[ExI] World thinkers

[Anders Sandberg]

William Flynn Wallace <foozler83 at gmail.com> , 5/4/2014 7:49 PM:
How in the world (literally) could they leave Stephen Pinker off?

Lists like these always have a great deal of arbitrariness in them. 
I like the approach of Murray in "Human Excellence": he scored importance by number of biographical encyclopaedias mentioning a person (and how much). That way the importance at least becomes distributed according to how a large group of dedicated writers from different backgrounds consider things. So maybe the real list should be something like the Science Hall of Fame, based on references in the literature. (http://fame.gonzolabs.org/)
Of course, being widely referred to doesn't mean one is important. Critical-theory.com has an amusing competition between the most overrated philosophers; the site seems to be down right now, but at last cache has some interesting resultshttp://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:EZKz3uXwrgUJ:www.critical-theory.com/march-madness-the-16-most-overrated-philosophers-are-here/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=uk


Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University
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