I hope this isn’t too politically volatile, but Milton Friedman.
I don’t mean this in the sense of “Oh, his views are so wonderfully rational compared to everybody else’s!” Rather, he actually influenced me in how to think.
Capitalism and Freedom had a sort of pattern where he would take something conventionally considered an insoluble social problem, poke at it for a minute, and easily come up with at least one conceivably practical improvement. It would be original, but only because nobody else was bothering to poke around. (In Friedman’s case, the goal was usually to refute the idea that “It’s impossible to improve X without government.” But the thinking style could be applied to a variety of goals. A claim of impossibility should be shaken a little bit before accepted.)
In everything I’ve read of his, technical and non-technical, there’s a certain cheerful, reasonable attitude; he seemed to think that humans are good at problem-solving, that we actually can think and that it’s worthwhile to try. That made a great personal impact on me, at a point in my life when I believed the contrary.
I hope this isn’t too politically volatile, but Milton Friedman.
I don’t mean this in the sense of “Oh, his views are so wonderfully rational compared to everybody else’s!” Rather, he actually influenced me in how to think.
Capitalism and Freedom had a sort of pattern where he would take something conventionally considered an insoluble social problem, poke at it for a minute, and easily come up with at least one conceivably practical improvement. It would be original, but only because nobody else was bothering to poke around. (In Friedman’s case, the goal was usually to refute the idea that “It’s impossible to improve X without government.” But the thinking style could be applied to a variety of goals. A claim of impossibility should be shaken a little bit before accepted.)
In everything I’ve read of his, technical and non-technical, there’s a certain cheerful, reasonable attitude; he seemed to think that humans are good at problem-solving, that we actually can think and that it’s worthwhile to try. That made a great personal impact on me, at a point in my life when I believed the contrary.