scientism comments on Rational Me or We? - Less Wrong

116 Post author: RobinHanson 17 March 2009 01:39PM

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Comment author: scientism 18 March 2009 06:22:10PM 2 points [-]

It's worth remembering that what we're looking for is not just people who contributed to multiple fields but generalists/rationalists: people who took a "big picture" view. (I'm willing to set aside the matter of whether their specific achievements were related to their "big picture" view of things since it will probably just lead to argument without resolution.) Leibniz would definitely fall into that category, for example, but I'm not sure Newton would. He had interests outside of physics (religion/mysticism) but they weren't really related to one another.