Living Heroes
Submitted by lukeprog on Sat, 03/14/2009 - 11:47
Tags:
- (no order)
- Jon Stewart - for doing real journalism when nobody else (who appeals to the masses) will.
- Alonzo Fyfe - for proposing and elaborating, in plain language, the first plausible theory of moral realism ever.
- Nassim Taleb - for mocking ignorant certainty everywhere and for proposing workable plans to reform world finance.
- Norman Borlaug - for saving hundreds of millions of lives through the patient application of good science.
- Kailash Satyarthi - for rescuing thousands of children from slave labor, and for leading a global movement on their behalf.
Author Comments:
I'll add more as I think of them. Feel free to nominate!
I have not included people who have done great things but a few very bad things (Nelson Mandela?), or people who have done great things and a few unknown things (Chomsky's push for anarchism, for example. I simply have no idea if that's good or bad.)
...and I'm curious to see what the world will think of Bjorn Lomborg 200 years from now. Assuming we figure out how to digitize human consciousness in my lifetime.
same here. did you like his book?
I skimmed it. Occasionally I read the rebuttals, Lomborg's counter-arguments, and his critics' counter-rebuttals. Alas, I do not have time to become an expert in environmental science. But what Lomborg says seems to make an awful lot of sense.
The global warming debate reminds me of the abortion debate. The arguments coming from both sides are either terrible, or very inconclusive.
Alonzo Fyfe is one of the few people who makes coherent arguments about abortion, and Bjorn Lomborg may be one of the few people who make coherent arguments about global warming.
But I could be totally misreading the global warming situation, which is why my response to Lomborg is "wait and see" rather than "Hero!"
hmm i see. And i definitely agree with that last sentence there
I know, I'm one of the last holdouts regarding global warming. :)
I agree that the earth is warming. As for the human cause, well, maybe. As for the dire consequences predicted, I'm skeptical.
A few things annoy me about global warming alarmists. One is their degree of certainty vs. the soundness of their evidence. We understand very little about global climate cycles. Another is their tendency to ignore contradicting evidence.
So my basic position is that this work understanding global climate must be done, and very quickly, and that I haven't had the evidence for anthropogenic global warming and catastrophic consequences presented to me in a way that gave me great confidence.
haha yeah global warming alarmists are seriously annoying sometimes.
i actually didn't pay much attention to the global warming chapter of the book.. perhaps on the el nino part and the ozone hole which were interesting and fun. i thought the biodiversity and air pollution chapters were seriously epic (: they were probably the ones which made me look at the whole thing differently, while i stayed skeptical about the things he said about forests and pesticides.
Nice, you watch the Daily Show? It's been so incredibly good lately, that interview with Cramer blew me away. I would certainly recommend Chomsky for all the work he's done exposing the atrocities of the US gov't (1967-present) & the media. I've always thought of Stewart as Chomsky on a much smaller (and more entertaining) scale. I don't see how Chomsky's political leanings (ie being an anarchist) is enough to diminish his vast contributions to political writings.
Also, I've never heard of Nassim Taleb, but he sounds fascinating. Have you read his book Black Swan & is it any good?
Black Swan is good, but unfortunately it is long and poorly edited. There are probably some media summaries of his work that will do you just fine.
I've started with a couple videos he has on his website. I love this guy! Glad you pointed me in his direction :>
Wow, just discovered E.T. Jaynes. Too bad he died in 1998, or he'd surely make this list. I wonder if, at the end of the 21st century, we'll recognize his Probability Theory as one of the most important texts of the century?