Seems to me that this list gets a lot wrong.
Odd how Muhammad is ranked as having higher impact than Jesus, while Christianity has more followers than Islam, and Jesus was born before Muhammad, thus he impacted more people for a longer period of time.
Somehow Abraham is not even on the list, which is even stranger, considering that he is considered the patriarch of the major monotheistic religions "namely Judaism, Christianity and Islam, as well as smaller religions such as the Baháʼí Faith, the Druze faith, Rastafari, and Samaritanism. The term may also include religions such as Yazidism, Mandaeism, Yarsanism, Shabakism."
Leopold II of Belgium is ranked higher than Napoleon Bonaparte or Julius Caesar. I can't even.
Hi HN, I built Humanity Top 10K to explore a question: can we rank historical figures by the consequences of their actions rather than their fame?
Instead of asking an LLM to rank people directly, I broke historical biographies into 131,478 contribution records across 11,948 figures. The system made 1.24M pairwise comparisons of those deeds, fitted them to a relative scale, and adjusted for shared credit, overlapping effects, and individual attribution.
One interesting result: Vasili Arkhipov (preventing global thermonuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis) ranks #8 by impact, but #804 by importance. The distinction is intentional by the decision models. Impact measures the magnitude of historical consequences regardless of whether they were beneficial or harmful. Net benefit and net harm reflect the signed balance, while importance is estimated independently through person-level comparisons.
This is an experiment, not a claim of objective historical truth. The results depend on incomplete historical records, LLM judgments, and assumptions about counterfactuals.
I'm especially interested in criticism of the methodology: how should we compare consequences across different fields, and how should credit be divided among collaborators?
Full methodology: https://hominidintelligence.org/leaderboard/methodology