Portal: History arcs

Portal: History arcs

try org-transclusion under each of these?

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Human rights

Slow progress of human rights. Slave ownership was normal for a long time. Philosophers tended to be open-minded – many ancient philosophers like Stoics and Daoists viewed slaves and women the same as free men. Philosophy is after all "the discipline that makes you more impressed with the poor than with kings" – though this expression was used to mock philosophers.

Somewhat damningly, we started banning slavery only after we had machines with which to replace slave labor.

Suffrage for women came about around 1900. How did that happen, since there was only men voting?

Probability theory

The earliest formulations of probability theory come from gambling, in the 17th century or so? After that, I don't know. Statistics was conceived of as a separate discipline, first by some guy whose paper about the value of keeping track of populations got widely read, and the Swedish gov was the first to do population statistics.

For Bayesians, statistics is just pure probability theory. But Bayesianism did not come about until de Finetti, Savage, Lindley etc popularized it around 1950, Ulam created Monte Carlo methods in WWII, and Markov chain Monte Carlo methods became computationally feasible in 1990.

Mathematicians (pointless category as every scientist is a mathematician)

  • Pascal, Euler, Gauss, Markov, Kolmogorov

Philosphers (pointless category as every scientist can figure in the history of philosophy)

Evolution

  • Anaximander -> Lamarck -> Darwin -> Mendel -> Dawkins…

Chemists

  • Thales (all is water) -> Heraclitus (all is fire) -> Empedocles (four elements) -> Democritus (atoms) -> Lavoisier -> Mendelev …

Healers

  • Hippocrates, Galen, (Vesalius), Semmelweiss, Jenner, Lister, Pasteur, Fleming

Quantum mechanics

  • Bohr, Einstein, Feynman, Everett, Tegmark…

Probability theory

  • Bayes -> Laplace -> Pearson/other guy -> Bruno de Finetti -> Savage -> Lindley -> Jaynes -> Gelman…

Computer science

  • Babbage, Lovelace, Bell, Von Neumann, Turing, Hopper, Ritchie, Dijkstra…

Civilizational incompetence (reproducibility crisis, the recognition that "scientists suck at statistics, and statisticians suck at science", "economists/execs run things badly because of course they do")

  • Ioannidis, Alvesson, Taleb, Alexander, Yudkowsky

The future

  • Ettinger, De Grey, Bostrom, Tetlock

Ethics

  • Gandhi, Hitler, Mandela, King, Parks, Chomsky, Pinker,

Cognitive science

  • Kahneman, Tversky, Cialdini, Stanford Prison Experiment, Milgram Experiment

The art of science

  • Bacon, Feynman, Kuhn, Popper, Mayo, Jaynes,

Astronomers

  • The Babylonians -> Aristarchos -> Ptolemy -> Copernicus -> Brahe -> Galilei -> Bruno -> Kepler -> Cassini -> Huygens -> Newton -> … -> Einstein -> Hubble -> …

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Created (3 years ago)