[HN Gopher] What have been the greatest intellectual achievement...
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What have been the greatest intellectual achievements? (2017)
Author : o4c
Score : 42 points
Date : 2026-04-12 10:46 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.thinkingcomplete.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.thinkingcomplete.com)
| lukan wrote:
| (2017) is missing
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15255847
| o4c wrote:
| Fixed it. Thank you!
| compounding_it wrote:
| 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.
| smokel wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| + using trees to form Pen & Paper for knowledge transfer.
| douglee650 wrote:
| Aren't special and general relativity the grand leviathans of
| intellectual achievement? Pure thought unlocking the nature of
| existence.
| uncanny2 wrote:
| 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.
| lukan wrote:
| "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.
| uncanny2 wrote:
| 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.
| lukan wrote:
| "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?
| uncanny2 wrote:
| 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.
| lukan wrote:
| "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?
| finghin wrote:
| >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 wrote:
| 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).
| finghin wrote:
| Yes in terms of philosophy, Kant absolutely needs to be here,
| Newton and Leibniz not as notably so.
| raddan wrote:
| On the other hand, Leibniz was one of the very first
| philosophers who recognized the value of the unique
| combination of formal thinking and computation. There's no
| doubt that he was one of the originators of the idea that
| calculation could be applied to general reasoning and not
| just arithmetic (although he also built a mechanical
| calculator, the "stepped reckoner"). Anyway, the following
| is one of my favorite Leibniz quotes.
|
| "I thought again about my early plan of a new language or
| writing-system of reason, which could serve as a
| communication tool for all different nations... If we had
| such an universal tool, we could discuss the problems of
| the metaphysical or the questions of ethics in the same way
| as the problems and questions of mathematics or geometry.
| That was my aim: Every misunderstanding should be nothing
| more than a miscalculation (...), easily corrected by the
| grammatical laws of that new language. Thus, in the case of
| a controversial discussion, two philosophers could sit down
| at a table and just calculating, like two mathematicians,
| they could say, 'Let us check it up ...'"
| moxifly7 wrote:
| The mention of effective altruism at the end aged a bit badly.
| jmrodgers wrote:
| Development of zero https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/0
| towledev wrote:
| 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).
| Asraelite wrote:
| "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.
| towledev wrote:
| ok, "no apples."
| throw0101a wrote:
| > _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
| dtj1123 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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, Ramon 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.
| finghin wrote:
| 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.
| aerhardt wrote:
| 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.
| finghin wrote:
| Good point, and noted
| yen223 wrote:
| 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.
| Hikikomori wrote:
| What about reading.
| rk06 wrote:
| The one invented writing also invented reading
| Jtarii wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| smokel wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| hwhehwhehegwggw wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Why Advaita and not Dzogchen?
|
| Just something to think about.
| hwhehwhehegwggw wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.?
| hwhehwhehegwggw wrote:
| Consciousness belong to nobody. You appear in it.
| contingencies wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I guess some of the great symphonies doesn't count as
| "intellectual"?
|
| I also nominate the invention of Clippy the friendly assistant.
| forinti wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| The work at PARC in creating Smalltalk-80 was pretty impressive,
| IMO.
| throw0101a wrote:
| 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...
| throw0101a wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Agree; and pair this with the revelations and achievements in
| optical engineering, lest it go unmentioned.
| mikewarot wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Bacon wrapped donuts?
| arunix wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Well, it is happening now. We take down scammers and terrorists I
| guess. Who wanted to destroy half of the society!!! Really
| disgusting.
| cineticdaffodil wrote:
| 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.
| directorscut82 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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)
| directorscut82 wrote:
| 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.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Hmm, I wonder why that could be. Perhaps because most LLMs have
| ingested scads of utter online shit in, so guess what comes
| out.
| sturakov wrote:
| A childhood moment when I learned what a period meant in a
| sentence. A joy so rare I have yet to recreate it.
| tim333 wrote:
| It skips over the arts rather. I'd rate the music of Bach and
| Beethoven above the theories of Chomsky and the like.
| beasthacker wrote:
| Many people fail to appreciate the thermos. I think it is one of
| mankind's greatest achievements.
| Teever wrote:
| 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?
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(page generated 2026-04-12 23:01 UTC)