6 ms·

I don't understand why the Nobel prize is so prestigious. It's the same with the Oscars: it's just some arbitrary committee of people somewhere that decide who

I don't understand why the Nobel prize is so prestigious. It's the same with the Oscars: it's just some arbitrary committee of people somewhere that decide who wins it. It's not like your peers decide if you win. So why does anyone actually care about the award? It's prestigious because we all agree it's prestigious.

Mediterraneo10 8y ago
> It's just some arbitrary committee of people somewhere that decide who wins it. The committee for the literature prize has contained some prestigious literary figures themselves, so it is to a slight degree a judgement of peers. Secondly, the membership of the committee has historically represented a high society that many authors have been members of themselves, or who hoped to have that high society among their audience. Go through the Nobel ceremony archives and you can see some writers getting quite emotional that they are there among the committee and the invited guests.
- Moodles 8y ago
  I agree that the deciding committee isn't completely incompetent. As you know, there are plenty of other intelligentsia that could also award prizes but they aren't deemed as prestigious. E.g. why the Swedish academy instead of the Royal Society? I think it is a bit strange how we fetisihize the Nobel above all others.
  - theoh 8y ago
    That's just how prestige works. It's a social phenomenon, not an objective reality. It can snowball. This book has an interesting but slightly reductive take on how prestige works in the arts: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/artworld-prestige-9780199913985?cc=ie&lang=en&# https://global.oup.com/academic/product/artworld-prestige-97...
    - Moodles 8y ago
      Indeed. One prize gets 1% prestige, so people want to win it. More people want to win it, so the prize gains more prestige, etc.
      - ska 8y ago
        So you've answered your own questions as to why this isn't strange at all - it's just how social capital works. Why else would the premier restaurant review have been started by a tire company? It's all path dependence, and once you get enough momentum behind one choice it becomes self reinforcing.
        Moodles 8y ago
        > So you've answered your own questions Yes, I am trying to.
  - Lionsion 8y ago
    > E.g. why the Swedish academy instead of the Royal Society? Because a rich Swede endowed it over a century ago, and its had that time to build up prestige. It's sort of like why Harvard is so prestigious: it was the first American University, its existed continuously, and has always ran itself like it was elite. > I think it is a bit strange how we fetisihize the Nobel above all others. My guess it's one of the oldest extant awards of its kind, if not the oldest. This scandal (and the hiatus) might allow a competitor to emerge as the most prestigious award in the field of literature, but I doubt such award will have the same popular awareness, because the Nobel's breadth helps a lot with it's fame.
- alecco 8y ago
  Just like Borges never got a Nobel, Kubrick never got an Oscar as director. These awards systems with arbitrary judges are far from fair.
  - Moodles 8y ago
    Leo should have won an Oscar a long time before The Revenant ;-)
    - praneshp 8y ago
      I'm not interested in looking it up and linking here, but there are several quora answers about how Leo wasn't really "robbed". He was unfortunate that every year he had a great movie, something was better.
  - Mediterraneo10 8y ago
    I have recently gone back through Kubrick’s entire filmography from Paths of Glory on, the first time I had seen many of these films since I was a teenager. It was... underwhelming. I am now able to sympathize with Kubrick critics. With regard to Borges, he shares the same problem in terms of female characters as Cormac McCarthy as mentioned above. Plus, there is a real lack of emotional depth to Borges’ work. His themes may interest anoraks like ourselves, but I don’t think he is a truly universal figure.
    - briandear 8y ago
      Timeliness is what made Kubrick “great” — the social commentary aspect of his films. As far as directing quality, I am simply whelmed rather than over or underwhelmed.
    - paganel 8y ago
      IMHO "Barry Lyndon" is one of the best movies ever-made, and I say that as a cinephile who also thinks that Kubrick is slightly (but just slightly) over-rated. A literature prize like the Nobel is by definition a thing targeted towards literature buffs, and Borges is a god among gods for those kind of people (of which I'm a part of), with or without female characters (come to think of it, I can't remember that many male characters in his books either). Anyway, I stopped taking the Nobel literature prizes all that seriously the moment when I realized that they hadn't given it to Proust (his duchesse de Guermantes is one of the most important female characters in the history of literature) and Kafka.
_ZeD_ 8y ago
While we can discuss the prestige of the Nobel price, please don't associate with the Oscar. The first is an actual prize for scientist works. The second is a fictional prize created to let Americans have prizes too.
- Moodles 8y ago
  I'm not saying that the prizes have equal merit. I'm saying that they're both similarly famous prizes that are judged as prestigious even though the award process isn't based on peer review.
  - briandear 8y ago
    The Oscars are absolutely based on peer review. You have to be a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and you have to be a member within the category of the award being voted upon, except for Best Picture for which all members can vote. Sound Editing is voted on by Sound Editor members. There is more peer review in terms of number of peers at the Academy than your average Nature article.
- B0btheBuilder 8y ago
  >The second is a fictional prize created to let Americans have prizes too. Huh? Doesn't the U.S. have more Nobel laureates than any other country?
  - bobosha 8y ago
    And between 30-35% of US Nobel laureates are immigrants.
- tossaway1 8y ago
  > The first is an actual prize for scientist works This article is about the Nobel prize for literature.
- briandear 8y ago
  This is insulting. The Nobel Prize is “fictional” too. While the article is discussing literature, let’s unpack “fictional” prizes: Yassir Arafat wins a peace prize relating to a war in which he was a primary beligerant. Obama wins the prize before he actually did anything — he won the prize for what he might do rather than for anything he did. Douglas Prasher getting snubbed for the 2008 Prize in Chemistry while the other three who won that year won because of Prasher’s discovery! Somorjai getting snubbed in 2007 despite his research partner winning. Eyring didn’t win because he was a Mormon. Fritz Haber helped developed poison gas used in World War I, yet he won in 1918, despite the entire raison d’être of Nobel’s mandate. If we want to talk about Literature, more Swedes have won than the entirety of Asia! Talk about creating a “fictional prize” so that a particular nationality can have prizes too. The Oscars do have merit and they don’t purport to be international. It’s the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, recognizing excellence in American film; they don’t claim to be an international award, yet Nobel — they explicitly are international oriented. You’re going to say Tolstoy and Mark Twain are less accomplished than Selma Lagerlöf? Really? James Joyce never won a Nobel but Frans Sillanpää did? Come now.
Ensorceled 8y ago
Welcome to humanity. We agree a Olympic gold is prestigious even though it’s just a sport. We agree Lawrence Olivier was great even though he was just acting. We praise Alan Turing even though he was just a mathematician.
- nileshtrivedi 8y ago
  Olympic gold in most sports are based on excellence measured objectively. It's not a human judgment. You either did race 100m in 9.5 seconds or you didn't. There are some sports where asthetics are included in scoring (like synchronized swimming).
  - mstade 8y ago
    Ok, but that only tells you how to win it, not how or why it’s more prestigious than other gold medals. That’s the point of the parent I think, that prestige is part of humanity and not always easily defined.
    - Moodles 8y ago
      I think the Olympics are prestigious because it is such a large competition. Every nation pretty much competes in a large spectacle. So if you win, it means you're the best in the world. The Olympics has more eyeballs on it than the world championship for most sports. And as said, it's objectively measured (although some sports like diving, boxing and gymnastics are determined by subjective scoring to some extent). The only sport I can think of which has more viewers is the Fifa World Cup, and indeed in football/soccer the Fifa World Cup is considered more prestigious than the Olympics. And as you know, Alan Turing pioneered computer science and helped saved millions of lives, so he deserves our respect :-) Perhaps prestige is like natural snowball kind of effect, like how the rich will naturally get richer. A prestigious event becomes somewhat prestigious, so people want to win it. Then more people want to win it. Then it becomes more prestigious, etc.
      - mamon 8y ago
clintonb 8y ago
The Academy has 7000 active/lifetime members who vote on Oscars. That’s not really an arbitrary committee.
- Moodles 8y ago
  Why are the Oscars more prestigious than the Golden Globes?
  - briandear 8y ago
    Because the Globes are voted on by the film press and not actual film practitioners. As an analog, it would be like patients at a hospital voting for the Nobel Prize in Medicine. Still a nice award but much different in the electorate.
    - empath75 8y ago
      More specifically, the globes are voted on by the foreign film press and the process is notoriously corrupt.
      - Moodles 8y ago
        and the Oscars aren't? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qhfxo8xPNGU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qhfxo8xPNGU
- tzs 8y ago
  Also, the voting members don't necessarily actually decide their own vote. Often if they have no opinion on a category they will ask a relative or friend, who may or may not actually be involved in the industry. This happens a lot in the voting for best animated feature. It is fairly common for an older voter to have seen none of the nominees. He asks his grandchildren what "cartoon" they liked best that year, or remembers which movie's merchandise they frequently wear, and that's the one he votes for. I remember seeing a couple article at animation publications where they asked a bunch of voters how they voted and why in years where the winner differed from what the majority of people working in animation expected, and found that the "my grandchildren liked it" factor was the main reason. I wonder how it works for the more technical categories, like best sound editing? Asking your grandchildren "what movie's sound editing did you like this year?" is probably not going to get a useful response.
chi3 8y ago
The nobel prize committee is far from "an arbitrary commmittee" as far as I know. At least for the nobel prize in physics I know it's peers who decide and I'd assume it's the same for the other subjects, and it's not just "arbitrary people who have PhDs within the subject" either, it's a few selected ones who are well known in their fields.
- Moodles 8y ago
  I agree that they're not totally arbitrary and there is probably some correlation between broad peer review acceptance of the genius of some work and a Nobel prize. However, there are also plenty of other committees which could award prizes but which don't carry the same prestige for seemingly arbitrary reasons: e.g. the Royal Society.
petters 8y ago
Both the Nobel prize and the Oscars are decided by peers in the same field.
torstenvl 8y ago
It's spelled "prestigious" because we all agree it's spelled "prestigious." The word has meaning because we all agree it has meaning. Corporations exist because we all agree that corporations exist. Money has value because we all agree that it has value. The United States of America exists because we all agree that it exists. Yes, there is a difference between objective reality and intersubjective reality. But I think you're making too much of that difference. A huge amount of our everyday world is based entirely off broad mass agreement. The vast majority of the things we interact with in modern life would immediately cease to exist if all the people who believed in them just vanished one day - if an extraterrestrial species arrived on Earth the day after, they would not be able to observe almost anything about our lives. That doesn't mean our reality is fake or that our interaction with it is arbitrary. It just means that it is geopolitically and/or culturally defined. Bottom line: Yes, social science is hard, but lighten up.
- Moodles 8y ago
  I'm only suggesting we could consider other awards more prestigious than the Nobel.
  - nugget 8y ago
    Keep in mind that the Nobel prize comes with an approximately $1 million USD cash award. It's not just a fancy gold medal.
    - dagw 8y ago
      And has been around for over 100 years with a pretty good track record of awarding the prize to innovations that have stood the test of time (with some notable exceptions when it comes to the peace prize).
  - Bud 8y ago
    You first. Then analyze the impact that has.
  - firmgently 8y ago
ISL 8y ago
The Nobel committee, at least in Physics, consistently selects people who have had a tremendous impact on the field. There are hundreds of people who may qualify who don't get selected, but those who are selected have done something important. Ergo, a prize winner has a powerful social signal that they have done something important. Scarcity does the rest, as there are three or fewer of them every year in a world with perhaps a few hundred thousand practicing physicists.
protonfish 8y ago
The reason the Oscars and Nobel are the only two major awards that I care about is because in the past the winners are usually (though not always) worthy, so that indicates their selection process has value. Certainly more value than a conceited waste of time like the Grammys.
lev99 8y ago
Part of it is the committee, Nobel prize selection committee is filled with some of the most prestigious people in that field. In addition, their selection process is very good. Part of it is their long history of very good selections. Part of it is the one million dollar reward.

Mediterraneo10 8y ago

> It's just some arbitrary committee of people somewhere that decide who wins it. The committee for the literature prize has contained some prestigious literary figures themselves, so it is to a slight degree a judgement of peers. Secondly, the membership of the committee has historically represented a high society that many authors have been members of themselves, or who hoped to have that high society among their audience. Go through the Nobel ceremony archives and you can see some writers getting quite emotional that they are there among the committee and the invited guests.

Moodles 8y ago
I agree that the deciding committee isn't completely incompetent. As you know, there are plenty of other intelligentsia that could also award prizes but they aren't deemed as prestigious. E.g. why the Swedish academy instead of the Royal Society? I think it is a bit strange how we fetisihize the Nobel above all others.
- theoh 8y ago
  That's just how prestige works. It's a social phenomenon, not an objective reality. It can snowball. This book has an interesting but slightly reductive take on how prestige works in the arts: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/artworld-prestige-9780199913985?cc=ie&lang=en&# https://global.oup.com/academic/product/artworld-prestige-97...
  - Moodles 8y ago
    Indeed. One prize gets 1% prestige, so people want to win it. More people want to win it, so the prize gains more prestige, etc.
    - ska 8y ago
      So you've answered your own questions as to why this isn't strange at all - it's just how social capital works. Why else would the premier restaurant review have been started by a tire company? It's all path dependence, and once you get enough momentum behind one choice it becomes self reinforcing.
      - Moodles 8y ago
        > So you've answered your own questions Yes, I am trying to.
- Lionsion 8y ago
  > E.g. why the Swedish academy instead of the Royal Society? Because a rich Swede endowed it over a century ago, and its had that time to build up prestige. It's sort of like why Harvard is so prestigious: it was the first American University, its existed continuously, and has always ran itself like it was elite. > I think it is a bit strange how we fetisihize the Nobel above all others. My guess it's one of the oldest extant awards of its kind, if not the oldest. This scandal (and the hiatus) might allow a competitor to emerge as the most prestigious award in the field of literature, but I doubt such award will have the same popular awareness, because the Nobel's breadth helps a lot with it's fame.
alecco 8y ago
Just like Borges never got a Nobel, Kubrick never got an Oscar as director. These awards systems with arbitrary judges are far from fair.
- Moodles 8y ago
  Leo should have won an Oscar a long time before The Revenant ;-)
  - praneshp 8y ago
    I'm not interested in looking it up and linking here, but there are several quora answers about how Leo wasn't really "robbed". He was unfortunate that every year he had a great movie, something was better.
- Mediterraneo10 8y ago
  I have recently gone back through Kubrick’s entire filmography from Paths of Glory on, the first time I had seen many of these films since I was a teenager. It was... underwhelming. I am now able to sympathize with Kubrick critics. With regard to Borges, he shares the same problem in terms of female characters as Cormac McCarthy as mentioned above. Plus, there is a real lack of emotional depth to Borges’ work. His themes may interest anoraks like ourselves, but I don’t think he is a truly universal figure.
  - briandear 8y ago
    Timeliness is what made Kubrick “great” — the social commentary aspect of his films. As far as directing quality, I am simply whelmed rather than over or underwhelmed.
  - paganel 8y ago
    IMHO "Barry Lyndon" is one of the best movies ever-made, and I say that as a cinephile who also thinks that Kubrick is slightly (but just slightly) over-rated. A literature prize like the Nobel is by definition a thing targeted towards literature buffs, and Borges is a god among gods for those kind of people (of which I'm a part of), with or without female characters (come to think of it, I can't remember that many male characters in his books either). Anyway, I stopped taking the Nobel literature prizes all that seriously the moment when I realized that they hadn't given it to Proust (his duchesse de Guermantes is one of the most important female characters in the history of literature) and Kafka.

_ZeD_ 8y ago

While we can discuss the prestige of the Nobel price, please don't associate with the Oscar. The first is an actual prize for scientist works. The second is a fictional prize created to let Americans have prizes too.

Moodles 8y ago
I'm not saying that the prizes have equal merit. I'm saying that they're both similarly famous prizes that are judged as prestigious even though the award process isn't based on peer review.
- briandear 8y ago
  The Oscars are absolutely based on peer review. You have to be a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and you have to be a member within the category of the award being voted upon, except for Best Picture for which all members can vote. Sound Editing is voted on by Sound Editor members. There is more peer review in terms of number of peers at the Academy than your average Nature article.
B0btheBuilder 8y ago
>The second is a fictional prize created to let Americans have prizes too. Huh? Doesn't the U.S. have more Nobel laureates than any other country?
- bobosha 8y ago
  And between 30-35% of US Nobel laureates are immigrants.
tossaway1 8y ago
> The first is an actual prize for scientist works This article is about the Nobel prize for literature.
briandear 8y ago
This is insulting. The Nobel Prize is “fictional” too. While the article is discussing literature, let’s unpack “fictional” prizes: Yassir Arafat wins a peace prize relating to a war in which he was a primary beligerant. Obama wins the prize before he actually did anything — he won the prize for what he might do rather than for anything he did. Douglas Prasher getting snubbed for the 2008 Prize in Chemistry while the other three who won that year won because of Prasher’s discovery! Somorjai getting snubbed in 2007 despite his research partner winning. Eyring didn’t win because he was a Mormon. Fritz Haber helped developed poison gas used in World War I, yet he won in 1918, despite the entire raison d’être of Nobel’s mandate. If we want to talk about Literature, more Swedes have won than the entirety of Asia! Talk about creating a “fictional prize” so that a particular nationality can have prizes too. The Oscars do have merit and they don’t purport to be international. It’s the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, recognizing excellence in American film; they don’t claim to be an international award, yet Nobel — they explicitly are international oriented. You’re going to say Tolstoy and Mark Twain are less accomplished than Selma Lagerlöf? Really? James Joyce never won a Nobel but Frans Sillanpää did? Come now.

Ensorceled 8y ago

Welcome to humanity. We agree a Olympic gold is prestigious even though it’s just a sport. We agree Lawrence Olivier was great even though he was just acting. We praise Alan Turing even though he was just a mathematician.

nileshtrivedi 8y ago
Olympic gold in most sports are based on excellence measured objectively. It's not a human judgment. You either did race 100m in 9.5 seconds or you didn't. There are some sports where asthetics are included in scoring (like synchronized swimming).
- mstade 8y ago
  Ok, but that only tells you how to win it, not how or why it’s more prestigious than other gold medals. That’s the point of the parent I think, that prestige is part of humanity and not always easily defined.
  - Moodles 8y ago
    I think the Olympics are prestigious because it is such a large competition. Every nation pretty much competes in a large spectacle. So if you win, it means you're the best in the world. The Olympics has more eyeballs on it than the world championship for most sports. And as said, it's objectively measured (although some sports like diving, boxing and gymnastics are determined by subjective scoring to some extent). The only sport I can think of which has more viewers is the Fifa World Cup, and indeed in football/soccer the Fifa World Cup is considered more prestigious than the Olympics. And as you know, Alan Turing pioneered computer science and helped saved millions of lives, so he deserves our respect :-) Perhaps prestige is like natural snowball kind of effect, like how the rich will naturally get richer. A prestigious event becomes somewhat prestigious, so people want to win it. Then more people want to win it. Then it becomes more prestigious, etc.
    - mamon 8y ago

clintonb 8y ago

The Academy has 7000 active/lifetime members who vote on Oscars. That’s not really an arbitrary committee.

Moodles 8y ago
Why are the Oscars more prestigious than the Golden Globes?
- briandear 8y ago
  Because the Globes are voted on by the film press and not actual film practitioners. As an analog, it would be like patients at a hospital voting for the Nobel Prize in Medicine. Still a nice award but much different in the electorate.
  - empath75 8y ago
    More specifically, the globes are voted on by the foreign film press and the process is notoriously corrupt.
    - Moodles 8y ago
      and the Oscars aren't? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qhfxo8xPNGU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qhfxo8xPNGU
tzs 8y ago
Also, the voting members don't necessarily actually decide their own vote. Often if they have no opinion on a category they will ask a relative or friend, who may or may not actually be involved in the industry. This happens a lot in the voting for best animated feature. It is fairly common for an older voter to have seen none of the nominees. He asks his grandchildren what "cartoon" they liked best that year, or remembers which movie's merchandise they frequently wear, and that's the one he votes for. I remember seeing a couple article at animation publications where they asked a bunch of voters how they voted and why in years where the winner differed from what the majority of people working in animation expected, and found that the "my grandchildren liked it" factor was the main reason. I wonder how it works for the more technical categories, like best sound editing? Asking your grandchildren "what movie's sound editing did you like this year?" is probably not going to get a useful response.

chi3 8y ago

The nobel prize committee is far from "an arbitrary commmittee" as far as I know. At least for the nobel prize in physics I know it's peers who decide and I'd assume it's the same for the other subjects, and it's not just "arbitrary people who have PhDs within the subject" either, it's a few selected ones who are well known in their fields.

Moodles 8y ago
I agree that they're not totally arbitrary and there is probably some correlation between broad peer review acceptance of the genius of some work and a Nobel prize. However, there are also plenty of other committees which could award prizes but which don't carry the same prestige for seemingly arbitrary reasons: e.g. the Royal Society.

petters 8y ago

Both the Nobel prize and the Oscars are decided by peers in the same field.

torstenvl 8y ago

It's spelled "prestigious" because we all agree it's spelled "prestigious." The word has meaning because we all agree it has meaning. Corporations exist because we all agree that corporations exist. Money has value because we all agree that it has value. The United States of America exists because we all agree that it exists. Yes, there is a difference between objective reality and intersubjective reality. But I think you're making too much of that difference. A huge amount of our everyday world is based entirely off broad mass agreement. The vast majority of the things we interact with in modern life would immediately cease to exist if all the people who believed in them just vanished one day - if an extraterrestrial species arrived on Earth the day after, they would not be able to observe almost anything about our lives. That doesn't mean our reality is fake or that our interaction with it is arbitrary. It just means that it is geopolitically and/or culturally defined. Bottom line: Yes, social science is hard, but lighten up.

Moodles 8y ago
I'm only suggesting we could consider other awards more prestigious than the Nobel.
- nugget 8y ago
  Keep in mind that the Nobel prize comes with an approximately $1 million USD cash award. It's not just a fancy gold medal.
  - dagw 8y ago
    And has been around for over 100 years with a pretty good track record of awarding the prize to innovations that have stood the test of time (with some notable exceptions when it comes to the peace prize).
- Bud 8y ago
  You first. Then analyze the impact that has.
- firmgently 8y ago

ISL 8y ago

The Nobel committee, at least in Physics, consistently selects people who have had a tremendous impact on the field. There are hundreds of people who may qualify who don't get selected, but those who are selected have done something important. Ergo, a prize winner has a powerful social signal that they have done something important. Scarcity does the rest, as there are three or fewer of them every year in a world with perhaps a few hundred thousand practicing physicists.

protonfish 8y ago

The reason the Oscars and Nobel are the only two major awards that I care about is because in the past the winners are usually (though not always) worthy, so that indicates their selection process has value. Certainly more value than a conceited waste of time like the Grammys.

lev99 8y ago

Part of it is the committee, Nobel prize selection committee is filled with some of the most prestigious people in that field. In addition, their selection process is very good. Part of it is their long history of very good selections. Part of it is the one million dollar reward.