--- title: Nobel Disease | daily.dev description: Nobel disease (or Nobelitis) describes the tendency of some Nobel Prize winners to embrace scientifically unsound ideas, often outside their area of expertise.... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/nobel-disease-xqvayltlf twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: Nobel Disease | daily.dev og:description: Nobel disease (or Nobelitis) describes the tendency of some Nobel Prize winners to embrace scientifically unsound ideas, often outside their area of expertise.... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/nobel-disease-xqvayltlf og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/XQvayLtlf.png og:image:alt: Nobel Disease og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Nobel Disease **[Hacker News](https://daily.dev/sources/hn)** · 12 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary Nobel disease (or Nobelitis) describes the tendency of some Nobel Prize winners to embrace scientifically unsound ideas, often outside their area of expertise. The phenomenon illustrates that expertise in one field does not confer authority in others, and that high intelligence is not incompatible with irrationality. Notable examples include Linus Pauling's megadose vitamin C claims, William Shockley's belief in eugenics, Kary Mullis's HIV/AIDS denialism, and Luc Montagnier's promotion of homeopathy-adjacent water memory theories. Paul Nurse and Milton Friedman both reflected on how Nobel recognition can inflate ego and encourage overconfidence beyond one's domain. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Community take How the wider developer community reacted, aggregated from 6 discussions and 131 comments across hackernews (as of 2026-08-05). **TL;DR:** The community is broadly skeptical of the 'Nobel Disease' framing, questioning whether laureates are actually more prone to unsound ideas than anyone else or whether fame simply amplifies pre-existing eccentricities; a significant side-thread devolves into a heated debate about whether eugenics is scientifically or merely ethically unsound. **Sentiment:** 20% positive · 45% mixed · 35% skeptical **The case for** - The phenomenon usefully illustrates that domain expertise doesn't transfer across fields, and that fame and sycophancy can erode critical self-assessment. - The concept serves as a humility check for the scientific community at large. - Milton Friedman's own observation that Nobel-level attention is 'flattering but also corrupting' is seen as an apt and honest self-reflection. **The pushback** - No evidence is presented that laureates hold unsound ideas at a higher rate than other scientists — fame may simply make their eccentricities more visible. - Several examples (especially early eugenics cases) reflect mainstream views of their era, making it unfair to single them out as uniquely afflicted. - The article conflates genuinely fringe beliefs with contested-but-plausible hypotheses (e.g., lab-leak theory), undermining its credibility. - The Wikipedia article is criticized as poorly sourced and potentially motivated by a desire to manufacture a phenomenon that may not exist. - Listing Milton Friedman as a voice of reason is seen as ironic, given his own controversial policy prescriptions far outside hard science. **By community** - hackernews (skeptical): Commenters largely challenge the premise — questioning the statistical basis, criticizing specific examples as anachronistic or politically motivated, and getting sidetracked into a divisive sub-debate about eugenics and the lab-leak hypothesis. **Hottest debate:** Whether eugenics qualifies as 'scientifically unsound' or merely 'ethically unsound' (and outside today's Overton window) sparked the longest and most acrimonious thread. **Open questions** - Is there any rigorous statistical evidence that Nobel laureates hold unsound beliefs at a higher rate than comparably prominent non-laureate scientists? - Does the causal arrow run from the prize to the beliefs, or were these individuals already eccentric thinkers whose unconventional thinking was part of what made them successful? - Should historical figures be judged by the scientific and social norms of their own era rather than today's standards? **Highlights** > I'm surprised the article doesn't address the Occam's Razor probability that... _most people_ hold ideas that the (a?) majority does not... and that increased media attention is likely to "discover" these beliefs. Or rather, I see no attempt to make an argument that Nobel laureates are statistically _more_ likely than other "well-known" non-politicians to hold non-majoritarian ideas... nor any attempt to argue that the ideas followed rather than preceded the award. > — [ledauphin on hackernews · 1 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49169558) > I think the logic here is backwards. Nobel Prize winners won the prize because they had unorthodox ways of thinking that led them to an actual discovery. I'd think that it's quite normal that 1 out of 10000 unorthodox beliefs ends up being a scientific reality of high impact. i.e. ~1 out of 10000 unorthodox thinkers will win the Nobel Prize, 9999/10000 of those thinkers you will never hear about. For the one who won, it's likely they will have continued unorthodox ideas, 9999/10000 of which will not lead to a second Nobel Prize. > — [qurren on hackernews · 1 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49174589) > > an informal term for the embrace of strange or scientifically unsound ideas by some Nobel Prize winners, usually later in life. It has been argued that the effect results, in part, from a tendency for Nobel winners to feel empowered by the award to speak on topics outside their specific area of expertise Sounds pretty much like every founder out there who strike gold once in the past now believing their genius now clearly applies to everything everywhere, including country governance, economics and sociology. It probably doesn't help that others around them are affected in similar ways and become more sycophantic because of the "award" these two types of people win. > — [embedding-shape on hackernews · 5 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49168856) > The article mentions it later - journalists and laymen end up asking Nobel Prize winners their opinion on matters outside their area of expertise. We don’t do that with Fields medal winners. Mainly because most people don’t even know what a Fields medal is. I can’t write a headline that relies on Elizabeth Moon’s or Stanislav Smirnov’s borrowed authority because the average joe doesn’t know who they are. But that definitely happened with multiple Nobel prize winners because the Nobel prize is that well known. A Nobel prize winners opinion on race science is inherently newsworthy. You know how we know the Nobel is in a different league to these other awards? Because when you explain what a Fields Medal is to someone who hasn’t heard of it, you say “it’s the Nobel prize for math”. And the fame of the prize leads to attention, which in the words of Milton Friedman, is “flattering but also corrupting”. > — [testdelacc1 on hackernews · 1 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49169094) > > Luc Montagnier co-discovered HIV in 1983 […] > During the COVID-19 pandemic, Montagnier promoted the idea that SARS-CoV-2 was deliberately created and escaped from a laboratory My understanding is that quite some researchers think that the lab leak hypothesis is possible, but unprovable at this point. I know Wikipedia treats it as some fringe hoax, but to me it seems almost religious. In the sense that the idea has been marked as a conspiracy theory at the very beginning and nothing can change that stance anymore. When a scientist supports it, it discredits the scientist instead of supporting the theory. (For transparency, my personal opinion on covid origin is that I find it difficult to believe either side of the debate when it claims it is 100% sure.) > — [yreg on hackernews · 2 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49168254) **Source threads** - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28693267) · 23 points · 10 comments - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49166918) · 89 points · 111 comments - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36741604) · 12 points · 8 comments - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36451029) · 3 points · 2 comments - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42600545) · 3 points · 0 comments - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34491170) · 2 points · 0 comments ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [The long history of vaccine hesitancy](https://daily.dev/posts/the-long-history-of-vaccine-hesitancy-cphtvkpyh) · MIT News · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [Willingness to look stupid is a genuine moat in creative work](https://daily.dev/posts/willingness-to-look-stupid-is-a-genuine-moat-in-creative-work-cfkduf2ki) · Hacker News · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [Find a way](https://daily.dev/posts/find-a-way-mvjgjkbpv) · Tech Lead Digest · 16 upvotes · 0 comments --- [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/nobel-disease-xqvayltlf) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"Nobel Disease","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/nobel-disease-xqvayltlf","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/nobel-disease-xqvayltlf"},"datePublished":"2026-08-04T12:53:30.555Z","dateModified":"2026-08-05T04:40:29.055Z","description":"Nobel disease (or Nobelitis) describes the tendency of some Nobel Prize winners to embrace scientifically unsound ideas, often outside their area of expertise....","image":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/s--1KxV4ohY--/f_auto/v1722860400/public/Placeholder%2007","thumbnailUrl":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/s--1KxV4ohY--/f_auto/v1722860400/public/Placeholder%2007","isAccessibleForFree":true,"articleSection":"Hacker News","inLanguage":"en","publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180}},"author":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Hacker News","logo":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/t_logo,f_auto/v1/logos/hn","url":"https://daily.dev/sources/hn"},"commentCount":0,"discussionUrl":"https://daily.dev/posts/nobel-disease-xqvayltlf","interactionStatistic":[{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":{"@type":"LikeAction"},"userInteractionCount":0},{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":{"@type":"CommentAction"},"userInteractionCount":0}],"keywords":"","timeRequired":"PT12M"} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https://daily.dev"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"Hacker News","item":"https://daily.dev/sources/hn"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"name":"Nobel Disease"}]} ```