A silly science prize changed my career | Hacker News Reader

A silly science prize changed my career

nature.com

110 pointssohkamyung15 comments

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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/

A lot of Tom7's projects are for SIGBOVIK:

http://tom7.org/

https://www.youtube.com/@tom7

Wow, he is prolific!

How safe is it to download and view one of his fonts from a non-https site[1]? I feel like I should create windows VM just to view the fonts.

[1] http://fonts.tom7.com/

windows sandbox is way faster, but you have to enable it in optionalfeatures.exe i think.

SIGBOVIK is wonderful. Take a look at the older proceedings too!

It’s my dream to publish there someday…

Wonderful website :D https://www.sigbovik.org/2023/

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.

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.

That's beautiful whahaha

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.

I don't understand what the fraud is. Did they substitute themselves into the identity of their dead relatives? I did read of such a case for the world's oldest women

https://metro.co.uk/2019/01/03/worlds-oldest-woman-122-compl...

> Oh why can't anyone just ever call a spade a spade on here?

IIRC, the reasons varied from one blue zone to another. Not all were fraud.

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

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.

The Golden Fleece award was a shameful disgrace for the presenters and their supporters, a bunch of ignorant fools, and should be taken as a badge of honor for the recipients, most of whom did excellent and important work.

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