What have been the greatest intellectual achievements? (2017)

lukan

(2017) is missing https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15255847

compounding_it

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.

dofdial

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

douglee650

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

uncanny2

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.

finghin

>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.

moxifly7

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

jmrodgers

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

The-Ludwig

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

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

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.

aerhardt

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.

yen223

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.

smokel

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?

hwhehwhehegwggw

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?

contingencies

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

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.

ape4

I guess some of the great symphonies doesn't count as "intellectual"? I also nominate the invention of Clippy the friendly assistant.

forinti

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

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