World’s Most Important Meta Inventions

Charles Murray, in Human Accomplishment, explores fourteen of the world’s most important meta-inventions that occurred after 800 B.C. until 1950, essentially cognitive (not physical) tools for improving the world around us:

1. Artistic realism
2. Linear perspective
3. Artistic abstraction
4. Polyphony
5. Drama
6. The novel
7. Meditation
8. Logic
9. Ethics
10. Arabic numerals
11. The mathematical proof
12. The calibration of uncertainty
13. The secular observation of nature
14. The scientific method

source: Ideas are more important than execution