scientism comments on Rational Me or We? - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (128)
This is a good idea. But I think 10 is too few. It would be better to pick the top 100 or 200, and see how many people who contributed to multiple fields are on the list.
I've not created the list first, but have thought of which of those I listed above have done something that would belong on that list, so feel free to take possible confirmation bias into account on my part, but even after trying to account for that, I think many of the following accomplishments would be on the list:
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.