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The duties of John von Neumann's assistant (1993)

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Re: The duties of John von Neumann's assistant (1993)

#61

Post by dwringer »

mark_l_watson wrote: post #25

As a young post doc at the Institute for Advance Study, my Dad knew von Neuman, who according to my Dad, tended to work late at night and work with loud music playing - very much like young hackers today!

I remember reading a similar anecdote in the book Turing's Cathedral, where it suggested that von Neumann had a particular preference for loud marches. It also makes me think about what Stanislaw Ulam wrote of von Neumann[1]:

"If one has to divide mathematicians, as Poincaré proposed, into two types—those with visual and those with auditory intuition—Johnny perhaps belonged to the latter."

[1] http://www.ams.org/journals/bull/1958-64-03/S0002-9904-1958-...

Re: The duties of John von Neumann's assistant (1993)

#62

Post by Pica_soO »

jimmy1 wrote: post #60
Pica_soO wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My embedded professor waged a little guerilla warfare against the Object Orientated Everything doctrine. Subtle little sentences like- fired mid lecture: "Yes, it helps us programmers, but the compiler has to rip it all out again, to not ruin the cache performance-" which got us to question other lectures, and find out that the exact truth - depends on the circumstances. PS: If you strip university down to its basics…

> PS: If you strip university down to its basics- its basically society accepted basic income for three/four years - to do whatever you want- if one does not use that, because s/he is chasing some gamified credits in exchange for real credit - is it really fair to blame that on the professors of that institution? I am finding it difficult to unpack this, but the basic assertion that it is some free time for you to ex…

Sorry, wrote very uncomprehensible.

In Germany college is free- so waste wherever you look- but i found i could invest that time and learn something there. And the professors where quite down to earth- also the sort of college i visit has a requirement that professors spend every fourth semester in the industry.

In contrast, as a consultant i met many companys, incredible proud on there tech- and only few of them really where as golden as they saw themselves.

Re: The duties of John von Neumann's assistant (1993)

#63

Post by miobrien »

dwringer wrote: post #61
mark_l_watson wrote: post #25

As a young post doc at the Institute for Advance Study, my Dad knew von Neuman, who according to my Dad, tended to work late at night and work with loud music playing - very much like young hackers today!

I remember reading a similar anecdote in the book Turing's Cathedral , where it suggested that von Neumann had a particular preference for loud marches. It also makes me think about what Stanislaw Ulam wrote of von Neumann[1]: "If one has to divide mathematicians, as Poincaré proposed, into two types—those with visual and those with auditory intuition—Johnny perhaps belonged to the latter." [1] http://www.ams.org/jou…

Interesting.

Not completely similar but somewhat interesting, here's an interview where Feynman admits to not being "great" (for lack of a better word) at music.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqtuNXWT0mo

“Lot’s of people love music and I never could carry a tune.”

Re: The duties of John von Neumann's assistant (1993)

#64

Post by microtherion »

M_Bakhtiari wrote: post #2

In some ultra-low power distance societies, places like Sweden, the idea that anyone, no matter how important, is ever entitled to an assistant or secretary is almost anathema. Imagine if von Neumann had been required to do all of that in addition to making his own airline and hotel reservations, as is the case for many university professors these days.

One amusing aside in that article was that one of the professors who appear to have received the budget to pay an assistant to nothing was Oswald Veblen.

His uncle Thorstein Veblen surely would have had a field day with this idea.

Re: The duties of John von Neumann's assistant (1993)

#65

Post by mixmastamyk »

spectre256 wrote: post #37
jimmy1 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Already hurting them, and has been hurting them for almost a decade, even more at this point. I was thinking about continuing my education to do research in distributed computing, but I learned midway through my undergraduate, majoring in computer science with the "Software Engineering" track, that our field was already playing catchup with industry. I learned this because I worked for a startup my senior year. Their…

I have a similar story for a college course also titled "Software Engineering". Essentially, it was a course on how to properly execute the waterfall model of design. We were assigned teams of four, wrote hundreds of pages of requirement papers, design papers, everything papers. Then we wrote the code in PHP in one night. For the final section of the class, 3 teams of 4 were merged into teams of 12. It's obvious that…

Sounds quite outdated with the excessive documentation, etc. However, believe that learning a sequential process first has some advantages in shaping the mental model and experience with pros/cons later when learning agile. What do you think?

Re: The duties of John von Neumann's assistant (1993)

#66

Post by dgacmu »

gumby wrote: post #19

What they don't tell you is that at the Institute for Advanced Study the poor assistant had to use the same filing cabinet for his list of duties, to do list, and all of Von Neumann's correspondence and papers. While up at Harvard the assistants were given separate cabinets to make their lives easier. But woe betide the poor assistant who tried to put a file in the wrong cabinet!

Please feel free to include in your comedy CV that you managed to sneak this one past a computer science professor until the third read-through. Kudos. :)

Re: The duties of John von Neumann's assistant (1993)

#67

Post by sethherr »

detaro wrote: post #45
sethherr wrote: post #43

This was posted within today, not 1993. Title fix?

It almost entirely consists of a quote from a 1993 document, the fact that someone quoted this in an e-mail today is comparatively unimportant.

Hmmm. If you think what the source (Plover’s shitpost blog, not an email) provides is not beneficial, then I’d think the link should be to the original document.

I, on the other hand, think his selection and publication of this excerpt has merit and is useful. His framing of the quote is what drew me to read it in the first place.

Re: The duties of John von Neumann's assistant (1993)

#68

Post by nasalgoat »

jimmy1 wrote: post #36
jacquesm wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Academia is stuck in the past in that sense. And it is already hurting them in quite a few disciplines where 'being published' is great but trumped by 'being able to afford a normal life'. So it filters out people that are willing to put their lives on hold in order to have their names at the top of a couple of papers. Some of them find that the lives they put on hold can not be put together again after a decade. Gra…

Already hurting them, and has been hurting them for almost a decade, even more at this point. I was thinking about continuing my education to do research in distributed computing, but I learned midway through my undergraduate, majoring in computer science with the "Software Engineering" track, that our field was already playing catchup with industry. I learned this because I worked for a startup my senior year. Their…

I've been interviewing the products of many of those types of classes lately and discovering that none of them seem particularly interested in computers outside a classroom.

If you haven't even booted up a VM on a cloud provider to try stuff out, why do you expect to have a career in it?

Re: The duties of John von Neumann's assistant (1993)

#69

Post by M_Bakhtiari »

caminante wrote: post #52
M_Bakhtiari wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Could you confirm that first statement? Yes, and as you can see from one of the comments below, the same is largely true of neighbouring Norway. > That is, when I visited Sweden for a consulting job about 15 years ago, there was definitely a secretary for the group I visited. She helped organize the paperwork for the visit, booked my hotel and taxi, etc. Notice that I talked about cultural views on secretaries, not…

He's seeking research or data supporting your claims and conclusions, not for you to repeat your claim again. For example, it would be useful to provide supporting evidence of secretaries declining in numbers/ratios related to cultural preference, not technology advances.

>He's seeking research or data supporting your claims and conclusions, not for you to repeat your claim again.

Culture isn't really very quantifiable, if anecdotal evidence coming from living and working in that particular society is unsatisfactory, feel free to disregard the argument.

>For example, it would be useful to provide supporting evidence of secretaries declining in numbers/ratios related to cultural preference, not technology advances.

But that's not what I claimed. I think that's what's happening, but I never claimed to know how strong the cultural component is compared to the technological and economic ones.

Re: The duties of John von Neumann's assistant (1993)

#70

Post by eesmith »

M_Bakhtiari wrote: post #69
caminante wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's seeking research or data supporting your claims and conclusions, not for you to repeat your claim again. For example, it would be useful to provide supporting evidence of secretaries declining in numbers/ratios related to cultural preference, not technology advances.

>He's seeking research or data supporting your claims and conclusions, not for you to repeat your claim again. Culture isn't really very quantifiable, if anecdotal evidence coming from living and working in that particular society is unsatisfactory, feel free to disregard the argument. >For example, it would be useful to provide supporting evidence of secretaries declining in numbers/ratios related to cultural prefer…

I wasn't seeking research data.

I wanted to know the source of your conclusions. Are you Swedish? Have you lived in Sweden for decades? Are you a sociologist of workplace cultures?

Or have you heard it third hand, or have you based it on your predictions of what Sweden is like.

Here you imply that you have lived and worked in Sweden, but you aren't clear about how long or how well you understand the history of the transition? (Eg, was it a big topic like the "Ni" question was in the 1960s?)

But really, how do you know if the transition in Sweden is any different than the transition in, say, the US? (As you write "organisation" instead of "organization", I assume that you are not from the US, and may not have the experience in that culture to make a solid comparison. Feel free to use another low-power-distance but not ultra-low-power-distance culture instead.)

BTW, you originally wrote: "the idea that anyone, no matter how important, is ever entitled to an assistant or secretary is almost anathema [in Sweden]." You then wrote "It's not unexpected that the secretary-general of any organisation, even in Sweden, has a secretary."

I interpret your original statement to mean that it is unexpected that the director of a university has a secretary.

If not, where would you place the boundary for where it is expected, and what makes Sweden's "ultra-low power distance" a significant contributor to that?

Because it seems to my non-Swedish eyes that in my limited experience in Sweden it didn't seem much different than my experience in the US.

For what it's worth, I plugged "sekreterare" into the job search at what I think is the Swedish employment agency. One of the results was https://www.arbetsformedlingen.se/Tjanster/Arbetssokande/Pla... . Google Translate says:

> As a secretary, you will assist a friendly, impulsive and simple person with; • write different investigations. • Create documents, such as in excelfiles. The workplace is located in Hornstull and you start your assignment with an introduction. The role can eventually be expanded and become more than the 60% as it is today.

That doesn't sound like a career which is "almost anathema".

I would expect that "maid" is something which is almost anathema, at least in the US. It looks like the Swedish word for that is "hembiträde", and there are no matches for it on that job site.

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