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- Hacker News
- 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.
by jdw64 - > 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.
by datakan - 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.by ImHereToVote
- Egas Moniz, cited in the list, got a Nobel for inventing lobotomy to cure mental illness.
He did not really embrace some weird idea once he got a Nobel: the weird itself was the reason for the Nobel prize.
by rufasterisco - Nobel laureates are just normal humans and sometimes believe in garbage ideas. Surprise.by aswegs8
- 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.
by ectoloph - 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.by bastawhiz
- 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"
by perilunar - 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...
by kiliantics - 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.
by ragazzina - 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 ?
by i-blis - Almost everyone harbors some scientifically unsound ideas. Especially when it comes to the human body and/or mental abilities.by BeetleB
- 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.
by qurren - 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.
by ledauphin - My thought too - lots of people have cranky ideas. But they only get taken seriously if they get a Nobel or something like that.by tim333
- 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".
by paxys - lol true, actors are probally the most visible as well on this.
I think it's partly because fame also brings a large number of "yes man" around people. If you let your ego get to you you'll believe it.
Kinda a common and real problem amoung the ruling classes of history forever now. It's also why some of the best rules have lower egos because it's less effective.
- > 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.
- It is called the halo effect.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_effect
More generally, if someone is good at something (here, basketball), or even just because he is tall, attractive,... we instinctively assume that he is good at everything (like here, geopolitics).
by GuB-42 - 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".by ciropantera
- Yes, reality is racist. Statistics is racist. Nobel prize laureates are racist.
Whole science is racist ... it's totally inaccessible to people with IQ 2 standard deviations below average.
by shuwix - That still belongs to strange or scientifically unsound.by epolanski
- 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.by dyauspitr
- > 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.
- A lot of that comes from becoming incredibly rich then adopting morals and policy preferences that align with that level of wealth inequalityby cousinbryce
- 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.
by Syzygies - Which comes first; the fraud or the title of 30 under 30?by blitzar
- Angela Collier has a terrific video about this : billionaires want you to know they could have done physics.
- Like making a payments platform and then 30 years later telling everyone the anti-christ is coming?by fred_is_fred