It is funny how few of these people I know anything about. I always thought I was culturally aware, but obviously I still have a way to go. Or it may just be that most of the intellectuals I know about and read are dead. Who knows?!"The 2005 Global Intellectuals Poll is a list of the 100 most important living public intellectuals in the world which has been compiled in November 2005 by the left-wing Prospect Magazine (UK), on the basis of a reader's ballot comprising more than 20,000 votes. The following are the names of the top 10 according to its classification:
- Noam Chomsky
- Umberto Eco
- Richard Dawkins
- Václav Havel
- Christopher Hitchens
- Paul Krugman
- Jürgen Habermas
- Amartya Sen
- Jared Diamond
- Salman Rushdie
As it happens with many free votes over the Internet, the poll may be a victim of organized voting campaigns and biases introduced by the nationality and language of the organizer. This may be true in the present case, since the number of Iranian intellectuals represented in the list is above that of entire Latin America, Nigeria has almost the totality of votes in the entire Africa and France is abnormally underrepresented.
In addition, the poll suffers from a wide spread of votes between the first and the last places, i.e., most of the nominees below the 50th rank have less than 100 votes. This fact makes the list quite unreliable.
The long list choices have also been criticised. According to a recent comment, "there are quite a few bum notes: assorted posers, dullards, charlatans and pseudo-intellectual crashing this list."-From Wikipedia.
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