I am writing a piece for a market research mag on the current “hottest thinkers” that industry people like to namecheck. Inevitably many of these people are as much derided as loved, so I decided to ‘crowdsource’ a list of the most overpraised intellectuals, using Twitter and LJ. Here it is, and YOU can decide on the worst intellectual of all using the power of votes. (You get 3 each).
A couple of people were excluded for not fitting any reasonable definition of intellectual, and a couple more were excluded for being dead (also, if I’d put Ayn Rand in it would have been a one-horse race). Otherwise what you see is everyone nominated. So: VOTE! (For up to three people)
Worst Living Intellectual
- Alain De Botton 20%
- Malcolm Gladwell 17%
- Noam Chomsky 12%
- Guy Kawasaki 12%
- Seth Godin 10%
- Edward De Bono 9%
- Michael Ignatieff 8%
- Dan Snow 3%
- Richard Florida 2%
- John Gray 2%
- Jakob Nielsen 2%
- Charles Handy 2%
- Nicholas Nassim Taleb 2%
- Dan Ariely 1%
Total Voters: 74
Poll closes: 10 Apr 2009 @ 10:42
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Sign of the times, no Francis Fukuyama.
Or Thomas Friedman now I think of it.
de bono still alive! (not even as old as i expected)
(btw claude levi strauss is 100! well done him)
Oh, Friedman is an absolute must. Also John Ralston Saul. Basically anybody who has ever been keynote speaker at a “Festival of Ideas”. And much as I adore the little Slovenian munchkin myself, I suspect Slavoj Zizek would garner a few votes.
except in the field of pop music (see thom yorke) having heard of some intellectuals does not mean you are an intellectual. so that’s de botton out. (er, also not sure what having not heard of some of the people on your list means…..).
subject to the above, thomas friedman would surely win by a mile – one of the world’s leading public idiots.
If you’ve not heard of them it’s probably because they are a social media dork.
Wait, which John Gray are you talking about?
Straw Dogs or Mars/Venus?
50% of this list makes me feel ignorant (I have no idea who they are). However, Malcom Gladwell is not an intellectual – I love his books, but only as works of fiction – he applies zero intellectual rigour to his interesting ideas. Can I give all three of my votes to him please.
I had to look some of them up too.
#7 – they are the same! Well OK no, I SUSPECT it’s Straw Dogs, knowing who nominated it.
i am a public idiot — i only voted once
re #1: am I taking the Alan Davies route by saying Francis Fukuyama is history?
i once had an awesome drunken conversation with a very earnest young german university student who explained to me that he was in correspondence with noam chomsky and had been for some time and the problem was that no-one understood him: and it was almost exactly like those interviews you see on television of women who develop relationships with men on death row.
that said i actually quite like the chomsk.
When nominating I did indeed have the John Gray of Black Mass, Straw Dogs etc etc in mind, but in the end I couldn’t bring myself to vote for him in the face of all these other asshats.
JG still worst cos he doesn’t make any sense on his own terms.
I have not heard of most of these, and the only one I’ve read a book by is Chomsky. I voted Gladwell on the basis of some article of his I read once and don’t remember and of what someone once said about him. I was going to nominate Taleb over on lj until I surmised that the poll was already up. I don’t know Taleb’s ideas well enough to like/dislike, just thought he needed to be on the ballot; he seems to be something of an asshole but that doesn’t necessarily make him a bad intellectual. (Cf. Meltzer.)
I wanted to vote against Alain de Botton and then I read one of his books (The pleasures and Sorrows of Work) and discovered it was actually good. Oh no… what a shame. It’s always so much easier to hate.
apart from that pompous twunt Ignatieff, I like all the other guys I had heard of, so I had to vote on the basis of people’s names.
I voted for the one Charlie Brooker once described as “an absolute pair-of-aching-balls of a man – a slapheaded, ruby-lipped pop philosopher who’s forged a lucrative career stating the bleeding obvious in a series of poncey, lighter-than-air books aimed at smug Sunday supplement pseuds looking for something clever-looking to read on the plane.”
THAT’S ALL OF THEM (merely to slap the heads of the glabrous as a deplorable bennyhillism)
(besides: camille paglia is secretly bald — why is she not on this list, at the top?)
Surely Camille is terribly 1994… but then Ignatieff is terribly 1988 (although isn’t he a David Mamet*/Martin Amis-style born-again rightist? Has that given him topicality).
*Mamet’s belated announcement that he has ‘become’ a conservative was a classic; rather like a colleague expecting a shock reaction when they finally tell they are gay and you’re too polite to go “well, everyone assumes that when they meet you…”
IDIOCY IS TIMELESS (also, they are both still around: why?)
It looks like a potentially decisive late surge for De Botton there.
De Botton it is then!
Noam Chomsky in 3rd place?… just glad this is obviously unrepresentative (hah!) given the tiny sample size etc.. otherwise I’d be worried.
“Actor Viggo Mortensen with avant-garde guitarrist Buckethead dedicated their 2006 album, called Pandemoniumfromamerica to Chomsky.”
Track Listing
1. “Den gang jeg drog afsted”
2. “Back to Babylon”
3. “Pandemoniumfromamerica”
4. “Gone”
5. “They ate your family”
6. “I want mami”
7. “Red river valley”
8. “Leave it”
9. “Holyhead”
10. “Fall of Troy”
11. “Shadow”
12. “Cuba on paper”
13. “Maybe”
14. “Half fling”
“Cuba on paper” – Noam Chomsky (words, vocals), Rumi (words), Buckethead (guitars), Havana (streets), Viggo Mortensen (vocals, drums, harmonica)
I can only assume Zizek is missing here because he fails on the “intellectual” part of “worst living intellectual”. Then again, it’s pushing the envelope somewhat to include Ignatieff as an intellectual, while had this been the “worst living pedant” contest Jakob Nielsen would have won by a mile; reading him is like being stuck in a lift with a sysadmin suffering from Asperger’s and OCD. Quite unusable.
On the other hand, Chomsky and Kawasaki have no business being on a worst *anything* list.
Zizek is missing because nobody nominated him! The ones I excluded as not being viable intellectuals were Janet Street-Porter and Piers Morgan.
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