
The Nobel Peace Prize 2019 - danielskogly
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/2019/summary/
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fmajid
Congratulations to PM Abiy on this exceedingly deserved award. Quite frankly,
I was surprised it had not been awarded to him last year.

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niyikiza
Nominations are submitted early in the year and he assumed the office in April
2018.

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cwkoss
The Nobel Peace Prize was greatly devalued when it was given to Obama in the
midst of bombing other countries.

Does anyone have an explanation of why Obama deserved to receive it?

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NeedMoreTea
Ang San Suu Chi, Kissinger, Yasser Arafat, and Cordell Hull raised no eyebrows
then?

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jansan
Great choice, his unexpected acceptance of the Algiers Agreement terms gave so
much hope for the region. This is what the Nobel Peace Price was originally
intended for.

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input_sh
Well, this is a much less controversial choice compared to the Nobel Prize in
Literature 2019.

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the_duke
From a global perspective, awarding two European writers yet again is just a
failure.

From a purely literary perspective, Handke is a great and influential writer,
who was a hot candidate for a long time. For his work, I think the award is
justified.

On a personal level, his ex-wife accused him of physical abuse, he held a
eulogy for a war criminal, was known for cursing and berating his audience,
...

If he still should have received it regardless depends on a difficult value
judgement: do you purely choose based on a writers work, or does his
personality influence the decision?

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phaus
I can get behind excluding individual authors from the award for being
terrible people, but I can't get behind purposely giving the award to someone
that's not European if Europeans would have otherwise deserved it based solely
on the merits of their writing.

There's plenty of amazing things written by non-white people. However, the
Nobel prize for literature should remain a pure meritocracy as much as
possible.

That's not to say that its a perfect system. If you point to any given year
you can likely find examples of written works that didn't get the award but
are arguably as good if not better.

If you intentionally limit the pool of potential awardees to people that are
not white, you make a mockery of the award and it loses any sense of prestige
or credibility, even if the non-white awardee was truly the best writer. Not
only are you discriminating against certain people, you are also doing a
disservice to the very people you want to help.

I think a better solution would be to try and make sure the people involved in
the process aren't heavily biased towards any specific demographic of authors.

There are probably additional ways to improve the system, but I think if we
want the award to mean anything they have to be focused on eliminating
discrimination, rather than using it as a tool to generate an equality in
outcomes.

Edit: I should note that this reflects my thoughts on prestigious awards being
meritocracies, it doesn't reflect my thoughts anything else, there are lots of
complicated issues such as affirmative action, university quotas, etc. That I
am not making a comment about because I don't know what the optimal solution
is to solving those problems.

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aeturnum
What do you think about the critiques of our understanding of merit -
specifically the idea that our cultural experiences bias our understanding and
perception of excellence?

I.e. If all your examples of good writing are written by a european for other
europeans, you will likely associate some cultural practices that aren't
required for good writing with your understanding of "good writing." The whole
idea of developing taste is, of course, that it is somewhat subjective.

I think the idea of meritocracy is one worth pursuing, but I think modern
advocates for it as a thing that actually exists today should engage more
energetically with the critiques of it in practice.

~~~
phaus
I agree completely with your comment.

> What do you think about the critiques of our understanding of merit -
> specifically the idea that our cultural experiences bias our understanding
> and perception of excellence?

I think everyone is biased and that objective thinking is a learned skill that
you have to constantly re-evaluate. No one will ever be perfectly unbiased or
anywhere near it. Even when you are practicing objective thinking honestly and
correctly, there are undoubtedly deeply ingrained biases that you can't shake
and you may not even be able to know what those biases are.

However, I think through effort we can improve and minimize the impact of
bias. Furthermore, over long periods of time, if we adopt a culture of doing
this, it may actually reduce bias overall in the generations to come.

The simple version is I think we are not going to be perfect, but surely we
can be better than we are if we try. I think that's better than attempting to
prevent bias by introducing extreme forms of bias in the opposite direction.

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peter303
I will see Greta in Denver Friday afternoon at a climate rally. She is young
and a voice of her generation. Many future possibilities for her and repairing
the climate crisis.

I respect the Nobels decision to award the prize to this peace broker. So many
global issues that need attention.

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goatinaboat
If she wants to make a difference her next speech will be delivered in
Beijing, not Denver. See
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions)
for why.

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mraison
I assume you're looking at overall CO2 emissions rather than per-capita
emissions.

The page you linked shows fossil CO2 emissions per capita:

China: 7.7t CO2/cap/yr

USA: 15.7t CO2/cap/yr

Denver seems like a good place to give a speech.

Of course, country size does matter, but it's unfair to simply compare total
emissions when there's such a huge difference in population size.

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Symmetry
If you're concerned with how guilty each individual consumer in a country
should feel look at per capita emissions. If you're interested in stopping
climate change effectively look at total emissions.

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brosinante
What if you're just interested in pushing a specific agenta.

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goatinaboat
It’s certainly notable how she never directs her anger at China or India, but
reserves it for Western countries only. She has a very white-centric view of
the world.

