There is a weakness of your scoring system. You fail to reward people who say true things, backing them up, regardless of social ostracism. This reduces the desirability of people like Steve Sailer. You may judge him overly tribal. I judge Scott Alexander as insufficiently intellectually honest when there is a risk of social ostracism. (You, Arnold, do pretty well by my lights.)
Excellent list. I approve of everyone on it. I would also add: Kelsey Piper, Adam Grant, Phil Tetlock, Yascha Mounk, Alex Tabarrok, Paul Graham, Steven Pinker, Nate Silver, Noah Smith, Jesse Singal, Robin Hanson.
Richard Epstein for sure. He has a huge corpus of podcasts, blogs, op-eds, legal briefs, debates, interviews, books, and a fantastic series of talks on property rights that were animated by the Federalist Society. On every subject he touches, he speaks at the absolute highest level, and he steel-mans opposing views almost to a fault. For a fantasy league, he has never been a better bargain because his stock was trashed last year by some embarrassing public misstatements and bad predictions about covid. Yet even on covid he was ahead of the curve, getting excoriated for observations that would later become mainstream. For some GMU gossip, one of my favorite intellectuals, Don Boudreaux, told me that Vernon Smith told him that Richard Epstein is the smartest person he ever met. (Don said the smartest person HE ever met was David D Friedman, and David himself gushes about Epstein here: https://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/search?q=Multitasking+or+Parallel+vs+Serial+Thinking ) Imo Epstein is woefully underrated.
Encouraging a non-tribal intellectual style is intellectual pacifism. If there is a tribe whose ascendancy will, in practice, destroy the values that you hold dear (e.g., freedom of association, free exchange of goods and services, freedom of conscience), then your interests will be served by aligning with the opposing tribe, however distasteful that might be to you.
So I’m going contrarian. While most of the people on your list might disagree at the margins they’re going to agree on the foundations. Most of them also fall under what I’d call “polite society.” Everyone doesn’t act that way. You won’t get a wide range of voices by limiting it to people that are nice.
You have no representation from the far left or the far right. Some of the people on these poles have more influence (and are more interesting) than some of the “also-rans” mentioned here.
From your list, I see several I believe are left of center (at least by some metric):
Matt Yglesias, John McWhorter, Julia Galef, and Scott Alexander are registered democrats. And even Andrew Sullivan has enthusiastically voted for Democratic candidates the last 3 major elections at least.
I completely agree with Arnold's criticism of political tribalism, but I feel that he is somewhat confused as to meaning and drivers of tribalism. Plenty of people complain about tribalism these days, but very few seem to bother to actually think about it.
In the US, tribalism in a natural consequence of the idea that everybody has to self-identify with 2-3 sets of beliefs. This idea is based on implicit assumption that there are only 1-2 dimensions of policy views.
Everybody, who assumes that there are "two sides", fuels tribalism. Everybody, who uses scale "left-right", fuels tribalism. Everybody, who divides people into conservatives/liberals/libertarians (especially given that these words often evolve meaning, very different from their literal meaning) fuels tribalism.
The first step out of tribal mentality is to acknowledge that there are multiple dimensions of policy views. And these dimensions need not be correlated. Space of policies is R^n, not R^1. So all political discussions in this country are between the views, which do not even span 1% of this space.
There is a weakness of your scoring system. You fail to reward people who say true things, backing them up, regardless of social ostracism. This reduces the desirability of people like Steve Sailer. You may judge him overly tribal. I judge Scott Alexander as insufficiently intellectually honest when there is a risk of social ostracism. (You, Arnold, do pretty well by my lights.)
Excellent list. I approve of everyone on it. I would also add: Kelsey Piper, Adam Grant, Phil Tetlock, Yascha Mounk, Alex Tabarrok, Paul Graham, Steven Pinker, Nate Silver, Noah Smith, Jesse Singal, Robin Hanson.
Richard Epstein for sure. He has a huge corpus of podcasts, blogs, op-eds, legal briefs, debates, interviews, books, and a fantastic series of talks on property rights that were animated by the Federalist Society. On every subject he touches, he speaks at the absolute highest level, and he steel-mans opposing views almost to a fault. For a fantasy league, he has never been a better bargain because his stock was trashed last year by some embarrassing public misstatements and bad predictions about covid. Yet even on covid he was ahead of the curve, getting excoriated for observations that would later become mainstream. For some GMU gossip, one of my favorite intellectuals, Don Boudreaux, told me that Vernon Smith told him that Richard Epstein is the smartest person he ever met. (Don said the smartest person HE ever met was David D Friedman, and David himself gushes about Epstein here: https://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/search?q=Multitasking+or+Parallel+vs+Serial+Thinking ) Imo Epstein is woefully underrated.
Encouraging a non-tribal intellectual style is intellectual pacifism. If there is a tribe whose ascendancy will, in practice, destroy the values that you hold dear (e.g., freedom of association, free exchange of goods and services, freedom of conscience), then your interests will be served by aligning with the opposing tribe, however distasteful that might be to you.
I suggest Matt Shapiro; he seems to be eager to join such a tribe himself
https://polimath.substack.com/p/default-friends-and-solving-problems
So I’m going contrarian. While most of the people on your list might disagree at the margins they’re going to agree on the foundations. Most of them also fall under what I’d call “polite society.” Everyone doesn’t act that way. You won’t get a wide range of voices by limiting it to people that are nice.
You have no representation from the far left or the far right. Some of the people on these poles have more influence (and are more interesting) than some of the “also-rans” mentioned here.
From your list, I see several I believe are left of center (at least by some metric):
Matt Yglesias, John McWhorter, Julia Galef, and Scott Alexander are registered democrats. And even Andrew Sullivan has enthusiastically voted for Democratic candidates the last 3 major elections at least.
Where is Bari Weiss? She's great. https://bariweiss.substack.com/
Ben Burgis and Matt McManus on the left are less popular than those on your list, but meet many of your other criteria
I completely agree with Arnold's criticism of political tribalism, but I feel that he is somewhat confused as to meaning and drivers of tribalism. Plenty of people complain about tribalism these days, but very few seem to bother to actually think about it.
In the US, tribalism in a natural consequence of the idea that everybody has to self-identify with 2-3 sets of beliefs. This idea is based on implicit assumption that there are only 1-2 dimensions of policy views.
Everybody, who assumes that there are "two sides", fuels tribalism. Everybody, who uses scale "left-right", fuels tribalism. Everybody, who divides people into conservatives/liberals/libertarians (especially given that these words often evolve meaning, very different from their literal meaning) fuels tribalism.
The first step out of tribal mentality is to acknowledge that there are multiple dimensions of policy views. And these dimensions need not be correlated. Space of policies is R^n, not R^1. So all political discussions in this country are between the views, which do not even span 1% of this space.