Celebrities are barely celebrities to me

I know Justin and even the guy that memes on him Pierre. Just learning about Brian. @strutheo is more of a celebrity than these three chumps.

@KeenenWatts If it were not for Brian Mulroney, I would not have been able to cross a bridge to legally drink when I was 18. I would not have been able to take a cab from Ottawa (at last call) to Hull so we could get another round because it closes at 3 am instead of 2 am. I would have needed a passport for any of that without (soon to be) Sir Mulroney. At least have the respect to spell the man's name correctly. 🇨🇦 🍺 🏒

@MikeNovak Yeah people where I live did stuff and made laws too. Doesn't make them celebrities.

@KeenenWatts niche internet microcelebrity confirmed! more (in)famous than mulroney :O

People have to be wacky out of touch to think that a prime minister of Canada and a director who was making award winning films are recently as two years ago are not celebrities. All of these deaths got major press coverage in their respective countries and two of them got NYT obituaries.

People are voting based on their mana invested, not on an basis in objective reality.

@ZacharyParker I think they should count, but I also think some people's definition of celebrity is based more on name recognition. And I had never heard of any of them before.

@ZacharyParker I don’t consider public figures and celebrities to be the same thing. Is Monica Lewinsky a celebrity? Molly Jong-Fast? The Central Park Five? Ted Bundy? Greta Thunberg?

@ClubmasterTransparent Oxford English Dictionary defines celebrity as "a famous person". By that definition all of them qualify. 1,083,300 living people have Wikipedia articles out of an estimated 8,000,000,000 people making up a little over 0.01% of the population of the world. I think by quantitative measures a Wikipedia article is a good metric. As far as qualitative metrics, a NYT obituary seems like it clears pretty much any reasonable standard.

Going off of name recognition or general vibes opens this up to bias. A plane full of professional soccer players from Indonesia could collide with the private jet of a somewhat notable Korean businessman and everyone could just vote no because they're not sure if athletes and businessmen count and moreover they've never heard of any of them before because this website is disproportionately American.

@TimothyJohnson5c16 Name recognition opens this up to major bias, especially since Manifold's userbase is disproportionately American vs the global population who all have a concept of celebrity.

@ZacharyParker Voting no purely on personal impression; I have no mana invested in this, fwiw.

@ZacharyParker It's a very USA perspective that being the leader of a country makes you a celebrity.

@ZacharyParker That lecture left me skeptical enough to look it up. You are correct, up to a point.

@ZacharyParker By the OED's definition I agree all three of these people are celebrities. The problem is everyone has their own individual definition of celebrity. When people hear celebrity they think Dua Lipa and Tom Brady: people who bask in the limelight. Politicians can be celebrities... but I think it depends. I'd call Obama and Trump celebrities since they regularly cultivate attention, but not George W Bush.

Personally I voted no before I read the OED's definition, because that fits with my understanding of celebrity.

What do you think? Are any of these people celebrities? 🤩🎤⭐️