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Nobel Minds and Ignoble Topics

Writer's picture: Mishkat BhattacharyaMishkat Bhattacharya

There is a series of videos on YouTube labeled Nobel Minds, which involves all the Nobel laureates for a given year gathered around a table for discussion. Though the discussion is run by a moderator, and there is an audience of Swedish students, the conversation ends up being quite informal. It's a nice venue for discovering the way the laureates think, what is personally important to them, and the stories of their journeys.


I watched a number of these videos, and was especially taken by the issue for 2019, which included, among others, Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee (they will figure later in the discussion), who were the laureates for Economics along with Michael Kremer.


The moderator buttonholed every speaker asking them how the Prize had changed their lives and how they planned to use it. After stock replies about promoting science from several laureates, Sir Peter Ratcliffe (Medicine) said all sorts of people who did not used to reply to his emails or agree with him (including his family) were now writing him and agreeing with him.


Next, the moderator described what each Prize was for. First she mentioned the Economics prize and the idea of using randomized control trials. Talking to Michael Kremer, she asked that if his work, where he found medicine was taken up faster by poor people if it was made totally free (and even a small price tag would lead to drastic reduction in population buy-in) was not 'blindingly obvious'. Kremer explained why it was not really obvious.


A little later, Esther Duflo picked up the thread by saying that whenever we think something is obvious we should test it, because most of our intuitions are wrong. At some point Didier Queloz (Physics) commented that scientists had been doing that since the time of Galileo five hundred years ago, and that he was surprised to hear from the economists' discussions that this seemed so new.


Prof. Banerjee leapt to the defense of the economists by saying that they were aware of the scientific method but their contribution was to break known facts into smaller pieces that were useful for making actionable plans. For example, he said, it is a fact that education is good and correlated with a high GDP. But that tells us nothing about what the curriculum should be or the classroom size, or number of teachers, etc. It's concrete information about the granular pieces that can help us determine policy.


This was, of course, a lovely reply, but I felt within the pit of my stomach that Prof. Queloz had vastly underrated in his comment the factor of human ignorance and dare I say it, stupidity. Just because Galileo had started the scientific method 500 years ago it hardly means that human beings would now have overcome a million years of evolution and gotten over, as Prof. Duflo said, our misplaced instincts. In fact this goes back to Prof. Ratcliffe's quote above. Before he won the Nobel, his logical pleas fell on deaf ears, because human beings are just not that amenable to reason. After he won the Nobel, everybody listened to him because human beings understand power (collective endorsement in this case) much better.


Looking at the state of the physics community and the way some people think, therefore, I hardly think it would be overdoing things to have a prominent scientist remind us each year that what we think is obvious is not so, and be awarded a Nobel prize for it -:).


Bonus


There is a heated (sic!) discussion of global warming towards the end of the video, plus a very entertaining exchange on exoplanets and life elsewhere in the universe, plus one of my favorite topics - the passion to do science till we die.


Enjoy!

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