This book is fantastic. Highly recommended if you have any interest in how the stored program computer came to be. The Dyson name apparently led to unrivaled access to first-hand accounts.
> Budapest around 1900 produced an absurd cluster of minds: von Neumann, Eugene Wigner, Edward Teller, Leo Szilard, Paul Erdős, Theodore von Kármán, George Pólya.
Not to mention Nikola Tesla about 20 years prior.
> When several of them turned up at Los Alamos and realized they had gone to high school together, Szilard joked that Hungary was a cover story for a Martian landing.
What if there actually are people who go to Mars in the future but regret it and the only way for them to come back to Earth is to invent a time machine and be reborn as a mathematical supergenius. That would explain this at least:
> At six, Janos (the OG hungarian name for Johnny) could divide eight-digit numbers in his head and hold a conversation in ancient Greek. He later added Latin, French, German, English, and Yiddish. The rumor was that he remembered everything he ever read. Many years later Herman Goldstine decided to test this by asking him to recite "A Tale of Two Cities." Von Neumann started on chapter one and had to be asked to stop fifteen minutes later.
It's worth keeping in mind in the 1900s the bar for novelty was much lower. Today you'd have to learn vastly more to even stand a chance of making a single contribution , let alone as many as he had done.
I recently read 'Maniac' by Benjamin Labatut, which also tracks the life of Johnny von Neumann. It is a wonderful read - very eloquently put together, giving accounts of the man from the perspectives of several people in his life.
Not only does it capture the alien-like genius of the protagonist, but also described his particular emotional and social character in a way that I have not seen written elsewhere. Highly recommended.
Seconding this. Maniac is a beautifully written book about von Neumann. It also led me to Benjamin Labatut's When We Cease to Understand the World, another great read.
I looked at the description and this part: "Braiding fact with fiction, Benjamín Labatut takes us on a journey to the frontiers of rational thought" - gave me pause. The Braiding fact with fiction part. Are there clear demarcations between fact and fiction?
Any cognitive scientists here, or actual people with eidetic memory, who can comment how the brain would store everything you ever read or heard and how it can be recalled? What does it feel like to be able to recall and recite the entire text of a Tale of Two Cities?
I would imagine that such people stay off opine and commentary style forums because their instant capacity to recall authoritative sources makes wrongful and derivative discussion tedious. To some extent, with the speed of LLM search and recovery today, we might all be heading that way. Indeed, interesting HN traffic of late appears to have waned. No doubt someone will say I'm hallucinating and all's normal. No, I'm not hallucinating.
It ebbs and flows. It’s actually quite fun to watch. When an interesting article pops up, inevitably a series of echos rise to the front page in the form of subjects corresponding to the various Wikipedia links one would need to fully understand a particular article, or sometimes just tangents that come up.
What beautiful writing. I had no idea JVN did so many things..
"Can we survive technology?" got me thinking about our industry's upheaval. Software engineering's receiving the disruption it so proudly inflicted on other industries.. not reaping what it sowed; rather just the natural order of things.
Acceptance and moving with change is all that can work. Obstructing; denying; ignoring progress.. you'll lose your edge, your relevance, your value to others, and your job. Progress won't wait for us to like it. We must move fast enough to survive change.
Junior engineers for example? Suddenly too junior to be hired? Great! They, and you, can access multiple answer boxes with every PhD ever, and with a bit of creativity, they can leverage that. The best will survive on their own - the rest we should help along. Let's create tools and structures and institutions and help junior engineers finish their education to marketable levels. Let's help them find efficiencies and get there in the same duration. We shouldn't compel companies to preserve a hiring pipeline; now should we incrementally upgrade university educations. Better to go to kids in schools & universities and stimulate their creativity, get them using new tools in new ways, finding efficiencies - because that's what today and tomorrow's jobs will be about. Institutions will adopt the good ideas in time.
We have a responsibility to invest in - and invent - ways of bringing people along.
I read The man From the Future a few years ago, and I highly recommend it!
John von Neumann was such a fascinating and influential character. If you are interested in the modern history of mathematics, computers, game theory and more, pick up a copy.
Big fan of VnM theorem, which this article alludes to in passing. I think it asks a really great question: "can we make good decisions under uncertainty?" And the answer turns out to be "Yes" with some caveats.
He advocated an immediate preemptive nuclear strike on the USSR: "If you say why not bomb them tomorrow, I say why not today? If you say today at five o'clock, I say why not one o'clock?"
This is why he was dismissed in so far as foreign policy was concerned, where nuance and patience takes precedence over cold, calculating game theory. Not only would it not have been feasible (Russia is huge), but it would have led to follow on effects by possibly pulling the US into potentially another world war. This is evidence you can be a genius in some areas and wrong in others.
I suspect some of these anecdotes are false, 15 mins of tale of two cities, 8 digit division in your head?
This gives a sense of embellishment by a clueless layman who think very smart people can memorize every single thing they ever do. Computers memorize well, very smart humans, it’s not clear if they memorize any better than a man of the street. I was struck by a fields medalist recent comment that he sometimes struggle remembering proofs he wrote himself in the past.
Memorizing books is absolutely possible. A great book about it is Moonwalking with Einstein (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moonwalking_with_Einstein), written by a journalist who was a skeptic but ended becoming a competitive mnemonicist himself. Some people intuitively learn the techniques early in life, and for some of them it becomes a habit.
Same thing applies to mental arithmetic. There are techniques for doing this. IIRC, ironically there's a famous case of someone who claimed to have memorized some hundreds of thousands digits of Pi but was suspected of using mental arithmetic techniques when reciting them.
Still, your point stands. People do embellish these kinds of stories based on stereotypes. It's certainly possible, but any particular anecdote may still be suspect.
I instantly lose respect to any man that "drove crowded roads like a maniac, and got bored and slowed down on open ones. He wrecked a car roughly every year"
Clearly, there is a reason Von Neumann spent so much time on this 'zero-sum' formulation of the problem, specifically in economics. Clearly he must have believed this was representative to a significant extent, especially given his interest in pragmatic problems.
It would make no sense for an intelligent person to work on an economics problem which doesn't model reality.
> Johnny remained a game theorist to the end. After a lifetime of culturally Jewish atheism, he asked to be baptized. His daughter attributed it to Pascal's Wager: a small probability of a much better afterlife, against a trivial cost.
People always leave off the second half of Pascal's Wager. Pascal's Wager is not simply that you can map out the odds vs risk and decide being a theist is more practical. But rather that if you take the odds, decide to be a theist, then start acting like one (participating in rituals, living like one, practicing what is preached, etc) then you may find God through those actions.
It's important to recall that an all-knowing God isn't necessarily very compassionate, or even rational. Some of the people I've known who knew the most have been the biggest assholes. Or insane.
What if there's a god, but he punishes humans for believing he exists, just for fun? Where's your wager now?
Judaism has, outside some mystical currents, less of an emphasis on "well, do you really believe?" than in Christianity, and more of an emphasis on rule-following (and studying how to navigate those rules) as the basic bargain between God and man.
EDIT: My bad, I missed that Neumann asked to be baptised, so he wasn't going back to the Judaism of his ancestors through his Pascal's Wager-esque step.
Maybe I'm just weird, but I can't actually choose what I believe. I can choose to go to church and I can choose to say I believe and I can choose to donate money to some religious institution, but I don't think I'm capable of believing something that I think is dumb.
Pascal's Wager if you read the entire book is more intricate than choosing to believe. He also argues that by practicing as if you believed, you may feel as if the choice is true and find God that way.
I see it as more of a rationalization. When you already believe something, you look for intellectual reasons to justify that belief. Pascal's Wager feel like that to me. Its main power is hardening an existing belief rather than swaying an undecided mind.
Except that 'pisteuō' means more nearly "to be faithful to" or, one could even say, to enter a type of contract (thus the Greek construct 'dia pistis', two parties relating "through faithfulness").
Anglo evangelicalism constrained its meaning to something like "intellectual assent", for its own purposes (in my opinion, it made for better sales models) some time in the nineteenth century. And as you essentially point out, intellectual assent is fairly meaningless.
If you're unfamiliar, there is a lot of historical context around Pascal's Wager -
Unless you live in a brutal theocracy, it's difficult to describe just how powerful institutionalized Christianity was at the time. Likewise the scale of religion-themed violence. A couple generations before Pascal's birth (in France), the Catholic-vs.-Protestant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Wars_of_Religion had kill off something between 10% and 25% of the population of France.
In many ways, I'd interpret the Wager as saying "if professing quiet belief in the current local orthodoxy is relatively cheap, and those not doing so are occasionally slaughtered at scale, then prudent people will parrot orthodoxy".
> Then the last paragraph suggesting he would want to ban AI.
The article doesn't say that, though. Here's the last paragraph quoted in full:
>> And then he names the qualities required: "patience, flexibility, intelligence". So, here is von Neumann, the master of abstraction, with no abstraction to offer. Maybe through his bout of applying minimax reasoning to nuclear strategy, he learned what a formal model is worth when the assumptions are shaky and the stakes are civilizational.
Please point out where in here Murat claims that von Neumann would ban AI?
In fact, the preceding paragraphs (the rest of that section) show that von Neumann would not be in favor of banning AI, or any particular technology. It's an argument for intelligent and deliberate action, not bans. Where he does talk about bans, he talks about their futility.
My apologies, I was skimming initially and, from just the headings it appeared to fit that pattern I've seen everywhere lately.
I agree with you that upon closer reading, this hypothetical JVN isn't arguing for a ban, but you could certainly read
> He goes on to say that a ban would have to be worldwide to work
> What safeguard remains? Apparently only day-to-day — or perhaps year-to-year — opportunistic measures, a long sequence of small, correct decisions. [...]
and
> The only safety possible is relative, and it lies in an intelligent exercise of day-to-day judgment.
as an argument for regulation.
And it does feel like a doomer narrative.
> For progress there is no cure. Any attempt to find automatically safe channels for the present explosive variety of progress must lead to frustration.
Also, while we glorify JVN's intellect, let's not forget that all his reasoning resulted in him publicly arguing for the nuclear annihilation of a vast country of people.
It says you can't ban AI and shouldn't try. There is no general solution except a worldwide ban of technology itself. What you can do is local and incremental and based on good judgement, patience, intelligence, etc.
I always recommend Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe[0] by George Dyson when John von Neumann comes up, it's a fabulous read.
[0] https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/44425/turings-cathe...
This book is fantastic. Highly recommended if you have any interest in how the stored program computer came to be. The Dyson name apparently led to unrivaled access to first-hand accounts.
The audiobook was fantastic
> Budapest around 1900 produced an absurd cluster of minds: von Neumann, Eugene Wigner, Edward Teller, Leo Szilard, Paul Erdős, Theodore von Kármán, George Pólya.
Not to mention Nikola Tesla about 20 years prior.
> When several of them turned up at Los Alamos and realized they had gone to high school together, Szilard joked that Hungary was a cover story for a Martian landing.
What if there actually are people who go to Mars in the future but regret it and the only way for them to come back to Earth is to invent a time machine and be reborn as a mathematical supergenius. That would explain this at least:
> At six, Janos (the OG hungarian name for Johnny) could divide eight-digit numbers in his head and hold a conversation in ancient Greek. He later added Latin, French, German, English, and Yiddish. The rumor was that he remembered everything he ever read. Many years later Herman Goldstine decided to test this by asking him to recite "A Tale of Two Cities." Von Neumann started on chapter one and had to be asked to stop fifteen minutes later.
Tesla was educated in Graz and was only in Budapest for about a year
> That would explain this at least:
There are more pedestrian explanations. https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/john-von-neumann-s...
Ha! thank you. Doubted these crazy anecdotes. Often we're tempted to repeat them to impress our audience. I know I do..
It's worth keeping in mind in the 1900s the bar for novelty was much lower. Today you'd have to learn vastly more to even stand a chance of making a single contribution , let alone as many as he had done.
I recently read 'Maniac' by Benjamin Labatut, which also tracks the life of Johnny von Neumann. It is a wonderful read - very eloquently put together, giving accounts of the man from the perspectives of several people in his life.
Not only does it capture the alien-like genius of the protagonist, but also described his particular emotional and social character in a way that I have not seen written elsewhere. Highly recommended.
Seconding this. Maniac is a beautifully written book about von Neumann. It also led me to Benjamin Labatut's When We Cease to Understand the World, another great read.
I looked at the description and this part: "Braiding fact with fiction, Benjamín Labatut takes us on a journey to the frontiers of rational thought" - gave me pause. The Braiding fact with fiction part. Are there clear demarcations between fact and fiction?
Any cognitive scientists here, or actual people with eidetic memory, who can comment how the brain would store everything you ever read or heard and how it can be recalled? What does it feel like to be able to recall and recite the entire text of a Tale of Two Cities?
It is debatable how much of his memory feats are true. many of these claims are aphorical.
I would imagine that such people stay off opine and commentary style forums because their instant capacity to recall authoritative sources makes wrongful and derivative discussion tedious. To some extent, with the speed of LLM search and recovery today, we might all be heading that way. Indeed, interesting HN traffic of late appears to have waned. No doubt someone will say I'm hallucinating and all's normal. No, I'm not hallucinating.
It ebbs and flows. It’s actually quite fun to watch. When an interesting article pops up, inevitably a series of echos rise to the front page in the form of subjects corresponding to the various Wikipedia links one would need to fully understand a particular article, or sometimes just tangents that come up.
1 reply →
What beautiful writing. I had no idea JVN did so many things..
"Can we survive technology?" got me thinking about our industry's upheaval. Software engineering's receiving the disruption it so proudly inflicted on other industries.. not reaping what it sowed; rather just the natural order of things.
Acceptance and moving with change is all that can work. Obstructing; denying; ignoring progress.. you'll lose your edge, your relevance, your value to others, and your job. Progress won't wait for us to like it. We must move fast enough to survive change.
Junior engineers for example? Suddenly too junior to be hired? Great! They, and you, can access multiple answer boxes with every PhD ever, and with a bit of creativity, they can leverage that. The best will survive on their own - the rest we should help along. Let's create tools and structures and institutions and help junior engineers finish their education to marketable levels. Let's help them find efficiencies and get there in the same duration. We shouldn't compel companies to preserve a hiring pipeline; now should we incrementally upgrade university educations. Better to go to kids in schools & universities and stimulate their creativity, get them using new tools in new ways, finding efficiencies - because that's what today and tomorrow's jobs will be about. Institutions will adopt the good ideas in time.
We have a responsibility to invest in - and invent - ways of bringing people along.
I read The man From the Future a few years ago, and I highly recommend it! John von Neumann was such a fascinating and influential character. If you are interested in the modern history of mathematics, computers, game theory and more, pick up a copy.
I also wrote about why I liked the book so much:
https://henrikwarne.com/2024/07/07/john-von-neumann-the-man-...
Big fan of VnM theorem, which this article alludes to in passing. I think it asks a really great question: "can we make good decisions under uncertainty?" And the answer turns out to be "Yes" with some caveats.
He advocated an immediate preemptive nuclear strike on the USSR: "If you say why not bomb them tomorrow, I say why not today? If you say today at five o'clock, I say why not one o'clock?"
This is why he was dismissed in so far as foreign policy was concerned, where nuance and patience takes precedence over cold, calculating game theory. Not only would it not have been feasible (Russia is huge), but it would have led to follow on effects by possibly pulling the US into potentially another world war. This is evidence you can be a genius in some areas and wrong in others.
I suspect some of these anecdotes are false, 15 mins of tale of two cities, 8 digit division in your head?
This gives a sense of embellishment by a clueless layman who think very smart people can memorize every single thing they ever do. Computers memorize well, very smart humans, it’s not clear if they memorize any better than a man of the street. I was struck by a fields medalist recent comment that he sometimes struggle remembering proofs he wrote himself in the past.
Memorizing books is absolutely possible. A great book about it is Moonwalking with Einstein (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moonwalking_with_Einstein), written by a journalist who was a skeptic but ended becoming a competitive mnemonicist himself. Some people intuitively learn the techniques early in life, and for some of them it becomes a habit.
Same thing applies to mental arithmetic. There are techniques for doing this. IIRC, ironically there's a famous case of someone who claimed to have memorized some hundreds of thousands digits of Pi but was suspected of using mental arithmetic techniques when reciting them.
Still, your point stands. People do embellish these kinds of stories based on stereotypes. It's certainly possible, but any particular anecdote may still be suspect.
I instantly lose respect to any man that "drove crowded roads like a maniac, and got bored and slowed down on open ones. He wrecked a car roughly every year"
I’m going to go out on a limb here and assume there is nobody on your people-I-respect list?
> And most of the world is not zero-sum...
That is a strange thing to say, especially now.
Clearly, there is a reason Von Neumann spent so much time on this 'zero-sum' formulation of the problem, specifically in economics. Clearly he must have believed this was representative to a significant extent, especially given his interest in pragmatic problems.
It would make no sense for an intelligent person to work on an economics problem which doesn't model reality.
> It would make no sense for an intelligent person to work on an economics problem which doesn't model reality.
So Newton was wasting everybody’s time with the gravity malarky after all?!
“All models are wrong, but some are useful.”
> Johnny remained a game theorist to the end. After a lifetime of culturally Jewish atheism, he asked to be baptized. His daughter attributed it to Pascal's Wager: a small probability of a much better afterlife, against a trivial cost.
The house always wins.
I've always thought that surely an all-knowing god would consider Pascal's Wager to be rather mercenary and insincere, and it wouldn't count.
People always leave off the second half of Pascal's Wager. Pascal's Wager is not simply that you can map out the odds vs risk and decide being a theist is more practical. But rather that if you take the odds, decide to be a theist, then start acting like one (participating in rituals, living like one, practicing what is preached, etc) then you may find God through those actions.
A god who didn't like rules lawyering would ruin a lot of people's plans https://www.npr.org/2019/05/13/721551785/a-fishing-line-enci...
Or maybe he'd even penalize you for it.
It's important to recall that an all-knowing God isn't necessarily very compassionate, or even rational. Some of the people I've known who knew the most have been the biggest assholes. Or insane.
What if there's a god, but he punishes humans for believing he exists, just for fun? Where's your wager now?
15 replies →
Judaism has, outside some mystical currents, less of an emphasis on "well, do you really believe?" than in Christianity, and more of an emphasis on rule-following (and studying how to navigate those rules) as the basic bargain between God and man.
EDIT: My bad, I missed that Neumann asked to be baptised, so he wasn't going back to the Judaism of his ancestors through his Pascal's Wager-esque step.
1 reply →
I never really understood Pascal's Wager.
Maybe I'm just weird, but I can't actually choose what I believe. I can choose to go to church and I can choose to say I believe and I can choose to donate money to some religious institution, but I don't think I'm capable of believing something that I think is dumb.
Pascal's Wager if you read the entire book is more intricate than choosing to believe. He also argues that by practicing as if you believed, you may feel as if the choice is true and find God that way.
I see it as more of a rationalization. When you already believe something, you look for intellectual reasons to justify that belief. Pascal's Wager feel like that to me. Its main power is hardening an existing belief rather than swaying an undecided mind.
Except that 'pisteuō' means more nearly "to be faithful to" or, one could even say, to enter a type of contract (thus the Greek construct 'dia pistis', two parties relating "through faithfulness").
Anglo evangelicalism constrained its meaning to something like "intellectual assent", for its own purposes (in my opinion, it made for better sales models) some time in the nineteenth century. And as you essentially point out, intellectual assent is fairly meaningless.
Yeah, this is one of the more subtle issues with Pascal's wager.
1 reply →
If you're unfamiliar, there is a lot of historical context around Pascal's Wager -
Unless you live in a brutal theocracy, it's difficult to describe just how powerful institutionalized Christianity was at the time. Likewise the scale of religion-themed violence. A couple generations before Pascal's birth (in France), the Catholic-vs.-Protestant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Wars_of_Religion had kill off something between 10% and 25% of the population of France.
Pascal's own religious beliefs changed several times - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blaise_Pascal#Religious_conver...
The Wager was published after Pascal's death, in an edited collection of his notes - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pens%C3%A9es
In many ways, I'd interpret the Wager as saying "if professing quiet belief in the current local orthodoxy is relatively cheap, and those not doing so are occasionally slaughtered at scale, then prudent people will parrot orthodoxy".
In the immortal words of Achewood's Cornelius T. Bear:
that's my man
[dead]
Article spends the first 95% establishing JVN as a mythologically intelligent person. Then the last paragraph suggesting he would want to ban AI.
So much content out there atm nudging very hard for AI regulation.
> Then the last paragraph suggesting he would want to ban AI.
The article doesn't say that, though. Here's the last paragraph quoted in full:
>> And then he names the qualities required: "patience, flexibility, intelligence". So, here is von Neumann, the master of abstraction, with no abstraction to offer. Maybe through his bout of applying minimax reasoning to nuclear strategy, he learned what a formal model is worth when the assumptions are shaky and the stakes are civilizational.
Please point out where in here Murat claims that von Neumann would ban AI?
In fact, the preceding paragraphs (the rest of that section) show that von Neumann would not be in favor of banning AI, or any particular technology. It's an argument for intelligent and deliberate action, not bans. Where he does talk about bans, he talks about their futility.
My apologies, I was skimming initially and, from just the headings it appeared to fit that pattern I've seen everywhere lately.
I agree with you that upon closer reading, this hypothetical JVN isn't arguing for a ban, but you could certainly read
> He goes on to say that a ban would have to be worldwide to work
> What safeguard remains? Apparently only day-to-day — or perhaps year-to-year — opportunistic measures, a long sequence of small, correct decisions. [...]
and
> The only safety possible is relative, and it lies in an intelligent exercise of day-to-day judgment.
as an argument for regulation.
And it does feel like a doomer narrative.
> For progress there is no cure. Any attempt to find automatically safe channels for the present explosive variety of progress must lead to frustration.
Also, while we glorify JVN's intellect, let's not forget that all his reasoning resulted in him publicly arguing for the nuclear annihilation of a vast country of people.
It says you can't ban AI and shouldn't try. There is no general solution except a worldwide ban of technology itself. What you can do is local and incremental and based on good judgement, patience, intelligence, etc.
[comment withdrawn]
> This is an invented quote...
It's not an invented quote, here's an Archive copy of the source:
https://archive.org/details/ETC3234/page/669/mode/2up
1 reply →
Where does it say (or suggest) that they would ban AI? Perhaps I'm reading it wrong, but I think you missed the point.