The 26th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize ceremony
Three years ago, I visited Lawrence and Elle in New York. The trip was timed so we could catch a train to Boston, take a short ride on the T and attend the 23rd First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony. Through sheer incompetence, Lawrence and I missed the train. This year, our attempt was more successful. Our expanded group of six registered as an official delegation – “Extremely Competent Public Transport Users” – and you can see us briefly in the video of the proceedings when the delegations are announced. I wear a bright orange hat and Lawrence models the official neckwear of the delegation.
Economics
An article by Tim Harford has been doing the rounds, in which he complains that the economics Igs “provoke little more than harsh laughter”:
They’ve been awarded to Nick Leeson and Barings Bank, Iceland’s Kaupthing Bank, AIG, Lehman Brothers, and so on. The first economics prize was awarded to Michael Milken, one of the inventors of the junk bond. He was in prison at the time.
Half an hour into this year's ceremony, some past winners were introduced, including David Karpook, a former director of one of the companies awarded the 2002 Economics prize “for adapting the mathematical concept of imaginary numbers for use in the business world” along with Enron and co. I did a bit of snooping, and it seems that while he was indeed a director of one of those companies, he wasn't directly implicated in the fraud.
This year's Economics prize – awarded to Mark Avis, Sarah Forbes, and Shelagh Ferguson “for assessing the perceived personalities of rocks, from a sales and marketing perspective” – was pretty interesting. Video of their informal lecture on the Saturday after the ceremony isn't online yet, unfortunately. The gist is that they applied a standard brand personality survey to photos of rocks – not notable rocks, just lumps of rock – which do not obviously have any of the same properties as brands; and yet they found positive results for a number of personality traits. The authors suggest that the perception of these traits (in brands and in rocks) could be an artefact of the brand personality methodology, rather than a property of the brands themselves.
Upside-down goggles
Atsuki Higashiyama and Kohei Adachi were awarded the Perception prize “for investigating whether things look different when you bend over and view them between your legs”. Higashiyama's Saturday lecture explained that they also used goggles that invert your vision to separate the “everything is upside-down” aspect from the “my head is between my legs” aspect. They discovered that it is the position of your head which affects the percieved size of objects, not whether objects appear upside-down. They've also worked on many related studies of how body position affects perception.
I find it striking that Carsten Höller exhibits upside-down goggles in art galleries and, let's say, other artistic contexts; and yet there's much more rigorous research being done, using essentially the same hardware, that is totally unreported. The prize-winning paper was published ten years ago!
Pseudo-profound bullshit
The Peace prize was awarded to the team behind On the reception and detection of pseudo-profound bullshit, who studied whether people are receptive to statements generated by a Deepak Chopra parody tweet generator. As a procedural text afficionado, naturally I find this interesting, but it's a shame they (apparently – I have only skimmed the paper) limited the study to 140-character statements. Without context, it's often hard to distinguish real statements from garbage in a field whose jargon you're not familiar with. English words do not necessarily have the same meaning in philosophical discussion (for example) as they do in everyday life. (I am completely unfamiliar with Deepak Chopra's writing – maybe it's profound, maybe it's bullshit? I'll leave that to someone else.)
Charles Foster shared the Biology prize for “living in the wild as, at different times, a badger, an otter, a deer, a fox, and a bird”. When he began his Saturday lecture, I muttered an obvious joke that his project might itself be pseudo-profound bullshit; but I was dismayed when someone in the audience made the same point to him directly. (I suppose this makes me a coward or a hypocrite.) He seemed hurt, but retorted that he was flattered that his work might be seen as “profound”. Another audience member asked him what sense he feels humans are most missing out on. In his (long!) answer he referred repeatedly to “olefaction”, and never used the word “smell”; a lot of the audience had no idea what he meant. So, I think he actually falls prey to people confusing his unfamiliar speech patterns and choice of vocabulary (particularly as an English barrister, speaking in the US) with bullshitting. Ben described him as “speaking in paragraphs”, which is absolutely right. That's just how he talks.
Tim Harford points out that the other Biology prize-winner, Thomas Thwaites, is the same person who tried to make a toaster from raw materials. I had no idea, and I agree that that work is much more worthy of an Ig; but, having seen him stumble to the lecturn in his goat prosthetics and try to stand up, I understand why they made the choice they did.
More generally …
… the descriptions of the prize-winners' work tend to (try to) be funny at the expense of doing the research justice. It's a real shame that videos of the Saturday lectures, where winners are given five minutes to actually explain themselves, are not online (yet).
