I don’t necessarily disagree, but why are you confident that STEM Nobels are heavily credentialized? Can you give some examples of breakthroughs in bio, chem, physics, medicine, or math that you feel deserved the prize, didn‘t win, and were discovered by a non-PhD/MD?
My main thesis is that STEM nobels are the result of status competition and networking. To win one, it’s not only a requirement to have created scientific value but it’s also necessary to win the status competition to be elected. If you start with the assumption that academia is an immoral maze it’s a logical conclusion that maze dynamics affect how voting for honors at the top of it is done.
The first example for a breakthough that I think deserves a Nobel Prize but hasn’t is the discovery of the link of lung cancer and smoking. Franz Hermann Müller seems to be the first person to establish the claim but we know very little about him.
He does seem to have made the discovery during his dissertation and it’s not clear what happend to Müller afterwards.
The problem is not only one of breakthough deserving of prizes but also one of credit. There are often many people in the sphere of an invention and academic politics leads to those with the best connections getting the price.
To get a better understanding of the role status and networking plays in Nobel Price giving, there might be someone in History and Philosophy of Science that studied the question.
Here’s an article re-analyzing Mueller’s paper. It finds that “The quality of the group comparison was modest and it did not add qualitatively new knowledge compared to a report published 8 years earlier.” So I’m not prepared to accept him as a candidate path-breaker.
Overall, I’m just not convinced that we have the levels of intellectual parasitism that would justify the idea that scientific credit is doled out to, or stolen by, people merely based on their credentials. Nor that credentials and connections are little-correlated with actual contribution to the discovery in question.
I just feel like if that were the case, we’d hear more modern stories of stolen science, with a significant number being clear-cut cases of “An non-credentialed amateur discovered this, and some PhD came in and stole all the credit.”
In this article on 10 famous instances of “stolen science,” the cases are examples of:
Sexism
Science not actually getting stolen
Credit going to the perfected model, rather than the poor prototype
Two competing researchers/inventors (sometimes both PhDs) who published at almost the same time
Spying
Early death, leaving others to carry on the work
In the few cases here where it’s clear-cut that credit was being unfairly stolen, it was sexism, not lack of a PhD, that was the real underlying problem.
This is just the first article that popped up on Google. Maybe there are lots more cases of stolen scientific credit that weren’t sexy enough for journalism, where lack of a PhD was the root vulnerability that permitted the theft. If you can find them, I’m all ears!
Nobody got a Nobel Prize for discovering that smoking caused cancer when it was a very important finding of the 20th century. That’s why I picked that example.
Again, I don’t think that the PhD is central. What’s central is the academic network.
There’s little critical academic journalism as is. There’s a motivation to fund research into stories where credit was stolen due to sexism (or racism) in a way there isn’t for uncovering people who deserve credit.
The interview between Eric and Bret Weinstein on the Portal podcast provides one case of stolen scientific credit and is quite insightful.
I think the initial NLP developers discovered mimikri of bodylanguage and implementation intentions under different names decades before the concepts made their way into academic psychology. Francine Shapiro who developed EMDR was an assistent of John Grinder and never mentioned that publically and presented her discovery of EMDR was a surprise discovery when it’s the kind of thing that makes much sense under the NLP paradigm.
Instead of crediting the NLP developers for their strong intellectual prodcutivity they aren’t giving any credit and maligned as pseudoscientists.
I’d chalk up the lack of a smoking/lung cancer Nobel to the fact that a rule of the Nobel Prize is that it a prize may not be shared among more than three individuals, nor awarded posthumously. I think it makes more sense to assume there just were too many contributions to select 1-3 individuals who should be credited with “discovering that smoking causes cancer.”
Interpreted that way, the lack of a Nobel for smoking/lung cancer is actually evidence against your assertion that the Nobel Prize is about credentialism and against the phenomenon of credit-stealing by high-status individuals. Who wouldn’t want to claim personal credit for discovering that smoking causes cancer if they could get away with it?
I’ll check out the Portal podcast interview when I get a chance. Can you find a source for your claims about NLP and EMDR? It sounds like it needs an in-depth treatment to tease out the issues.
Remember, the overwhelming preponderance of PhD-holders among prize winners and discovery-makers means that there has to be a lot of mere credentialism and credit-stealing in order for those factors to explain the phenomenon. We should expect there to be plenty of clear-cut stories of out-and-out theft if that is true. Salient examples shouldn’t be hard to find. Frankly, I just don’t see it.
You might ask why there’s no independent reporting here. Imagine a reporter goes to his editor and asks to write a story. Ask Francine Shapiro whether she was employed by Grinder. Ask her about how her name came to be on the article on Eye Accessing Cues in the Holistic Life Magazine. Ask her why she didn’t mention being enough into the NLP model of Eye Accessing Cues to write public articles but still billed her discovery as an independent surprise discovery without mentioning any of that history.
That’s not a story that any editor of a major publication would sign off as it goes counternarrative. You don’t challenge the credit that powerful mainstream people take and say that they didn’t give enough credits to those that don’t have strong mainstream backing. At least unless you are doing it for the ends of critical theory.
The story of Francine Shapiro is an easy one to research given that it’s well layed out in that PDF and it still doesn’t get a reporter to write it up. There are likely plenty of cases of credit rippoff that are less well documented and thus it would be even harder for a reporter to write about them.
In general if you believe in the immoral maze frame you shouldn’t expect that public credit goes to whoever is deserving of the credit.
When it comes to more exploration of the media dynamics the Weinstein podcast is good.
I think that a massive trend of scientific theft would actually make for compelling journalism. I also think you’d hear about it through the academic whisper network. People would post about it on their personal blogs, on Reddit, Twitter, and talk about it in private conversations.
This just doesn’t seem to happen. And if the evidence is so hard to come by, I’m not sure you have a basis for being as convinced it exists as you seem to be.
I think that a massive trend of scientific theft would actually make for compelling journalism.
Going counter-narrative might be compelling narrative in the sense that people want to read the story but it’s not a story that a newspaper wants to publish. How many US newspapers tell you that one of the most reputable US investigative-journalists wrote a story that about how the US military didn’t kill Osama bin Laden? It’s a compelling story, but not one that the US media wants to touch as it goes counter-narrative, so he had to publish it outside of the US while the US media mostly ignored it.
To argue for a massive trend you also have to do a lot of work to document every case and therefore open a lot of fights against powerful people.
I also think you’d hear about it through the academic whisper network.
The academic whisper network is not the place where I would expect a lot of talk about how academics rip off non-academics.
If academia is a immoral maze as you suggested in Survival in the immoral maze of college you wouldn’t expect people in academia to talk about it because talking about it gets you shut out for being indiscrete.
I think Nassim Taleb talks about it a bit when he says that a lot of what academics do boils down to teaching birds to fly.
One of Taleb’s examples is the Black–Scholes equation. According to Taleb, the equation was used by traders before Black and Scholes did their work. Black–Scholes work was basically about how when you make a bunch of assumptions that don’t apply to real financial markets you can derive the formula. Afterwards they tanked a headfund, that they capitalized with the reputation they got from a Nobel prize, because they acted as if all those assumptions are true.
No. I just shows that there are cases where the merit is strong enough to counteract the lack of credentials.
I don’t necessarily disagree, but why are you confident that STEM Nobels are heavily credentialized? Can you give some examples of breakthroughs in bio, chem, physics, medicine, or math that you feel deserved the prize, didn‘t win, and were discovered by a non-PhD/MD?
My main thesis is that STEM nobels are the result of status competition and networking. To win one, it’s not only a requirement to have created scientific value but it’s also necessary to win the status competition to be elected. If you start with the assumption that academia is an immoral maze it’s a logical conclusion that maze dynamics affect how voting for honors at the top of it is done.
The first example for a breakthough that I think deserves a Nobel Prize but hasn’t is the discovery of the link of lung cancer and smoking. Franz Hermann Müller seems to be the first person to establish the claim but we know very little about him.
He does seem to have made the discovery during his dissertation and it’s not clear what happend to Müller afterwards.
He has no Wikipedia article. I pulled the information I could find into a Wikidata item (https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q97128811).
The problem is not only one of breakthough deserving of prizes but also one of credit. There are often many people in the sphere of an invention and academic politics leads to those with the best connections getting the price.
To get a better understanding of the role status and networking plays in Nobel Price giving, there might be someone in History and Philosophy of Science that studied the question.
Here’s an article re-analyzing Mueller’s paper. It finds that “The quality of the group comparison was modest and it did not add qualitatively new knowledge compared to a report published 8 years earlier.” So I’m not prepared to accept him as a candidate path-breaker.
Overall, I’m just not convinced that we have the levels of intellectual parasitism that would justify the idea that scientific credit is doled out to, or stolen by, people merely based on their credentials. Nor that credentials and connections are little-correlated with actual contribution to the discovery in question.
I just feel like if that were the case, we’d hear more modern stories of stolen science, with a significant number being clear-cut cases of “An non-credentialed amateur discovered this, and some PhD came in and stole all the credit.”
In this article on 10 famous instances of “stolen science,” the cases are examples of:
Sexism
Science not actually getting stolen
Credit going to the perfected model, rather than the poor prototype
Two competing researchers/inventors (sometimes both PhDs) who published at almost the same time
Spying
Early death, leaving others to carry on the work
In the few cases here where it’s clear-cut that credit was being unfairly stolen, it was sexism, not lack of a PhD, that was the real underlying problem.
This is just the first article that popped up on Google. Maybe there are lots more cases of stolen scientific credit that weren’t sexy enough for journalism, where lack of a PhD was the root vulnerability that permitted the theft. If you can find them, I’m all ears!
Nobody got a Nobel Prize for discovering that smoking caused cancer when it was a very important finding of the 20th century. That’s why I picked that example.
Again, I don’t think that the PhD is central. What’s central is the academic network.
There’s little critical academic journalism as is. There’s a motivation to fund research into stories where credit was stolen due to sexism (or racism) in a way there isn’t for uncovering people who deserve credit.
The interview between Eric and Bret Weinstein on the Portal podcast provides one case of stolen scientific credit and is quite insightful.
I think the initial NLP developers discovered mimikri of bodylanguage and implementation intentions under different names decades before the concepts made their way into academic psychology. Francine Shapiro who developed EMDR was an assistent of John Grinder and never mentioned that publically and presented her discovery of EMDR was a surprise discovery when it’s the kind of thing that makes much sense under the NLP paradigm.
Instead of crediting the NLP developers for their strong intellectual prodcutivity they aren’t giving any credit and maligned as pseudoscientists.
I’d chalk up the lack of a smoking/lung cancer Nobel to the fact that a rule of the Nobel Prize is that it a prize may not be shared among more than three individuals, nor awarded posthumously. I think it makes more sense to assume there just were too many contributions to select 1-3 individuals who should be credited with “discovering that smoking causes cancer.”
Interpreted that way, the lack of a Nobel for smoking/lung cancer is actually evidence against your assertion that the Nobel Prize is about credentialism and against the phenomenon of credit-stealing by high-status individuals. Who wouldn’t want to claim personal credit for discovering that smoking causes cancer if they could get away with it?
I’ll check out the Portal podcast interview when I get a chance. Can you find a source for your claims about NLP and EMDR? It sounds like it needs an in-depth treatment to tease out the issues.
Remember, the overwhelming preponderance of PhD-holders among prize winners and discovery-makers means that there has to be a lot of mere credentialism and credit-stealing in order for those factors to explain the phenomenon. We should expect there to be plenty of clear-cut stories of out-and-out theft if that is true. Salient examples shouldn’t be hard to find. Frankly, I just don’t see it.
https://www.nlp.ch/pdfdocs/Historie_EMDR_Wingwave.pdf it’s unfortunately no independent source.
You might ask why there’s no independent reporting here. Imagine a reporter goes to his editor and asks to write a story. Ask Francine Shapiro whether she was employed by Grinder. Ask her about how her name came to be on the article on Eye Accessing Cues in the Holistic Life Magazine. Ask her why she didn’t mention being enough into the NLP model of Eye Accessing Cues to write public articles but still billed her discovery as an independent surprise discovery without mentioning any of that history.
That’s not a story that any editor of a major publication would sign off as it goes counternarrative. You don’t challenge the credit that powerful mainstream people take and say that they didn’t give enough credits to those that don’t have strong mainstream backing. At least unless you are doing it for the ends of critical theory.
The story of Francine Shapiro is an easy one to research given that it’s well layed out in that PDF and it still doesn’t get a reporter to write it up. There are likely plenty of cases of credit rippoff that are less well documented and thus it would be even harder for a reporter to write about them.
In general if you believe in the immoral maze frame you shouldn’t expect that public credit goes to whoever is deserving of the credit.
When it comes to more exploration of the media dynamics the Weinstein podcast is good.
I think that a massive trend of scientific theft would actually make for compelling journalism. I also think you’d hear about it through the academic whisper network. People would post about it on their personal blogs, on Reddit, Twitter, and talk about it in private conversations.
This just doesn’t seem to happen. And if the evidence is so hard to come by, I’m not sure you have a basis for being as convinced it exists as you seem to be.
Going counter-narrative might be compelling narrative in the sense that people want to read the story but it’s not a story that a newspaper wants to publish. How many US newspapers tell you that one of the most reputable US investigative-journalists wrote a story that about how the US military didn’t kill Osama bin Laden? It’s a compelling story, but not one that the US media wants to touch as it goes counter-narrative, so he had to publish it outside of the US while the US media mostly ignored it.
To argue for a massive trend you also have to do a lot of work to document every case and therefore open a lot of fights against powerful people.
The academic whisper network is not the place where I would expect a lot of talk about how academics rip off non-academics.
If academia is a immoral maze as you suggested in Survival in the immoral maze of college you wouldn’t expect people in academia to talk about it because talking about it gets you shut out for being indiscrete.
I think Nassim Taleb talks about it a bit when he says that a lot of what academics do boils down to teaching birds to fly.
One of Taleb’s examples is the Black–Scholes equation. According to Taleb, the equation was used by traders before Black and Scholes did their work. Black–Scholes work was basically about how when you make a bunch of assumptions that don’t apply to real financial markets you can derive the formula. Afterwards they tanked a headfund, that they capitalized with the reputation they got from a Nobel prize, because they acted as if all those assumptions are true.