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The legend of John von Neumann (1973)

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Re: The legend of John von Neumann (1973)

#51

Post by jerf »

irremediable wrote: post #31
jerf wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"It's tricky stuff... Feynman was (is?) a hero of mine, and I struggle to put this stuff in context." Heros have feet of clay. The correct move is to adjust your concept of "hero" to include this. The alternative, that you will only declare someone a "hero" if they are perfect in every way yields a definition of "hero" with 0 instances, which is a useless definition. If Feynmann was abusive to his wife to some degree…

I half-agree with you, but isn't there an ethical line past which it's wrong to call someone a hero?

To be honest, I don't really call very many people "heros". I personally keep a pretty high bar for that. But that goes into an entirely different, and very large, discussion.

Re: The legend of John von Neumann (1973)

#52

Post by eggoa »

spindritf wrote: post #44

What I find truly remarkable about polymaths is that they don't seem to be crippled in other regards. There is no trade-off. Actually, abilities seem to positivly correlate rather than displace each other. It seems like there's a free lunch somewhere. Which is unusual for living beings, for evolution to miss it.

Well, he only had one kid. That makes him a pretty lousy performer from evolution's point of view.

Re: The legend of John von Neumann (1973)

#53

Post by levlandau »

coliveira wrote: post #40
slg wrote: post #4

I wonder if a person like this came along today, whether they would be allowed to have the same type of impact in the variety of different ways that John von Neumann did. Whether he was advancing economic theory or telling the military the most efficient altitude to detonate a bomb, it was all the same basic skill set. He was just a crazy smart and logical guy and he applied that to every field that he could. I can't…

The opportunity still exists, but it is not in the obvious places, like computer science or physics. Great thinkers gravitate to fields that are starting right now, where there is a lot of basic work to do. Computer science is in many ways a mature field. Of course, there is always the possibility of something new and exciting appearing, as it happens in physics and mathematics from time to time. We don't know that i…

This is exactly right. I strongly disagree any sentiment that's basically equivalent to "they had it easier back then". There are always fields which are too deep for the newbie to penetrate...that's why the newbie either invents a new field or works in a much younger field i.e. great people are great because they found basic and turned it into the software industry not because they joined the software industry and sobbed about the fact that it's too late to make a change within it. In 2014 we also have Google. It's impossible to overstate how much of an advantage we have today. Learning is INCREDIBLY easy and so while the fields are growing at a fast clip so is the ability to instantly find the information we need to learn things.

Re: The legend of John von Neumann (1973)

#54

Post by calibraxis »

crassus2 wrote: post #28
Radim wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to rain on the parade, but such glorification of "heroes" is... just awkward. Wasn't there an article on Herbert's Dune on the HN front page, just yesterday? In particular, von Neumann was an "amazing human" as long as you don't mind him advising the military to bomb Russia out of the map, preemptively. What a wonderfully humane move. "If you say why not bomb them tomorrow, I say why not today? If you say today a…

Nietzsche has interesting things about our need to tear down people who have great, unique accomplishments over common weaknesses - calling this the "slave morality". The weak need to feel superior to the great, so we redefine greatness to mean other things.

The context: slave vs. master morality. Democracy is a slave morality. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master%E2%80%93slave_morality)

Personally, I think slave moralities have much to recommend them, as movements against elite domination.

Intellectual culture has its own hype, like the computer world. Some with loudspeakers try to deify a few "great thinkers", focussing on (certain narrow aspects of) their personalities they wish others to emulate. Brushing others aside who don't fit their model, despite talent. (Like people with the wrong gender/race.)

Let's take another well-known philosopher (Chomsky), who pointed out how humanity's masters try to turn "great" figures into villains, when they act with exemplary slave morality:

"Compare Russell and Einstein, two leading figures, roughly the same generation. They agreed on the grave dangers facing humanity, but chose different ways to respond. Einstein responded by living a very comfortable life in Princeton and dedicating himself to research that he loved, taking a few moments for an occasional oracular statement. Russell responded by leading demonstrations and getting himself dragged off by the cops, writing extensively on the problems of the day, organizing war crimes trials, etc. The result? Russell was and is reviled and condemned, Einstein is admired as a saint. Should that surprise us? Not at all."

Re: The legend of John von Neumann (1973)

#55

Post by vilhelm_s »

e12e wrote: post #45
coliveira wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Implementing a new language was never such an exciting deal as many think. New languages happen more because of the need than because of properties of the language itself. For example, C was created because a language with those features were necessary for the UNIX project. Similarly for Smalltalk and the environment at PARC. Lisp is a little different because it started as theory that was eventually implemented.

The modern language that comes to mind, is of course, Haskell. And "in between" we have Standard ML. And I think one could argue that the Dylan revival project and Rust are various extensions on the idea of invent(academically)-implement(pragmatically). And the Racket ball is still rolling, of course. So, I don't think it's right to say that things are all different now. Might be that the maturation of computer scien…

I do think there is a big difference in academic computer science now and then. Rob Pike has written about it from an operating systems perspective [1], and Richard Gabriel from a programming language perspective [2]. It seems that until the early 1990s, there were lots of projects focused on building "systems", i.e. big pieces of software which are in themselves practically useful; then there is a sharp shift and academic research focus on "theory" (in PL research, e.g. a type safety proof for small core calculi, or a particular algorithm for program analysis).

People have always pursued "small" ideas. But I think the fact that we stopped writing "big" systems is a real change. (I guess the reason is that off-the-shelf operating systems and programming languages gradually got better, until it became impossible to "compete" with them. C.f. the Lua langauge, which got written basically because "western" langauges were not easily available at the time). My impression is that there is a lot less diversity of ideas now than there used to be, because everyone is incrementally improving the same set of OSs/langauges.

[1] http://herpolhode.com/rob/utah2000.pdf [2] https://www.dreamsongs.com/Files/Incommensurability.pdf (see the section starting on page 10)

Re: The legend of John von Neumann (1973)

#56

Post by xrange »

tachyonbeam wrote: post #7
slg wrote: post #4

I wonder if a person like this came along today, whether they would be allowed to have the same type of impact in the variety of different ways that John von Neumann did. Whether he was advancing economic theory or telling the military the most efficient altitude to detonate a bomb, it was all the same basic skill set. He was just a crazy smart and logical guy and he applied that to every field that he could. I can't…

I think in many ways, in terms of exploring scientific and engineering realms, we're more conservative now. Personally, I'm doing a PhD in computer science, and I find it incredibly frustrating. Publishing papers is all about minute incremental improvements, and you absolutely must have numerical results to prove that you beat the competition. You can't publish negative results either, your work is considered worthle…

>all about minute incremental improvements

...how much of that is due to the fact that CS is now much more of a mature field compared to 44 years ago. It seems like the fields of synthetic biology and biological and chemical computers and self replicating nanobots (hey Von Neumann again) would be more open to grand scale ideas, and there are lots of exciting opportunities that haven't been explored.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_biology

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biocomputer

http://phys.org/news/2014-01-slime-molds.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemical_computer

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-replicating_machine#von_Ne...

Re: The legend of John von Neumann (1973)

#57

Post by ScottBurson »

tachyonbeam wrote: post #7
slg wrote: post #4

I wonder if a person like this came along today, whether they would be allowed to have the same type of impact in the variety of different ways that John von Neumann did. Whether he was advancing economic theory or telling the military the most efficient altitude to detonate a bomb, it was all the same basic skill set. He was just a crazy smart and logical guy and he applied that to every field that he could. I can't…

I think in many ways, in terms of exploring scientific and engineering realms, we're more conservative now. Personally, I'm doing a PhD in computer science, and I find it incredibly frustrating. Publishing papers is all about minute incremental improvements, and you absolutely must have numerical results to prove that you beat the competition. You can't publish negative results either, your work is considered worthle…

Why do you want to create your own language? People create languages for many different purposes. What would be original and interesting about this language?

I am inclined to agree with your larger point that we have gotten too conservative, but I also think we are awash in programming languages. Before I would encourage someone to create a new language, I would want to see a good argument that none of the existing ones would suffice for some interesting purpose.

Re: The legend of John von Neumann (1973)

#58

Post by scott_s »

tachyonbeam wrote: post #7
slg wrote: post #4

I wonder if a person like this came along today, whether they would be allowed to have the same type of impact in the variety of different ways that John von Neumann did. Whether he was advancing economic theory or telling the military the most efficient altitude to detonate a bomb, it was all the same basic skill set. He was just a crazy smart and logical guy and he applied that to every field that he could. I can't…

I think in many ways, in terms of exploring scientific and engineering realms, we're more conservative now. Personally, I'm doing a PhD in computer science, and I find it incredibly frustrating. Publishing papers is all about minute incremental improvements, and you absolutely must have numerical results to prove that you beat the competition. You can't publish negative results either, your work is considered worthle…

I've mentioned this a bunch already on HN, but I recommend reading "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" by Thomas Kuhn. The book was published before most people had even heard the phrase "computer science," but I think that computer science still follows some of the patterns he talks about.

In Kuhn's view, "normal science" is mostly iterative and incremental. It is so because most people in the discipline agree on most of the big issues, and people are mostly refining those understandings. The periods where people don't agree on the big issues in a discipline is around the time of scientific revolutions: the solutions to such big issues are so different from previous approaches that accepting them requires a complete re-think of what the discipline is.

A lot of areas of CS are in the "normal science" part of that cycle, and I think compilers and languages are in there. (The biggest argument against that is concurrency and parallelism.) In the 60s and 70s, programming languages were new, and they changed computer science forever. We were exploring what these things could be.

I also recommend Cristina Videira Lopes's blog post, "The Evolution of CS Papers": http://tagide.com/blog/2014/02/the-evolution-of-cs-papers/

Re: The legend of John von Neumann (1973)

#59

Post by Tycho »

irremediable wrote: post #10
mau wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you please add some sources for the claim about Feynman? A quick search on the web "feynman abuse" didn't gave me relevant results.

The famous quote is "His ex-wife reportedly testified that on several occasions when she unwittingly disturbed either his calculus or his drums he flew into a violent rage, during which time he attacked her, threw pieces of bric-a-brac about and smashed the furniture." That was from an FBI file ( https://www.muckrock.com/foi/united-states-of-america-10/fbi... ) on Feynman. I don't know anything about the "paid aborti…

I thought this was a rumour started by Feynman himself in order that the authorities would think twice about asking him to preside over something or other.

The 'his calculus or his drum playing' part is kind of a giveaway.

Re: The legend of John von Neumann (1973)

#60

Post by walterbell »

eggoa wrote: post #52
spindritf wrote: post #44

What I find truly remarkable about polymaths is that they don't seem to be crippled in other regards. There is no trade-off. Actually, abilities seem to positivly correlate rather than displace each other. It seems like there's a free lunch somewhere. Which is unusual for living beings, for evolution to miss it.

Well, he only had one kid. That makes him a pretty lousy performer from evolution's point of view.

He did improve the evolutionary odds of most people on HN, so that counts for something.
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