7 ms·

>it is absolutely impossible to tell whether It's literally the second sentence of the article.

cyclopeanutopia 1mo ago
Yes, that's my point. Take any other award, list people who got it and had "incorrect beliefs", add an article about it and preamble it with "it is unclear whether it is an effect of the award". What purpose does it serve? Do you think there should be articles for all of those "diseases"? Nebula award disease Crossword Book award disease Turing award disease Pulitzer award disease Fields medalist disease et cetera?
- leni536 1mo ago
  The difference is notability, which is the criteria used whether a distinct Wikipedia article is warranted. There are multiple cited sources that use the "Noble disease" term, there are possibly much fewer similar publications with "Fields medalist disease". That is not to say that the theory holds water. Flat Earth theory is also notable and has a wiki page, even if blatantly wrong. There is no hyperboloid Earth theory wiki page.
  - cyclopeanutopia 1mo ago
    Ok, notability is a good argument for having such an article (although I'm not too sure about it really being notable), but the current shape is absolutely misleading.
  - aleph_minus_one 1mo ago
    > there are possibly much fewer similar publications with "Fields medalist disease" Among mathematicians, I wouldn't claim that "Fields medalist disease" is an unusual term, though this term is typically meant to mean "some mathematician got a Fields medal, but did not prove any other deep mathematical result afterwards". There also exists the much more derogatory term "dead wood" for mathematicians who once proved highly celebrated results, but after they got tenured, no they didn't manage to prove anything deep anymore." Concerning the "crackpot undertone" of "Nobel Disease": lots of mathematicians know the names of achieved mathematicians who got into some eccentric ideas ("eccentric" in the sense of "outside the Overton window") once they got older. Famous examples for the latter point are Serge Lang > https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Serge_Lang&oldid=1351221004#Activism https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Serge_Lang&oldid=... or Anatoly Fomenko > https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Anatoly_Fomenko&oldid=1367365961#Historical_revisionism https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Anatoly_Fomenko&o...
- testdelacc1 1mo ago
  The article mentions it later - journalists and laymen end up asking Nobel Prize winners their opinion on matters outside their area of expertise. We don’t do that with Fields medal winners. Mainly because most people don’t even know what a Fields medal is. I can’t write a headline that relies on Elizabeth Moon’s or Stanislav Smirnov’s borrowed authority because the average joe doesn’t know who they are. But that definitely happened with multiple Nobel prize winners because the Nobel prize is that well known. A Nobel prize winners opinion on race science is inherently newsworthy. You know how we know the Nobel is in a different league to these other awards? Because when you explain what a Fields Medal is to someone who hasn’t heard of it, you say “it’s the Nobel prize for math”. And the fame of the prize leads to attention, which in the words of Milton Friedman, is “flattering but also corrupting”.
  - cyclopeanutopia 1mo ago
    Got it.

Yes, that's my point. Take any other award, list people who got it and had "incorrect beliefs", add an article about it and preamble it with "it is unclear whether it is an effect of the award". What purpose does it serve? Do you think there should be articles for all of those "diseases"? Nebula award disease Crossword Book award disease Turing award disease Pulitzer award disease Fields medalist disease et cetera?

leni536 1mo ago
The difference is notability, which is the criteria used whether a distinct Wikipedia article is warranted. There are multiple cited sources that use the "Noble disease" term, there are possibly much fewer similar publications with "Fields medalist disease". That is not to say that the theory holds water. Flat Earth theory is also notable and has a wiki page, even if blatantly wrong. There is no hyperboloid Earth theory wiki page.
- cyclopeanutopia 1mo ago
  Ok, notability is a good argument for having such an article (although I'm not too sure about it really being notable), but the current shape is absolutely misleading.
- aleph_minus_one 1mo ago
  > there are possibly much fewer similar publications with "Fields medalist disease" Among mathematicians, I wouldn't claim that "Fields medalist disease" is an unusual term, though this term is typically meant to mean "some mathematician got a Fields medal, but did not prove any other deep mathematical result afterwards". There also exists the much more derogatory term "dead wood" for mathematicians who once proved highly celebrated results, but after they got tenured, no they didn't manage to prove anything deep anymore." Concerning the "crackpot undertone" of "Nobel Disease": lots of mathematicians know the names of achieved mathematicians who got into some eccentric ideas ("eccentric" in the sense of "outside the Overton window") once they got older. Famous examples for the latter point are Serge Lang > https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Serge_Lang&oldid=1351221004#Activism https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Serge_Lang&oldid=... or Anatoly Fomenko > https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Anatoly_Fomenko&oldid=1367365961#Historical_revisionism https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Anatoly_Fomenko&o...
testdelacc1 1mo ago
The article mentions it later - journalists and laymen end up asking Nobel Prize winners their opinion on matters outside their area of expertise. We don’t do that with Fields medal winners. Mainly because most people don’t even know what a Fields medal is. I can’t write a headline that relies on Elizabeth Moon’s or Stanislav Smirnov’s borrowed authority because the average joe doesn’t know who they are. But that definitely happened with multiple Nobel prize winners because the Nobel prize is that well known. A Nobel prize winners opinion on race science is inherently newsworthy. You know how we know the Nobel is in a different league to these other awards? Because when you explain what a Fields Medal is to someone who hasn’t heard of it, you say “it’s the Nobel prize for math”. And the fame of the prize leads to attention, which in the words of Milton Friedman, is “flattering but also corrupting”.
- cyclopeanutopia 1mo ago
  Got it.