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Great? Angela Merkel, Maragaret Thatcher, Frauke Petry. Whatever your political persuasion there is, i'm sure at least one of those you would not describe as '

• croon 10y ago
  I'm not sure what your point is, regardless of my view on those examples. It wasn't an emphatic "This is great in every single scenario", but I very much think that it has a much larger chance of being great than the alternative, which is the long form of what I wrote.
• burkaman 10y ago
  And you would probably also not describe that one as "reasonable", which is one of the criteria.
• soundwave106 10y ago
  No matter what you think of them as far as policy goes, two of those three have ended up being very dominant politicians in their nation and time. Margaret Thatcher is near the top of most historical rankings of UK PMs in most surveys (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_rankings_of_Prime_Ministers_of_the_United_Kingdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_rankings_of_Prime_M...). It's probably too early to tell whether Merkel is considered "good" or "bad" from a historical perspective, but her term as chancellor has been quite influential, enough for many publications to describe you as "de-facto leader of the EU" (and for Forbes to name Merkel as the 2nd most powerful person in the world in 2015). Obviously the converse exists, but Thatcher and Merkel seem like good examples for reasonable, well-educated scientists doing "great" in politics.