Active inventor Alfred Nobel screwed by passive academic discoverers

You write your will with the help of the smartest lawyers in the universe , you die , and then you take your chances.

Because no matter how simple blunt and explicit your will instructions were , the ambitious and the dishonest will still find a way to screw the dead.

Like the disgusting way the worldwide academic science community has screwed poor dead Alfred Nobel and all his fellow (living) inventors.


Because Nobel's fortune came from his inventions and not his discoveries, he naturally wanted to honor inventions , as well as discoveries ,that had helped humanity the most in the previous year.

The thousands of intellectually dishonest - elite - academics who nominate candidates for the Nobel Prizes and the handful of intellectual dishonest - elite - academics who decide on which candidates to reward have long ago throw out Nobel's silly dying request to focus on the events of the last year.

Because that awkward request throws far too much weight on inventions (or discoveries) that are in active use now .

 Ignoring Alfred's dying request lets the juries award discoveries made many years earlier that lay fallow until someone much less passive than their initial discoverer invented ways to make them useful.

Nobelling ultra-passive academic Alexander Fleming for 'lifesaving' is the posterboy of all that is wrong with Nobel Prize committees

(Think of the notably passive Alexander Fleming winning a Nobel for being the first to discover penicillin , despite his refusing to invent ways to use it to actually save lives.)

Academics are notorious both for disdaining applied science and for worshipping the alpha male pissing contest of 'who discovered something first' , aka primacy of discovery.

Putting them in charge of the Prize system in hope that they will honor Nobel's command to reward urgency , ie that useful things will happen to humanity within a year of discovery or invention , is like putting foxes in charges of chicken coops and hoping for eggs.

The full reason most discoveries lay fallow for decades and thus the reason why Nobel committees reward work done up to a half century earlier isn't just academics' reluctance to apply their discoveries by getting their hands dirty in the commercial marketplace.

Rather it is also because of the heavy inertia of Normal Science ( ie the whole of the scientific world - scientists, corporations & universities, even science journalists) against having their comfortable careers and assumptions upset by a paradigm-busting new discovery or invention.

Most discoverers are reluctant to get their hands dirty in the scientific marketplace of ideas - old incorrect ones with powerful friends fighting off new correct ones with no friends.

If humanity is going to avoid environmental self destruction , it needs a new world class medal and prize - awarded to the people who actively invent new scientific paradigms and with the courage and endurance needed to destroy the old one in the process.

Maybe we need a prize that awards active scientific courage instead of just passive primacy of discovery...