I just came across an article on Peter Putnam, allegedly a 20th century physicist who invented something like reinforcement learning (though the details are unclear) and was forgotten until a recent effort to dig into his cryptic writings. The whole thing doesn't seem plausible at all, since Putnam was supposed to have, among other things, donated $40M made by investments to Nature Conservancy or corresponded with Einstein and Wheeler, and yet he has left no trace other than this one article ...| Recent Questions - Skeptics Stack Exchange
According to the SEP page on David Hume (see my emphasis in bold): "Kant reported that Hume’s work woke him from his “dogmatic slumbers” (Prolegomena, Introduction) and Jeremy Bentham remarked that reading Hume “caused the scales to fall” from his eyes (“A Fragment on Government”, chapter 1, paragraph 36, footnote 2). Charles Darwin regarded his work as a central influence on the theory of evolution." More specifically, the following is also stated (lower down) on the same page:...| Recent Questions - Skeptics Stack Exchange