[HN Gopher] A silly science prize changed my career
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A silly science prize changed my career
Author : sohkamyung
Score : 78 points
Date : 2024-11-19 12:29 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nature.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nature.com)
| more_corn wrote:
| I like this. It's an opportunity for unpopular science to shed
| light on things we might not otherwise talk about. The research
| on blue zones is all fraud or records error. Ducks are rapacious
| little fuckers. This topics are not pleasant, but they're real
| science. Our understanding gets advanced, errors in thinking get
| corrected.
|
| Science is one of the rare structure of knowledge which includes
| self correction by default. But correction and reputation don't
| play nicely together. For correction to occur somebody had to be
| wrong. In some cases a lot of people.
|
| Having a prize like this lets us elevate previously embarrassing
| findings, take the whole thing less seriously and make room for
| ideas outside the status quo.
|
| I'm not sure this prize is any less important than the Nobel
| prize.
| BeetleB wrote:
| I credit the Ig Nobels for alerting me of the "blue zone" myth.
|
| For people who don't know, it was about research related to
| communities around the world that are known to have a high
| number of centenarians. Lots of researchers have studied those
| populations to see how their genes/lifestyles are different
| from ordinary folks and try to take lessons from them.
|
| Then one researcher came along and showed that most/all of
| those communities have poor record keeping, and it's quite
| possible they didn't have as many centenarians as claimed.
| What's more, for the folks in those communities where the
| records are reliable, the average lifespan is actually average
| or even below average.
|
| One example: I think it was Okinawa - most of the records were
| destroyed due to heavy bombing in WW2. So we just had people's
| own claims of their age.
| azeirah wrote:
| That's beautiful whahaha
| citizenpaul wrote:
| Oh why can't anyone just ever call a spade a spade on here?
|
| The main finding was that it was Fraud. People in these
| villages got addicted to free money for their long dead
| relatives. So instead of declaring them dead they willfully
| knowingly illegally buried/cremated them and happily kept
| cashing checks. In the form of various retirement payments
| and government social programs.
|
| It unveiled massive wide scale fraud. It was not some silly
| innocient whoopsie story as you tell it.
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| Not to be confused with the Golden Fleece Award (for which they
| prize money is disbursed beforehand)
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Fleece_Award
| HarryHirsch wrote:
| Haven't we all had bosses who were socially adept but fully
| inept otherwise, who would laugh and scoff at anything they
| couldn't understand? Proxmire is just another such figure.
| KineticLensman wrote:
| I love the Ig Nobles. But, I have to admit to a soft spot for
| SIGBOVIK, the Computer Science equivalent [0].
|
| Warning: here lie rabbit holes. Just as well it's Sunday
| tomorrow.
|
| [0] https://www.sigbovik.org/
| Rendello wrote:
| A lot of Tom7's projects are for SIGBOVIK:
|
| http://tom7.org/
|
| https://www.youtube.com/@tom7
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