Comment by tomrod
6 hours ago
Nash's game theory dissertation was something von Neumann considered obvious and not particularly noteworthy, if I remember my lore right. He was among the first game theorists, focusing more on collaborative games than pure strategic/competitive games.
Einstein built on the shoulders of Riemann, Gauss, and others when considering the universe might be non-Euclidean!
All brilliant people, many singular minds of great repute, yet, all improved by the rest.
Saying that von Neumann was one of the first game theorists undersells it.
He wrote the original book on game theory! The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior with Oskar Morgenstern.
Relatedly, MAD was his conception as well.
> He wrote the original book on game theory!
I always found it endearing that von Neumann loved playing poker with friends but was admittedly terrible at it, regularly losing money.
I believe Nash himself didn't consider it particularly noteworthy either, and was far prouder of his work in pure math (like the Nash embedding theorem).
another famous piece of Von Neumann lore is that he constantly advocated nuking the Soviets.
I was wondering if someone would mention this.
It's interesting how much worse off the world would be if the smartest people were in charge of it.
What ultimately blocked his nuke proposals? (Why didn't anyone listen?) I'm curious about whatever failsafe that was.
1. Big assumption that the world would be worse off in that alternative future, no?
2. Probably what blocked his proposals is that most people are loath to murder millions of other people (especially if they have ~any other option, including "do nothing")
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Not sure that it would be worse than letting the other end of the spectrum be in charge of it, as we've seen..
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Even Bertrand Russell briefly advocated this. "Better dead than Red."