Prix Ig Nobel 2022. N’en dites surtout pas de mal…

*LE BABILLARD 490 N'EST POUR LE MOMENT ACCESSIBLE QU'À L'EXTÉRIEUR DU 490*

La 32e cérémonie annuelle des célèbres prix Ig Nobel s'est déroulée en ligne, le jeudi 15 septembre 2022. Ces prix sont une création loufoque mais ô combien plaisante des gens de Harvard.

Les prix Ig Nobel récompensent les réalisations qui font RIRE, puis PENSER. Les prix sont destinés à célébrer l'insolite, à honorer l'imagination et à stimuler l'intérêt du public pour la science, la médecine et la technologie. Mais parfois avec le fou rire…

https://improbable.com/ig/winners/#ig2022

Cette année signalons deux prix Ig Nobel qui se distinguent.

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Le prix IgNobel de littérature est allé à un trio qui a étudié le jargon légal de contrats types. La publication qui leur a mérité les honneurs démontre que la majorité des contrats sont écrit dans une bouette linguistique obscure qui en rend la compréhension inutilement complexe même par les spécialistes.

LITERATURE PRIZE [CANADA, USA, UK, AUSTRALIA]

Eric Martínez, Francis Mollica, and Edward Gibson (July 2022) Poor Writing, Not Specialized Concepts, Drives Processing Difficulty in Legal Language. Cognition, vol. 224, 105070.

Despite their ever-increasing presence in everyday life, contracts remain notoriously inaccessible to laypeople. Why? Here, a corpus analysis (n ≈10 million words) revealed that contracts contain startlingly high proportions of certain difficult-to-process features–including low-frequency jargon, center-embedded clauses (leading to long-distance syntactic dependencies), passive voice structures, and non-standard capitalization–relative to nine other baseline genres of written and spoken English. Two experiments (N=184) further revealed that excerpts containing these features were recalled and comprehended at lower rates than excerpts without these features, even for experienced readers, and that center-embedded clauses inhibited recall more-so than other features. These findings (a) undermine the specialized concepts account of legal theory, according to which law is a system built upon expert knowledge of technical concepts; (b) suggest such processing difficulties result largely from working-memory limitations imposed by long-distance syntactic dependencies (i.e., poor writing) as opposed to a mere lack of specialized legal knowledge; and (c) suggest editing out problematic features of legal texts would be tractable and beneficial for society at-large.

L’article est ici : https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2022.105070

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Enfin, un magnifique prix Ig Nobel de la Paix remis à une équipe internationale pour avoir développé un algorithme permettant aux commères de décider quand dire la vérité et quand mentir. 

PEACE PRIZE [CHINA, HUNGARY, CANADA, THE NETHERLANDS, UK, ITALY, AUSTRALIA, SWITZERLAND, USA] Junhui Wu, Szabolcs Számadó, Pat Barclay, Bianca Beersma, Terence Dores Cruz, Sergio Lo Iacono, Annika Nieper, Kim Peters, Wojtek Przepiorka, Leo Tiokhin and Paul Van Lange (2021) Honesty and Dishonesty in Gossip Strategies: A Fitness Interdependence Analysis. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, vol. 376, no. 1838, 20200300.

Gossip, or sharing information about absent others, has been identified as an effective solution to free rider problems in situations with conflicting interests. Yet, the information transmitted via gossip can be biased, because gossipers may send dishonest information about others for personal gains. Such dishonest gossip makes reputation-based cooperation more difficult to evolve. But when are people likely to share honest or dishonest gossip? We build formal models to provide the theoretical foundation for individuals' gossip strategies, taking into account the gossiper's fitness interdependence with the receiver and the target. Our models across four different games suggest a very simple rule: when there is a perfect match (mismatch) between fitness interdependence and the effect of honest gossip, the gossiper should always be honest (dishonest); however, in the case of a partial match, the gossiper should make a choice based on their fitness interdependence with the receiver and the target and the marginal cost/benefit in terms of pay-off differences caused by possible choices of the receiver and the target in the game. Moreover, gossipers can use this simple rule to make optimal decisions even under noise. We discuss empirical examples that support the predictions of our model and potential extensions.

L’article est ici : https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2020.0300

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Si on n’a vraiment rien à faire, on peut écouter l’intégrale de la cérémonie ici : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uSELZ1A5OT8