I think this article is mischaracterizing him as an applied mathematician with contributions to economics, game theory, computing etc — it gives almost no weight to his real mathematical work. I wonder why - it seems inconceivable that the biography being reviewed makes the same mistake.
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 erasing uncomfortable history.
In any case, hero-worship of scientists is very silly. The Nobel Prize bears a lot of the blame for this - but in reality, the vast majority of fundamental scientific discoveries are the result of dozens if not hundreds of researchers working over decades. The invention of the electronic computer is a good example of this, as is the invention of the nuclear bomb, as is the discovery and characterization of DNA's role in the cell.
And willing to kill tens of millions of innocents to achieve this. Yeah man a lunatic who in his detachment from the common man became less than in some of the most important dimensions of all: empathy, humanity.
Easy to say now, looking back on history and seeing that there wasn't a civilization ending nuclear war.
I wonder what the odds were of that happening? Did we get lucky and eke by that period with 1% odds? Or was there only ever a very very small chance of a nuclear holocaust, and people were worried about nothing? The answer to that question is what I would need to know about whether it is reasonable to nuke 10M people.
Every potential enemy is also a potential friend or a potential neutral. By definition.
Besides you don't get to wipe 1B people off the planet (which way back then represented 35% of the global population), and have as only consequence the fact that you "won" the prisoner's dilemma.
Such "victories" emerge as such after centuries when scientists would be studying the DNA remains and see who survived and who perished. But such great filter doesn't produce anything good for those living through it. Even the "winners"
There was no quality of life to be gained by the US and USSR in nuking each other, still there isn't today between US and Russia.Russia and the US can only be baited into nuking each other. And that's the danger we must be really careful about.
Thank god "normal" people like JFK and Kruschev who enjoyed the pleasures of life like cigars, alcohol and women were at the helm and not some guy who was paranoid about "winning" a game.
As far as predictive capabilities on this matter...Tom Clancy > John Von Neumann
Tom Clancy eventually turned into the worst kind of paint by numbers right wing kook. I have no doubt he'd be slavishly and unquestioningly supporting Trump if he were still alive.
Von Neumann's advocacy of a preemptive strike, to my knowledge, took place in the 1950's, when the Soviet Union was still under the rule of Stalin and did not yet have the ability to effectively strike back at the US. It was far from a guarantee that the Soviets would moderate after Stalin's death--it was sort of like hoping that, if Germany won WWII, that the Nazis would moderate after Hitler's death.
> 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 matter the other side of the world argument, countries which decided to be moderate were never involved even as they were right there where the disaster went down: Spain, Portugal, Switzerland, Greece, Norway...
If you adjust for education, quality of life and also hunger, then the US didn't look so moderate after all.
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.
That’s a lot of bullshit to make a moral equivalence between murdering tens of millions of people in cold blood and not murdering tens of millions of people in cold blood.
I fail to see how pushing for a strategy that, from a game theory point of view, was sound makes him a lunatic.
Plenty of people don't view the preservation of life as the be all end all and if that strategy had been followed and it had led to a world where only the United States had ever been allowed to develop nuclear weapons I see a very easy argument for it being the more long-term humane option.
Edit: who's more of a lunatic: the man who presses a button that kills a million people and saves a billion or the man that doesn't? I'd argue the latter.
>Edit: who's more of a lunatic: the man who presses a button that kills a million people and saves a billion or the man that doesn't? I'd argue the latter.
And should nuclear war ever occur? ~70 years is a relatively short time frame. Check back with me in another 200 and let me know if your comment still holds.
Is your theory that nuking the USSR would have completely prevented nuclear proliferation for at least two centuries? That no other nation would have developed nukes in secret, or stolen some from the USA? Or is your theory that nuking China, India, Pakistan, France, Israel, etc., as soon as they started to get nuclear weapons would still be worth it?
If you're saying global thermonuclear war is a bigger risk than we tend to think, e.g. because of anthropic shadow effects, I agree. But I still don't think there's positive expected value in a pre-emptive all-out nuclear attack.
Well that's a strawman. That is not a belief I hold and no where did I claim or imply I did. There's nothing in my comment, or in von Neuman's stance that I'm aware of that, that endorses world domination. I also don't see any reason to evoke the emotions associated with the word genocide either...
What I believe is that preventing development and possession of nuclear weapons by other nations would very likely lead to less deaths over time than nuking Russia would have. Are you really not concerned that we as a species may eventually wipe ourselves out? I am.
You are advocating for a United States hegemony via a monopoly on nuclear weapons, maintained by nuclear first strikes on the population centers of any other nation which might develop them. Is that an inaccurate summary?
In this case of action, and I can't believe Neumann didn't let you in on the sillyness of his plan(if he was even aware at all), the first nation with nukes would have done everyone else a favor and minimized future 'wipe outs' by nuking themselves off. Sadly, he fooled you, or didn't see his hypocracy. Doesn't sound too bright imo. 2ez to idolize celebrities though.
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 of the megalomaniacal individual who knows what's best for everyone based on their own personal views and experiences, who takes no input from anyone else, because everyone else in the room is an idiot who doesn't understand the genius of their position...
This might lead to arguments like "who's more of a lunatic, the woman who releases the virus that ends the insane human population explosion on Planet Earth, or the woman who doesn't? I'd argue the latter."
To quote William Gibson, roughly: "It's like they're all running around with luminous messages scrawled on the inside of their foreheads."
If your goal is preservation of Earth and not the human species then yes, that may be a sound action.
> who knows what's best for everyone based on their own personal views and experiences, who takes no input from anyone else, because everyone else in the room is an idiot who doesn't understand the genius of their position...
We're talking about von Neuman here. If I was to find myself in conflict with an assessment of his I would default to assuming I was likely wrong. From a statistical point of view anyone who wouldn't do the same is wrong to do so and ego, personality, or some other "thing" is likely getting in their way. It's not a big deal to cede to him imo.
To summarize my point, being a brilliant physicist and mathematician in no way qualifies one as a brilliant diplomat or foreign policy strategist. Would you want John von Neumann to do brain surgery on you, for example?
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."
The Cobra Event was buried and lost by having a title not unlike 500 other novels by more recognizable authors like Ludlum, Clancy, etc. Too bad too, because it's a great read.
> In any case, hero-worship of scientists is very silly. The Nobel Prize bears a lot of the blame for this
I think it's more that it gets indoctrinated in the process of learning math and science, where every historic formula, theory, hypotheses, and law, is named after someone. It's easy to overlook that all those someones were complex, flawed human beings. And as you allude to, many great discoveries are the work of many. But when learning science, I feel like the history often gets glossed over and tends to overlook the less famous contributors to great ideas.
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.
Apparently he was a highly sexualized person and he partook in debauchery, got grabby with women in general and took advantage of naive science groupies when the opportunity presented itself and other things that are probably worse than that.
If you read his autobiography he includes a fair bit of Red Pill style advice to the reader. Stuff like how to neg women to get them to sleep with you. He also includes anecdotes about how he was the least sexist guy in the room on other occasions. This is the danger of filtering past culture through a modern lens.
Ha! I'm in the middle of reading it. was might be more suitable seeing as I haven't touched it in about two months now but that's how I like doing it (3-4 in parallel). Just went back to check, and found out I left it at Part 4, with his involvement in the military having recently started. Don't recall anything particularly improper as regards the allegations(facts?, I'm not sure) but it's probably coming up.
Maybe some people are tired of sycophantic hero worship (in science and elsewhere).
>We are trying to look at the worst of someone that did so much for the world.
Have you ever considered that maybe hagiography is a disservice to these people? I know that if I were to do something extraordinary, I would be ashamed if other people used it as a smokescreen for my shortcomings.
trying to get a balanced perspective on people who did a lot for the world is not cancel culture. Winston Churchill saved Britain from the Nazis, but he was also pretty racist. That doesn't reduce the meaning of his positive accomplishments, but it does give his character more dimensionality.
I don't have data to back this up, but it seems to me most people were racist back then and there, but most people didn't save Britain from the Nazis, so from a PCA perspective one dimension is more significant than the other.
Churchill's legacy is more complex that just "he had racist viewpoints, but everybody had that back then." He was an imperialist who believed in Britains right to conquer and rule inferior people around the world. He was bitterly opposed to dismantling the Empire. Even after WWII, he was responsible the the horrifically brutal suppression of the rebellious Mau Mau in Kenya, which included the use of concentration camps. Yes, this happend after the Nürnberg trials.
So while he is rightfully remembered as a hero for opposing the Nazis when few others did, he also did much of the same the Nazis did, just far from Europe and against non-white people.
> People on HN are trying to cancel Feynman as well.
What does the word "cancel" mean to you? Feynman can't be deplatformed since he's dead, and no one can deny his fundamental contributions to physics.
> Please stop this onslaught of taking down the history for some axe to grind.
You know, if someone told me to stop saying something about a historical figure because they'd "rather focus on their positive sides", I might call that "taking down the history".
> You know, if someone told me to stop saying something about a historical figure because they'd "rather focus on their positive sides"
This is the most fragile strawman I've seen in a while. That's not what I said at all. I did not say we should stop talking about bad parts of the history. That would be literally be a totalitarian state.
"Please stop this onslaught of taking down the history for some axe to grind."
To me that sounds precisely like telling someone to "stop saying something about a historical figure because they'd "rather focus on their positive sides""
And yet you claim that isn't at all what you said.
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?
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.
One thing that I try to do as much as possible is try to just ignore this kind of people. They've got their agendas, and I am not going to give them the attention they want.
An intellectual-yet-idiot who placed too much hope and emphasis on game theory, despite the fact that it only works when agents are perfectly rational.
Consider the following game matrix, in which you pick a row and your opponent picks a column, and you receive the first payoff and your opponent receives the second.
(100,100) (-100,99)
(99,99) (98,98)
The Nash equilibrium strategy is that you pick row 1 and your opponent picks column 1, each receiving 100 points. Once in this state, neither of you can improve by unilaterally changing your strategy. However, if your opponent irrationally deviates and takes column 2, receiving 99 instead of 100, you will get the catastrophic -100 payoff.
I am not going to correct this statement, just please ask you not to use the word "intellectual-yet-idiot" to describe other people ever again. IYI is a great and new concept, and can be enlightening when correctly applied. Let us (pseudo)intellectuals cherish that value.
Yeah, after you reading that article, I totally agree.
It might also be fitting to describe NN Taleb. The only one it does not fit, I think, would be Edward Snowden, the last cultural bastion of free speech and human rights protection.
Have you ever wondered if your opinion is derived from first facts or based on a biased selection of sources that you've been exposed to? Not that I am telling this is the case, but have you ever considered that? I am generally curious, because saying John Von Neumann is IYI is a very courageous proposition.
About what they should think when developing a weapon of ultimate mass destruction? Rainbow unicorns?
You can't be a pacifist and simultaneously fight for "peace", that's nonsense. You can only fight for your survival, and for your people, your culture, your principles and values.
He's much more than a brilliant scientist! Some people think he's the greatest mathematicians of the 20th Century, in addition to his seminal applied contributions to game theory, computing, economics etc.
So it's not about "rehabilitating" or "hagiography". The discussion isn't about his political views or his personality or any of that. This person is an, perhaps the, outstanding genius of human history.
In mathematics and theoretical science, the major breakthroughs have often been the work of one person. I'm sure you know this. In general your comment is going wrong by discussing Von Neumann as if he were an applied scientist: he was a theoretician.
> 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.
Imagine if every time a story came up about a once-in-a-generation brilliant innovator, the top comments were all about highlighting their flaws and mistakes and minimizing their accomplishments. What a depressing way to live.
I have had this great book for 10+ years, and still find it fascinating it's called "Prisoner's Dilemma: John von Neumann, Game Theory, and the Puzzle of the Bomb". I try to re-read it on occasion. It's half John von Neumann biography and half subject matter history.
Call him an unhinged lunatic if you want photochemsyn; but I consider him a super genius.
He was a super genius. Just a super genius who repeatedly called for genocide and nuclear first strikes. He was removed from the target selection committee for the Japan bombings because he kept advocating for high civilian targets with no military value and even the generals at the table viewed him as crazy. The ability to be a genius and a lunatic aren't mutually exclusive and the recent efforts to build a hagiography around him are concerning.
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 statements, these are statements of mathematical fact, not political strategy.
If anything, he showed the hypocracy of target selection and its justifications for war. You want to play to win, or worry about rules and perceptions, unsure of if your opponent employs similarly intelligent analysts and game theorists?
Look at the target selection of American adversaries in their information warfare. Made by lunatics? Or made to win a shadow war and damage American culture and politics without regard to military status?
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.
There's no such restriction in the prisoner's dilemma.
Lets make it explicit. Let me _pretend_ that I'm going to work with you on the prisoner's dilemma game. I pretend that I'm trustworthy, and coordinate with you that we both trust each other.
That's when I betray you and take all the money for myself.
------------
In an *iterated* prisoner's dilemma, I simply work with you for the first X-1 trials (where X is the number of trials), and then betray you on the final trial. Since you know I'm going to betray you on the final trial, you betray me on the 2nd to last final trial. Etc. etc. This follows like induction all the way to the 1st trial.
Which means my best move is to betray you in the 1st trial, as per the rule of induction. But you know, pretend that I'm going to work with you (so that you choose trust in the 1st trial).
---------
Where things go sideways is iterated + public prisoner's dilemma. That is, there are 3 players, and the 3rd player watches what the other 2 players do. Each iteration, we rotate who plays the game.
Finally, we have a situation where trust is a good move: if only to "prove" to the other player that you're trustworthy and possibly get more gains over the long term.
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.
Also, for any of this to work, no matter the theory or rationale or lack thereof, the otherside has to believe that you're both capable and willing to execute any given plan.
Meaning that floating crazy-but-rationlized war strategies, especially sourced from individuals who are respected and known to be influential, can itself be seen as part of the overall strategy.
Regardless of whether said strategies are officially adopted or not. It's posturing.
Exactly. Trump weaponized this principle, making very rash and sudden moves during negotiations. This disadvantaged others, because they had trouble predicting his reaction to their own actions, thus moderating them in his favor or "You're fired!". I think a US general took it upon himself to inform China they would not be attacked, no matter what Trump threatened, because he himself was unable to model Trump's mind. "My task at the time was to de-escalate".
Also why MAD does not work well against information warfare. Is the current polarization of culture and politics a natural outgrowth of American culture, the result of unwitting civilians being targeted by military black and grey propaganda, or an unentangleable combination of the two? Did the opponent push the button? Did we push it back in the 80s and did they notice? Where exactly do we stand and draw the line, allowing countries to defend their (cultural) borders and feel safe, without the constant threat and fallout from offenders, who act like children pushing their parents to see how far they can go.
Sometimes I suspect these larger than life scientists working on the top-secret projects, Turing, Feynman, Shannon, Neumann, Kolmogorov, Tesla, Satoshi, were actually collections of people working undercover, an Alan Smithee catch-all type to launder intelligence, take credit, while keeping it in the shadows. Like the unnamed people supporting Bobby Fisher in his match against Russia. Modern day equivalents would be companies like Google, Dell, IBM, and Microsoft.
The moment the bomb became a button, was the moment the physicists had to step aside, and let the decision theorists step in. The bomb effectively became about how to make winning decisions. Decision science itself weaponized, opponents worrying about the analysts on the other side, not the aviators: you would know they would follow orders, and drop the bomb if instructed. You never fully know what those instructions were going to be, but you wanted to find out. Strategic Cold war espionage and misinformation must have ran wild.
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 tries to engage with programming/computer science communities online.
It makes me appreciate the largely positive and safe experience HN provides, despite the occasional user that insists the opposite.
Edit: some of the comments appear to have been removed/deleted or otherwise fallen off, though the comment about "ethnicities that are less intelligent" is still up near the top.
All he said is that some ethnicities are less intelligent than others. What is the statistical likelihood that 100% of ethnicities, which have evolved in drastically different environments across the world, have all developed perfectly identical intelligence on average? It's just not how evolution realistically works. People shouldn't close their eyes to how the world actually is whenever it doesn't match up with how they think it should be.
If you measure the IQ for the same ethnicity you will notice that the IQ changes over time.
Having proper levels of iodine is responsible for about 15 points of IQ. Removing lead from fuel, some extra increase.
Pollution, nutrition, water purity, all the accrued knowledge about fetal and child development that is applied in modern economies, etc. plays a role.
Also, there are negative factors like exposure to violence and trauma, substance abuse, which is correlated with poverty and inequality... which is a legacy of slavery, racial segregation, etc.
All you've done is restate the original claim without providing evidence that intelligence "doesn't match up" (as you claim) across ethnicities.
Generally when pressed, folks who dress up their racism in pseudoscientific language rely on the same small handful of talking points which largely haven't changed since "scientific racism" was mainstream in the 19th century. This started with phrenology, a widespread mainstream pseudoscience not only focused on dehumanizing black people, but also explicitly targeting natives as an apparent attempt to justify otherwise unconscionable public policies of the day. [1]
It's bad enough to hold pseudoscientific beliefs; it's worse if those beliefs originate in a blantant attempt to dehumanize others.
James Watson had evidence on the subject, he was stripped of his titles and harassed by ideologues who are convinced everyone should be exactly equal. Scientists have realized it's not worth it to sacrifice their career when the general public simply isn't interested in knowing things that might be considered racist.
James Watson made many unfounded racist claims that have been completely discredited.
The rhetoric surrounding racist pseudoscience mirrors that of the anti-vaccine and climate change denial movements. They point to a discredited "anti-vaxx" doctor or a discredited "climate change denying" researcher and view the criticism of their work as censorship, rather than as a sign they might not be a credible source.
In addition to sexism. I read his book Double Helix as a young woman and will never forget passages criticizing Rosalind Franklin's "choice" not to “emphasize her feminine qualities” and her lack of “even a mild interest in clothes.”
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 tricky line to walk. The brazen pursuit of truth or tabooing of prospectively society uprooting revelations. Both are a result of the same observation, just different moral systems.
I'm sure many grapple with this struggle in their own way. However, ostrasizing those who find themselves on the other side of that fence by shouting various 'X-isms', is neither productive nor effective.
>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."
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.
Unfortunately again, IQ is highly predictive. It obviously clashes with the massive emphasis on merit, grit & educational attainment placed by western liberal ideology. It fundamentally shakes the very foundation of outcome based evaluation of one's protestant/puritanism, especially in American Academia.
(the deeply rooted nature of protestantism in the pro-science / anti-religion/ Academic community in the US is long discussion I would love to have at some point. I want to be clear that I do not mean it in a derogatory manner. It is an observation. Not a value judgement)
Imagine if grit, intelligence and productivity within a capitalistic system were highly predictable at birth. Then the claim to eliteness that lends these elite institutions power, will suddenly get the appearance of genetic superiority. It quickly starts sounding like old school eugenicists. They/We will become what they claim to hate.
Intelligence is an easier discussion in the east. The floor for the value you bring to society is not based on your intelligence alone. They also don't hide the brutal realities for survival/thriving in a society where you might lack vital skills from birth.
I think everyone on HN would agree that a feudal-class system determined at birth, is not a desirable outcome. As it stands now, ignoring the ground realities has led to us building exactly that. The tabooing of IQ does not serve to stop the creation of this dystopia. It serves to obscure the reality that we might already be living in it.
Razib Khan [1] writes a lot about intelligence from a genetic standpoint (He works in population genomics).
One quote of interest
General intelligence is one of the most predictive psychological measures in existence.
The chestnut of wisdom that ability to test well measures how well you take a test is true but trivial.
The implication that test measurement does not correlate with other aspects of performance is manifestly false.
Those with higher measured IQs have higher incomes, greater educational attainment, and lower crime rates
(this remains true among siblings who differ in IQ).
This is well known within psychological science,
but for various reasons has been obscured and downplayed by broader American culture.
As with the athletically gifted,
the differences in outcomes is most obvious in those who are intellectually gifted at a young age.
The chart below shows the outcomes of 259 children identified as very gifted in their early teens on the SAT:
One out of thirteen of these extremely bright children became tenured professors.
One out of thirty-three wrote a book. Nearly half obtained doctorates.
These are not average kids who simply “test well.”
There is luck in life, but the die is loaded.
Very high intelligence is no guarantee of exceptional achievement,
but it clearly changes the probabilities.
The people I speak of have high incomes, high education levels, don’t break the law, can solve logic puzzles very fast, etc. They are also extremely stupid.
The fact that you personally happen to know some people who are successful despite being "stupid" (whatever that means according to you), is not really any sort of convincing point. And at any rate, the fact that a "stupid" person _can_ be successful certainly says nothing about how likely to be successful any given "stupid" person is.
High IQ people are often more skilled than others in explaining away gulfs between their understanding and encounters with reality. For IQ believers, such people still get to be called intelligent. For me, it makes them stupid.
You're quibbling about the definitions. Sure, high IQ people can be irrational and believe stupid stuff. Doesn't change the fact that IQ is important for success in modern society.
It comes back to the idea that intelligence comes back to performing well in our current narrow paradigm with all its rules and constraints. It could be very differently defined for instance in a world where the fundamental rules are different.
The fundamental problem with the “open secret” is a lack of a definition of what intelligence is. Something that works very well in our current paradigm may not do so well in another. If a mental trait is more advantageous in another paradigm, that would be classified as intelligence.
People complain about the target selection and first-mover advantage of Von Neumann, in the same thread which seems to be taken over by collateral damage of polarizing identity politics propaganda, set to target social cohesion of American civilians (which leaks into Western culture) done by the very same adversaries targeted decades back by Von Neumann.
"It’s fashionable to say that intelligence isn’t real, or that we can’t define it, or that it’s a Western colonial construct. But the word points to a real thing: there is some quality which rocks don’t have, and which mice have a bit of, and which chimpanzees have more of, and humans have a lot of; and which is something like problem-solving ability or ability to achieve goals."
We have IQ for measuring problem-solving ability, but it doesn't correlate well with the ability to achieve goals. That would be another very useful measure though, of something like intelligence * grit. Call it IGQ. An IGQ test would somehow set goals in a realistic, complex, chaotic environment, with social and physical as well as intellectual obstacles. So, a GPA is a sort of IGQ.
The quote sounds like either a strawman or a misunderstanding. I don't think many people would claim intelligence "isn't real", but obviously IQ tests are created by humans which certain culturally-influenced ideas about what constitute intelligence.
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 cancer has evolved to the point where you can recognize some aspects of it, but it has shed a lot of the characteristics of its cell of origin. It could also have been a cholangiocarcinoma or possible gastric cancer, hepatic, etc...
The term bone cancer refers to things like osteosarcomas, these usually occur in children.
Not trying to say the rest of the article is bad, but when I see something like this I want to point it out.
Previous biographies I've read have always reported pancreatic cancer, which is what I was going to originally type, but according to wikipedia there are some different sources listed.
>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.
I can never escape von Neumann. Everywhere I look, there is his influence. Even just as an engineer I see this. Physics, mathematics, computing (!), economics.. I am dumbfounded whenever I come across yet another monumental von Neumann idea that I use every day without knowing. Imagine how much further down the track we would be if we got another decade out of this incredible man…
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[ 1.7 ms ] story [ 260 ms ] threadA 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 erasing uncomfortable history.
In any case, hero-worship of scientists is very silly. The Nobel Prize bears a lot of the blame for this - but in reality, the vast majority of fundamental scientific discoveries are the result of dozens if not hundreds of researchers working over decades. The invention of the electronic computer is a good example of this, as is the invention of the nuclear bomb, as is the discovery and characterization of DNA's role in the cell.
I wonder what the odds were of that happening? Did we get lucky and eke by that period with 1% odds? Or was there only ever a very very small chance of a nuclear holocaust, and people were worried about nothing? The answer to that question is what I would need to know about whether it is reasonable to nuke 10M people.
Besides you don't get to wipe 1B people off the planet (which way back then represented 35% of the global population), and have as only consequence the fact that you "won" the prisoner's dilemma.
Such "victories" emerge as such after centuries when scientists would be studying the DNA remains and see who survived and who perished. But such great filter doesn't produce anything good for those living through it. Even the "winners"
There was no quality of life to be gained by the US and USSR in nuking each other, still there isn't today between US and Russia.Russia and the US can only be baited into nuking each other. And that's the danger we must be really careful about.
Thank god "normal" people like JFK and Kruschev who enjoyed the pleasures of life like cigars, alcohol and women were at the helm and not some guy who was paranoid about "winning" a game.
As far as predictive capabilities on this matter...Tom Clancy > John Von Neumann
Behold your "potential friend":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katyn_massacre
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Purge
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 matter the other side of the world argument, countries which decided to be moderate were never involved even as they were right there where the disaster went down: Spain, Portugal, Switzerland, Greece, Norway...
If you adjust for education, quality of life and also hunger, then the US didn't look so moderate after all.
No, it isn’t. FDR didn’t have tens of millions of people murdered in cold blood.
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.
Had the same circumstances happened in USSR, then the USSR would have gotten the same praise of moderation that you are reserving for the US.
Same goes for East Germany or Greece or Malta or even Macedonia
And so for every instance, you have to adjust for those special circumstances
How many slight deviations in the space of possibility would've caused global thermonuclear war during the Cold War?
Could you guarantee ahead of time that it would not occur? You have the benefit of hindsight now.
Plenty of people don't view the preservation of life as the be all end all and if that strategy had been followed and it had led to a world where only the United States had ever been allowed to develop nuclear weapons I see a very easy argument for it being the more long-term humane option.
Edit: who's more of a lunatic: the man who presses a button that kills a million people and saves a billion or the man that doesn't? I'd argue the latter.
Hitler, Stalin, and Mao would agree
If you're saying global thermonuclear war is a bigger risk than we tend to think, e.g. because of anthropic shadow effects, I agree. But I still don't think there's positive expected value in a pre-emptive all-out nuclear attack.
What I believe is that preventing development and possession of nuclear weapons by other nations would very likely lead to less deaths over time than nuking Russia would have. Are you really not concerned that we as a species may eventually wipe ourselves out? I am.
Several books and movies have employed this plot, 'Cobra Event' comes to mind.
Consider the psychology of the megalomaniacal individual who knows what's best for everyone based on their own personal views and experiences, who takes no input from anyone else, because everyone else in the room is an idiot who doesn't understand the genius of their position...
This might lead to arguments like "who's more of a lunatic, the woman who releases the virus that ends the insane human population explosion on Planet Earth, or the woman who doesn't? I'd argue the latter."
To quote William Gibson, roughly: "It's like they're all running around with luminous messages scrawled on the inside of their foreheads."
> who knows what's best for everyone based on their own personal views and experiences, who takes no input from anyone else, because everyone else in the room is an idiot who doesn't understand the genius of their position...
We're talking about von Neuman here. If I was to find myself in conflict with an assessment of his I would default to assuming I was likely wrong. From a statistical point of view anyone who wouldn't do the same is wrong to do so and ego, personality, or some other "thing" is likely getting in their way. It's not a big deal to cede to him imo.
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.
How long will that plot really be fiction?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cobra_Event
https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4336/5/1/53/htm
I think it's more that it gets indoctrinated in the process of learning math and science, where every historic formula, theory, hypotheses, and law, is named after someone. It's easy to overlook that all those someones were complex, flawed human beings. And as you allude to, many great discoveries are the work of many. But when learning science, I feel like the history often gets glossed over and tends to overlook the less famous contributors to great ideas.
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.
I'm out of the loop on this one too. Anyone care to explain?
https://galileospendulum.org/2014/07/13/the-problem-of-richa...
Thanks for letting me know!
>We are trying to look at the worst of someone that did so much for the world.
Have you ever considered that maybe hagiography is a disservice to these people? I know that if I were to do something extraordinary, I would be ashamed if other people used it as a smokescreen for my shortcomings.
So while he is rightfully remembered as a hero for opposing the Nazis when few others did, he also did much of the same the Nazis did, just far from Europe and against non-white people.
What does the word "cancel" mean to you? Feynman can't be deplatformed since he's dead, and no one can deny his fundamental contributions to physics.
> Please stop this onslaught of taking down the history for some axe to grind.
You know, if someone told me to stop saying something about a historical figure because they'd "rather focus on their positive sides", I might call that "taking down the history".
This is the most fragile strawman I've seen in a while. That's not what I said at all. I did not say we should stop talking about bad parts of the history. That would be literally be a totalitarian state.
"Please stop this onslaught of taking down the history for some axe to grind."
To me that sounds precisely like telling someone to "stop saying something about a historical figure because they'd "rather focus on their positive sides""
And yet you claim that isn't at all what you said.
Quite an unusual claim.
> "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.
(100,100) (-100,99)
(99,99) (98,98)
The Nash equilibrium strategy is that you pick row 1 and your opponent picks column 1, each receiving 100 points. Once in this state, neither of you can improve by unilaterally changing your strategy. However, if your opponent irrationally deviates and takes column 2, receiving 99 instead of 100, you will get the catastrophic -100 payoff.
EDIT: https://nassimtaleb.org/2016/09/intellectual-yet-idiot/ to add something interesting for others.
It might also be fitting to describe NN Taleb. The only one it does not fit, I think, would be Edward Snowden, the last cultural bastion of free speech and human rights protection.
About what they should think when developing a weapon of ultimate mass destruction? Rainbow unicorns?
You can't be a pacifist and simultaneously fight for "peace", that's nonsense. You can only fight for your survival, and for your people, your culture, your principles and values.
So it's not about "rehabilitating" or "hagiography". The discussion isn't about his political views or his personality or any of that. This person is an, perhaps the, outstanding genius of human history.
In mathematics and theoretical science, the major breakthroughs have often been the work of one person. I'm sure you know this. In general your comment is going wrong by discussing Von Neumann as if he were an applied scientist: he was a theoretician.
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.
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.
Compared to, say, people who use sticks to roll balls into holes? [https://www.theonion.com/man-who-used-stick-to-roll-ball-int...] I'll take scientist worship any day compared to all the other idiots and charlatans our culture chooses to worship.
Call him an unhinged lunatic if you want photochemsyn; but I consider him a super genius.
Link: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29506.Prisoner_s_Dilemma
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 statements, these are statements of mathematical fact, not political strategy.
If anything, he showed the hypocracy of target selection and its justifications for war. You want to play to win, or worry about rules and perceptions, unsure of if your opponent employs similarly intelligent analysts and game theorists?
Look at the target selection of American adversaries in their information warfare. Made by lunatics? Or made to win a shadow war and damage American culture and politics without regard to military status?
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.
Lets make it explicit. Let me _pretend_ that I'm going to work with you on the prisoner's dilemma game. I pretend that I'm trustworthy, and coordinate with you that we both trust each other.
That's when I betray you and take all the money for myself.
------------
In an *iterated* prisoner's dilemma, I simply work with you for the first X-1 trials (where X is the number of trials), and then betray you on the final trial. Since you know I'm going to betray you on the final trial, you betray me on the 2nd to last final trial. Etc. etc. This follows like induction all the way to the 1st trial.
Which means my best move is to betray you in the 1st trial, as per the rule of induction. But you know, pretend that I'm going to work with you (so that you choose trust in the 1st trial).
---------
Where things go sideways is iterated + public prisoner's dilemma. That is, there are 3 players, and the 3rd player watches what the other 2 players do. Each iteration, we rotate who plays the game.
Finally, we have a situation where trust is a good move: if only to "prove" to the other player that you're trustworthy and possibly get more gains over the long term.
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.
Meaning that floating crazy-but-rationlized war strategies, especially sourced from individuals who are respected and known to be influential, can itself be seen as part of the overall strategy.
Regardless of whether said strategies are officially adopted or not. It's posturing.
Also why MAD does not work well against information warfare. Is the current polarization of culture and politics a natural outgrowth of American culture, the result of unwitting civilians being targeted by military black and grey propaganda, or an unentangleable combination of the two? Did the opponent push the button? Did we push it back in the 80s and did they notice? Where exactly do we stand and draw the line, allowing countries to defend their (cultural) borders and feel safe, without the constant threat and fallout from offenders, who act like children pushing their parents to see how far they can go.
Sometimes I suspect these larger than life scientists working on the top-secret projects, Turing, Feynman, Shannon, Neumann, Kolmogorov, Tesla, Satoshi, were actually collections of people working undercover, an Alan Smithee catch-all type to launder intelligence, take credit, while keeping it in the shadows. Like the unnamed people supporting Bobby Fisher in his match against Russia. Modern day equivalents would be companies like Google, Dell, IBM, and Microsoft.
The moment the bomb became a button, was the moment the physicists had to step aside, and let the decision theorists step in. The bomb effectively became about how to make winning decisions. Decision science itself weaponized, opponents worrying about the analysts on the other side, not the aviators: you would know they would follow orders, and drop the bomb if instructed. You never fully know what those instructions were going to be, but you wanted to find out. Strategic Cold war espionage and misinformation must have ran wild.
It makes me appreciate the largely positive and safe experience HN provides, despite the occasional user that insists the opposite.
Edit: some of the comments appear to have been removed/deleted or otherwise fallen off, though the comment about "ethnicities that are less intelligent" is still up near the top.
If you measure the IQ for the same ethnicity you will notice that the IQ changes over time.
Having proper levels of iodine is responsible for about 15 points of IQ. Removing lead from fuel, some extra increase.
Pollution, nutrition, water purity, all the accrued knowledge about fetal and child development that is applied in modern economies, etc. plays a role.
Also, there are negative factors like exposure to violence and trauma, substance abuse, which is correlated with poverty and inequality... which is a legacy of slavery, racial segregation, etc.
Generally when pressed, folks who dress up their racism in pseudoscientific language rely on the same small handful of talking points which largely haven't changed since "scientific racism" was mainstream in the 19th century. This started with phrenology, a widespread mainstream pseudoscience not only focused on dehumanizing black people, but also explicitly targeting natives as an apparent attempt to justify otherwise unconscionable public policies of the day. [1]
It's bad enough to hold pseudoscientific beliefs; it's worse if those beliefs originate in a blantant attempt to dehumanize others.
[1] https://pages.vassar.edu/realarchaeology/2017/03/05/phrenolo...
The rhetoric surrounding racist pseudoscience mirrors that of the anti-vaccine and climate change denial movements. They point to a discredited "anti-vaxx" doctor or a discredited "climate change denying" researcher and view the criticism of their work as censorship, rather than as a sign they might not be a credible source.
The claims were true in the past, and the evidence has continued to accumulate. Denial of the evidence at this point is just silly.
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 tricky line to walk. The brazen pursuit of truth or tabooing of prospectively society uprooting revelations. Both are a result of the same observation, just different moral systems.
I'm sure many grapple with this struggle in their own way. However, ostrasizing those who find themselves on the other side of that fence by shouting various 'X-isms', is neither productive nor effective.
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."
Afaik, they are looking at measurable traits that we think are associated with intelligence.
Intelligence itself is a much much harder problem to unravel.
(the deeply rooted nature of protestantism in the pro-science / anti-religion/ Academic community in the US is long discussion I would love to have at some point. I want to be clear that I do not mean it in a derogatory manner. It is an observation. Not a value judgement)
Imagine if grit, intelligence and productivity within a capitalistic system were highly predictable at birth. Then the claim to eliteness that lends these elite institutions power, will suddenly get the appearance of genetic superiority. It quickly starts sounding like old school eugenicists. They/We will become what they claim to hate.
Intelligence is an easier discussion in the east. The floor for the value you bring to society is not based on your intelligence alone. They also don't hide the brutal realities for survival/thriving in a society where you might lack vital skills from birth.
I think everyone on HN would agree that a feudal-class system determined at birth, is not a desirable outcome. As it stands now, ignoring the ground realities has led to us building exactly that. The tabooing of IQ does not serve to stop the creation of this dystopia. It serves to obscure the reality that we might already be living in it.
Razib Khan [1] writes a lot about intelligence from a genetic standpoint (He works in population genomics).
One quote of interest
[1] https://razib.substack.com/p/applying-iq-to-iq[2] https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q...
High IQ people are often more skilled than others in explaining away gulfs between their understanding and encounters with reality. For IQ believers, such people still get to be called intelligent. For me, it makes them stupid.
Lol people should really enable showdead on this website, the science denialism is incredible.
People complain about the target selection and first-mover advantage of Von Neumann, in the same thread which seems to be taken over by collateral damage of polarizing identity politics propaganda, set to target social cohesion of American civilians (which leaks into Western culture) done by the very same adversaries targeted decades back by Von Neumann.
We have IQ for measuring problem-solving ability, but it doesn't correlate well with the ability to achieve goals. That would be another very useful measure though, of something like intelligence * grit. Call it IGQ. An IGQ test would somehow set goals in a realistic, complex, chaotic environment, with social and physical as well as intellectual obstacles. So, a GPA is a sort of IGQ.
The term bone cancer refers to things like osteosarcomas, these usually occur in children.
Not trying to say the rest of the article is bad, but when I see something like this I want to point it out.
Previous biographies I've read have always reported pancreatic cancer, which is what I was going to originally type, but according to wikipedia there are some different sources listed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brouwer_fixed-point_theorem
no mention of him. I don't think he conceived of the idea.