27 answers answered between 2010 and 2026 one of 5 in 9 Questions
Originally asked
Vox, to writers and thinkers, 9 Questions, 2017
Vox used this as one of nine fixed questions in its 2017 series on intellectual habits.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
Public figures who have answered a question like this elsewhere. Quoted from the source shown, not written for FLAPSS.
The National Review, on occasion. An attempt to understand the brain wiring of as many points of view as I can.
I read the New Yorker film critic Anthony Lane. Don’t always agree with his opinions on movies but he’s always deadly funny.
I disagree with virtually everything I’ve ever seen on Fox News, but I watch it anyway.
I chose this book because it’s written by a physicist, very elderly now, who has spent all his life working in controlled fusion. The title is a take on Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth . The first part of the book is Chen claiming that fusion is indispensable for our future, and why. He has a very readable section on climate change, a section on fossil fueled energy and a section on renewables—in which I disagree with him strongly, because he denigrates solar energy—and then goes on to say that we need fusion.
Even though I’m not a utilitarian, and so I tend to disagree with Singer in terms of the general framework, this book literally changed my life. I read it many years ago, in the 1990s, when I was in Knoxville, Tennessee.
That’s where I disagree with her. I don’t actually think happiness is a meaning of life, though lots of people assume that. Still, happiness is something folks care about, and she gives the best discussion I know, of the nature of happiness and the ways that one can practically accomplish it.
Nobody has answered this one yet.