N.N. Taleb is perhaps the best out of 'public' intellectuals, mostly because of his references. I'm just saying there are better alternatives who are not public intellectuals (e.g., Mandelbrot himself), although perhaps not for Taleb's Twitter account.
Broke: Chomsky, Marx & Engels, Simone de Beauvoir, Ayn Rand, Steven Pinker, Richard Posner, Howard Zinn, National Review, crookedtimber.org, and Steven Spielberg as the "greatest philosopher of the 20th century".
Half-woke:
John Dolan
, Mark Ames,
James Burnham
, Murray Rothbard, Paul Gottfried, Lubos Motl, David Gelernter, "Goldman" Spengler (annoying, but often scores),
Karl (son of Carl) Menger
, William E. Odom,
Herman Kahn
,
Vaclav Smil
,
Fernand Braudel
, N.N. Taleb (will introduce you to lots of good stuff, if you happen to be a newbie), Otto Weininger (despite the silliness, he has good references), Sunny Auyang (
Link
-- much, much more learned than Taleb, as is evident from simply any one of the books e.g. on
complex systems
or
engineering
), Stanislaw Lem, Hans Kelsen,
Evgeny Pashukanis
.
Woke: H.P. Lovecraft (the one who most understood modernity, although his prose was often turgid),
William T. Lee
(one step above Odom),
William H. McNeill
, Burton H. Klein (
RAND articles
, and on
dynamic economic analysis
),
David C. Stove
, J.A. Schumpeter (not as 'economist', but as negative critic and
general historian of thought
),
Gian-Carlo Rota
, V.I. Arnold (a general polymath, including in history, although the writings that reflect this
are
scattered
), V.M. Glushkov (
link 1
,
link 2
), Saunders MacLane (quite polymathic, though it doesn't come out in his writings),
C.R. Shalizi
(minus the politics that are clearly self-interested), Matteo Ricci,
G.W. Leibniz
as an inventor of cognitive devices (and
associated
contemporaries: Thomasius, Jungius, Bruno, Delgarno, Wilkins),
Warren McCulloch
(also known for the "
MacKay-McCulloch limit
"), and Salo Forum (along with the usually cited authors here: Carl Schmitt, Ernst Jünger, Michael Oakeshott, Vilfredo Pareto, and (the best parts of) Oswald Spengler). Notice none of these are "public intellectuals".
Even "broke" is worth reading. The only useful superstition is that if you laugh *really really hard* at stupid people (or stupid books), this will make you smarter.
Bob Dylan Roof
spigot
Welund
Where does Greg Cochran fit into this taxonomy?
Kerouac's On The Road was the worst book I've ever read and colossal waste of time.
Never found any reason to read Noam Chomsky. He just strikes me as dishonest, an intelligent man who insists on being superficial, perhaps to appeal to a certain audience.
Yup, the absurdities of early "cybernetics" are very well known and I believe Shalizi (among others) elaborated on them. A
recent book
(that came to my attention some years ago) attempts to diagnose (in a spotty manner) what went wrong with McCulloch's entire formulation of cybernetics. My interest in McCulloch mainly stems in how I barely noticed him until very recently, but he seems to have a very wide range of reflections on all sorts of things that are serious, including on the status of psychology or philosophy (and their interconnections) that should be grappled with --
hence, my inclusion of him in the "philosophy" sub-forum in Salo
(as opposed to actually established sciences). I still haven't found time to actually read (or refute) him comprehensively. There is a
German website
that seems to support McCulloch, and that also link him to the heterodox thinker
Gotthard Günther
.
For that matter, Husserl's early (as opposed to late) work was non-esoteric and quite coherent (his "Logical Investigations" covered the same questions as Russell and Frege); up to the
1906/7 lectures
that were recently translated. He definitely seems to have turned "esoteric" in his later career however; and this later led to people like Heidegger, or "esoteric" forms of phenomenology (but "phenomenology" itself was not Husserl's idea and was developed in Brentano). Say, Rota's version of Husserl (which I don't believe in) was mostly some processed version of Heidegger. I don't like Husserl; I believe he was filled with lots of "empty wind", overly theoretical circumlocutions that usually involve re-stating the same concept over and over and declaring it irreducible ("essences", Husserlian "intuitions"), but that's another matter.
On the other hand, Wittgenstein and Hegel definitely fall on the wrong side of "esoteric". These are almost definitely not worth reading; not enough reward for all the effort put in.
Von Neumann was quite "woke" about some pretentious currents in analytic philosophy, linguistics, and "almost-science" in general. Almost none of this is published: in his unpublished correspondence with Carnap, he has some quite acid comments about Carnap's ideas on information and semantics, Samuelson on economics, and much else. Much it was not published b/c excessively inflammatory, but I believe they should be published some day. Some anecdotes, however, are contained in the 4-volume McCulloch
collection
.
Grothendieck was quite "woke" to the widespread plagiarism and used-carsalesmanship of academia, hence his departure from the field: some of this is described in his
memoirs
.
But now back to the topic of this thread:
among the most massively "broke" would be Bill Gates. I can understand why people refuse to read him. In his case, even his legitimate comments (say in
The Road Ahead
) are completely outdated.
Ray Kurzweil's popular books (say
The Age of Spiritual Machines
) are not worth reading, for the same reasons as well as a few others.