What have been the greatest intellectual achievements? | Hacker News Reader

What have been the greatest intellectual achievements?

thinkingcomplete.blogspot.com

42 pointsGormisdomai48 comments

Hi all, post author here. Thanks for all the feedback. Although the idea of a definitive list would be nice, in practice a lot of it will always be very subjective. I wrote this up pretty quickly, which is evident from some of the omissions (Maxwell, the Internet(!), etc). But I've learned a lot from various suggestions I've received, which was the point of doing this, and am currently writing them all up to add to the list.

Seems like a vary bias/incomplete list to me.

No guass, euler, ohm/kirchhoff, and many more people who made huge leaps for human umderstanding/achievement.

Gauss and Euler would probably each need their own lists...

More notably, the author missed Maxwell's equations, the development of the solid-state transistor, and the creation of the integrated circuit.

Yeah, Maxwell's equations occurs to me immediately. And Heaviside's reformulation of them.

- The internet (TCP/IP) and world wide web (HTML, HTTP).

History of the Internet:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Internet

History of the World Wide Web:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_World_Wide_Web

- Relational algebra, databases, Linked Data (RDF,).

Relational algebra:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relational_algebra

Relational database:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relational_database

Linked Data:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linked_data

RDF:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_Description_Framework

Epidemiology (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Snow)

Yes! I was thinking some math or physics breakthrough but in terms lives saved I'd have to agree with you.

In terms of math then I'd pick statistics probably. Even though I personally never quite liked it as much in school, at least not as much as calculus or linear algebra.

The development of the scientific method, as advocated by Francis Bacon and other empiricists seems to me to underlie so many of the achievements that followed Bacon.

He also discovered that heat is motion, so the dude practiced what he preached to good success.

Bill Tutte breaking the Lorenz cipher in a fortnight using only pen and paper, and having never even seen the machine surely has to at least count as impressive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._T._Tutte#Diagnosing_the_cip...

Glad to see the Socratic method in the list.

BTW there is a guy on youtube using it to discuss religious beliefs with random people. It's fantastic.

youtube link? thanks

Is it Anthony Magnabosco's channel? "Street Epistemology"?

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCocP40a_UvRkUAPLD5ezLIQ

The UNDHR (UN Declaration of Human Rights): [Equality,]

http://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/

The numerical system developed by Indian hindu sages without which there would be no maths or binary

The discovery of the Boson,by Sathendra Nath Bose

Yoga

I concede the first point, but I wouldn’t really consider bosons and yoga to be as important as a numerical system.

EDIT: Also, Bose, along with Einstein, did not “discover” bosons; instead, they created a model for them. Experimental verification came later.

I was going to say the concept of zero, but your answer works well enough.

Some less obvious omissions on this list are major theological developments:

- Zoroastrianism's development of dualistic cosmology, i.e., that the present universe is locked in a cosmic struggle between ultimate good and ultimate evil (which underpins the modern theological foundations of Western religions like Christianity and Islam).

- The Vedic development of karma, which is similarly one of the central foundations of Eastern religions

- Confucian and other Axial Age Chinese philosophies (although Confucian is the main one well-known to modern Westerners)

There's also a tendency to favor theoretical developments over practical developments that preceded theory by a long time. Three-field and four-field crop rotations, ship keels, square-rigged ships, corned gunpowder, double-entry bookkeeping--these are all "minor" inventions that are little-known in the popular sphere that truly made impressive advancements in agriculture, sailing, warfare, economics.

At the same time, some of these developments are definitely overrated:

Copernicus's theory is actually almost completely and entirely wrong, and certainly defied evidence that even contemporaries were more than eager to point out (the lack of stellar aberration being the biggest problem of all). The only thing that it got right didn't even originate with Copernicus (it's Aristarchus who is the earliest known proponent of such a theory, and Copernicus was definitely aware of Aristarchus).

Similarly, Freud, while popular in the popular imagination of psychology, is generally considered almost completely discredited in his own field.

Comparing Kahnemann's work with Newton's is absurd.

Indeed, stopping to rank everything on absurd scales would be a great intellectual achievement for humanity.

That's what I thought browsing the comments.

As a scientist, it is important to attribute ideas to the people that put them forward.

But the essence of science is about the preservation, dissemination, and most importantly researching knowledge.

Whenever the topic of attribution comes up, it seems to quickly escalate from giving due credit to sciences politics.

There are several items in the list that seem glaringly out of place

Which ones? Note that an item being on the list doesn't mean it's a comparable achievement to all others on the list, just that it's above an implicit and slightly vague threshold.

On Kahnemann in particular, I was quite influenced by this series of tributes to him: https://www.edge.org/conversation/daniel_kahneman-on-kahnema...

This list seems very Western. Are there Eastern developments that should be added?

Some Muslim and Middle Eastern developments that are missing from this list too (off the top of my head):

* Al Khawarizmi's development of algebra

* Al Zahrawi's creation of commonly used surgical instruments

* Ibn Sina's Canon

* Ibn Al Haytham's description of optics and how human vision works

* Ibn Khaldun as the founder of modern sociology.

Ibn Khaldun should replace Adam Smith on the list for modern economic theory as well.

Al Khwarizmi should not be credited with the development of algebra. Al Khwarizmi wrote a compendium, and algebra was used at least 2,000 years prior to Al Khwarizmi.

Similarly, Ibn Sina's Canon was a compendium of existing practices from the time.

Those two compendiums have been extremely valuable, but one shouldn't classify compendium's as great intellectual achievements.

When discussing optics of human vision, don't stop at Ibn Al Haytham, but include Al Razi and Ibn Sina. You should also include Galen, whose prior work was the foundational achievement.

> Al Khwarizmi should not be credited with the development of algebra. Al Khwarizmi wrote a compendium, and algebra was used at least 2,000 years prior to Al Khwarizmi.

He formalized it from what I recall. Formalization is as important as the initial discovery.

> but one shouldn't classify compendium's as great intellectual achievements.

You seem to be quite certain that both of these compendiums lacked any original contributions from their authors. May I ask why that is the case?

No. I won't say that there were no original contributions from the authors. They were written by highly intelligent individuals who knew their fields. I was attempting to say that compendiums in and of themselves are not amongst the greatest of intellectual achievements.

I'd put Buddhist systematic philosophy of radical selflessness in there, seems like a major strand of human development.

- CRISPR/Cas9, CRISPR/Cpf1

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CRISPR

Cas9:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cas9

CRISPR/Cpf1:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CRISPR/Cpf1

- Tissue Nanotransfection

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tissue_nanotransfection

J.S. Bach's Wohltemperiertes Clavier

Completely agree. The lack of anything between Socrates and Copernicus alone shows the distinct bias of the list. Not a single Scholastic? No mention of achievements outside of hard science or mathematics. If the author specified that as his area of focus, we might be able to have a more profitable discussion.

I've received a fair few suggestions on insights in the humanities which I'm currently writing up to add to the post. I considered some of the Scholastics but felt that they hadn't had an impact on modern thought in the same ways as most of the others (which is a relatively good proxy for "correctness", which is one component of being "great", which is a bad metric but I have to draw the line somewhere). Would you disagree?

Also, I agree that there are some amazing artistic achievements. To keep things concise, I wasn't focusing on them here (I'll make that explicit now).

How do you define modern thought? How do you measure impact on it?

Suggestion to the future generations on Mars reading this in their archives...this would be a pretty good list in case you look for inspiration setting up monuments and busts in your libraries.

- Time, Calendars

Time > History of the calendar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time#History_of_the_calendar

- Standard units of measure (QUDT URIs)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Units_of_measurement

CV Raman - Raman light scattering and amplification, pretty much being used everyday now in fibre communication

The great writers like Shakespeare and Proust probably deserve a spot on this list.

Also I'm not sure what Said is doing on that list with all those geniuses. Not saying he isn't great, but why him?

Mathematics

How about Tesla?!

Nikola Tesla > AC (alternating current) and the induction motor:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikola_Tesla#AC_and_the_induct...

Induction motor:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induction_motor

AI?

In hindsight, it might be the ultimate achievement.

McCarthy, as one of the founders (+ Lisp!) should probably be there.

Why is Darwin in there? Everything in his model of evolution has failed. He's just a popularizer of evolution.

In Origin he actually acknowledges, though not too deeply, several of natural selection's failures to explain evolution entirely. And it seems unlikely that "everything" in his model has failed. Why Only Us by Chomsky/Berwick point out several of these failures in good detail, esp. with reference to language. But Darwin/Wallace were right on some pretty big things as far as I can tell, but I welcome your argument contrariwise.

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