Foreign Policy Magazine has identified what it considers the top 100 public intellectuals. Now they want our help to pick the top 20. On one of their webpages, you can vote for your top 5. Here were my choices:

1. Peter Singer
2. Steven Pinker
3. Richard Dawkins
4. J. Craig Venture
5. Steven Levitt

As with any voting system to chose the top anything, it’s far from perfect. Everyone brings their own bias, not least of which is familiarity bias. I voted for those because they were members of the subset of listed intellectuals that I actually know about. Still, it’ll be interesting to see who winds up in the top 20 list.

Who did/would you vote for?