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What have been the greatest intellectual achievements?
- dbatten 9y agoThis list seems very Western. Are there Eastern developments that should be added?
- Cyph0n 9y agoSome 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.
- mozumder 9y agoIbn Khaldun should replace Adam Smith on the list for modern economic theory as well.
- IncRnd 9y agoAl 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.
- Cyph0n 9y ago> 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?
- IncRnd 9y agoNo. 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.
- mbrock 9y agoI'd put Buddhist systematic philosophy of radical selflessness in there, seems like a major strand of human development.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- thcsa 9y agoComparing Kahnemann's work with Newton's is absurd.
- Rexxar 9y agoIndeed, stopping to rank everything on absurd scales would be a great intellectual achievement for humanity.
- sddfd 9y agoThat'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.
- gaius 9y agoThere are several items in the list that seem glaringly out of place
- ricraz 9y agoWhich 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.
- ricraz 9y agoOn Kahnemann in particular, I was quite influenced by this series of tributes to him: https://www.edge.org/conversation/daniel_kahneman-on-kahneman https://www.edge.org/conversation/daniel_kahneman-on-kahnema...
- davemp 9y agoSeems 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.
- Cyph0n 9y agoGauss 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.
- emmelaich 9y agoYeah, Maxwell's equations occurs to me immediately. And Heaviside's reformulation of them.
- kbmilton 9y agoDoes this list exist to elevate animal rights and feminism?
- Entangled 9y agoAI?
- amriksohata 9y agoThe 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
- saagarjha 9y agoI 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.
- KGIII 9y agoI was going to say the concept of zero, but your answer works well enough.
- briga 9y agoThe 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?
- lcuff 9y agoThe 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.
- wittedhaddock 9y agoHe also discovered that heat is motion, so the dude practiced what he preached to good success.
- xchip 9y agoGlad 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.
- udfalkso 9y agoyoutube link? thanks
- maroonblazer 9y agoIs it Anthony Magnabosco's channel? "Street Epistemology"? https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCocP40a_UvRkUAPLD5ezLIQ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCocP40a_UvRkUAPLD5ezLIQ
- akkartik 9y agoEpidemiology (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Snow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Snow)
- rdtsc 9y agoYes! 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.
- gtsteve 9y agoBill 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_cipher_machine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._T._Tutte#Diagnosing_the_cip...
- rikelmens 9y agoHow about Tesla?!
- westurner 9y agoNikola Tesla > AC (alternating current) and the induction motor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikola_Tesla#AC_and_the_induction_motor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikola_Tesla#AC_and_the_induct... Induction motor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induction_motor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induction_motor
- holri 9y agoJ.S. Bach's Wohltemperiertes Clavier
- k4l3 9y agoCompletely 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.
- ricraz 9y agoI'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).
- wittedhaddock 9y agoHow do you define modern thought? How do you measure impact on it?
- elorant 9y agoMathematics
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- novalis78 9y agoSuggestion 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.
- yters 9y agoWhy is Darwin in there? Everything in his model of evolution has failed. He's just a popularizer of evolution.
- wittedhaddock 9y agoIn 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.
- westurner 9y ago- The internet (TCP/IP) and world wide web (HTML, HTTP). History of the Internet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relational_algebra Relational database: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relational_database https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relational_database Linked Data: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linked_data https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linked_data RDF: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_Description_Framework https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_Description_Framework
- ricraz 9y agoHi 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.
- westurner 9y agoThe UNDHR (UN Declaration of Human Rights): [Equality,] http://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/ http://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/
- westurner 9y ago- Time, Calendars Time > History of the calendar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Units_of_measurement
- westurner 9y ago- CRISPR/Cas9, CRISPR/Cpf1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CRISPR https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CRISPR Cas9: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cas9 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cas9 CRISPR/Cpf1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CRISPR/Cpf1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CRISPR/Cpf1 - Tissue Nanotransfection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tissue_nanotransfection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tissue_nanotransfection
- jcranmer 9y agoSome 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.
- amriksohata 9y agoCV Raman - Raman light scattering and amplification, pretty much being used everyday now in fibre communication