Is there, as some commentators have claimed, affirmative action at work in the awarding of Nobel Prizes?
If there is, it has been almost entirely restricted to the Peace Prize in recent years. The Nobel Committee publishes a year-by-year list of winners, with photographs and clues to nationality, here. Scanning back through the last ten years, I get the following headcounts.
I have used the Ice People / Sun People schema of We Are Doomed, with Europeans and East Asians as Ice People, Africans and Amerindians as Sun People. Subcontinental Asians I have cut crudely, with Moslems as honorary Sun People and non-Muslims as honorary Ice People. It’s a fair balance, I think, and doesn’t actually make much difference to the numbers.
Here we go. For each year I list the six Nobel categories in order: Physics, Chemistry, Medicine, Literature, Peace, and Economics. The score in each box is Ice People / Sun People, so “2-0” means two Ice People and no Sun People.
| Year | Phys | Chem | Med | Lit | Peace | Econ |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2009 | 3-0 | 3-0 | 3-0 | 1-0 | 0-1 | TBA |
| 2008 | 3-0 | 3-0 | 3-0 | 1-0 | 1-0 | 1-0 |
| 2007 | 2-0 | 1-0 | 3-0 | 1-0 | 1-0 | 3-0 |
| 2006 | 2-0 | 1-0 | 2-0 | 1-0 | 0-1 | 1-0 |
| 2005 | 3-0 | 3-0 | 3-0 | 1-0 | 0-1 | 2-0 |
| 2004 | 3-0 | 3-0 | 2-0 | 1-0 | 0-1 | 2-0 |
| 2003 | 3-0 | 2-0 | 2-0 | 1-0 | 0-1 | 2-0 |
| 2002 | 3-0 | 3-0 | 3-0 | 1-0 | 1-0 | 1-0 |
| 2001 | 3-0 | 3-0 | 3-0 | 1-0 | 0-1 | 3-0 |
| 2000 | 3-0 | 3-0 | 3-0 | 1-0 | 1-0 | 2-0 |
That gives us totals of 28-0 for Physics, 25-0 for Chemistry, 27-0 for Medicine, 10-0 for Literature, 4-6 for Peace, 17-0 for Economics.
There are some gray patches. The guy from Mauritius may be a Muslim, for all I know — one-sixth of Mauritians are. It doesn’t make much difference. The Nobel Prize looks awfully like an Ice People club, and those earnest Scandinavians feel terrible about it.
Le Clézio? A Franco-Mauritian, specifically Breton.
It is waaaay simpler than that.
On the Nobel prize controversy: if we can have pre-emptive war we can have pre-emptive peace.
Sun People must just have a natural aptitude for Peace.
If you live in a mud hut with six chickens, two goats, and a cow, and are likely to die of malaria or typhoid fever at age thirty, you probably aren’t doing much advanced work in particle physics.
John Derbyshire is a funny man. The dude merely has an undergrad degree in math. It bothers him that he isn’t smart enough to do original research in math (or, even, attain a Ph.D.) Yet, he uses the fact that he studied mathematics to give a scientific veneer to his nonsense. His IQ is significantly lower than that of the faculty in math departments across the country. This fact pains him, hence his obsession with ranking people and groups based on IQ. If we all came to recognize the importance of IQ, maybe *then* he will grouped with the gifted intellectual elite (i.e, math and science professors) he so clearly envies.
Derbyshire must also be sorely disappointed that his half-chinese half white kids aren’t geniuses (he said they were intellectually average in an op-ed he wrote.)
Lolz.
It may not be so much an issue of Ice versus Sun, but of finding whoever it is that hates the United States/Western civilization the most, and awarding the peace prize to him or her. What did Rigoberta Menchu do other than write a phony memoir?
Susan, Derbyshire needs to make it a white people vs brown people issue. Because then he can derive self-esteem from having the same skin color as great scientists and mathematicians in lieu of not being smart enough to even quality as a competent mathematician or scientist himself.
What Derb derives self-esteem from, is looking honestly at facts.
And being indifferent, obnoxiously so, to the political correctness of them.
To paraphase Ronald Reagan, paraphrasing someone else:
“Facts are politically incorrect things.”
Derb’s Mother.
Abe’s got my number all right. Boy, it’s humiliating to be exposed like that! Yes, I’ll admit I just made up those numbers in a pathetic attempt to bolster my sagging self-esteem. Fact, the Nobel website isn’t really a Nobel website: I just made that up, too. It took me hours to do the mock-up — but I’ll do anything, anything, to vent my rage at not being super-smart. And yes, I really hate my kids for not being geniuses! Who wouldn’t?
I didn’t accuse you of making anything up. Your obsessions with ranking groups and races is real enough. Also, you REALLY seem to go out of your way to imply that you’re a mathematician when you’re clearly NOT. What original research have you done? What degrees do you have beyond undergrad? Yet all the time you talk about math, something you don’t seem to understand better than your average math major at any State U. It’s REALLY pretentious and as obnoxious as your raging White Nationalism.
“Also, you REALLY seem to go out of your way to imply that you’re a mathematician…”
Please give examples. In fact, please give ONE instance of my having implied that I am a mathematician.
“Yet all the time you talk about math, something you don’t seem to understand better than your average math major at any State U.”
Where have I said or implied that I have a better-than-undergraduate understanding of math? Examples, please. Put up, or shut up.
To help you out, all my published work since the 1990s is on www. olimu.com (to Sept. 2007) or http://www.johnderbyshire.com (thereafter).
This is like the Anglo Saxon men at the Alamo patting themselves on the back over the Industrial Revoloution while the Mexicans are bayoneting the gate guards.
Big Al: You are right, alas! That dream of Anglo-Saxon superiority was all a vainglorious fantasy, as the floods of desperate, impoverished Anglos immigrating illegally into Mexico’s glittering cities proves.
What’s the point of moderating comments if asshats like Abe can get their word in? Seriously, the point of moderation is to weed out people whom the truth hurts so much that they need to go all ad hominem, and Abe is even worse than that, since even his ad hominems are so obviously baseless… the lashing out of a deeply frustrated tool.
Btw, Derb is way too modest about his mathematical chops. I was an applied math major at Harvard, and I learned a shit ton from his two books.
Every time you talk about math in The Corner, you are implying that you’re a mathematician. You even have a “Math Corner” or some such in your monthly diaries, the purpose of which it seems is to make you appear smarter than you are. You’re not exactly a trained scientist, and you seem to write about scientific issues a lot, so you have every incentive to (indirectly) puff up the little education you have. Normal math grads proceed to the job market and stop obsessing about math or they go on to graduate school and think about math all the time. You want to make it appear like you’re in the latter category when you’re clearly not.
The “truth” hurts me? Oh noes, brown people don’t win the Nobel in math and science!
something’s hurting you, dude.
Rasputin: Lor’ bless you, guv’nor. The assertion that I pose as a mathematician gets a wan, ironical smile from me, for the following reason.
The world is full of math cranks. I had heard this (there’s a book about it, though I have forgotten both author and title), but did not appreciate it until I published a book about math. Then — and now, and very likely for ever — I got mail and emails from people who claimed to have proved the Riemann Hypothesis, quite an astounding number of them. Their proofs tend to run to 80 pages, and when handwritten (which is more often than not), have a tendency to be done in odd colors of ink, e.g. purple ink with green capitals. Would I mind reading through their proofs, they ask plaintively?
My stock response to these folk is: “I am not a mathematician, only a freelance writer with a math degree. Please get in touch with the math department at your local university.”
Meanwhile, I must say, I have developed warm feelings towards Abe. I make a posting in which I add up some columns of single-digit numbers. He protests that I am posing as a mathematician. If only the whole world were that easy to impress! Or just my wife …
Abe: Sorry, pal. I offered you specific challenges in my post #11. Your score on those challenges looks to me — hold on while I do the math — mmm, around zero. [Sound of gong.]
This is shooting fish in a barrel. Aren’t there any SMART Derb haters out there?
“Meanwhile, I must say, I have developed warm feelings towards Abe. I make a posting in which I add up some columns of single-digit numbers. He protests that I am posing as a mathematician. If only the whole world were that easy to impress! Or just my wife”
Heh…
I think it’s time for a nice drink.
@Bradlaugh
Umm, Derb won’t defend himself so I will.
He wrote a book which won the friggin’ Euler Book Prize! You know, “best popular exposition of a mathematical topic”, by the Mathematical Association of America.
What have YOU done recently? When you aren’t killing messengers, that is.
That was a reply to abe — thought it’d go in that thread.
abe is just taking a page from the Saul Alinsky textbook.
Don’t like a fact? Personalize and polarize!
Abe himself doesn’t post his qualifications. I’m sure he’s teaching math at Harvard.
Well, abe, I do have a science Ph.D., and I can definitely say that Derb has contributed far more to society than you ever will.
Hey, I can pose as a mathematician too. Watch me prove Goldbach’s conjecture:
2 + 2 = 4
3 + 3 = 6
3 + 5 = 8
…
thus, by induction, all even numbers are the sum of two primes.
Bradlaugh, I recall you referring to yourself as a mathematician several times, but you win: I am not prepared to slog through your nauseating ouvere to substantiate this. But let me ask you something…if you’re so concerned about not being mistaken for a mathematitican, why do you let Barnes and Noble refer to you as one?
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Unknown-Quantity/John-Derbyshire/e/9780309096577
A popular history of mathematics is not mathematics. Go to your local library and you’ll find dozens of those type of books (“the history of e” or some such.)
Susan: It’s way LATE for a drink! I’m on my fourth (Old Crow bourbon — Barry Goldwater’s drink) and lemme tell you, it makes everything look a lot better. Cheers!
Abe, JD has no control over the descriptors Barnes and Noble or any other retailer uses. Trust me. It took me a week to convince one of my publishers that I’m not English and living in England.
And…it IS possible to be a mathematician with an undergraduate degree in math. Just as it’s possible to be an engineer with an undergraduate degree in engineering.
I soured on Derb when he told me in the introduction to “Prime Obsession” that if I couldn’t understand his explanation of the zeta function, I would never understand it.
Susan, I agree: however, what characterizes a mathematician is original, substantive research in mathematics. Where’s Derbs? Did Derb petition B&B to change that misleading description of him? Probably not.
Abe, again, you can petition Barnes and Noble up the wazoo, and to no avail. I’ve been trying to get them to attribute one of my books to me and not to someone with a different middle initial for years now. But they won’t. Obviously they know better than I do.
In any case, promotional language tends to be hyperbolic.
I vote this thread as this month’s most irrelevant to the topic originally posted, which was: Affirmative Action in Nobel Prize Awards. Anyone got anything to say about that?
@Bradlaugh
irrelevant, maybe, but much thanks nonetheless to abe for teaching us that a mathematician is not, as the dictionary defines it, “a person skilled or learned in mathematics”… also helpful was his insight that an undergraduate math major has a choice: either enter the job force and stop thinking about mathematics, or go to graduate school and think about math all the time.
I was just going to raise that issue. How did we get from meaningless peace prizes to Derb the (Alleged)Poseur?
Susan: Never mind retailers, try publishers. The back dust-jacket flap of my current mega-bestseller (which contains NOT A WORD about math!) lists me as having “frequently” written for the Washington Examiner. Well, they did once ask me to do a review, and I did it, and sent it in (it’s here), but I have no idea if they used it, and am pretty sure they didn’t pay me. Do I care about this? No. What are my chances of getting the publisher to correct it in future printings? Zero.
Finished that drink yet? Go on, have another one. You deserve it. We all do. Cheers!
JD: Yeah, I know; see my comment above about the publisher who was convinced that I was born, bred, and living somewhere in Shropshire. You’d think it would occur to someone in the publicity department (or whoever writes the flap copy) to check with the author about biographical details. But no.
I actually have not had a drink yet.
Susan, it doesn’t matter. Many readers might come cross that description and be compelled to buy that book because of it. It’s ethically required of Derb to, at least, submit a post in the entires correcting the error.
Anyway, Derb, as to this odious topic: Isn’t it obvious that most people who might merit the NPP would have to face some sort of conflict? And don’t non-western nations tend to have more conflict than Western nations? Consider Yasser Arafat or the Dali Lama. Western Nations don’t have the sort of problems those two had to deal with. Thus, NPP winners will tend to be representative of the whole world. Seriously, Derb, not everything involves a pro-Affirmative Action, anti-White conspiracy!
I love that “Dali Lama.” So all those melting timepieces represent the Buddhist concept of time as an illusion … Never looked at it that way before. You learn something every day.
Yes, I should have spell checked. Excellent rejoinder.
But why wouldn’t yer man Obama (I’m going out on a limb here and guessing that he IS yer man) meet with the Dali Lama? Afraid he might end up in a painting?
Ice People/Sun People … ballsy! How’d they let you get away with that, Bradlaugh??
Looking forward to reading yr book on the plane, two genetics conferences in Hawaii (IGES and ASHG) next week… anything good there?
I remember a time when you were urging people to stay on topic.
“Ice People/Sun People … ballsy! How’d they let you get away with that, Bradlaugh??”
I’m guessing by mentioning that it was a phrase coined by a Black Studies professor and pretending to use it ironically even though Derb believes that the ice age differentiated the human races to an extensive degree.
So the findings of Black Studies professors should not be taken seriously? What kind of arrogant condescension is that?
Well that is one way to interpret what I wrote. Another is that you’re a weasel.
Letting people like Abe defecate on a thread is like letting a San Francisco “homeless person” into your house.
Isn’t this Secular *Right*? Are there no prisons, no poorhouses, and no ban/delete buttons?
Deport abe ASAP.
The phrases “sun people” and “ice people” were invented by Lionel Jeffries when he was chairman of the African American Studies Department at CCNY. Jeffries was a major-league crackpot who espoused, among other deeply weird ideas, that the original Africans had wings, of which they were deprived by ice people, and that the Jews were responsible for the slave trade.
I think that Professor Jeffries was also the prime mover behind the notion that the Sphinx had an African nose, which Napoleon’s soldiers shot off so that the Sphinx would look more like an Ice Person, at least nasally speaking.
@Susan
It is also possible to be an engineer without having an undergraduate degree in engineering. In fact, I know a guy who designs circuit boards, does VHDL (internal chip layout), and embedded software and he quit college after one quarter. Oh, and his hourly rate (for which he has no shortage of takers) is north of $100.
The whole computer industry is full of people who were trained in other areas. I work with people trained in physics, math, biology, and other topics.