What have been the greatest intellectual achievements? (2017)

https://www.thinkingcomplete.com/2017/09/what-have-been-greatest-intellectual.html

by o4c • 3 months ago

57 91 3 months ago

thinkingcomplete.com

lukan4• 3 months ago

(2017) is missing

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15255847

o4c• 3 months ago

Fixed it. Thank you!

compounding_it• 3 months ago

Be modest. A lot was accomplished before you were born.

Humans are incredible. Leaving the planet and taking a trip on the moon and possibly mars someday is no small feat.

We just need to fix our planet. Or to be honest, stop ruining it so it heals itself.

smokel2• 3 months ago

Humans are also, possibly apart from dogs, the only beings that think humans are incredible. If we take any other entity in the universe, then chances are they think pretty lowly of humans and their cherished intelligence, if at all.

6510• 3 months ago

We don't have a frame of reference. Compared to similar creatures we could be pathetic or impressive.

Personally I'm very impressed how much we've accomplished with our crappy intellect and destructive nature.

dofdial• 3 months ago

+ using trees to form Pen & Paper for knowledge transfer.

douglee650• 3 months ago

Aren't special and general relativity the grand leviathans of intellectual achievement? Pure thought unlocking the nature of existence.

uncanny23• 3 months ago

Modern information theory is wrong. Information is not the fundamental essence of existential reality, potential resolving into state is. This subtle difference propagates into the modern intellectual lies we tell ourselves. Reality is not “states.” It is “potential” resolving into “states” through constructive and destructive interference. The “number of states allowable in a system” is a function of boundary conditions of potential distribution.

I think you will find this agrees with Shannon’s original point and purpose as expressed in his seminal equation. Every interpretation since beginning with “the state of …” or “number of states …” is a misapprehension exhibiting the intellectual fallibility of our times.

This is only one for instance.

Read my threads, if you can find your way around my claims of the voices in our heads being real and waging a secret war among us, and the UFOs are actually a long familiar secret, you will find other arguments regarding the tightly held ideals so many believe as fundamental truths of this age.

Burtrand Russel and Einstein both agreed to their death beds that most of what we tell ourselves is true is merely what we have come to agree with among ourselves.

This is as true today.

The difficulty lies not in finding “Truths”, the difficulty is undeceiving the self.

lukan4• 3 months ago

"The difficulty lies not in finding “Truths”, the difficulty is undeceiving the self."

So what makes you think you successfully undeceived yourself? The voices in your head told you as much?

Besides, of course the voices in our head are real. (What would be a unreal voice in our head?) But if you believe they are coming from aliens or whatever it is you are claiming, I would recommend therapy.

uncanny23• 3 months ago

Read my threads. The Aliens are the nice guys, the Americans and their Thought Control are spreading pedophilia and running a rape war. They are the voices in our heads. They are Jesus Christ in the minds of the White Nationalists.

I came to be a person of interest due to my ideals. As a person of interest I have been indoctrinated (press ganged) into the greatest secret of our humanity.

I am not here to “prove” to you. I am bearing an account, and I think if you read this collection of threads you will see I have explained my position clearly if not “incredulously.”

If you cannot tell without an authoritative collective reassuring you that “entropy” is the “existential phenomena of potential distributing over the surface area of negative potential.” After hearing it and giving it some moments, you cannot be impressed only assured.

The great big problem is that we as humans are sleep walking through our time of prosperity and comfortable convenience.

That we must awaken ourselves every day to a new world that is POTENTIAL RESOLVING not states interacting.

You have trained yourself to see the world as you expect it, and the world you “think feel and believe” in is a pleasant self satisfying lie. On many levels.

finghin5• 3 months ago

Descartes' launch of modern analytic philosophy I find this questionable. If we go back there is a similar analyticity to Spinoza. Go forward and Frege, Russell and Wittgenstein are impossible to ignore given this framing.

Joker_vD• 3 months ago

Like, seriously. Descartes was quite a great mathematician, but he was wrong about pretty much anything related to philosophy, biology, or physics (I've read his explanation of the refraction law; it's frankly worse than Newton's).

finghin5• 3 months ago

Yes in terms of philosophy, Kant absolutely needs to be here, Newton and Leibniz not as notably so.

moxifly7• 3 months ago

The mention of effective altruism at the end aged a bit badly.

jmrodgers• 3 months ago

Development of zero https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/0

towledev6• 3 months ago

Is it though? All languages have the word 'nothing'.

Better candidates: a) place-value numbering aka the positional numeral system, b) the Cartesian coordinate system. Forced to choose, I would pick (b).

Asraelite3• 3 months ago

"nothing" is not the same the same as "zero". "zero apples" means something different to "nothing", but that difference is subtle and difficult to explain, which is what makes the invention of zero such an achievement.

throw0101a3• 3 months ago

Is it though? All languages have the word 'nothing'.

The interpretation of the concept that been different over time. See perhaps The Nothing That Is: A Natural History of Zero by Kaplan:

* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3188988

dtj11232• 3 months ago

The difference is that zero is explicitly a number, rather than a concept.

Making it a number allows it interact with the rest of mathematics in a consistent way, which I'd argue you can't do with "nothing".

To use your later example of "no apples":

Is no apples the same thing as no bananas? What about no meters? I honestly don't know, the question is a bad one. My gut says yes, nothing in each case is just nothing.

Is zero apples the same thing as zero bananas or zero meters? No, they're different because the unit "apple" is orthogonal to the unit "meter".

The precision of zero is what's so special about it.

The-Ludwig• 3 months ago

Planck didn’t make the list, although his achievements did.

I’d also argue that Meitner and Noether deserve a mention.

Stepping outside my expertise, I’d argue Poppers description of what science and Pseudo-Science is, is essential.

Anyway great list!

okintheory• 3 months ago

This was clearly written by someone with too little exposure to history and (comparably) too much to academic economics. No one else could think Coase belongs on such a list and forget Orsted/Faraday/Maxwell (initially...). And if you think John Locke did something important beyond adding philosophical veneer to capitalism as it was already practiced, you need to read Meiksins Wood's 'The Origin of Capitalism'.

Xcelerate• 3 months ago

Would be interesting to think about what works are currently out there, published, yet will not be recognized as great intellectual achievements until much later after the fact for some reason.

aerhardt2• 3 months ago

The fact that Hegel is not there is ridiculous. Perhaps the most influential philosopher since Aristotle.

Not only did he influence the young hegelians and Marx, he continues to influence many philosophers across all kinds of schools and ideologies.

Marx not being there is an implicit moral judgement - if “great” means good in some ethical sense subjective, then OK. But if “great” means impactful or influential, that’s a problem.

Then no Spinoza, Leibniz, Hume, Tocqueville, Watt, Ramón y Cajal, Ford, Schumpeter, Cervantes…

On the latter, not a single mention of literature. Not even Homer. I find this list problematic in an innumerable amount of ways.

finghin5• 3 months ago

I also agree that Marx is a thinker who altered the course of the world and I see where you are coming from regarding the moral judgement on his absence.

As a counterpoint, what would Marx’s great intellectual achievement be, and could it stand up to the early capitalists like Smith?

What comes to mind is the Labour Theory of Value, and I would say it is a strong candidate for sure. Whether it figures as a key human intellectual achievement is definitely at best borderline compared to the other exemplars on this list.

aerhardt2• 3 months ago

I would say historical materialism is way more influential. His theory of value was quickly dispelled (although many continued to believe in it) but all marxist and post-marxist thinkers (the Frankfurt school, French post-modernists, current woke academicians) continue to use historical materialism in one way or another.

bazoom42• 3 months ago

The idea that history is driven by material conditions.

yen2232• 3 months ago

Whoever figured out writing, all those years ago.

The compounded effect of having knowledge recorded for generations to come - thereby unlocking all the other things mentioned on this list - surely should count for something.

Hikikomori2• 3 months ago

What about reading.

rk06• 3 months ago

The one invented writing also invented reading

yen2232• 3 months ago

Imagine inventing reading before writing was a thing

"Me understand meaning from symbols"

"What are symbols?"

"Dunno"

Jtarii• 3 months ago

I would assume writing evolved with humans over many thousands of years and wasn't just some big invention a guy came up with.

bombcar• 3 months ago

Hieroglyphics were probably generated over time (as they’re a simple progression from cave paintings) - but a standardized alphabet has to be, well; standardized by someone at a point in time.

smokel2• 3 months ago

I find it a bit depressing that this list is tied so closely to individuals. Obviously these individuals did great things, but it is typically by standing on the shoulders of giants (Isaac Newton) that any of this has been possible.

It might be a nice exercise to describe the larger waves of ideas that follow certain cultural currents. To list some random examples, capitalism has spurred many developments, as did religion. Setting up universities, introducing law, being able to replicate documents, all seem more relevant than some individuals taking credit for the cherry on top.

To contradict myself once more, where is Gutenberg in this list?

keiferski• 3 months ago

Well, there are at least two presuppositions to a post like this:

1. That individuals are capable of unique achievements separate from their context, trends, etc.

2. That doing some intellectually impressive thing is "great", in a values or ethics sense. There are many things listed here that other intellectuals have argued as having extremely negative consequences for human society, culture, etc.

Which is why I think a list of the "greatest" is inherently a bit flawed, and you're better off looking at a list of "influential" people or ideas instead.

hwhehwhehegwggw3• 3 months ago

Advaita (non duality) is the highest intellectual achievement of the human civilization.

The list itself mentioned is interesting but it focuses on content of consciousness and not consciousness itself. The contents keep changing. Consciousness doesn't.

In other words humans appearing in consciousness discovering consciousness is more interesting than what appears on consciousness like laws of motion.

This is not to say Pythagorean laws are not cool.

It's cool. But it's just a ripple in consciousness.

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

Close your eyes. Where does the darkness appear?

bananaflag• 3 months ago

Why Advaita and not Dzogchen?

Just something to think about.

hwhehwhehegwggw3• 3 months ago

From my understanding they all point to consciousness. I mentioned Advaita because I think it's focus on logic is probably a a good gateway for HN Audience. But for audience who wants more options

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

amelius• 3 months ago

Are you sure? After trying to read into it a bit, I'm getting the feeling that this theory does not solve many practical problems and leaves more questions than answers, e.g.: does my AI (or my GPU) have a consciousness, should it have rights, etc.?

hwhehwhehegwggw3• 3 months ago

Consciousness belong to nobody. You appear in it.

contingencies• 3 months ago

Overall this list skews ridiculously to western classicism, and misses a great many more significant intellectual achievements. Here's some nobody's mentioned.

Mechanics: wheel, lever, screw, gear trains, cam/follower, crank‑slider, water/wind mills, mechanical clock, printing press, and the steam engine.

Every advance in basic metallurgy. Controlled smelting, casting, hot forging, alloying to make bronze, carburising to make early steel, blooms and bloomery furnaces, quenching/tempering, wrought‑iron forging, large‑scale iron production, advanced steels.

Coinage.

Sail.

Plumbing.

Refrigeration.

Plastics.

If you take the position these are not intellectual achievements, I think you under-appreciate how revolutionary they were at the time.

irdc• 3 months ago

Self-domestication. That in order to be more successful as a collective species we had to literally breed ourselves to become less violent and more playful and sociable.

And the nice part is that it wasn't just one person deciding this but the collective intellectual leap of all those people throughout our history who decided to reproduce with the less violent and more cooperative members of the opposite sex.

And it must have been intellectual, because on the animal level being more capable of violence is surely an individual advantage.

cjbgkagh• 3 months ago

I think it was more the violent people were hung, or ostracized to die in the wilderness. Animals likely have similar genetic pressures as some animals have evolved ways to determine who’s the strongest with contests instead of the more deadly violence that they care capable of.

accidentallfact• 3 months ago

That, just isn't true. Many animals live in herds, flocks or other groups. There is a kind of fish that eats debris from the teeth of much bigger fishes. Predators get swarmed.

ape4• 3 months ago

I guess some of the great symphonies doesn't count as "intellectual"?

I also nominate the invention of Clippy the friendly assistant.

forinti• 3 months ago

My personal hero is Shannon. He is underrated even in IT; the general public has never heard of him. But he had an enormous impact in the twentieth century.

PontifexMinimus• 3 months ago

The work at PARC in creating Smalltalk-80 was pretty impressive, IMO.

throw0101a3• 3 months ago

The lack of Aristotle is surprising:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristotle

Not only his systemized thinking, but his metaphysics—especially since it got later taken up by Christianity/Catholicism. I doubt we would have gotten to Naturalism (and modern science) without his influence:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalism_(philosophy)

* https://old.maa.org/press/periodicals/convergence/mathematic...

belviewreview• 3 months ago

I agree. And modern Western science and political thought has followed Aristotle far more than Plato. In particular, the parts of Aristotle's science that got thrown out was the result of following out his empirical method further than he was able to. We have also followed his empirical approach to political philosophy rather than Plato's Republic.

throw0101a3• 3 months ago

I think that glass is under-appreciated. Without it we would not have telescopes and microscopes (and all the scientific (and later engineering) that came from them), and later movies and photography—the latter also led to photolithography.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telescope

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microscope

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photolithography

Nevermind the day-to-day quality of life improvements of eye glasses. Also:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_fiber

Would also need laters: modern communications would be much different if we still had to use copper cable (esp. over long distances), or microwave relays.

markoman• 3 months ago

Agree; and pair this with the revelations and achievements in optical engineering, lest it go unmentioned.

mikewarot• 3 months ago

No mention of Agriculture, Whitworths 3 plate method of making flat surfaces, The screw cutting lathe, The Micrometer, Gage blocks, Ford's mass production, the Haber-Bosch process for producing Ammonia.

Technologies are also the result of intellect applied to practical problems, and also deserve recognition as achievements.

aeonik• 3 months ago

My votes for relatively modern stuff: Ed Witten: Unification of various forms of string theory.

Category theory and the work building programming langauges on top of that.

If the whole thing pans out: Langlands Program (unifying most of mathematics).

Wofram Language and the math capability is pretty amazing for such a small team.

Anything that CERN touches, from the web to various quantum theories.

Genetic mapping and science.

The Lambda CDM model, and all the work that goes into constraining their predictions with limited data is pretty amazing.

Some of the things cryptanalysts and hackers do is pretty remarkable. Side channel attacks like Row hammer attacks (not strictly crypto), EM analysis, etc..., and things like hash collisions and Differential cryptanalysis.

Modern materials science is chock full of amazing intellectual achievements.

"Winning ways for your mathematical plays" as a book on game theory is a remarkable achievement by itself.

RaftPeople• 3 months ago

Bacon wrapped donuts?

arunix• 3 months ago

Cantor is mentioned, but I'd also mention the idea that some infinities are equivalent (e.g. Integers and Rationals), but others are not (Rationals and Real numbers).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantor%27s_paradise

r4sz• 3 months ago

Well, it is happening now. We take down scammers and terrorists I guess. Who wanted to destroy half of the society!!! Really disgusting.

cineticdaffodil• 3 months ago

Not often mentioned because joyless hard work, but standardization is in my eyes quite the archievement. All those synergies, systems suddenly becoming frictionless recimbineable and thus iterations faster is a pretty great achievement.

directorscut822• 3 months ago

One should also mention the creation of "God(s)" in any religion (sub)context. We are probably the only mammalian creature who delegated all his existential angst to an abstracted entity responsible for anything that it didn't make sense at the time. I think it is THE intellectual pinnacle of a brain trying to survive and process information full of null pointers without halting its programming:/)

youoy• 3 months ago

Nicely written! I was thinking about this the other day. What is the benefit from your point of view of procesing information full of null pointers? (I know what the benefit of not halting its programming is :P)

directorscut822• 3 months ago

De-referencing null pointers is the ultimate tilt but our NNs needed a way to explore just a tiny bit of unmapped memory without halting a.k.a go crazy, surrender to fear etc, probably because planning and anticipating for the next threat/unknown is their main role. It seems that we have devised a clever way of offloading the exact point of no return of our pcregister to handling by fantastical powerful creatures. What if the next crop does not deliver, crash danger alert -> praise a god. What happens when we die -> establish a religion based on afterlife benefits etc.

At the same time and while this jump command is now installed/available it allowed us to explore alternative solutions (medicine, technology etc). Since one can always transfers his main program's control to GOD section, it feels less risky to process methodically information full of unknowns and failures (the context now is "with the help of god we/one can deliver a solution"). This particular section throughout history controlled our lower instincts, maybe even made us more empathetic to other (unknown) humans instead of always perceive them as a threat but ultimately controlled all aspects of life and when misused delivered bloodshed and misery. What a weird section! I think at some point we should become brave enough and refactor/remove it, it served a purpose but now is not required/obsolete.

satvikpendem• 3 months ago

This is basically the argument laid forth by Yuval Noah Harari in Sapiens.

krapp2• 3 months ago

I ascribe the creation of God(s) to sub-rational behavior - paredolia, superstition, emotion born of fear and ignorance. The pinnacle of intellect was realizing the universe operated by rules that could be understood rather than the capricious will of supernatural forces.

vixen99• 3 months ago

If we've already reached the pinnacle I guess we've no more to achieve bar amassing a bunch more salient observations regarding how the universe ticks. The it's job done! Almost Boring.

GuB-422• 3 months ago

Asking ChatGPT, I have:

- The scientific method

- Calculus

- Einstein's Relativity

- Darwin's Evolution

And more generally:

- The zero

- Formal logic

- The written language

This is the kind of questions I think a LLM work well for, because people are going to have different opinions. I think that most of us will think about science, maths, etc... But what about, say, monotheism, Athenian democracy, banking and accounting, etc... I also see that Freud is in there, a controversial take as his ideas are considered pseudoscience today, but it certainly opened the way for modern psychology, so what do you make of that.

Using a LLM trained on what is most of human written knowledge and carefully aligned will hopefully give a reasonable consensus. It is not perfect of course, but I think it is better than personal guesses.

Note: your experience may differ, not all LLMs are the same and your prompt matter, but I get similar results: mostly scientific achievements, with the one I cited usually getting top spots. A bit of social (democracy, human rights) but spirituality in general seems to be absent.

raptor99• 3 months ago

Hmm, I wonder why that could be. Perhaps because most LLMs have ingested scads of utter online shit in, so guess what comes out.

GuB-422• 3 months ago

Among the "scads of utter online shit" is the submitted website for which it mostly agrees with. It also agrees with most of the comments here.

But the thing is, I used a LLM because I want to see the "scads of utter online shit". The "greatest intellectual achievement" is an opinion reflecting what people think matters most, not an empirical fact. And what I want is something approaching a global consensus, not what the HN bubble thinks matters. And for that, I think LLMs have value.

And anyways, what LLMs say generally match what people are saying here, so unless you are implying that we are all talking shit, I don't really see the problem.

sturakov• 3 months ago

A childhood moment when I learned what a period meant in a sentence. A joy so rare I have yet to recreate it.

tim333• 3 months ago

It skips over the arts rather. I'd rate the music of Bach and Beethoven above the theories of Chomsky and the like.

beasthacker• 3 months ago

Many people fail to appreciate the thermos. I think it is one of mankind's greatest achievements.

Teever• 3 months ago

I actually had this 10 guy sort of thought last night:

There was a point where an organism became self aware, and then there was a point sometime after that where an organism realized that it was the first that had become self aware and all the implications of that.

To me that's a demarcation point in all of life -- the moment a creature realized that it was different from all the things that had come before it on the earth, whether they be non-living or living, as if there was a third category, living and self-aware.

I wonder if it considered it important to spread self-awareness or if it lamented that it had more important things to deal with like just surviving.

And what kind of organism was it -- was it a mammal? Or was it something that came before that?

janpeuker• 3 months ago

That’s an extremely western and recency biased list, what about

* The Decimal System

* Concept of Zero (Brahmagupta)

* Invention of Algebra (Al-Khwarizmi)

* Invention of Optics (Ibn al-Haytham)

* Meritocracy (Confucius)

webnrrd2k• 3 months ago

I'll put in a vote for the Panini Sutra (Aṣṭādhyāyī) [1], which is a sort of "Backus–Naur form" for classical Sanskrit grammar. I don't understand Sandskrit, but I've heard from people that I respect that the Panini Sutra should be considered as one of humanities great intellectual achievements.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A%E1%B9%A3%E1%B9%AD%C4%81dhy%C...

DiscourseFan• 3 months ago

This is quite a well-rounded list for one that seems to understand some its subjects relatively poorly

thelastgallon• 3 months ago

Vasectomy. Condoms.

What have been the greatest intellectual achievements? (2017)

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