From the examples given in this article it is absolutely impossible to tell whether the "incorrect beliefs" (be it racism, mushroom aliens, vitamins curing cancer, whatever) are in any way connected to the Nobel prize.
For all I know, they all could have been racists, psylocibe users, etc. long before they received any prizes and the associated attention.
In fact, it could even be possible that they had much worse and radical beliefs earlier in life which were tempered by the burden of being a thought leader.
I'd go as far as to say that this is a good example of an article that should be removed from Wikipedia.
>it is absolutely impossible to tell whether
It's literally the second sentence of the article.
Yes, that's my point.
Take any other award, list people who got it and had "incorrect beliefs", add an article about it and preamble it with "it is unclear whether it is an effect of the award". What purpose does it serve? Do you think there should be articles for all of those "diseases"?
Nebula award disease
Crossword Book award disease
Turing award disease
Pulitzer award disease
Fields medalist disease
et cetera?
The difference is notability, which is the criteria used whether a distinct Wikipedia article is warranted. There are multiple cited sources that use the "Noble disease" term, there are possibly much fewer similar publications with "Fields medalist disease".
That is not to say that the theory holds water. Flat Earth theory is also notable and has a wiki page, even if blatantly wrong. There is no hyperboloid Earth theory wiki page.
> there are possibly much fewer similar publications with "Fields medalist disease"
Among mathematicians, I wouldn't claim that "Fields medalist disease" is an unusual term, though this term is typically meant to mean "some mathematician got a Fields medal, but did not prove any other deep mathematical result afterwards". There also exists the much more derogatory term "dead wood" for mathematicians who once proved highly celebrated results, but after they got tenured, no they didn't manage to prove anything deep anymore."
Concerning the "crackpot undertone" of "Nobel Disease": lots of mathematicians know the names of achieved mathematicians who got into some eccentric ideas ("eccentric" in the sense of "outside the Overton window") once they got older.
Famous examples for the latter point are Serge Lang
> https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Serge_Lang&oldid=...
or Anatoly Fomenko
> https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Anatoly_Fomenko&o...
Ok, notability is a good argument for having such an article (although I'm not too sure about it really being notable), but the current shape is absolutely misleading.
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”.
Got it.