The Unparalleled Genius of John von Neumann • Hacker News Board

Re: The Unparalleled Genius of John von Neumann

#281

Post by nn3 » Sun, Nov 17, 2019, 6:25 PM UTC

hgytr wrote: post #279

spookthesunset wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you're intellectually gifted (many programmers are) Lets not jerk each other off too hard, eh? Just like everybody in life, in any trade or profession, most programmers are just average people like everybody else. They just happened to luck out and be good at a talent that pays well. Odds are incredibly high you aren't any smarter than somebody who paints houses for a living, fills your prescription, or plays fo…

There is a reason why a cashier works for minimum wage. A few days ago I went to a grocery store to buy sparkling water. I got 16 small bottles and arranged them as a 4 by 4 grid before cashier, so she wouldn't need to spend time counting them and delaying the line. It took her over 10 seconds to count the bottles: apparently, she didn't recognize the pattern and counted them by groups of 3-4 bottles covering the cou…

>This scene hints that the cashier's analytical skills are >next to none and this alone explains why she is a cashier.

Her numerical analytics skills perhaps, but she might be great at something else. Maybe she is a poet, or a musician, or great at handling 5 kids, or something else that you are terrible at.

Just something that doesn't pay well, so she has to be a cashier.

This is kind of a form of Moravec's paradox: we assume what is easy for us must be easy for others, and what is hard for us must be also hard for others too.

I can't find the reference right now, but this was a famous problem in early testing of monkey's intelligence. They showed the monkey's pictures of humans and they couldn't distinguish them, so it was assumed they were fairly dumb. But then eventually someone figured out they were much better at distinguishing pictures of other monkeys.

Of course it's still possible that the cashier is not good at anything, but in my experience that's very rare. Most people have some skills.

Re: The Unparalleled Genius of John von Neumann

#282

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Nov 17, 2019, 6:39 PM UTC

bostik wrote: post #256

Gatsky wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not sure that a ‘bloodline’ is a valid genetic concept. It depends a lot who the partner is, after all they provide 50% of the offspring’s genetic material. Put another way, if you are a genius in some field, the chance of having a child with someone of equal or greater aptitude is effectively zero. The ‘more to the story’ is possibly just affluence and family stability, which are also culturally embedded.

> The ‘more to the story’ is possibly just affluence and family stability, which are also culturally embedded. At a guess I would think these are the more important factors. Being born into an affluent family gives access to higher likelihood of more varying influences and stimuli from an early age. Children are by their nature curious creatures, so having the possibility to satisfy their curiosity in more avenues sh…

[deleted]

Re: The Unparalleled Genius of John von Neumann

#283

Post by mixmastamyk » Sun, Nov 17, 2019, 6:52 PM UTC

pfdietz wrote: post #244

mixmastamyk wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Folks nearest to nuclear testing died early of cancer. VN didn’t smoke. Look up the movie the Conqueror. I grew up near SSFL so have some stories too.

That's nice. It remains the case that fallout will have caused only a small increase in the national background cancer rate. https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/r...

Yes, only a “small” significant increase to those nearby. And we’re not talking only about fallout but manipulation in the lab.

It’s specifically your brand of risk downplaying that led to all these early deaths. Things are much safer today because educated folks understand the risks and prepare for them.

Re: The Unparalleled Genius of John von Neumann

#284

Post by SamReidHughes » Sun, Nov 17, 2019, 6:54 PM UTC

codingslave wrote: post #274

Gatsky wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not sure that a ‘bloodline’ is a valid genetic concept. It depends a lot who the partner is, after all they provide 50% of the offspring’s genetic material. Put another way, if you are a genius in some field, the chance of having a child with someone of equal or greater aptitude is effectively zero. The ‘more to the story’ is possibly just affluence and family stability, which are also culturally embedded.

But what I am saying is this, the highest levels of genius, I would argue, are categorically different than just highly intelligent people. I think theres something different about the way their brains are structured. I've interacted with some of the top minds in a few fields, and I never come off with the feeling that they are merely farther along some kind of "intelligence spectrum". It always feels as if their thi…

This is just unnecessarily many moving parts. All it takes to have extra geniuses is for grad students to marry each other and have a bunch of kids, instead of dating in the general pool. Also, the thinking of regular people is different in myriad ways, if you pay attention.

Re: The Unparalleled Genius of John von Neumann

#285

Post by hgytr » Sun, Nov 17, 2019, 7:12 PM UTC

nn3 wrote: post #281

hgytr wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a reason why a cashier works for minimum wage. A few days ago I went to a grocery store to buy sparkling water. I got 16 small bottles and arranged them as a 4 by 4 grid before cashier, so she wouldn't need to spend time counting them and delaying the line. It took her over 10 seconds to count the bottles: apparently, she didn't recognize the pattern and counted them by groups of 3-4 bottles covering the cou…

>This scene hints that the cashier's analytical skills are >next to none and this alone explains why she is a cashier. Her numerical analytics skills perhaps, but she might be great at something else. Maybe she is a poet, or a musician, or great at handling 5 kids, or something else that you are terrible at. Just something that doesn't pay well, so she has to be a cashier. This is kind of a form of Moravec's paradox:…

Eh. Poetry and handling kids is orthogonal to intelligence.

Intelligence is a very narrow and specific skill of discerning the real. It allows us to predict things. Coincidentally, it allows to make money and thus is well paid. It's ok if others disagree with me.

My two examples above are meant to hint that intelligence consists of two distinct skills: ability to keep a still detailed image in your mind (the 3x3 grid example) and ability to analyze this still image (the counting bottles example). The latter builds on the former because if the image is blurry in your mind, there is nothing to analyze (you can't see words in the 3x3 grid if it keeps floating away). We can go further and divide the two skills into say 10 distinct levels of mastery, define their characteristics, but the point remains the same: it's a steep ladder that has to be climbed if one wants to get this skill.

Poetry, music and handling kids are different skills and are of no help in climbing the ladder of intelligence. No, I agree that compassion and other skills can be as useful as intelligence, but they are different skills and have to be mastered separately.

Just my 2c.

Re: The Unparalleled Genius of John von Neumann

#286

Post by mikorym » Sun, Nov 17, 2019, 8:02 PM UTC

corporate_shi11 wrote: post #163

Scaevolus wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a depressing analysis on where all the Hungarian geniuses came from and why they vanished: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-consid...

Interesting. I never knew about the link between Ashkenazi genetics and intelligence.

I don't know about the genetics part, but what I have noticed is that Jewish "leaf nodes" tend to be great mathematicians or otherwise intellectual. What I mean by this is a child/person of Jewish descent, that is no longer religious and also does not have children. They are thus a leaf node in the tree. A current example would be Grigory Perelman.

I don't like to conjecture about cleverness and intellegence and especially not genetics. But if there is one thing these Jewish leaf nodes have in common it is a really good education.

Re: The Unparalleled Genius of John von Neumann

#287

Post by williamDafoe » Sun, Nov 17, 2019, 9:18 PM UTC

GhettoMaestro wrote: post #158

Merrill wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>He died at age 53 on February 8, 1957, at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., under military security lest he reveal military secrets while heavily medicated. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_von_Neumann#Illness_and_d...

Makes you wonder what secrets he took to the grave. Thus the military security right up to the very end.

He was a member of the US gov JASONs team.

Re: The Unparalleled Genius of John von Neumann

#288

Post by williamDafoe » Sun, Nov 17, 2019, 9:24 PM UTC

rmp33 wrote: post #174

A question to mathematicians: what does your mind look like when you prove a theorem? There is a comment here, saying that many hard theorems require one to build a complex branch of math and use it to prove a single statement. So I asked myself: what does it really look like to prove a theorem at such level? I can tell what's going on in a programmer's mind. Software is very much like an imaginary mechanism and soft…

I can say, based on proving new NP-completeness complexity theorems and also optimal algorithms in my CS Theory PhD thesis, it's like a little orgasm light turned on in my brain for about 36h. Not as intense but definitely an extreme glow of elation that I carried around for almost 2d. Nothing like it since ....

Re: The Unparalleled Genius of John von Neumann

#289

Post by williamDafoe » Sun, Nov 17, 2019, 9:29 PM UTC

anongraddebt wrote: post #22

danieltillett wrote: post #10

I have always wondered how close von Neumann was to the maximum human potential. Does he sit close the outer edge of possible human potential, or can greater geniuses be created? Is there anyone alive who even comes close to Johnny?

My guess is that each relatively difficult field (fields that require substantial thought... I guess you know it when you see it) has its freaks of nature: genetic anomalies that, for at least a brief moment, seem to transcend the other participants. In the 20th century, philosophy had Saul Kripke. Among other things, he published one of the seminal papers in the (at that time) nascent area of modal logic when he was…

Ed Witten at Princeton, who reduced the number of dimensions in string theory, is called "The Martian" by his affectionate (but disbelieving) grad students ...

Re: The Unparalleled Genius of John von Neumann

#290

Post by williamDafoe » Sun, Nov 17, 2019, 9:33 PM UTC

pfdietz wrote: post #215

mixmastamyk wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He died of cancer, probably a result of nuclear testing. They didn’t fully realize how dangerous it was until later.

That's not a valid inference. Even during the era of nuclear testing, the great majority of cancers were not caused by radiation. Now, SMOKING...

Smokers lungs experience something like 1000x more radiation than a visit near Chernobyl. My dad was a student of von Neumann. In the 50's it was fashionable to smoke, drink martinis, and drink lots of coffee, and exercise was for chumps. My dad didn't live even as long as von Neumann, and died of a heart attack.