The BBC has revealed the results of its competition Britain 's Brainiest to find talent. But identifying the top public intellectual is a tricky task

Well, I can 't say that I no' t warned. If I produced a list of 300 British public intellectuals told me that I 'd never eat lunch in this town again (to borrow Julia Phillips' s famous line about Hollywood). Some people were angry because they weren 't on the list, others were incensed by the was included, and anyone else would the whole exercise as idiotic / useless / trivial complaint (delete as appropriate). And all of these predictions proved accurate.

So why do it?

The answer goes back to a dinner I have a few months earlier in a college. I was sitting next to a bright young neuroscientists and it turned out that we both read Christopher Hitchens 's book on George Orwell. "Who are today's means of Orwell?" Mused my colleague. I rattled a few names, and he replied with some other suggestions. I scribbled on a napkin and then it went to other guests and asked for their suggestions on the leading public intellectuals. At the end of the evening I had a napkin with some 90 names on it.

The problem was that the list was completely incoherent. It had many famous "name" (Richard Dawkins has been a common choice, for example), but others, the mysterious, dark, or were just plain weird. Many of the names were of British thinkers, but it also gave Americans (North and South), Europeans, Indians, Japanese and some Chinese on the list.

All in all, it seemed a hopeless confusion - for obvious reasons. There was no common understanding of what "\ public intellectuals" as \, for example, and even less about what 'leading "meant. So it was clear that only compile a list of suggestions as he would lead nowhere. From this it was only a short step to the thought that if I compiled a list, could the people respond then we might be able to clarify the definition of public intellectuals and the thinkers whose ideas really shape public opinion in this country. So the list that we on 8 May was released, as the intended starta journey not a destination.

How naive can you get? I had the first law of lists that people take them at face value and respond accordingly rather ignored. Why Kazuo Ishiguro was omitted, fumed reader, not John Le Carr?, Iain Sinclair, Marilynne Robinson, Russell Hoban, Armando Iannucci and Chris Morris to mention? As could be Colm T?ib?n, Fintan O 'Toole or Seamus Heaney conceivable considered "British"? (Answer:. Because they constantly published by British newspapers and magazines) Why are John Dunn, Quentin Skinner, but not? Why not Geoff Mulgan Matthew Taylor? And where was Juliet Mitchell? And so on, ad infinitum. In some cases, the explanation for seemingly inexplicable omission, which publishes the people in question are not in the publications that I consulted in drawing up the list. But in other cases, I 'm afraid that the only explanation that one of Dr. Johnson to the lady who had asked why the dictionary defines offered is wrong "Fessel" as "the knee of a horse' . "Ignorance, Madam," said the great man, "pure ignorance."

What readers 'reactions really stressed, however, were the main difficulties with which I began, namely the twin problems of reaching a definition of "public intellectuals", the sharp enough to great thinkers, without the field to one identify some genuis and arriving in an objective measure of "impact".

On the definitional front, it was clear that Stefan Collini 's idea - a public intellectual as someone who has achieved the distinction in a scientific or artistic field, before it enters the public debate - would exclude many of the people on my original list .

In this context, it 's interesting to see that the BBC has effectively adopted these criteria in the search for young radio professionals with flair. The talent search was a collaboration between Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council. "We felt like," said Matthew Dodd, head of speech programming on Radio 3, "that the people in the science, we have had to do it very often published books that have been established on air regularly. We are looking for people with the view of the most interesting ideas who want to share their knowledge and can make fantastic programs. "The scientists were awarded in a number of full-day workshops and auditions from 57 finalists nominated from over a thousand applications selected.

The definition of another author on the subject, Richard Posner suggested, more accommodating than Collini 's. Posner defines a public intellectual as "one, the general ideas from history, philosophy, political science, economics, law, literature, ideas that are part of the cultural intellectual tradition of the world are to current events address, usually of a political benefits obtained or ideological flavor ... in the popular media, whether in the form of op-ed pieces, TV appearances, signing full-page ads or writing magazine articles or books to the general audience. "

But even if you identify public intellectuals, how do you measure their impact? In his study, Posner uses three metrics - scientific citations, links, and media mentions - better than nothing, but very unsatisfactory for comparison purposes because they aren 't relevant for everyone. One commentator on our 8th May suggested that it might be better suited for something like Klout in modern conditions list. Klout tried \ measure "impact" in social media. He does this by counting on Twitter Retweets, one trailer, memberships, and people you everything that you influence your \ calculate mention "true \ reach" on Twitter, and now has similar things on Facebook. The result is a measure of an individual 's "Klout".

Upon closer inspection: Klout doesn \ s 't look very convincing, it' basically a measure of how active you are on Twitter and Facebook.

So the problem of finding objective measures of an intellectual's impact remains unsolved. In the old days, media mentions (eg via searches on Lexis-Nexis) might have been relevant, but the decline of print media will render such metrics decreasingly useful. And the metrics provided by online services like Klout, Google hits or YouTube views seem just as flaky. This provides an interesting opportunity for a new generation of PhD students in sociology: find rigorous ways of measuring a thinker's influence.

In the meantime, we are back to Keynes 's celebrated observation that the ideas of economists and political philosophers, "both when they are right and when they are wrong, are greater than commonly thought". Quite so. But wouldn 't it be nice if we knew who they are?