I don’t know enough about JvN to say he is/isn’t a terrible person, but this quote seems like weak evidence either way. Of course it’s entirely different: self preservation instinct applies to self.
No, self-preservation instincts, and other protective instincts, also apply to others. That's what so-called "mirror neurons" are known for. It isn't just some separate wish not to see other people's suffering, but an actual activation of the same pathways that react to pain experienced by the indidivual themselves.
I am somewhat surprised a single quote can render someone a terrible person. All of us are just one quote away from having our entire lives reduced to "good" or "bad"!
> I am somewhat surprised a single quote can render someone a terrible person
You should be surprised. It can't.
The important extraction from that premise, is that the opinions of essentially all people on such a subject are worthless, unless you happen to specifically know the person and value their opinion accordingly.
One of the mass delusions that is very popular today - and particularly destructive - is to treat everyone's opinions on all things as having some great value and their feelings as being the most important thing to consider. We live in hyper irrational times.
> All of us are just one quote away from having our entire lives reduced to "good" or "bad"!
Reduced by whom? Who cares. That's the correct response to such a reduction by opinions of people that do not matter to you.
A stranger on the Internets said my life is bad. Comeon. Who cares. It's meaningless garbage and a waste of precious time to consider such things.
If the article's glorification of the man is acceptable, then so is criticism. And the fact that the term "cancel culture" is applied to a person that has been dead for more than half a century tells you that the term has become even more useless than it ever was.
This culture, whatever it is, has had a personal impact on me. Many great people that I truly and deeply admired growing up, the reason why I am the person that I am today is because of historical figures. People need to learn how to forgive, look for the best in people and let go of decades old misgivings of a person. They changed the world. They inspired a whole generation. Anything that they did in their personal lives pales in comparison. If you want to go with this route, literally every person's great great grandfather was sexist in 1920s by today's standards. People need to understand the era, the context under which they operated. I am pretty sure my thoughts today are going to be outdated after 50 years. This is a dangerous slippery slope of wokeness that needs to be strongly codemned IMO. It's one thing to raise awareness, another to deflate historical figures because of some shit they said 70 years ago. It is toxic, futile and against your cause.
Absolutely. If we have to throw away the work of anyone with moral failings, then all human culture must be destroyed.
I wonder how much this modern tendency to want perfect people and flat history can be related to things like the popularity of comic book films. People seem to really be craving simple absolute black and white fables with cardboard villains fighting superheroes these days.
The point is that it is trivial to find character flaws from people of the by-gone era and it only satisfies one's need to ostensibly feel morally superior. It wasn't too long ago that women weren't allowed to vote in Switzerland (1991).
That’s exactly what happens with cancel culture. Nothing is off limits and context of a person’s actions and works is lost and scrutinized as if it were now.
Accusation was not even direct, it was James Webb's complicitness for LGBTQ issues 70+ years ago!:
> James Webb. Prescod-Weinstein and other critics argue that Webb was complicit in the discrimination of LGBTQ employees in the ’40s, ‘50s and ‘60s — both as undersecretary in the U.S. Department of State and as the top administrator at NASA.
Response from NASA:
> “NASA’s History Office conducted an exhaustive search through currently accessible archives on James Webb and his career,” NASA spokeswoman Karen Fox said in a statement to The Post. “They also talked to experts who previously researched this topic extensively.
> “NASA found no evidence at this point that warrants changing the name of the James Webb Space Telescope,” Fox added.
I despise these people (Scientific American). At this point, I will never see Scientific American magazine in the same light - it is completely derailed.
this is something that I've thought about for a long time
I would say that if you delve deep enough that everybody, including every great person has had issues (some more and some less) and these have to been seen in the context of the time. But even if say for example Eistain was an evil person (I doubt it) or Chirchill a rasict person etc... should this matter?
Should this distract from their achievement and contribution to human society??
My gut feeeling says not but I can't logically piece it together in my head
It takes about 20 seconds of attention to learn with positive reinforcement, while negative is instant. This is because negative experiences are critical for survival.
These same circuits get used for dealing with things that are unrelated to survival but still produce results the same way. When e.g. propaganda is used people learn that they can weild power this way, which they believe they need for survival.
And mostly we err into this mode when our biochemistry isn't at 100%. It is simply irrationality spilling over.
I don't want to call JvN a terrible person. He is like many brilliant people who develop surveillance tech for masses. The moment the lives of these brilliant people are surveilled by others, then they claim "it is wrong". Same thing for those people who work for the govt agencies in developing weapons(say, killing by drones).
The perspective shifts somewhat if you look at it from Eastern European PoV.
West had a game-breaking advantage over the SU. It could've threatened Soviets with that power. Instead it folded and gave them everything they wanted.
Presumably West wouldn't even need to drop the bombs - just use the threat for negotiations.
> The term refers to—what appeared, from the perspective of Americans—to be a group of men with superhuman intellects, arriving from an obscure country speaking an incomprehensible foreign language and English with strong, characteristic accents (later popularized by Bela Lugosi in Dracula). Scientists typically thought to belong to the group include refugees from the University of Göttingen, early associates of the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) and members of The Manhattan Project.
> Persons frequently included in the description: Paul Erdős, Paul Halmos, Theodore von Kármán, John G. Kemeny, John von Neumann, George Pólya, Leó Szilárd, Edward Teller, and Eugene Wigner are included in The Martians group.
> For the reasons suggested by Cochran, Hardy, and Harpending, Ashkenazi Jews had the potential for very high intelligence. They were mostly too poor and discriminated against to take advantage of it. Around 1880, this changed in a few advanced Central European economies like Germany, Austria, and Hungary. Austria didn’t have many Jews. Germany had a lot of Jews, but it was a big country, so nobody really noticed. Hungary had a lot of Jews, all concentrated in Budapest, and so it was really surprising when all of a sudden everyone from Budapest started winning Nobel Prizes around the same time. This continued until World War II, and then all anyone remembered was “Hey, wasn’t it funny that so many smart people were born in Budapest between 1880 and 1920?”
> And this story is really, really, gloomy.
> For centuries, Europe was sitting on this vast untapped resource of potential geniuses. Around 1880, in a few countries only, economic and political conditions finally became ripe for the potential to be realized. The result was one of the greatest spurts of progress in scientific history, bringing us relativity, quantum mechanics, nuclear bombs, dazzling new mathematical systems, the foundations of digital computing, and various other abstruse ideas I don’t even pretend to understand. This lasted for approximately one generation, after which a psychopath with a stupid mustache killed everyone involved.
> I certainly can’t claim that the Jews were the only people being crazy smart in Central Europe around this time. This was the age of Bohr, Schrodinger, Planck, Curie, etc. But part of me wonders even here. If you have one physicist in a town, he sits in an armchair and thinks. If you have five physicists in a town, they meet and talk and try to help each other with their theories. If you have fifty physicists in a town, they can get funding and start a university department. If you have a hundred, maybe some of them can go into teaching or administration and help support the others.
Doubtless Hungarian Ashkenazim like von Neumann, Teller, Erdos, Soros were extraordinarily intelligent but I also wonder how much of this has to do with family environments and social connections vs. just innate capability. An upper middle class bourgeois upbringing can do wonders for intellectual development. Kind of a chicken vs. the egg problem.
Genius level intellect is fairly well distributed amount the global population. However, the opportunity for these people to add to the collective knowledge isn’t well distributed. If you look at the backgrounds of most of the well known geniuses, rare are the ones that were the children of poor or destitute people.
Anecdotally, I’ve met quite a few rural poor that were hyper intelligent. The types of things that matter to them aren’t really applicable to anyone else.
We have a bunch of twin studies that say your biological parents have far more impact on your intellect than your adopted parents.
We know there are upper middle class all over the world, and almost half the Manhattan project came from the same neighborhood and ethnicity.
It would be amazing if we find out that one weird trick that increases your intellect by 2 standard deviations. But most likely it's just Ashekanazi have lots of smart genes.
I was a bit curious about von Neumann's work in quantum mechanics and found this. There are a number of online sources (pdf) if you want to search for it.
Hilbert Space Theory and Applications in Basic Quantum Mechanics
by Matthew R. Gagne
> "Ultimately it was Von Neumann, while a student of Hilbert, who realized
the equivalence of wave mechanics and matrix mechanics and proposed the
current formulation. However, the argument at the time was largely heuristic
and unconcerned with mathematical detail. In [CMMC] he argues that the bulk
of the equivalence proof were and have been historically taken for granted. The
reader can consult [CMMC] for more on the technicalities of equivalence proofs.
While the theoretical and conceptual leaps that made the formulation of
quantum mechanics possible came largely from Bohr, Heisenberg, and Schrodinger,
Von Neumann is responsible for the last unifying mental leap and also for many
of the technical mathematical achievements that accompanied it. We discuss
Von Neumann and the mathematical perspective of these events next."
If you ever take a intro QM course or even a modern chemistry course, you'll get introduced to the Schrodinger Wave Equation and how it explains the hydrogen atom. However, on a computer, basically all QM calculations are done with matrix mechanics. JvN, as I read it (no QM physicist expert am I), mathematically tied these two conceptions together utilizing a complex abstraction called Hilbert space:
> "Hilbert space gives a means by which one can consider functions as points
belonging to an inÖnite dimensional space. The utility of this perspective can be found in our ability to generalize notions of orthogonality and length to collections of objects (i.e. functions) which don't naturally suggest the consideration of these properties."
Clearly that's a major achievement, in a head-spinningly complex area. However, in looking at several other areas of JvN's legacy - the invention of computation in its current form, and economic game theory - it's all a bit more curious and iffy.
With computation, there really seems to be a lot of controversy over where the credit for the theories and practice really belongs, i.e. Alan Turing on one hand and some of the people who actually engineered the first working American vacuum-tube computers on the other. Some of the literary efforts at cementing JvN's legacy in this area have been questionable, i.e. "Turing's Cathedral" which isn't really about Turing at all, it's a cloaked JvN hagiography.
As far as game theory as a mathematical basis of economics and 'rational nuclear war', it honestly seems to be, at this point, discredited on multiple grounds, such as humans not being rational actors. Neoclassical economic model projections based on such theories have failed spectacularly time and again (NAFTA outcomes, failure to foresee the 2008 crash, etc.) for example. Of course if this basic structure is pulled out from under the feet of neoclassical economists today, there's not much left... Could it be they're trying to build a statue to their hero to avoid that fate?
Furthermore, JvN made some predictions that were entirely off base in the area of climate, as he believed long-term forecasts were possible, meaning that he thought tickling the climate system at just the right point could cause a hurricane to hit a particular location. The discovery of chaos, aka sensitive dependence on initial conditions, by Ed Lorenz about a decade later, put the end to such dreams of climate warfare.
He certainly was a brilliant mathematician, but his other contributions are a bit more questionable. The concept of the 'universal genius' doesn't really seem to apply in practice. And, hagiography is bad bibliographic practice.
> He had also seen into the mathematical heart of quantum mechanics — that subtle, far from intuitive account of the ultra-small world within atoms — developing concepts without which our 21st century’s internet economy would never have arisen.
How did quantum mechanics influence the "internet economy"?
Quantum Mechanics led to the development of nuclear weapons which led to the development of the packet switched Internet Protocol designed to maintain connectivity even during a nuclear war. Internet Protocol led to the development of the internet economy.
The Wikipedia page quotes one Director of DARPA (Stephen J. Lukasik):
The goal was to exploit new computer technologies to meet the needs of military command and control against nuclear threats, achieve survivable control of US nuclear forces, and improve military tactical and management decision making.
And Vint Cerf is quoted elsewhere [1] saying:
the original ARPAnet project was built to share computing resources among all the computer science departments. It was not built _solely_ to deal with nuclear attack, so it was a resource-sharing system
Well, not really. The atomic bomb didn't really require quantum mechanics to build. Certainly not the gun bomb. That's two hunks of enriched uranium forced together. Implosion was tougher, but mostly a hydrodynamics problem. H-bombs required much more theory.
Yes, you probably don't need QM to design a gun bomb, but to build one you do need 64kg of enriched U-235 and for that you need a Manhattan Project and for that you need Einstein to write a letter to the President and for that you need Bohr & Wheeler to write "The Mechanism of Nuclear Fission" in 1939 and confidently explain that it could work and for that you need QM.
And they could only produce a single gun bomb. The other one had to be Plutonium, meaning it had to have a neutron trigger, IIRC that involved Bohr. It took two bombs to end the war.
Well, where QM really comes into play the most is probably in the chip fabrication industry, all the nanometer-scale processes involve rely heavily on that theory. If you get an applied physics / quantum mechanics PhD from a leading research university today you can get a very well paid job designing and troubleshooting the machines that go into a chip fabrication setup.
Claiming it wouldn't be possible with JvN is a bit much, though. It was Heisenberg who developed matrix mechanics the most, along with people like PAM Dirac. JvN put the mathematics on a firmer footing, but claiming he should be viewed like Einstein, it's kind of silly:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrix_mechanics
No interest in a payed subscription article that is not available for free from the Apple One European subscription, because Apple make you pay the same price form Europe to US but not for the same stuff.
So no your article is not interesting, because Apple says by the way that FT is not interesting.
I sort of remember there is a novel about someone who travel back in time and use a nuclear mushroom cloud as a signal that he is from the future.
I think to avoid drawing attention (like talking about quark, dark energy etc.) each era must have something that is iconic in the future, but people in the same era does not aware of.
Imagine someone talked about Mac OS future version and that it will run under arm. That may alert that he is from the future without too much attention.
61 comments
[ 5.5 ms ] story [ 131 ms ] threadIn healthy people, that is.
You should be surprised. It can't.
The important extraction from that premise, is that the opinions of essentially all people on such a subject are worthless, unless you happen to specifically know the person and value their opinion accordingly.
One of the mass delusions that is very popular today - and particularly destructive - is to treat everyone's opinions on all things as having some great value and their feelings as being the most important thing to consider. We live in hyper irrational times.
> All of us are just one quote away from having our entire lives reduced to "good" or "bad"!
Reduced by whom? Who cares. That's the correct response to such a reduction by opinions of people that do not matter to you.
A stranger on the Internets said my life is bad. Comeon. Who cares. It's meaningless garbage and a waste of precious time to consider such things.
Pretty hard to be worse that that.
Hell, even James Webb was on the chopping block until NASA administration pushed back on the cancel culture nonsense from Scientific American.
"That's not activism" - President Obama: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qaHLd8de6nM
I wonder how much this modern tendency to want perfect people and flat history can be related to things like the popularity of comic book films. People seem to really be craving simple absolute black and white fables with cardboard villains fighting superheroes these days.
Accusation was not even direct, it was James Webb's complicitness for LGBTQ issues 70+ years ago!:
> James Webb. Prescod-Weinstein and other critics argue that Webb was complicit in the discrimination of LGBTQ employees in the ’40s, ‘50s and ‘60s — both as undersecretary in the U.S. Department of State and as the top administrator at NASA.
Response from NASA:
> “NASA’s History Office conducted an exhaustive search through currently accessible archives on James Webb and his career,” NASA spokeswoman Karen Fox said in a statement to The Post. “They also talked to experts who previously researched this topic extensively.
> “NASA found no evidence at this point that warrants changing the name of the James Webb Space Telescope,” Fox added.
I despise these people (Scientific American). At this point, I will never see Scientific American magazine in the same light - it is completely derailed.
this is something that I've thought about for a long time
I would say that if you delve deep enough that everybody, including every great person has had issues (some more and some less) and these have to been seen in the context of the time. But even if say for example Eistain was an evil person (I doubt it) or Chirchill a rasict person etc... should this matter?
Should this distract from their achievement and contribution to human society??
My gut feeeling says not but I can't logically piece it together in my head
These same circuits get used for dealing with things that are unrelated to survival but still produce results the same way. When e.g. propaganda is used people learn that they can weild power this way, which they believe they need for survival.
And mostly we err into this mode when our biochemistry isn't at 100%. It is simply irrationality spilling over.
West had a game-breaking advantage over the SU. It could've threatened Soviets with that power. Instead it folded and gave them everything they wanted.
Presumably West wouldn't even need to drop the bombs - just use the threat for negotiations.
If the U.S. approached every death with the horror we reserve for our own we'd lose every war we ever fought.
> The term refers to—what appeared, from the perspective of Americans—to be a group of men with superhuman intellects, arriving from an obscure country speaking an incomprehensible foreign language and English with strong, characteristic accents (later popularized by Bela Lugosi in Dracula). Scientists typically thought to belong to the group include refugees from the University of Göttingen, early associates of the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) and members of The Manhattan Project.
> Persons frequently included in the description: Paul Erdős, Paul Halmos, Theodore von Kármán, John G. Kemeny, John von Neumann, George Pólya, Leó Szilárd, Edward Teller, and Eugene Wigner are included in The Martians group.
> For the reasons suggested by Cochran, Hardy, and Harpending, Ashkenazi Jews had the potential for very high intelligence. They were mostly too poor and discriminated against to take advantage of it. Around 1880, this changed in a few advanced Central European economies like Germany, Austria, and Hungary. Austria didn’t have many Jews. Germany had a lot of Jews, but it was a big country, so nobody really noticed. Hungary had a lot of Jews, all concentrated in Budapest, and so it was really surprising when all of a sudden everyone from Budapest started winning Nobel Prizes around the same time. This continued until World War II, and then all anyone remembered was “Hey, wasn’t it funny that so many smart people were born in Budapest between 1880 and 1920?”
> And this story is really, really, gloomy.
> For centuries, Europe was sitting on this vast untapped resource of potential geniuses. Around 1880, in a few countries only, economic and political conditions finally became ripe for the potential to be realized. The result was one of the greatest spurts of progress in scientific history, bringing us relativity, quantum mechanics, nuclear bombs, dazzling new mathematical systems, the foundations of digital computing, and various other abstruse ideas I don’t even pretend to understand. This lasted for approximately one generation, after which a psychopath with a stupid mustache killed everyone involved.
> I certainly can’t claim that the Jews were the only people being crazy smart in Central Europe around this time. This was the age of Bohr, Schrodinger, Planck, Curie, etc. But part of me wonders even here. If you have one physicist in a town, he sits in an armchair and thinks. If you have five physicists in a town, they meet and talk and try to help each other with their theories. If you have fifty physicists in a town, they can get funding and start a university department. If you have a hundred, maybe some of them can go into teaching or administration and help support the others.
Anecdotally, I’ve met quite a few rural poor that were hyper intelligent. The types of things that matter to them aren’t really applicable to anyone else.
We know there are upper middle class all over the world, and almost half the Manhattan project came from the same neighborhood and ethnicity.
It would be amazing if we find out that one weird trick that increases your intellect by 2 standard deviations. But most likely it's just Ashekanazi have lots of smart genes.
Hilbert Space Theory and Applications in Basic Quantum Mechanics by Matthew R. Gagne
> "Ultimately it was Von Neumann, while a student of Hilbert, who realized the equivalence of wave mechanics and matrix mechanics and proposed the current formulation. However, the argument at the time was largely heuristic and unconcerned with mathematical detail. In [CMMC] he argues that the bulk of the equivalence proof were and have been historically taken for granted. The reader can consult [CMMC] for more on the technicalities of equivalence proofs. While the theoretical and conceptual leaps that made the formulation of quantum mechanics possible came largely from Bohr, Heisenberg, and Schrodinger, Von Neumann is responsible for the last unifying mental leap and also for many of the technical mathematical achievements that accompanied it. We discuss Von Neumann and the mathematical perspective of these events next."
If you ever take a intro QM course or even a modern chemistry course, you'll get introduced to the Schrodinger Wave Equation and how it explains the hydrogen atom. However, on a computer, basically all QM calculations are done with matrix mechanics. JvN, as I read it (no QM physicist expert am I), mathematically tied these two conceptions together utilizing a complex abstraction called Hilbert space:
> "Hilbert space gives a means by which one can consider functions as points belonging to an inÖnite dimensional space. The utility of this perspective can be found in our ability to generalize notions of orthogonality and length to collections of objects (i.e. functions) which don't naturally suggest the consideration of these properties."
Clearly that's a major achievement, in a head-spinningly complex area. However, in looking at several other areas of JvN's legacy - the invention of computation in its current form, and economic game theory - it's all a bit more curious and iffy.
With computation, there really seems to be a lot of controversy over where the credit for the theories and practice really belongs, i.e. Alan Turing on one hand and some of the people who actually engineered the first working American vacuum-tube computers on the other. Some of the literary efforts at cementing JvN's legacy in this area have been questionable, i.e. "Turing's Cathedral" which isn't really about Turing at all, it's a cloaked JvN hagiography.
As far as game theory as a mathematical basis of economics and 'rational nuclear war', it honestly seems to be, at this point, discredited on multiple grounds, such as humans not being rational actors. Neoclassical economic model projections based on such theories have failed spectacularly time and again (NAFTA outcomes, failure to foresee the 2008 crash, etc.) for example. Of course if this basic structure is pulled out from under the feet of neoclassical economists today, there's not much left... Could it be they're trying to build a statue to their hero to avoid that fate?
Furthermore, JvN made some predictions that were entirely off base in the area of climate, as he believed long-term forecasts were possible, meaning that he thought tickling the climate system at just the right point could cause a hurricane to hit a particular location. The discovery of chaos, aka sensitive dependence on initial conditions, by Ed Lorenz about a decade later, put the end to such dreams of climate warfare.
He certainly was a brilliant mathematician, but his other contributions are a bit more questionable. The concept of the 'universal genius' doesn't really seem to apply in practice. And, hagiography is bad bibliographic practice.
How did quantum mechanics influence the "internet economy"?
Source please?
The goal was to exploit new computer technologies to meet the needs of military command and control against nuclear threats, achieve survivable control of US nuclear forces, and improve military tactical and management decision making.
And Vint Cerf is quoted elsewhere [1] saying:
the original ARPAnet project was built to share computing resources among all the computer science departments. It was not built _solely_ to deal with nuclear attack, so it was a resource-sharing system
[1] https://federalnewsnetwork.com/defense/2010/05/vint-cerf-exp...
Claiming it wouldn't be possible with JvN is a bit much, though. It was Heisenberg who developed matrix mechanics the most, along with people like PAM Dirac. JvN put the mathematics on a firmer footing, but claiming he should be viewed like Einstein, it's kind of silly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrix_mechanics
I think to avoid drawing attention (like talking about quark, dark energy etc.) each era must have something that is iconic in the future, but people in the same era does not aware of.
Imagine someone talked about Mac OS future version and that it will run under arm. That may alert that he is from the future without too much attention.