[noobermin]

There is some nice sweet irony here. Very marginal inside baseball. I know of one of the recipients although indirectly. I felt like their group was kept around their university physics dept because they were known to be good in that field, while generally their colleagues were generally not respected as their physics (which was derisively deemed "AMO" as if it were an epithet) was not seen as "fundamental" enough by the particle physics people who held high administrative positions in the department. Fast forward a few years, and first Gerard Morou and Donna Strickland and Authur Ashkin got the Nobel for CPA and optical trapping, and now we have a nobel for research into attosecond physics.

There was a nobel prize for the Higgs, but SUSY and all the other sorts of things particle physicists hinged on...well that didn't peter out, did it?

[urthor]

Academic politics is something else.

I thought for awhile those guys got lucky and skip office politics.

Then I realize that PhD level IQs + pressure to get into the fancy journals means that the politics is 古典小說 tier.

[seanhunter]

> Academic politics is something else.

There is a famous formulation of this known as Sayre's law[1], which is often stated via the quote "In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake. That is why academic politics are so bitter," which wikipedia attributes to Charles Philip Issawi.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre's_law

[act_of_dog]

Link didn't work because of the apostrophe. Here's a fixed link https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre%27s_law

[xxs]

posting a mobile link? the original one is fine too, aside using 1-based indexing

[kranke155]

I’m advertising, where I work, it’s 100% this

[leemailll]

That's a wonderful sum up. The pettiness often drive you insane, when you read the comments from reviewer 2

[HerculePoirot]

In french academic circles, we use the word "mandarin" to refer to a powerful academic figure.

[simonh]

Cool. In the UK that's used for powerful civil servants.

[azepoi]

Understood it that way in french too.

[daniel-s]

The Chinese translates to, "classical novels," according to Google.

[ovi256]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classic_Chinese_Novels

They're about court life and conflict, so of course they're full of court politics and intrigue

[seabass-labrax]

I'm really intrigued, but I can't read Chinese (yet!) - would you be able to tell me in which person these are written?

[VHRanger]

As an anglophone, I really enjoyed the Water Margin podcast [1] which is a tranlastion of one of the great classics in full length, and with appropriate explanations for contemporarty cultural context.

1. http://www.outlawsofthemarsh.com/

[thrdbndndn]

I'm a native Chinese speaker but I have no idea what OP means by "古典小說 tier".

[dogben]

武侠小说 may be more appropriate.

[birdyrooster]

Maybe it’s not Chinese but uses Chinese characters. Not all Latin character use is English.

[thrdbndndn]

It is. I know what 古典小說 is (others have already said, "classic novels").

I just don't know what "古典小說 tier" means since I don't remembered they're known for "high-intelligent politics".

[urthor]

Maybe for context, the fact that high-ranking public servants in the West are known as "Mandarins" should indicate the reputation of Chinese government officials for political intrigue.

The Big 4 novels contain a lot of public servants.

[belinder]

If academic is all politics and favoritism then wouldn't that also apply to the prizes at the top? The people deciding or at least confirming scientific breakthroughs for stuff like nobel prizes must be scientists too, no? So if it's all politics, why are they immune to it?

[dotnet00]

There's plenty of politics and arbitrariness to Nobel prizes (especially in non-science prizes, eg giving Obama or Malala the peace prize), which probably makes it less of an issue that there may be some politicking within the small group of potential laureates since who among them actually wins is relatively arbitrary.

Eg since only 3 people can win a prize, you can have cases like Francois Englert and Peter Higgs winning the prize for the Higgs Boson despite 4 other scientists having published papers on the same thing around the same time, and the scientists at the LHC who actually confirmed its existence.

Similarly, a work can have won a prize, but if one of the authors passes away before the nomination is made, that person misses out on the title.

[nyssos]

> then wouldn't that also apply to the prizes at the top?

It does, but the politics and favoritism is happening within a heavily selected group of very, very competent people. Plenty of people get snubbed for petty reasons, but they get snubbed in favor of others who are also doing Nobel-worthy work.

[pyb]

Surprising/doubtful, never heard of AMO physics being marginalised anywhere.

[casparvitch]

I can vouch, I'm in a heavily particle/astro dominated dept and AMO is looked down upon.

[mjfl]

seems absurd. AMO is the only opportunity to study high energy physics where you're not a cog in a giant machine.