Hierarchy of People
Of course, all people are equal but are all people equally interesting?
Can we make a list of “famous” people?
“You have about one more week to get your first-round answers in for the 2023 Prediction Contest. Also, I think it would be fun (not necessarily scientific, but fun) to highlight and compare the answers of various famous people. If you’re a “famous” person (I’m thinking eg Zvi or Richard Hanania, not Joe Biden) who has already entered or is interested in entering, please send me an email.”
from Astral Codex Ten
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_French_people
What fascinates you- the rich- Musk, Arnault, Gates, Bezos, Bettancourt, Slim?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_French_billionaires_by_net_worth
or the entrepreneurs- Musk, Gates, Jobs, Zuckerberg, Paul Graham?
or the “movers and shakers”/thinkers/ intellectuals- Musk, Gates, Snowden, Jancovici, Starck, Piketty- tedtalk here, Harari, Sandel, Assange-wikileaks here?
Snowden was working for the NSA- discovered the goverment were intercepting data, went public as a whistleblower- see him on a bot here
Piketty- http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/en/
Starck- designer of the freebox, tedtalk here
Jancovici- https://theshiftproject.org/en/home/
or the journalists- Malcolm Gladwell, Matt Taibbi, Glen Greenwald, Jon Ronson, Ben Goldacre, AA Gill?
Influencers- Mr Beast, Andrew Tate, Scott Galloway, Tim Ferriss, Hugo de Crypte?
Villains- Elizabeth Holmes and Sam Bankman-Fried?
IT/AI giants Gates, Swartz, Paul Graham, Linus Torvalds- Linux, Github,, Xavier Niel-free, 42, Tim Berners-Lee, Scott Aaronson, Sam Altman, Demis Hassabis, Geoffrey Hinton, kaggle, Jeremy Howard, Karl Friston blanket, more here ?
https://openai.com/blog/authors/sam-altman/
https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=6946
the people changing the world- Gary Slutkin, Michael Rosen, Emma Macadam, Larry Lessig,
bloggers/podcasters?- Scott Alexander, Jordan Peterson?
Footballers?
Comedians? Dave Chappelle- “all my heroes are either murdered by the government or registered sex offenders”
everything’s funny till it happens to you- crack
Writers Hannah Arendt, Primo Levi, George Orwell, Christopher Hitchens,Kurt Vonnegut, Douglas Adams ?
Scientists? Richard Feynman, David Eagleman, Philip Tetlock - predictions?
Politicians? Lumumba, Nkrumah?
Economics/business/ Nobel Prize winners- Dan Ariely, Warren Buffett, Marc Andreessen,Peter Thiel, Paul Romer, Paul Krugman, Steven Levitt (freakonomics)
Organizations Bilderberg?
Ramachandran -brain
Aaron Swartz died on January 11, 2013.
Here is his blog.
http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/
He reviews the books he read that year- I love this casual dismissal of QED because it’s not Feynman. He was also light years ahead of most people in noticing people like Yudkowsky and Taibbi (in the news today because of the twitter files).Dufloand Banerjee- long before they won the Nobel prize. And recommending Gallwey a long time before Bill Gates! Lean business methods, Christopher Hitchens, Joan Didion, Tony Blair and how accounting firms work- this was just one year for Swartz!
QED by Peter Parnell
Not bad, by any stretch, but on the page, for anyone who’s familiar with Feynman’s actual writings, this can’t help but feel thin.
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality by Eliezer Yudkowsky
The eXile: Sex, Drugs, and Libel in the New Russia, Matt Taibbi and Mark Ames
Matt Taibbi is my favorite political journalist. He writes with a raw honesty that manages to be both politically biting and hilarious.
Poor Economics by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo
God, what a book! Poor Economics is a series of tales of foreigners trying to save the far-flung poor, while failing to realize not only that their developed-country ideas are terrible disasters in practice, but also that everything they've learned to think of as solid—even something as simple as measuring distance—is far more fraught, and complex, and political than they ever could have imagined. It's a stunning feeling to have the basic building blocks of your world questioned and crumbled before you—and a powerful lesson in the value of self-skepticism for everyone who's trying to do something.
The Inner Game of Tennis by Timothy Gallwey
This book touched me deeply and made me rethink the entire way I approached life; it's about vastly more than just tennis. I can't really describe it, but I can recommend this video with Alan Kay and the author that will blow your mind.
video
Good point from Helena Luna.
It's sad you managed to included only few women....
https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/2577-a-hacktivist-reading-list-aaron-swartz-s-recommended-reading
The conversation eventually turned to the fact that Palanpur farmers sow their winter crops several weeks after the date at which yields would be maximized. The farmers do not doubt that earlier planting would give them larger harvests, but no one the farmer explained, is willing to be the first to plant, as the seeds on any lone plot would be quickly eaten by birds. I asked if a large group of farmers, perhaps relatives, had ever agreed to sow earlier, all planting on the same day to minimize losses. “If we knew how to do that,” he said, looking up from his hoe at me, “we would not be poor.”
http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/bowles
Haiti: After the Quake by Paul Farmer
The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice by Christopher Hitchens
Mother Teresa is a byword for saintliness, but have you ever stopped to ask why? Christopher Hitchens makes a convincing case that she’s something closer to a monster. Everyone I’ve told about this book is shocked by the concept, but it’s a short book with a pretty compelling argument.
Joan: Forty Years of Life, Loss, and Friendship with Joan Didion by Sara Davidson
It’s hard to shake the feeling that this book is merely the author attempting to cash in on their minor friendship with Joan Didion, but I love Didion so much that I’m just grateful for the stories.
The Ghost [Writer] by Robert Harris
It’s hard to shake the feeling that a big part of the appeal of this book is watching Tony Blair get arrested for war crimes, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s a first-rate political thriler.
The Lean Startup by Eric Ries
Ries presents a translation of the Toyota Production System to startups — and it’s so clearly the right way to run a startup that it’s hard to imagine how we got along before it. Unfortunately, the book has become so trendy that I find many people claiming to swear allegiance to it who clearly missed the point entirely.
The Great Stagnation by Tyler Cowen
A dreadful little book, which boils down to nothing more than a vast tract of economic illiteracy. Take just the insanity that is chapter 2. Cowen takes as his dictum:
The larger the role of government in the economy, the more the published figures for GDP growth are overstating improvements in our living standard.
For example, as government-insured health care takes up a larger proportion of our country’s spending, we can’t accurately measure how our living standards are improving since it’s paid for at set rates by government instead of through a competitive market process to set accurate prices.
Private Firms Working in the Public Interest by Abigail Bugbee Brown
Enron, WorldCom, Tyco, Olympus — why is there so much accounting fraud? Why isn’t this stuff caught? In this serious but briskly-written work, Abigail Brown explains the incredible story of how accounting firms actually work. Paid by the people they’re supposed to be auditing, accounting firms have developed an elaborate culture of corruption, letting them aid and abet the most egregious forms of dishonesty.
(Disclosure: Ms. Brown and I were lab fellows together at the Harvard Center for Ethics.)
http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/books2011
Further reading:
You can view The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz in its entirety for free on the Internet Archive.
http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/theaftermath
“But there’s nothing to it!” he insisted. “Why is it so popular?”
Inside the bubble, nobody asks this inconvenient question. We just mumble things like “democratic news” or “social bookmarking” and everybody just assumes it all makes sense. But looking at this guy, I realized I had no actual justification. It was just a list of links. And we didn’t even write them ourselves.