Q26 - Winston: The rules for awarding Nobel Prizes

[mshinners]

Question Type:
ID the Agreement

Stimulus Breakdown:
W: Nobel rules limit winners to three per award. Scientists often work in groups larger than that.

S: The rules also don't let dead people win, and some people aren't appreciated in their own time.

Answer Anticipation:
Both bring up a shortcoming in the Nobel rules that prevent someone who deserves an award from getting one. Note that this is an Agreement question, not a Disagreement question.

Correct answer:
(E)

Answer choice analysis:
(A) Half scope/degree. Only Sanjay talks about dead people. Also, Sanjay isn't committed to thinking the rules should be changed.

(B) Out of scope. Neither talks about other disciplines.

(C) Out of scope. Neither establishes who shouldn't receive Nobel prizes.

(D) Out of scope. Neither talks about subjectivity.

(E) Bingo. They both mention people who deserve awards but aren't eligible. Note the language here - inaccurate. It's not judgmental; it just states that it isn't a perfect reflection, which they both say to be true.

Takeaway/Pattern:
Watch out for ID the Agreement questions. They're rarer than ID the Disagreement questions, so it's easy to think you're in a different question type.

#officialexplanation

[reginaphalange]

My first instinct was (E), but then I thought that the wording 'Nobel Prizes are inaccurate indicators...' should only refer to people who get the prize, not the people who don't. Surely when you refer to Nobel Prizes, you refer to the awarded prizes, and not the non-awarded people, i.e. Bob Dylan and Toni Morrison's Nobel Prizes. And neither speaker contend that people who DO get the prizes are not worthy or did not contribute enough to their scientific disciplines.
The idea is that some people who DIDN'T get the Nobel Prize who are worthy, so (E) should read 'Not receiving a Nobel Prize may not be an accurate indicator...' or 'Whether or not one receives a Nobel Prize is not an accurate indicator of one's contribution...'

This really bugs me! Perhaps (E) still has that flaw, but it's the only viable answer? I thought (B) is the only other possibility, because both Winston and Sanjay are very science-specific - but it's still possible they think that the same problems exist in other disciplines.

[jambam]

E is only correct if we assume:

1) Winston and Sanjay believe that some scientists who have not received Nobel Prizes (living or dead) deserved them
2) Winston and Sanjay believe that the failure to award these scientists with a Nobel Prize diminishes the importance of those who actually won it

The stimulus didn't provide enough information for me to comfortably make these assumptions, especially the second.

I tentatively chose D because Winston and Sanjay are aware of objecting to the Nobel Committee's criteria for the awarding of the Nobel Prize, suggesting the determination of such criteria (naturally associated with the evaluation of achievement) is subjective. Granted, D's inclusion of the word "highly" is concerning.

I honestly didn't like any of the answer choices.

[jiangziou]

I eliminated ABC because they both include prescriptive language --"should", but the arguments only have descriptive language, which is not able to infer any specific recommendations.

[LukeM22]

Also dissatisfied with the answers. I feel like both B and E can be disqualified for the same reason: B, requires that we know something about the other disciplines... which we don't, so that makes sense... but why couldn't that logic be applied? I mean, I think we can agree that saying that Nobel Prizes, in the aggregate, are inaccurate, is a fairly broad, general statement that would require knowing something about non-science Nobel Prizes...

[ohthatpatrick]

Ugh. I totally agree with the antipathy towards (E).

However, my problem isn't quite this:
I mean, I think we can agree that saying that Nobel Prizes, in the aggregate, are inaccurate, is a fairly broad, general statement that would require knowing something about non-science Nobel Prizes...

Since the answer choice specifies that we're talking about Nobels in relation to SCIENTISTS' contributions to their disciplines.

(B) isn't as tempting to me, because in order to get to the "should be different" in (B), you'd already be assuming the "failure of the status quo" in (E) that would be motivating the idea that we SHOULD change it.

I do agree with an earlier complaint that this answer sounds way more like it applies to people who HAVE Nobels, when we were really talking about people who would LACK them but potentially deserve them.

If you read (E) as, "If something is an accurate indicator of contributions to your discipline, then people who deserve a prize get one and people who don't deserve a prize don't get one", then it makes sense.

Maybe everyone who gets a Nobel is deserving (there are no false positives),
but if there are bunch of people DON'T get a Nobel, who ARE deserving (a bunch of false negatives),
then a Nobel (is at least sometimes) not an accurate indicator.

I think we'd all still hate the move from "at least sometimes it gets it wrong" to "it's an inaccurate indicator". It seems to force us to judge accuracy as an absolute, rather than a relative idea.

But ... it is what it is: the best available answer

[RyanS198]

Man. They were pretty sloppy in the early 80s. This is bad.