Demis Hassabis and Geoffrey Hinton Awarded Nobel Prizes
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Correction: the 2024 Nobel Prize in Medicine was for the discovery of microRNA, not mRNA which is also important but a different thing.
2I don't pay attention to what gets people the Nobel Prize in physics, but this seems obviously illegitimate. AI and physics are pretty unrelated, and they aren't getting it for an AI that has done anything to solve physics. I'm pretty sure they didn't get it for merit, but because AI is hyped. The AI chemistry one makes some sense, as it is actually making attempts to solve a chemistry issue, but I doubt its importance since they also felt the need to award AI in a way that makes no sense with the other award.
The Nobel Committee for Physics that decides who gives out the physics price is not made up of the same people as the chemistry price.
While it's possible that the people from the Nobel Committee for Chemistry talked with the Nobel Committee for Physics, modelling them as an amorphous "they" seems to me like it makes little sense.
I think that the fact that they are technically separate people just makes it more likely for this to come into play. If it was all the same people, they could simply choose the best contribution of AI and be done with it, but they have the same setup, pressures, and general job, but have not themselves honored AI yet... and each wants to make their own mark.
I do think this is much more likely the reason that the physics one was chosen than chemistry, but it does show that the pressures that exist are to honor AI even when it doesn't make sense.
I do think it often makes sense to model organizations as if they individuals that respond to their collective incentives regardless of what the people actually doing it may be thinking. If the parts are separate enough, it may make more sense to model each part as an individual. Any pathology an individual can have, a group can too, even if that group has exactly zero people with that actual pathology involved.
This is a lot like the time they awarded it for the invention of the blue LED, so I don't think "hype" is a good explanation. I agree it's bullshit though: it's not a physics achievement in any meaningful way.
The Chemistry one for AlphaFold seems reasonable to me.
Huh, they really gave a Nobel in Physics specifically for the blue LED? It would have made sense for LED's at all, but specifically for blue? That really is ridiculous.
I should be clearer that AlphaFold seems like something that could be a chemistry breakthrough sufficient for a prize, I'd even heard about how difficult the problem was before in other contexts, and it was hailed as a breakthrough at the time in what seemed like a genuine way, but I can't evaluate its importance to the field as an outsider, and the terrible physics prize leads me to suspect their evaluations of the Chemistry prize might be flawed due to whatever pressures led to the selection of the Physics prize.
Inventing blue LEDs was a substantial technical accomplishment, had a huge impact on society, was experimentally verified and can reasonably be called work in solid state physics.
Substantial technical accomplishment' sure, but minor impact compared to the actual invention of LEDs. Awarding the 'blue LED' rather than the 'LED' is like saying the invention of the jet engine is more important than the invention of the engine at all. Or that the invention of 'C' is more important than the invention of 'not machine code'.
One of the problems with the Nobel Prize as a measurement or criteria is that it is not really suited for that by nature, especially given criteria like no posthumous awards. This means that it is easy to critique awarding a Nobel Prize, but it is harder to critique not awarding one. You can't give a Nobel Prize to the inventor of the engine, because they probably died a long time ago; you could have for a recent kind of engine. Similarly, you could give a Turing Award to the inventors of C (and they probably did) but the first person who created a mnemonic shorthand over raw machine opcodes during WWII or whatever was probably dead before the Turing Award was even created.
Let's take your 'inventing the LED' for example. You seem keen on interpreting the absence of a Nobel Prize here as a relative judgment about 'inventing LEDs' vs 'inventing blue LEDs'. But you don't establish that there is any reason to think this is one of the cases where the lack of an award can be validly interpreted as a snub & a judgment by the relevant committee. Is it?
Well, let's take 5 seconds to check some of the historical context here, like who would you award a prize to? I open up Wikipedia and I check the first three names. (Why three? Because Nobel Prizes are arbitrarily limited to 3 awardees.)
All 3 of them, including Oleg Losev who is described as physically creating the first bona fide LED and so seems to be the closest to "the inventor of the LED", died before or around the first commercial LED being announced (October 1962). For about a decade, early weak expensive red LEDs "had little practical use", until finally they began to replace nixie tubes. Only then did they start to take off, and only then did they start to become a revolution. (And reading this WP history, it seems like blue LEDs have wound up being more important than the original red ones anyway.)
Oleg Losev in particular died in 1942, in obscurity, and given the year, you won't be too surprised why:
Losev died of starvation in 1942, at the age of 38, along with many other civilians, during the Siege of Leningrad by the Germans during World War 2.
You can't award Nobel Prizes to the dead - and by the time it was clear LEDs were a major revolution, many of the key players were well and thoroughly dead. That is, the committee could not have awarded a Nobel Prize for 'inventing the LED', without either being prescient or awarding it to later researchers, who were lucky enough to be long-lived but did not actually invent the LED, and that would be a travesty on its own and also crowd out meritorious alternative physics breakthroughs (of which there were many in the 20th century that they are still working their way through).
So, this is one reason to not put too much stress on the absence of a Nobel Prize. Not having a Nobel Prize for work in the early-to-mid 20th century means in considerable part things like "was not killed by Hitler or Stalin", things which are not particularly related to the quality or value of your scientific research but are related to whether you can survive for the 20 or 40 years it may take for your Nobel Prize to show up.
The point is that the 'Blue LED' is not a sufficient advancement over the 'LED' not that it is a snub. I don't care about whether or not it is a snub. That's just not how I think about things like this. Also, note that the 'Blue LED' was not originally my example at all, someone else brought it up as an example.
I talked about 'inventing LEDs at all' since that is the minimum related thing where it might actually have been enough of a breakthrough in physics to matter. Blue LEDs are simply not significant enough a change from what we already had. Even just the switch to making white LEDs (from blue) which simply required a phosphor (or required multiple colors) of the right kind were much more significant in terms of applications if that is what you think is important.
Also, note that the 'Blue LED' was not originally my example at all, someone else brought it up as an example.
Then maybe you shouldn't be trying to defend it (or your other two examples of engines and programming languages, for that matter), especially given that you still have not explained how 'the LED' could have been given a Nobel ever inasmuch as everyone involved was dead.
It seems like you are failing to get my points at all. First, I am defending the point that blue LEDs are unworthy because the blue LED is not worthy of the award, but I corrected your claiming it was my example. Second, you are the only one making this about snubbing at all. I explicitly told you that I don't care about snubbing arguments. Comparisons are used for other reasons than snubbing. Third, since this isn't about snubbing, it doesn't matter at all whether or not the LED could have been given the award.
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