Who are the overrated intellectuals of the past century?

che guevara.

fgdfvz wrote:

Rachel Carson fabricated a lot of evidence and caused the resurgence of malaria as a major killer in tropical countries.

Pretty overrated.

That seems a bit harsh! Some of her claims (that DDT kills all living things) are certainly overblown and never had any basis in fact. But she doesn't fabricate evidence, just goes a little crazy rhetorically and claims some things she shouldn't.

Her main argument in Silent Spring is just that soaking everything in DDT, which was the practice at the time, is a bad thing, since DDT is a poison. She was right. Her book was remarkably effective in curtailing the use of DDT, and pretty much singlehandedly started the environmental movement. Views may differ on whether this is a good thing, but the point is just that Carson probably couldn't have predicted that her demonization of DDT would lead to the creation of the EPA, which would then ban DDT and pressure third world countries to do the same.

'fgdfvz' is right that banning DDT altogether was a bad thing. It probably at least made the african and indian resurgence of malaria in the '90s worse than it would have otherwise been. But it doesn't make sense to say it CAUSED that resurgence, when the banning took place a couple decades before the resurgence, and when it occurred in India too where DDT is still used.

Anyway, she was really influential, her claims were a bit strong but she probably had no idea the extent to which people would run with them! USA actually subsidizes use of DDT in homes now as malaria/typhus prevention.

Sorry, that's actually US AID (international development) that funds use of DDT in homes in tropical countries, not EPA. Obviously that's outside of EPA's scope.

MLK jr., Malcolm X, Angela Davis, Ho Chi Mihn, Mao, Gorbachev, Stalin, Lenin, Hitler, Winston Churchill, Howard Zinn, Kipling.

Listen to all you f****** dropping random names of people you've only heard of. Noam Chomsky, are you serious? How many here have actually read one of his books? and Freud! Either your intentionally being stupid or your just f***ing dumb.

Samuel P. Huntington

Brother Cornel West

Brother Colm O'Connell

sestro wrote:

MLK jr., Malcolm X, Angela Davis, Ho Chi Mihn, Mao, Gorbachev, Stalin, Lenin, Hitler, Winston Churchill, Howard Zinn, Kipling.

I think I've missed something because no-one would ever call the likes of Churchill and Mao intellectuals. Hitler probably gets over rated as a leader but I doubt anyone would call him an intellectual similarly Stalin. Maybe I just mi with different people to you.

I would just like to recommend a book to everyone that is (sort of) about overrated intellectuals: "Public Intellectuals," by Richard Posner, who is arguably an overrated intellectual himself.

keynes, krugwoman, greenspan

Trotsky. People call themselves "Trotskyists"- but WTF did he ever contribute intellectually? All of the important Marxist concepts still in play- hegemony, class consciousness, some game theoretic contributions, critical legal theory, and the structuring power of ideology- are attributable to other thinkers.

Dawkins. Whatever you think of his science, it's clear he has taken his biological credibility and tried to use it to mask some total BS. Disprove God? No way man. Agnosticism is so much less arrogant a worldview.

Rand. You'd be surprised how many people take her seriously. I work in D.C. and people in the right-wing think-tank world talk about Atlas Shrugged like Gospel. It's pretty scary.

Second A. Maynard Keynes.

Coffee Drinker wrote:

Bertrand Russell is possibly the most evil of all modern philosophers.

Do you have any idea what you are talking about or are you just repeating what someone else once said?

(Hey, it turns out yo are just parrotting what Lyndon LaRouche said. Funny).

jjjjjjjjjjj wrote:

Skinner and Trotsky, sure, but Heidegger? Are you kidding? He is the most or second most influential philosopher of the twentieth century. Freud's influence permeates the society.

Overrated:

Friedrich Hayek

Ayn Rand

William F. Buckley

Milton Friedman

Why overrated? Because their thought does not stand up to analysis.

I don't think they would be mentioned as being "overrated" if they WEREN'T influential...

"So, let’s imagine how [the September 11th attacks] could have been worse for example. Suppose that on September 11, Al-Qaeda had bombed the White House and killed the President, instituted a murderous, brutal regime which killed maybe 50,000 to 100,000 people and tortured about 700,000, set up a major international terrorist center in Washington, which was overthrowing governments all over the world, and installing brutal vicious neo-Nazi dictatorships, assassinating people. Suppose he called in a bunch of economists, let’s call them the 'Kandahar Boys' to run the American economy, who within a couple of years had driven the economy into one of the worst collapses of its history. Suppose this had happened. That would have been worse than 9/11, right? But it did happen. And it happened on 9/11. That happened on September 11, 1973 in Chile. The only thing you have to change is this per capita equivalence, which is the right way to look at it. Well, did that change the world? Yeah, it did but not from our point of view, in fact, who even knows about it? Incidentally, just to finish, because we [the U.S.] were responsible for that one." — Noam Chomsky

+1!!!!!

Open your eyes people.

Um, Carl Jung is a genius and one of the most influential psychologists in history. Tied everything together, be it stuff from Aldous Huxley to Timothy Leary.

meta intellectual wrote:

sdfadfadfaf wrote:

+1

More of an idiot than an intellectual.

+1

This is really of list of who you all think got it right or wrong. According to these standards, Aristotle and Plato were morons since they were wrong about a lot of stuff (heliocentrism for starters). Napolean would lose as well since he lost a war.

Freud worked from basically a blank canvas, and while much has been proven wrong, we would be nowhere near where we are in the field of psychology and psychoanalysis.

Dawkins? Hardly. He is one of the leading anthropologists of our time. If all you know is his atheism stuff, you are ignoring the vast body of his work.

Chomsky? There would be no modern concept of linguistics if it were not for Chomsky. All taught linguistics is based on his work.

Hayek? Milton Friedman as well? Love them or hate them, but their work is backbone of the non-Keynsian line of thinking and extremely important for understanding economics and monetary policy. Like Keynes as someone said, you are are either defending the policies or fighting them.

Milton Friedman is a neoclassical economist and not too far away from Keynesianism. He should not be associated with Hayek.