I was so inspired by pg's essay, I thought I'd start a thread for the rest of us. To keep things manageable, how about a 5 hero limit with one line for each.
My dad. He has a work ethic like no one else I know. It doesn't matter how intractable a problem seems, he always stays calm and just starts working on it. No panic, no hesitation. He's getting close to 60 now, and he still gets up at 5:30 every day and he can still solve mechanical problems that none of the younger workers can.
Really an amazing man, in his own little corner of the world. He's also the only person whose advice I trust because he's the only one I know that thinks like me. My friends and acquaintances don't take things as seriously as my father and I. My dad has that extreme practicality that comes from growing up poor. He's the only one that I ask myself what he would do in tough situations.
And he's loyal to a fault. I know without a doubt that he would give his life for his family. There's few humans in the modern world that have that kind of nobility. Indeed, he seems like a creature from an earlier age, sturdy, stoic, rejecting everything I dislike about modern culture. Maybe I get that from him.
Edit: All the famous people, they're too abstract for me. I admire some of them, sure. I'm grateful for what they've done. However, they can never be my "heroes".
At the moment...Ernest Gallo. We'll see how that pans out come morning.
EDIT:
My real list:
1. Nietzsche. Some others have mentioned him. Too often he's thought of as a proto-Nazi, and maybe he is, at least in terms of attitude. But every reading lends to the belief that above all else he's an endlessly untapped pool of thought.
2. Debussy. I'm increasingly convinced that he is Beethoven/Bach/Mozart's superior. Each among the latter wrote endless meadering or cliche'd passages. Debussy produced consisent note-by-note perfection, combined with experimentation. He, however, has no "great works". They all stand about the same, even La Mer.
3. Rachmaninov. Reached some of the greatest possible heights, though he is full of mistakes and lapses. The Paganinni variations sits on a pedestal along with the 9th, Brahms' requiem, and Bach's Bm mass.
4. Chopin. A composer of limited scope and a laughable arranger, still has the incomparable distinction of writing the world's greatest melody, in the E flat major etude. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-idMTyc0AY
Richard Branson - for a hugely successful business man, he has done things right. He truly seems to care about his employees, customers and profit in a respectable way. That isn't common for a billionaire.
Barack Obama - The game of politics forces the players to be tireless self promoters, but somehow Barack manages to come off as genuine, honest and more concerned with civic duty than personal gain.
Limiting it to 5 makes it tough! Right off the top I'm going to remove family members and Paul Graham from consideration (and encourage others to do so to obviate the need for any "obligatory mentions").
After a couple minutes thinking about it, I've got (in no particular order):
Hank Rearden (fictional) - A brilliant, but "normal" engineer and businessman breaks free of society's shackles through his ethics and determination. I try to channel him every time I sit down to work.
Jack Kerouac - Spent his life living, writing, dreaming and merging the three wherever he could. Maintained an ambitious vision of his life's work and actually finished it.
George Clooney - the guy emanates class.
Alexander Mackendrick - His teachings and notes on film directing are a tour de force. Creativity meets pragmatism.
Jeff Temple - Taught astrophysics at PA Governors' School for the Sciences. It wouldn't be much of a stretch to say that he's the reason I applied to MIT.
OK, I'm going to cheat now and add a couple extra mentors and friends whose heroics could scarcely fit one book, let alone one line.
Hal Abelson - My undergraduate advisor. Helped write SICP (one of the most important works I've read), spearheaded OpenCourseWare, showed me the intersection of technology and policy.
Patrick Winston - My undergrad project advisor. Headed the AI Lab, brilliant speaker, and a formative influence who molded my appreciation of "important work."
And one more cheat:
Richard Feynman - Great thinker, teacher, and human being.
Stephen Bohne: My social studies teacher in High School. His was a restless mind, always teaching, always learning, and always challenging us to greater things. He got in trouble a lot.
Mark Jones: My mentor as a nurse. Up until him, I'd been surrounded by up-tight nurses who worried about more about a bed bath or a clean patient room while the patient was dying. I could tell a lot of stories about Mark. Like the day he cut his underwear off himself and threw them at another nurse while doing CPR without missing a beat. Or, the day he was doing chest compressions in one hand and starting an IV in the other. Again, not missing a beat. He taught me that the most important thing was to take good care of the patient and have fun doing it.
Francis Schaeffer: For teaching me that I didn't have to check my mind at the door to be a Christian.
Paul Graham (But not in a creepy or a suck up kinda way). His communicating how the startup world works and how wealth creation works really changed me. I was raised in the Banana Republics of Central America during the 70's and 80's, and really had no idea how the US worked, and how the whole money thing worked. Paul's writings on the subject 4-5 years ago started me on a journey to where I am today. I'm grateful for that. He also taught me to give back. It's important.
Sorry, but I feel the one line limit changes this from a potentially interesting and insightful thread to an endless sea of lists of names.
Richard Dawkins: I remember when I first saw the link to his documentary "The root of all evil?" on reddit. I was quickly enchanted by his ability to beautifully relate ideas and convey their wonder and simplicity. (Although I had heard of Richard Dawkings before, I didn't learn who the captivating narrator was until after watching.) Later on, I was impressed with his ability to attack the core of arguments and sidestep being pushed into a corner by misrepresentations and side-arguments.
Ayn Rand: After being taught for a decade that "morality" was synonymous with obedience to authority and a repressive code of social behavior, in middle school I began to quietly rebel and privately switch the meanings of moral and immoral. Then, I was introduced to Ayn Rand. Aside from the uplifting nature of her demonstrations of the positive nature of selfish and egoistic concepts, I was greatly relieved to find that I did not have to submit to quietly seething against society's oppressive definitions of the terms; I did not have to mentally wander without a way to think about what I deep down considered truly good.
Ron Paul: He showed me that politics could be more than something for citizens accepting of the status quo to squabble over and disenchanted, apathetic souls to cynically joke about. In addition, I am always impressed with his ability to never be backed into a corner, to turn the tables on those attempting to cast him and his ideas in a negative light, and his honesty and ability to get back to the core issues.
Jared Diamond: While I do not know too much about the man himself, I am nevertheless extremely impressed with the ideas presented in Guns, Germs, and Steel, especially his emphasis on chasing ideas to their root. With its emphasis on patterns in history, it has completed changed my outlook on history, the importance of individuals, and human nature. Furthermore, what is perhaps the most important idea in the book, that all useful technologies and other inventions over areas and good periods of time if and only if political homogeneity does not preclude adoption, has changed my views on government. I strive to share the same emphasis on searching for the root cause, which I suppose goes along well with the hacker's focus on abstraction and elegance; many essays I have written, including all of my SAT and ACT essays (practice and real), have traced simple questions about life back to either behavioral psychology, evolutionary psychology -- or ideas present in Guns, Germs and Steel (or some combination thereof).
Evariste Galois - pulled the world's most famous all-nighter by writing down all the math in his head for posterity, then got killed in a duel in the morning.
Magic Johnson - did whatever it took to make everyone else around him better.
Rabbi Harold Kushner, who turned his personal tragedy into sharing spirituality and humanity in a manner I have found nowhere else.
Laura Barrett Mikesell - You never forget the teacher who actually encouraged you to do great things.
My grandfathers - made unimaginable sacrifices by coming to this country (U.S.) so that I could have this great life.
Ernest Rutherford - Discovered the proton and originated the orbital theory of the atom. Director of a lab that launched the careers of many other famous physicists.
William Pickering - Director of NASA's JPL during the moon years. Held the position for 22 years.
Peter Jackson - Created a movie industry out of nothing in a country thousands of miles away from Hollywood.
Sir Edmund Hillary - Helped build hundreds of schools and hospitals in Nepal. Climbed Everest. Crossed the Antarctic in a hacked together tractor. Jet-boated up the Ganges.
Charles Upham - Won the Victoria's Cross twice during WW II.
Using pg's criteria, the first one that comes to mind is Eugine Hutz (front man Gogol Bordello).
Like others pg mentioned, he writes the music for himself not for the audiences. The sincerity and lack of compromise really comes through - his music is an unconventional blend of gypsy and punk (go to a concert and for the first time ever you'll see a mosh pit in front of an accordionist), many of his songs have a lot of humour (something painfully lacking from most music), he sings half in Ukrainian etc and yet him and Gogol Bordello have achieved a fair amount of success.
I know it may sound a bit stupid since its 12 year olds would usually have music heroes, but I'm 24 and he's the only musician I'd ever call a hero.
It may be just me, but his music, lyrics and actions all all exude the same message: do what you love doing, be a decent human being, be sincere and you'll do alright. And that's an awesome message, regardless of what you choose to do in life.
John Lennon - turned songcraft into the most powerful political tool possible
William Shakespeare - will anybody ever reach greater heights of understanding about the human character?
Terry Fox - when was the last time you ran across Canada with one leg?
John von Neumann - there wasn't a ground-breaking field in the 20th Century he wasn't a part of
Wayne Gretzky - he dominated his sport like no other, even though he was a small man playing a large man's game. He was put on this Earth to play hockey, and he followed his passion.
Roald Amundsen --- The first man to reach the south pole. It's not the accomplishment itself, but the way it was accomplished. If interested, read "The Last Place on Earth: Scott and Amundsen's Race to the South Pole."
Warren Buffett. He went from role model to hero when he donated his fortune to someone else's foundation. No one does that.
Steve Albini. I love his songs, but he's a hero for how he thinks and writes about music and the music industry. His "The Problem With Music," his review of Slint's "Spiderland," and his "Remembering a Friend" (about Silkworm's Michael Dahlquist) could be Paul Graham essays.
Judith Martin (Miss Manners). What PG wrote about Wodehouse and Austen applies to Martin, especially her early work, which is among the funniest, most sane, best written, and most useful writing I've ever encountered.
Bill James (the baseball writer). More than anyone else, he taught me how to think and how to share my thoughts with others.
S.R. Ranganathan. _The Five Laws of Library Science_ is fantastic. And his colon classification system is pretty great as well.
Richard Feynman - For his integrity and for insisting on skepticism and rigor in everything.
Robert Heinlein - Along with John W. Campbell, he brought science fiction away from ray-guns and bug-eyed monsters and made it interesting and thought-provoking. A lot of people went into science and engineering because of his influence.
Raoul Wallenberg - He stood up to the Nazis and Hungarian fascists to prevent thousands of people from being sent to the death camps.
Douglas Bader - PG mentioned him in his essay; this is a man who lost his legs in a flying accident. His disability didn't stop him from joining the Royal Air Force and piloting a fighter plane during the War. Not once did he feel sorry for himself; instead he was flying over Europe killing Nazis.
Norm Zadah - He went from being a professor of CS at Stanford to running a hedge fund and being a championship poker player. When a female friend of his was rejected from Playboy, he went ahead and started his own magazine, Perfect 10. So far, he's lost nearly $46 million on Perfect 10, and he's switched to web distribution, but he doesn't care, he likes his work. Truly a renaissance man.
Good topic, but one line doesn't do enough justice. I want to know why people chose who they did. So forgive the length of my reply.
1) Personally, I'd have to say Matthew Halfant. I worked for him at VM Labs around y2k. Apart from his prodigious mathematical ability, he was a collaborator with Abelson and Sussman (of SICP fame) back in the 80s. More importantly he was a very kind mentor to me, and a great teacher. I still recall at my interview how he remarked it was nice to have a 'young fellow such as myself come aboard because I could teach them a thing or two.' Yeah, right! His willingness to hire me is what brought me to Silicon Valley.
I only wish I had asked him more about Lisp :)
2) I don't know Woz personally, but he's awesome because he achieved the pinnacle of 'ultimate engineer' through intense dedication to his craft, and also (and equally importantly) by retaining a playful, childlike attitude throughout his career.
2. for showing that it's possible to succeed without selling out, Whedon.
3. for challenging me to stick to my beliefs, J.D. Salinger.
4. for a glimpse of honor, compassion, and beauty, Harper Lee.
5. Anne Frank.
One German-born girl, three American writers, and one fictional character. On the surface
they don't look like super-heroes, but all have affected the way I think and view the world.
What's sobering is that none of my heroes are on anybody else's list.
I could list my heroes, but they're basically the same set of people that I already quote here constantly. Mostly people who have made major contributions to the philosophy and culture of the Internet, plus a few others from the social sciences and education theory.
Kaczynski was just a dedicated psycho whose only hack was to show how hard it can be for society to deal with people like him. He may have dicked around with math a little but to call him "brilliant" is a mistake along the lines of Clarke's third law.
Tell that to the families? Traces of sarcasm aside, police analysis showed him to have intelligence significantly above average. Sorry if you have a loftier value for the word 'brilliant'.
Really an amazing man, in his own little corner of the world. He's also the only person whose advice I trust because he's the only one I know that thinks like me. My friends and acquaintances don't take things as seriously as my father and I. My dad has that extreme practicality that comes from growing up poor. He's the only one that I ask myself what he would do in tough situations.
And he's loyal to a fault. I know without a doubt that he would give his life for his family. There's few humans in the modern world that have that kind of nobility. Indeed, he seems like a creature from an earlier age, sturdy, stoic, rejecting everything I dislike about modern culture. Maybe I get that from him.
Edit: All the famous people, they're too abstract for me. I admire some of them, sure. I'm grateful for what they've done. However, they can never be my "heroes".