[ExI] World thinkers

[William Flynn Wallace]

I would be remiss if I did not encourage all of you to read Pinker's The
Blank Slate, where he just crushes that idea and a lot of political
correctness that goes along with it, and The Better Angels of our Nature,
where he documents the drastic reduction of violence of all kinds, from
wars to animals, since the Enlightenment.  The world, believe it or not, is
becoming a more moral and safer place.  Just amazing books, at times funny,
shocking, and even folksy.  No dreary academic writing from him.  Best
history writing since Barzun.  billw


On Sat, Apr 5, 2014 at 4:02 PM, Anders Sandberg <anders at aleph.se> wrote:

> 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 results
>
> http://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
>
> _______________________________________________
> extropy-chat mailing list
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20140405/ee8fd88c/attachment.html>