an income they can be more truthful.
Indeed. The FIFA Peace Prize winners espousing views they don't seem to have any qualification to comment on (and may express factually incorrect views, unsupported by data), seems to be running at a rate of ~100% at the moment. The Bayesian in me wants to see more data before calling it a disease, but early signs are not promising.
What I've (noticed) is that many of their beliefs overlap.
Nobel prize winners are the smartest people on the planet, people go out of their way to extend them a carpet everywhere they go, we are supposed to do that, but then are we also supposed not supposed to believe what they say?
I'm truly confused, this part of the training definitely needs a review.
I think I would trust a Nobel laureate on their topic of expertise, as indicated by their Nobel prize.
The problem seems to be that they are asked - and often answer - questions on topics unrelated to that topic, in the belief they're just, y'know, really smart.
I think the economics prize must be the worst banana skin for the recipients - popular economics science books like Freakonomics have cemented in the public's (and journalists'), minds, that economics has applicability to a number of different parts of life. And it does! However that does not mean they have any authority to speak on anything outside of their published work.
You’re not supposed to believe anything anyone says or because it’s written in a book or because that’s how it always has been. You have a brain and use it to think critically and analytically. Only after that you decide if you agree or not.
I think the point is exactly that just because someone is smart in one area doesn't mean they know anything about other areas, and yet we constantly assume that's true.
We probably shouldn't be treating Nobel prize winners as the smartest people generally, just specifically in the field of their discovery. Very common fallacy to fall for though, and when everyone treats you like a general genius, of course you're going to give your opinions.
> Nobel prize winners are the smartest people on the planet
I wouldn't go that far. They are not dumb and they like to promote their ideas. They can probably give an above-average take on most things.
There are millions of other not-dumb people who will give their opinions on anything. If you ask them their opinions on everything a lot of them will say crazy stuff, but a Nobel laureate says it it makes more headlines.
> He's definitely been successful as an entrepeneur.
Has he had anything to do with the "success" of his companies other than as a fundraiser, i.e., grifter? Have people forgot about his tunnel company, his solar company, the fact that he was kicked out of PayPal, someone else actually runs SpaceX, his ridiculous $40+ billion dollar purchase of Twitter, and his recent grifts to basically rid himself of the massive debt and risk of his Twitter purchase by forming pyramid companies?
The dude is a joke of an entrepreneur. He is a grifter and nothing more. Grifters can be "successful", unfortunately.
Further, this post is discussing intellectuals and not entrepreneurs.
> an informal term for the embrace of strange or scientifically unsound ideas by some Nobel Prize winners, usually later in life. It has been argued that the effect results, in part, from a tendency for Nobel winners to feel empowered by the award to speak on topics outside their specific area of expertise
Sounds pretty much like every founder out there who strike gold once in the past now believing their genius now clearly applies to everything everywhere, including country governance, economics and sociology. It probably doesn't help that others around them are affected in similar ways and become more sycophantic because of the "award" these two types of people win.
Like making a payments platform and then 30 years later telling everyone the anti-christ is coming?
"making" seems far fetched, "happened to be vested with shares" seems the most factual
Angela Collier has a terrific video about this : billionaires want you to know they could have done physics.
seconded
I thought this was how Nobel Prizes sickened fields.
Mathematicians believe we're lucky to have been spared the Nobel Prize. While some repeat a discredited story this was because Gösta Mittag-Leffler was sleeping with Nobel's wife, it is generally felt that mixing ego and the possibility of a Nobel Prize has toxic effects on a field.
We now have both the Fields Medal and the Abel Prize, but both pass over the midlife period when ego eclipses talent.
A lot of that comes from becoming incredibly rich then adopting morals and policy preferences that align with that level of wealth inequality
I am convinced that a similar proportion of non-prize winner scientists across all fields of natural sciences share "scientifically unsound ideas" or "scientifically unsupported or discredited beliefs", or however else we want to call them. I am not even confident that age may be a decisive factor.
As an (almost retired) anthropologist with background in genetics, I do certainly nurture yet unverified and pretty unorthodox convictions, if only as a matter of hypothesis. Looking around me among colleagues who have a wealth of experience, cultivating strange ideas seems to be very common and indeed part of the discovery process.
How can one find new insight without erring ?
I think the logic here is backwards.
Nobel Prize winners won the prize because they had unorthodox ways of thinking that led them to an actual discovery. I'd think that it's quite normal that 1 out of 10000 unorthodox beliefs ends up being a scientific reality of high impact.
i.e. ~1 out of 10000 unorthodox thinkers will win the Nobel Prize, 9999/10000 of those thinkers you will never hear about. For the one who won, it's likely they will have continued unorthodox ideas, 9999/10000 of which will not lead to a second Nobel Prize.
The article lists an order some 10 of Nobel prize-winners later seen as "unsound" mostly in a field other than their main area of expertise. Making them 1 in 100. I won't be surprised that 1 in 100 senior scientist expresses unorthodox or even unsound ideas when foraging far away from their field, particularly on the kind of topics listed.
I agree that the share of unorthodox thinkers should all in all be higher among those winners. This is indeed what made them advanced in their field. But the main bias remains: looking at those whose voice reaches even when they venture out of their field rather than the full pull of (good) scientists.
Venturing outside your field is also part of what drives discovery itself, not a post-Nobel symptom, because you see the new field with a fresh set of eyes rather than textbook-brainwashed eyes.
A lot of discoveries are made by someone who "imported" insights from one field to another.
> Venturing outside your field is also part of what drives discovery itself, not a post-Nobel symptom
This is precisely what I meant to say (and seemingly failed) and why I upvote you!
Almost everyone harbors some scientifically unsound ideas. Especially when it comes to the human body and/or mental abilities.
A lot of these aren't "strange or scientifically unsound ideas" but downright racism. Whether Nobel prize recipients are less or more racist than their contemporaries is debatable but I'm not sure they fit the same category as "believed in ghosts" or "claims to have talked to a fluorescent racoon".
That still belongs to strange or scientifically unsound.
Eugenics is not scientifically unsound. It's just completely outside of today's Overton window.
> It's just completely outside of today's Overton window
Never heard it expressed like that, but I guess you could apply it to tons of stuff?
> Lobotomy is not scientifically unsound, as aswegs8 proves, it's just completely outside of today's Overton window.
Well in fairness so long as you describe the goal as "largely destroying the frontal cortex and all the functions that go along with it," then lobotomy is incredibly sound.
I mean, if we wanted every human on Earth to be over 6' tall, we could just cull the short ones (or stop them from reproducing), and this is scientifically valid, but, of course, evil.
As far as lobotomy, I don't know, but it seems to be widely discredited inasmuch as it didn't achieve its aims (or if it did, the aims themselves were highly questionable)
Given the title, lobotomy is an apt reference "The originator of the procedure, Portuguese neurologist António Egas Moniz, shared the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine of 1949 for the "discovery of the therapeutic value of leucotomy in certain psychoses"," - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lobotomy
> or stop them from reproducing
It may not be possible to breed any trait to any distribution one would like.
For body size, maybe, also depending on maternal nutrition. But apparently there is (and anthropologists think always has been) a certain percentage of people with schizophrenia even though it carries a severe reproductive disadvantage.
Similarly, it may well be that personality always approaches a certain distribution like a random experiment.
The culling mechanism would work in any case, of course.
> I mean, if we wanted every human on Earth to be over 6' tall, we could just cull the short ones (or stop them from reproducing), and this is scientifically valid, but, of course, evil.
What's scientifically valid about that? What part of the scientific process is being utilized? What hypothesis is being tested?
If you're implying that people would start to be taller because we are culling short people, then you're talking about "artificial selection", not "eugenics". People who believe that there are groups of humans that are inferior or superior based on genetic differences would love for you to conflate the two concepts because that gets them closer to their political goals that have historically resulted in unimaginable human suffering.
It is ethically unsound.
"Ethics" is subjective, there is no such thing as an objective ethics (unless you are religious).
This is why thought experiments like the Trolley problems don't have a simple answer.. and they get even more complex with variations of the thought experiment.
I agree ethics can be subjective, so much so that there is more than one model of ethics.
However, please tell me which model of ethics supports eugenics. Is it Utilitarian, Rights, Fairness, Common Good, or Virtue?
Since it's subjective, you can just make up your own model supporting eugenics, and it'll be just as valid as any other model.
are ethics man-made or „given“ to us by god, the watchmaker or the universe?
Eugenics rejects the idea that all are created equal. Equality is supported by both Judeo-Christian theology and secular enlightenment philosophy.
I can think of little modern philosophy more regressive than the idea that a self-appointed superior can determine that another is inferior to the point that they (or their offspring) should be culled from existence. Eugenics and racism have been intertwined since the beginning and with a modern twist continue to target vulnerable populations.
For the most part they come out of emotions that evolution found useful for procreation (love, fear, anger), then extrapolated to people living in small groups, then to larger societies after the invention of agriculture via the "iterated prisoners dilemma".
I think that in this context it's more useful to pose the question in there other direction: which moral systems declare that the slave trade and the disenfranchisement of persons on the basis of skin colour is not ok?
Ethics is a field of study. I know some on this site loathe the humanities, but those same often don’t mind using language, psychology, and sociology to make a buck.
average Hacker News user opinion
Oooph. I'm going to be charitable and make a (horrifying) steelman point for you: Eugenics can be understood as a subset of the ideas of plant and animal breeding that have been practiced for centuries. Those are scientifically sound, thus the idea that humans can be bred for certain traits should be too.
THAT SAID, "Eugenics" as espoused and understood over the past two centuries isn't that at all. It's 100%, every time, a pretty face for racism. Human social and ancestry divisions ARE NOT the product of deliberate selection, never have been, and any attempt to conflate the ideas is, yeah, pretty fucking unsound. And horrifying.
> Eugenics can be understood as a subset of the ideas of plant and animal breeding that have been practiced for centuries.
That's called "artificial selection", and people who believe that certain groups of humans are somehow superior or inferior to each other because of differences in genetics would love for you to conflate "artificial selection" and "eugenics".
There's no need to steelman a concept that has caused unimaginable human suffering.
It is unsound because “better” is completely subjective and up to the definer. There’s no objective, scientific truth there.
Maybe you’re coming from a good place from this, so I’ll avoid tearing into you and just assume you haven’t really been exposed to people who challenge really shitty rightwing opinions.
A simple example for why “Eugenics”[1] isn’t simply a scientific concept (without severe bastardizing of the word “science”) are people born with Down Syndrome. Abortions for fetuses shown to have Down Syndrome is a contentious topic because many individuals with Down Syndrome have an extremely high quality of life, and many find it insulting to consider them any less human or worthy of life.
But from a genetic perspective, Down Syndrome is objectively bad because it reduces fertility. In the most objective sense, less fertility = less genetic utility. But aside from being fucking horrific, there’s nothing inherently “scientific” about that, just like there’s nothing “scientific” about choosing one chess opening over a different chess opening due to objective measurements like win percentage. We’re not challenging hypotheses in this hypothetical, we’re applying an arbitrary utility function.
[1] using a capital E here intentionally to refer to the idea that humans can be bred to be superior, and inferior humans can be culled (disgusted even typing that out).
Edit: “artificial selection” is a scientific concept; “eugenics” is what I can’t believe we’re still talking about in 2026 in supposed polite company. That’s what HN is supposed to be, right? Polite company? Jfc, “eugenics”.
I'm going to start over actually, here's what I should have said:
Get the fuck out of here saying anything remotely positive about "eugenics" while there are multiple genocides (and attempted genocides) happening across the globe right now due to racial and ethnic differences. Even if you're just being "devil's advocate", or "edgy", or if you genuinely believe that you're superior to other humans based on some deep personal inferiority complex that you're forced to externalize onto your political beliefs.
There's nothing "scientific" about eugenics, where the prefix "eu" implies "good" or "better" and the root "genics" refers to genetics. There is no objective utility function on which to base "good", they are all subjective. To imply that the scientific method can be twisted to create an "objective good" on which to measure human genetic utility against is pseudoscientific bullshit that should have been left behind 80 years ago. But it appears its a lesson we can never truly learn as a species.
The key point is it’s not just ethically wrong, but it’s not scientific because it’s subjective and has no basis in reality. For instance, you cannot use genetic studies to define a race because for instance, in Africa, you could have massive genetic diversity in people that are 200 miles apart. That doesn’t make them different races. If you did attempt to classify people into races based on something scientific like genetics, you would end up with hundreds of thousands of “races”. With even more fine tooth classification, you could subdivide those people into further sub groups that becomes indistinguishable from just classifying extended families.
That just means you can't call Africans one "race" because they hold all the genetic diversity on the planet. But it doesn't mean there's not some meaningful genetic grouping of populations that splintered out of Africa. Or, concretely, I'm struggling to square what you're saying with the fact that I tell my doctor I'm Hispanic because that means a higher genetic predisposition to things like diabetes.
Hispanic is probably the perfect example for this. A blonde Argentinian is probably not predisposed to diabetes. What I’m trying to say is racial categorizations don’t follow any rules based in our biology or genetics. For it to be scientific you would need to be able to categorize any given individual 100% based on some unchanging rule that is based on underlying biology. We cannot currently do that and what I’m saying is I don’t think you can come up with a rule like that without the result being hundreds of thousands of different categories of “races”.
> If you did attempt to classify people into races based on something scientific like genetics, you would end up with hundreds of thousands of “races”. With even more fine tooth classification, you could subdivide those people into further sub groups that becomes indistinguishable from just classifying extended families.
'Biologically speaking', wouldn't that 'just' be something like breeds?
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dog_breeds
Yeah, but at the end of the day, all of this classification is very arbitrary. Until you can come up with a measurable system like “8% genetic differences are defined as a different species” or “can successfully interbreed with viable non-sterile offspring” or something it’s all just a useful pneumonic to understand the world, but it’s not really objective science. Dog breeds are notoriously subjective and just depends on what the registry in the place wanted to do.
I'm surprised the article doesn't address the Occam's Razor probability that... _most people_ hold ideas that the (a?) majority does not... and that increased media attention is likely to "discover" these beliefs.
Or rather, I see no attempt to make an argument that Nobel laureates are statistically _more_ likely than other "well-known" non-politicians to hold non-majoritarian ideas... nor any attempt to argue that the ideas followed rather than preceded the award.
My thought too - lots of people have cranky ideas. But they only get taken seriously if they get a Nobel or something like that.
While he didn't win a Nobel prize, I'm reminded of Dr Henry Heimlich (inventor of the Heimlich maneuver), who went on to become a proponent of malariotherapy: the deliberate infection of people suffering from HIV, Lyme disease, and other ailments with malaria as a treatment. It goes without saying that malariotherapy is not a scientifically well-supported procedure.
This has always felt like such a weird quirk in human behavior.
Imagine a 5 year old who is good at basketball. His parents notice it and enroll him in a class. Coaches recognize his talent and dedicate special time to him. He trains every morning, every night and entire weekends through primary, middle and high school. Gets barely any time for classes, but he anyways just needs a passing grade (which teachers are happy to help him with). He joins advanced youth academies, travels for tournaments across the country. No time for distractions. No TV, no parties, barely any social time at all. He gets a sports scholarship in college. Finally goes pro. Continues training hard for every waking minute. Plays hard for years and is considered one of the best players in the world. Absolute peak of achievement in his field.
Then the night he wins a championship a reporter shoves a microphone in his face and asks "what are your thoughts on the geopolitical crisis developing in the East China sea?" And whatever he says will make the front page, generate countless social media clips and will undoubtedly influence the opinions of millions.
And this applies to every field. Look at all the VCs who make a lucky bet and then sit on a hundred podcasts proclaiming "world peace is easy, actually".
> will undoubtedly influence the opinions of millions.
Is this actually true, based on just one statement?
Usually the ones who change their minds so easily, are following a person like a cult almost, and go with whatever they say, whenever they say.
There aren't huge masses of millions of people idly watching TV, coming across an interview with some random baseball star and trusts his opinion on stuff.
Personally, I think in generally the problem is "celebrity worship", and all the related things, rather than just about the specific person who said something, or even about the platform. People are so quick to just go "Well, I like that person, so whatever they say, is what I think more or less" which is absolutely bananas to me.
From the examples given in this article it is absolutely impossible to tell whether the "incorrect beliefs" (be it racism, mushroom aliens, vitamins curing cancer, whatever) are in any way connected to the Nobel prize.
For all I know, they all could have been racists, psylocibe users, etc. long before they received any prizes and the associated attention.
In fact, it could even be possible that they had much worse and radical beliefs earlier in life which were tempered by the burden of being a thought leader.
I'd go as far as to say that this is a good example of an article that should be removed from Wikipedia.
>it is absolutely impossible to tell whether
It's literally the second sentence of the article.
Yes, that's my point.
Take any other award, list people who got it and had "incorrect beliefs", add an article about it and preamble it with "it is unclear whether it is an effect of the award". What purpose does it serve? Do you think there should be articles for all of those "diseases"?
Nebula award disease
Crossword Book award disease
Turing award disease
Pulitzer award disease
Fields medalist disease
et cetera?
The difference is notability, which is the criteria used whether a distinct Wikipedia article is warranted. There are multiple cited sources that use the "Noble disease" term, there are possibly much fewer similar publications with "Fields medalist disease".
That is not to say that the theory holds water. Flat Earth theory is also notable and has a wiki page, even if blatantly wrong. There is no hyperboloid Earth theory wiki page.
> there are possibly much fewer similar publications with "Fields medalist disease"
Among mathematicians, I wouldn't claim that "Fields medalist disease" is an unusual term, though this term is typically meant to mean "some mathematician got a Fields medal, but did not prove any other deep mathematical result afterwards". There also exists the much more derogatory term "dead wood" for mathematicians who once proved highly celebrated results, but after they got tenured, no they didn't manage to prove anything deep anymore."
Concerning the "crackpot undertone" of "Nobel Disease": lots of mathematicians know the names of achieved mathematicians who got into some eccentric ideas ("eccentric" in the sense of "outside the Overton window") once they got older.
Famous examples for the latter point are Serge Lang
> https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Serge_Lang&oldid=...
or Anatoly Fomenko
> https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Anatoly_Fomenko&o...
Ok, notability is a good argument for having such an article (although I'm not too sure about it really being notable), but the current shape is absolutely misleading.
The article mentions it later - journalists and laymen end up asking Nobel Prize winners their opinion on matters outside their area of expertise.
We don’t do that with Fields medal winners. Mainly because most people don’t even know what a Fields medal is. I can’t write a headline that relies on Elizabeth Moon’s or Stanislav Smirnov’s borrowed authority because the average joe doesn’t know who they are. But that definitely happened with multiple Nobel prize winners because the Nobel prize is that well known. A Nobel prize winners opinion on race science is inherently newsworthy.
You know how we know the Nobel is in a different league to these other awards? Because when you explain what a Fields Medal is to someone who hasn’t heard of it, you say “it’s the Nobel prize for math”.
And the fame of the prize leads to attention, which in the words of Milton Friedman, is “flattering but also corrupting”.
Got it.
This article linked at the bottom is interesting too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ne_supra_crepidam
"Let the cobbler not judge beyond the shoe"
nice, "ultracrepidarian" is going to be getting some use from me, looks like I'm late to the game though:
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=ultracrepidari...
Nobel laureates are just normal humans and sometimes believe in garbage ideas. Surprise.
In the article, Milton Friedman sums it up well I think by describing the attention is 'corrupting'.
It cannot be good for you for everyone to assume that you are somehow omniscient all of a sudden.
At either extreme, it isn't good. You start believing it and overestimating yourself more and ore, or you are buried under an ever increasing sense of impostor syndrome.
I think there are two things at work here:
-An expectation that because a scientist is incredibly good at one thing, they must be good at another, entirely different type of thing. This seems to uniquely apply to scientists.
We don't judge a phenomenal football player for not being an incredible archer, but then we do judge a Nobel prize-winning physicist for believing in astrology.
-I think this can sometimes be two sides of the same coin: The same divergent thinking that helps you make revolutionary discoveries (you're unwilling to take the status quo for granted) also makes you explore "strange" ideas.
The first entries are a bit weird to me. They are mostly about eugenics for people who got their Nobel prices in the early 1900s. The thing is that in those days even the state of California promoted eugenics [1]. And according to Wikipedia, so much so that they might have even played a role in influencing Germany [2].
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics_in_California
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_eugenics
You've touched on the whole problem with the "cancel culture" of today.
Scientific and political beliefs often do not stand the test of time, but is it fair to blame the people of past eras for their misjudgements using the values of today?
How do we know for sure when we're right about something?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8V8rtdXnLA
However Noble Rot is delightful:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_rot
Billionaires are also susceptible to extreme forms this disease. It was also known as hubris to the ancient Greeks.
> Luc Montagnier co-discovered HIV in 1983 […]
> During the COVID-19 pandemic, Montagnier promoted the idea that SARS-CoV-2 was deliberately created and escaped from a laboratory
My understanding is that quite some researchers think that the lab leak hypothesis is possible, but unprovable at this point. I know Wikipedia treats it as some fringe hoax, but to me it seems almost religious. In the sense that the idea has been marked as a conspiracy theory at the very beginning and nothing can change that stance anymore. When a scientist supports it, it discredits the scientist instead of supporting the theory.
(For transparency, my personal opinion on covid origin is that I find it difficult to believe either side of the debate when it claims it is 100% sure.)
Lab leak is one thing, "deliberately created and escaped" is a different story.
It depends on personal interpretations of "deliberately created". To wit, virology labs will deliberately breed up more virulent strains of viruses in order to study their effects.
I don't know what's Montagnier's position beyond that paragraph on Wikipedia, but a virus undergoing gain of function research could be I suppose described as "deliberately created" (obviously not from scratch and not deliberately released).
The most likely theory of artificial origin is that SARS-CoV-2 was deliberately created as a chimera of two natural sarbecoviruses with a human-designed furin cleavage site between them. The WIV proposed to undertake this research in collaboration with Ralph Baric in the DEFUSE proposal, as a step towards his goal of a pan-coronavirus vaccine. DARPA declined to fund the proposal, in part due to safety concerns. Zhengli Shi had the technical knowledge to perform the work alone at the WIV, although no specific evidence has yet emerged that she did so.
https://theintercept.com/2021/09/23/coronavirus-research-gra...
That said, Montagnier appears to have speculated that SARS-CoV-2 contains genetic information from HIV. That seems almost surely false, since the sequences he cited occur frequently in many organisms.
https://apnews.com/article/conspiracy-theories-iran-only-on-...
"deliberately (created and escaped)" is very implausible yes. "(deliberately created) and escaped" not so much though.
Agreed, and I think conflating these two is one of the reasons for the resistance towards the lab leak theory that gp mentioned.
Came here to note this as well. I think the lab leak theory is becoming more acceptable.
I think all ideas can be entertained without an association with how it manifested, we should be able to have any level of discussion (be it dismissive, reductive, or enriching and productive) about anything.
“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself.” - Richard Feynman
Milton Friedman being the main quoted figure in the article, and that he attempts to link it back to his own field, is a huge irony. He’s certainly one of the most “wild ideas beyond his domain” public intellectuals of his century.
> In his autobiography, Mullis professed a belief in astrology and wrote about an encounter with a fluorescent, talking raccoon that he suggested might have been an extraterrestrial alien.
Absolutely wild shit whoa
You don’t need a Nobel prize to see talking raccoon aliens. Just take a heroic dose of hallucinogens.
I’d argue it is even more common among successful startup founders.
Well I'll guess they'll need to make an edit to post on Luc Montagnier.
There's a statistic similar to this showing that socially successful people tend to think they're above the law.
I think that once people achieve a certain level of success, they start to think, 'I can get away with this much.'
That's why I'm not successful. I'm trying not to lose my critical perspective. I consider that critical perspective my treasure.
> There's a statistic similar to this showing that socially successful people tend to think they're above the law.
That's actually the premise of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. If you actually read the book there is no Mr. Hyde, it was Jekyll all along. It was a commentary on the times it was written in where the rich elite would behave horribly in "private" while maintaining a social standing in public suited to their supposed stature. They believed they were above the law.
Most people are scared of voicing their heterodox views. It really is as simple as that. Once you are not dependent on an income they can be more truthful.
Some of these symptoms are also exhibited by Nobel Prize Whiners like a certain gentleman who has been hankering for a Nobel Peace Prize.
Indeed. The FIFA Peace Prize winners espousing views they don't seem to have any qualification to comment on (and may express factually incorrect views, unsupported by data), seems to be running at a rate of ~100% at the moment. The Bayesian in me wants to see more data before calling it a disease, but early signs are not promising.
What I've (noticed) is that many of their beliefs overlap.
Nobel prize winners are the smartest people on the planet, people go out of their way to extend them a carpet everywhere they go, we are supposed to do that, but then are we also supposed not supposed to believe what they say?
I'm truly confused, this part of the training definitely needs a review.
I think I would trust a Nobel laureate on their topic of expertise, as indicated by their Nobel prize.
The problem seems to be that they are asked - and often answer - questions on topics unrelated to that topic, in the belief they're just, y'know, really smart.
I think the economics prize must be the worst banana skin for the recipients - popular economics science books like Freakonomics have cemented in the public's (and journalists'), minds, that economics has applicability to a number of different parts of life. And it does! However that does not mean they have any authority to speak on anything outside of their published work.
There isn't simply any awards given for heterodox views alone.
You’re not supposed to believe anything anyone says or because it’s written in a book or because that’s how it always has been. You have a brain and use it to think critically and analytically. Only after that you decide if you agree or not.
I think the point is exactly that just because someone is smart in one area doesn't mean they know anything about other areas, and yet we constantly assume that's true.
We probably shouldn't be treating Nobel prize winners as the smartest people generally, just specifically in the field of their discovery. Very common fallacy to fall for though, and when everyone treats you like a general genius, of course you're going to give your opinions.
> Nobel prize winners are the smartest people on the planet
I wouldn't go that far. They are not dumb and they like to promote their ideas. They can probably give an above-average take on most things.
There are millions of other not-dumb people who will give their opinions on anything. If you ask them their opinions on everything a lot of them will say crazy stuff, but a Nobel laureate says it it makes more headlines.
People that enjoyed success in any field tend to think they can replicate in others.
See Musk, whom believes that if he's done A or B right, makes him an expert on the entire alphabet.
Musk hasn't ever been intellectually successful in anything. He's a grifter.
He's definitely been successful as an entrepeneur.
That doesn't make him an expert in physics, computing, politics, economy, etc, etc.
> He's definitely been successful as an entrepeneur.
Has he had anything to do with the "success" of his companies other than as a fundraiser, i.e., grifter? Have people forgot about his tunnel company, his solar company, the fact that he was kicked out of PayPal, someone else actually runs SpaceX, his ridiculous $40+ billion dollar purchase of Twitter, and his recent grifts to basically rid himself of the massive debt and risk of his Twitter purchase by forming pyramid companies?
The dude is a joke of an entrepreneur. He is a grifter and nothing more. Grifters can be "successful", unfortunately.
Further, this post is discussing intellectuals and not entrepreneurs.