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Comment by skrebbel | Hacker News Reader

You're a bit filter bubbled. Of course Obama is an amazing celebrity. He's the president of the USA. That sort of makes him an amazing celebrity by definition.

Stallman, however, is not the president and not Brad Pitt, so he has a harder time achieving celebrity status.

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Current celebs may need to be powerful or beautiful, but in the future, at least from what we've seen in the present, it is the thinkers and innovators that get remembered.

Plenty of celebrities get remembered too. Ever heard of Marilyn Monroe? It's pop culture, this is just how it works.

How many Marilyns do you remember from ancient Greece? How many thinkers?

That's a really misleading rhetorical question. Attic actors wore masks and were expected to melt into their roles; what would you say if an Attican asked you "How many theatrical technicians do you remember?" Something more appropriate would be "How many playwrights do you remember?" Many poets not only wrote their own scripts but also directed them, having bigger roles than our famous contemporaries. History notes quite a few. I can name four right off the top of my head: Aristophanes, Aeschylus, Diogenes (different man from the philosopher) and Euripides.

OP (ish) here. You've definitely made me reevaluate my statement. And for that, I thank you.

A fair point, to be sure.

Who is better known amongst the (anglo) general public - Louis XIV, the Sun King, probably the most long-lived, powerful, and reformative monarch in Europe's history... Or Marie Antoinnette, famed utterer of a vapid phrase which she probably didn't even say?

Granting (probably correctly) that Marie Antoinette is better known, the fact that you can pick out two examples with a particular relationship doesn't tell us a lot about the distributions they're drawn from. Looking at rough contemporaries, I would expect Descartes is better known than either, and Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Voltaire aren't exactly obscure.

Great point. I should also note, that when I said innovators and thinkers, that definitely included any politically related character. I'd like to think that Marie Antoinette is mostly popular because of her involvement with the French Revolution, and all of the characters relevant to that.

Well, there's always women like Helen of Troy in history.

You never know, Marilyn could go that way. Everyone knows her name, but I'd bet already many people don't even really remember how she looked, sounded like, or what she acted in.

Sure. My point was not that there were zero.

It's not a great example. From the Ancient world, the thinkers were the only ones capable of recording such things, so we have a bit of a sample bias!

Granted.

Wow, how many films and photographs was ancient Greece putting out way back then?

> You're a bit filter bubbled.

And the developed world in general is filter bubbled by the mass media.

Fair point.

One could say that an intellectual's goal should be to get as little filter bubbled as possible, but then we'd all end up like the cranky people on lesswrong.com.

'cause there's no bubble there, at all.

My favorite example: http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/LessWrong#Roko.27s_Basilisk

Eh, I think that's overblown, but yeah.

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