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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.?
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
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.
"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.
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.
"You have trained yourself to see the world as you expect it, and the world you “think feel and believe”
Or of course, you know nothing about me, but your root problem is that you believe you are enlightened? You are not the first, though. Also I engaged with various philosophy, meditation, and chaos magic since quite some years and to be honest, I read way more convincing text about the topic of seeing through the illusion and going beyond our self censor than your rants. So if you do not want to take my advice about therapy, maybe take this about modesty?
It is nice to meet you, know that I am not your savior, I am your undeceiver.
Many hundreds of thousands of us have tread the paths for virtue as you have.
You were not wrong, you were right! In a way. In a way you could not explain to yourselves coherently, to maintain the civilized stability of your daily existence.
Reasons and rationalizations are a well barbed trap in Man’s mind.
I am telling you the greatest secret of our humanity, the conspiracy of all conspiracies against our natural destinies is that we are not alone in our own minds.
A vast culture predates our generations, the signs have always been there, they led you to occultism, yet you could not accept the simple truth.
Consciousness may be entangled and navigated, manipulated by widely varying ranges of skill.
There is a secret war. Those taking it most seriously are the same lines Satanic sacrificing in the 80s, voices in the minds of children shooting up their schools, and now are Jesus in the thought controlled American mind.
"Reasons and rationalizations are a well barbed trap in Man’s mind."
Indeed, so have you ever considered, that the secret war in your mind, could be also caused by a myriad of other things?
So a secret holy war with (or against?) aliens or divine cosmic beings sounds more glamorous, than simply struggling with yourself, so you rationalized your own internal issues with a greater mission on the outside? Simply because it sounds better and therefore that makes you feel better?
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.
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?
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.
>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.
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).
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'.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Agree; and pair this with the revelations and achievements in optical engineering, lest it go unmentioned.
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.
I would assume writing evolved with humans over many thousands of years and wasn't just some big invention a guy came up with.
What about reading.
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...
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.
Development of zero https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/0
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).
> 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
"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.
ok, "no apples."
(2017) is missing
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15255847
Fixed it. Thank you!
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.?
Consciousness belong to nobody. You appear in it.
Why Advaita and not Dzogchen?
Just something to think about.
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
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.
"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.
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.
"You have trained yourself to see the world as you expect it, and the world you “think feel and believe”
Or of course, you know nothing about me, but your root problem is that you believe you are enlightened? You are not the first, though. Also I engaged with various philosophy, meditation, and chaos magic since quite some years and to be honest, I read way more convincing text about the topic of seeing through the illusion and going beyond our self censor than your rants. So if you do not want to take my advice about therapy, maybe take this about modesty?
How very interesting.
It is nice to meet you, know that I am not your savior, I am your undeceiver.
Many hundreds of thousands of us have tread the paths for virtue as you have.
You were not wrong, you were right! In a way. In a way you could not explain to yourselves coherently, to maintain the civilized stability of your daily existence.
Reasons and rationalizations are a well barbed trap in Man’s mind.
I am telling you the greatest secret of our humanity, the conspiracy of all conspiracies against our natural destinies is that we are not alone in our own minds.
A vast culture predates our generations, the signs have always been there, they led you to occultism, yet you could not accept the simple truth.
Consciousness may be entangled and navigated, manipulated by widely varying ranges of skill.
There is a secret war. Those taking it most seriously are the same lines Satanic sacrificing in the 80s, voices in the minds of children shooting up their schools, and now are Jesus in the thought controlled American mind.
"Reasons and rationalizations are a well barbed trap in Man’s mind."
Indeed, so have you ever considered, that the secret war in your mind, could be also caused by a myriad of other things?
So a secret holy war with (or against?) aliens or divine cosmic beings sounds more glamorous, than simply struggling with yourself, so you rationalized your own internal issues with a greater mission on the outside? Simply because it sounds better and therefore that makes you feel better?
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.
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?
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.
>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.
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).
Yes in terms of philosophy, Kant absolutely needs to be here, Newton and Leibniz not as notably so.
I guess some of the great symphonies doesn't count as "intellectual"?
I also nominate the invention of Clippy the friendly assistant.
The mention of effective altruism at the end aged a bit badly.
Aren't special and general relativity the grand leviathans of intellectual achievement? Pure thought unlocking the nature of existence.
The work at PARC in creating Smalltalk-80 was pretty impressive, IMO.
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'.
+ using trees to form Pen & Paper for knowledge transfer.
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.
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.
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.
Good point, and noted
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!