Stan receives its second Nobel prize.

Aki writes:

Nobel prize and other science prices are problematic and this is not endorsement of such prices, but this might be useful for someone who needs to tell (hype) about the impact of Stan (or just as another funny fact about Stan).

Previously Stan was used in the the LIGO gravitational wave research awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2017.

In 2020 half of the the Nobel Prize in Physics was given jointly to Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez “for the discovery of a supermassive compact object at the centre of our galaxy.” There is at least one paper, “Relativistic redshift of the star S0-2 orbiting the Galactic Center supermassive black hole,” co-authored by Andrea Ghez, using Stan to validate their Bayesian modeling results (and using elpd for model comparison, but it’s not mentioned whether loo or ArviZ was used). (Since this paper was published in 2019, use of Stan didn’t probably have causal effect for the prize, or maybe the prize committee was convinced only after this paper as it used Stan?)

My anti-Nobel-prize rants are here:

Should statistics have a Nobel prize?

Not getting the Nobel Prize reduces your expected lifespan by two years

2 econ Nobel prizes, 1 error

But given that the prize exists, we might as well take advantage of the publicity.

6 thoughts on “Stan receives its second Nobel prize.

  1. I imagine there must have been at least one discovery that was significantly accelerated by the motivation to win the Nobel prize–that is, the Nobel has surely caused scientific progress. The real question is whether the Nobel has significantly decelerated more discoveries than it has accelerated–that is, whether it has cause a net positive change in scientific progress. I suggest that the first “Statistics Nobel” go to whoever is able to conclusively answer this causal question. :)

    • I mean the price is what close to a million dollars?

      If you look at the crappy NSF or DoE projects that budget a million dollars clearly the Nobel is doing much better.

  2. Congratulations!

    This reminds me that awarding Nobel price to several individuals is like giving a gold medal to a single body part of an Olympic winner.

  3. Not getting the Nobel Prize reduces your expected lifespan by two years? This explains the four nominations of Donald Trump for the Peace Prize: slowest assassination attempt in history.

Leave a Reply to DuplexFields Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *