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The genius of John von Neumann

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Re: The genius of John von Neumann

#81

Post by photochemsyn »

systemvoltage wrote: post #15
photochemsyn wrote: post #5

You could write another article entitled 'the lunacy of John von Neumann' over his endless pushes for destroying every major city in the Soviet Union with nuclear weapons, too. A brilliant scientist, yes, but also an unhinged lunatic. Not an unusual situation, see Cantor etc. What's curious is how many hagiographies have been written about this individual - some people seem bent on rehabilitating this figure by erasi…

I hate this. We are trying to look at the worst of someone that did so much for the world. People on HN are trying to cancel Feynman as well. I have nothing but feelings of disdain for you. Even if they did something wrong, I’d rather focus on their positive sides. Please stop this onslaught of taking down the history for some axe to grind.

Actually, I think the history of Feynmann and von Neumann is sort of illustrative. This quote in particular:

> "Richard Feynman quote: [John] von Neumann gave me an interesting idea: that you don't have to be responsible for the world that you're in. So I have developed a very powerful sense of social irresponsibility as a result of von Neumann's advice. It's made me a very happy man ever since. But it was von Neumann who put the seed in that grew into my active irresponsibility!"

This is sort of an argument for perpetual childhood... and children with nuclear weapons, playing with matches, well what could go wrong?

P.S. It looks like this: https://www.henrirousseau.net/images/famous/war.jpg

Feynmann's lecture on physics are invaluable though and Caltech made them all available online recently, including the audio, so I don't see him getting 'cancelled' any time soon, even if the 1964 class was basically all-white-male, and Caltech didn't allow women students until the 1970s.

Re: The genius of John von Neumann

#82

Post by dash2 »

paulpauper wrote: post #78

>He was not an economist, but he developed the use of fixed-point theorems in economics in a paper which the historian Roy Weintraub calls “the single most important article in mathematical economics”, and which inspired “half a dozen” Nobel laureates. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brouwer_fixed-point_theorem no mention of him. I don't think he conceived of the idea.

He didn't invent the fixed-point theorem, he developed their use in economics.

Re: The genius of John von Neumann

#83

Post by vishho »

gonehome wrote: post #72
vishho wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A first strike is not lunacy. It is a rational decision, if the nuclear arms race is viewed under game theory. He was a consultant, not had his hand on the button. The people with the hand on the button were talking about the rising threat and how to deal with it in the future. Neumann rightly reasoned that if there ever came a conflict, the winning move would have been an early first strike. If you look at his state…

In the prisoner's dilemma isn't a core constraint that the prisoners can't collaborate? Therefore you can't cooperate for the best outcome and both are independently incentivized to defect. In global diplomacy the goal is to coordinate for the best outcome. So I'm not sure a strike first 'defection' is the rational move.

Game Theory eventually settled on Mutually Assured Destruction. MAD can be seen as the tit-for-tat strategy in an iterated PD with multiple level thinking (If we have crazy von Neumann, do they have similar consultants? Do they know that we think Neumann is a lunatic? etc.) and super rationality (we are all players on the same board, damaging other players reduces our own chances to grow, we should be competing against those urging for war, on either side).

Von Neumann was consultant on game theory, not on geopolitical diplomatic strategy. War generals wanted to talk about future conflicts. Von Neumann reminded them that all talk of winning future conflicts could be made moot by a single move. And he reasoned that intelligent analysts on the other side would inform their generals similarly. Both did a good job, and the generals are commended for taking things outside pure maths into consideration.

What is our solution for when Russia joins the game and gets access to its own nukes?

The Spockian rational answer is: make this question irrelevant and increase our power on the board, by making sure Russia cannot even join the game we are currently winning.

To make good decisions you need diverse expert input like this. All in all, I think von Neumann's work helped keep the nuclear war on paper, instead of reality. His input of a first strike evolved into MAD and allowed us to reach an equilibrium.

Re: The genius of John von Neumann

#84

Post by photochemsyn »

user982 wrote: post #35
photochemsyn wrote: post #5

You could write another article entitled 'the lunacy of John von Neumann' over his endless pushes for destroying every major city in the Soviet Union with nuclear weapons, too. A brilliant scientist, yes, but also an unhinged lunatic. Not an unusual situation, see Cantor etc. What's curious is how many hagiographies have been written about this individual - some people seem bent on rehabilitating this figure by erasi…

> A brilliant scientist, yes, but also an unhinged lunatic. Not an unusual situation, see Cantor etc. What made Cantor unhinged? I skimmed his Wikipedia page (assuming you mean Georg) and the worst seemed to be a couple of sanatorium stays for depression.

Okay that's perhaps an unfair comparison. But would you want Cantor in a depressed state running something important?

The concept of the 'universal genius' or the 'universal manager' and so on seems nonsensical, and yet we see those themes pumped out constantly. Expertise in one area does not magically create expertise in one area, and the mental skills involved in complex higher math don't make one an expert is human behavior or international relations. That's what I was trying to get at, perhaps poorly.

Re: The genius of John von Neumann

#85

Post by Herodotus38 »

paulpauper wrote: post #77
Herodotus38 wrote: post #47

A little pedantic but I want to fix something. I noticed in the first sentence that he states Von Nuemann died of bone cancer. This is incorrect. His cancer was first found in his collarbone, and it was a metastatic lesion. They biopsied it and various sources I've read have stated the primary cancer was pancreatic or prostate. This means that it would have been an undifferentiated adenocarcinoma. This means the canc…

Interesting insight

Thanks. Who knows, maybe this article will be cited by others in the future, and it will be one more piece of misinformation. The fight never stops.

Re: The genius of John von Neumann

#86

Post by photochemsyn »

stevemadere wrote: post #74
photochemsyn wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a lunatic position. Consider the die-hard environmental activist who decides the best way to save the planet is to create a collection of deadly infectious pathogens, distribute them to every major city on the planet, and so reduce the human population by 75%, creating a glorious utopia for everyone to enjoy. Several books and movies have employed this plot, 'Cobra Event' comes to mind. Consider the psychology o…

Is there a Kickstarter for that project? Asking for a friend.

I imagine once we start seeing serious migration levels due to global warming, some idiot genius will come up with something.

On some days, I look up at the stars and think "You know it's shit like this, why we don't have alien visitors. Intelligence is apparently a dead-end evolutionary tree."

I hope I'm wrong about that.

Re: The genius of John von Neumann

#87

Post by GDC7 »

philwelch wrote: post #79
GDC7 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It was far from a guarantee that the Soviets would moderate after Stalin's death That is the same of saying that there was no reason to suspect that the US would moderate after FDR's death. Getting involved in a conflict on the other side of the world is not exactly something a moderate would do. Germany had a spirit of revenge after WW1. What did the US have to do on the other side of the world...once again? No ma…

> That is the same of saying that there was no reason to suspect that the US would moderate after FDR's death. No, it isn’t. FDR didn’t have tens of millions of people murdered in cold blood.

But he had camps for immigrants. Let's talk about Indian Americans?

Again.....adjust for wealth , education, quality of life, etc.

The US was really not that moderate if you adjust for the aforementioned conditions.

Switch cultures and systems between the US and the USSR...also switch standards of living etc. and the USSR would have been just as "moderate". Perhaps a tad harsher or a tad softer.

But humans are humans, their aggressivene/moderate behavior is modulated by standards of living, age, sex, male to female ratio...and not much else.

For sure it's not capitalism vs. communism which are essentially the same thing.

Modern day religions propagated by the church of the state with the head of state as Pope.

Make people believe you have found a system to turn a 300 tons oil tanker into a cruise liner (and/or viceversa), and convince them to elevate you socially to implement (or conserve) such system.

At the end of the day that social elevation is the only thing that's real and the ship...well nobody really knows what happens to it, except for some BS metrics such as GDP which aren't metrics anymore, they became the objective.

When a metric becomes the objective..it ceases to be a good metric.

Re: The genius of John von Neumann

#88

Post by badRNG »

screye wrote: post #76
badRNG wrote: post #9

Bizarre that the second to top comment (on the linked page) immediately turned the conversation into one about the commenter's view on racial/sexual supremacy and goes on to say "correspondingly, there are also ethnicities that are less intelligent" (I'm assuming they are implying supremacy of their own group.) It's quite jarring the frequency one comes across white supremacist/misogynist talking points when one trie…

The unfortunate reality is that group level differences in characteristics associated with intelligence are measurable. It is pretty much an open secret in genomics. Additionally, given how regression to the mean works, a small enough endogamous minority will display larger deviations from the mean (positive or negative) than larger ethnic groups that usually constitute the majority. I agree that it is a really trick…

>The unfortunate reality is that group level differences in characteristics associated with intelligence are measurable. It is pretty much an open secret in genomics.

Do you have any evidence to support these assertions?

We don't even have a reliable way to measure intelligence (a concept that is troublesome enough to even define), much less conclude that there are so-called "group level differences."

Re: The genius of John von Neumann

#89

Post by huetius »

screye wrote: post #76
badRNG wrote: post #9

Bizarre that the second to top comment (on the linked page) immediately turned the conversation into one about the commenter's view on racial/sexual supremacy and goes on to say "correspondingly, there are also ethnicities that are less intelligent" (I'm assuming they are implying supremacy of their own group.) It's quite jarring the frequency one comes across white supremacist/misogynist talking points when one trie…

The unfortunate reality is that group level differences in characteristics associated with intelligence are measurable. It is pretty much an open secret in genomics. Additionally, given how regression to the mean works, a small enough endogamous minority will display larger deviations from the mean (positive or negative) than larger ethnic groups that usually constitute the majority. I agree that it is a really trick…

Group level differences in IQ and its components are measurable. As someone not remotely progressive and who simply does not care about their values, I don’t believe any of these things actually amount to a workable definition of intelligence. I base this on my experiences with the very well-sifted meritocrats I encounter daily.

Re: The genius of John von Neumann

#90

Post by paulpauper »

photochemsyn wrote: post #5

You could write another article entitled 'the lunacy of John von Neumann' over his endless pushes for destroying every major city in the Soviet Union with nuclear weapons, too. A brilliant scientist, yes, but also an unhinged lunatic. Not an unusual situation, see Cantor etc. What's curious is how many hagiographies have been written about this individual - some people seem bent on rehabilitating this figure by erasi…

Yes research is collective, but , still, individuals prove key insights.
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