Quote:
Originally Posted by mike_bike_kite
I don't exclude those professions but actors chose to mimic others which seems an odd thing for a great thinker to do, astronauts are admirable in almost every way but I don't think they're the greatest thinkers and politicians are just politicians. I'm not sure why I'm defending my position though as you don't seem to have any either 
Oddly your list of great thinkers is very similar to my own. Perhaps there really aren't that many great thinkers out there to chose from? I'll admit I didn't have quite so many from Google or any chess players. Oddly none on the list are particularly young.
My suspicion is that people aren't getting smarter. There was a film called Idiocracy which explained why - it's a fairly low brow comedy but it seemed to have it's finger on the pulse (well worth watching if you worry about your fellow man). |
The individuals on my list are older because: (i) great thinkers often only became great after getting some life experience; and (ii) it takes awhile for someone to get famous enough as a thinker for someone like me to recognize them as such.
I've also seen and enjoyed Idiocracy, but its main premise (people are getting stupider because stupid people breed more) isn't based on facts. People generally seem to share the lurking suspicion that the world used to be better in some undefined past and that people are getting less intelligent, but that suspicion doesn't stand up to research.
The Wikipedia article on the
Flynn Effect might prove an interesting read on this. I'd also really recommend Stephen Pinker's book The Better Angels of Our Nature if you want an incredibly well-researched argument that the world is becoming more not less civilized (Pinker talks about rates of violence from all causes, but I'm going to cheat and equate that with being civilized), and has been for thousands of years. Pinker's book also discusses the Flynn Effect and related research, although it isn't the main thrust of the book. The book is dense (around 1,000 pages), but it's probably one of the most uplifting I've ever read.
