> Johnny remained a game theorist to the end. After a lifetime of culturally Jewish atheism, he asked to be baptized. His daughter attributed it to Pascal's Wager: a small probability of a much better afterlife, against a trivial cost.
Maybe I'm just weird, but I can't actually choose what I believe. I can choose to go to church and I can choose to say I believe and I can choose to donate money to some religious institution, but I don't think I'm capable of believing something that I think is dumb.
That and it only really works in a system where one decision involves an infinity. Once you add a second infinity that is not aligned or is incompatible with the first it falls apart.
I see it as more of a rationalization. When you already believe something, you look for intellectual reasons to justify that belief. Pascal's Wager feel like that to me. Its main power is hardening an existing belief rather than swaying an undecided mind.
If you're unfamiliar, there is a lot of historical context around Pascal's Wager -
Unless you live in a brutal theocracy, it's difficult to describe just how powerful institutionalized Christianity was at the time. Likewise the scale of religion-themed violence. A couple generations before Pascal's birth (in France), the Catholic-vs.-Protestant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Wars_of_Religion had kill off something between 10% and 25% of the population of France.
In many ways, I'd interpret the Wager as saying "if professing quiet belief in the current local orthodoxy is relatively cheap, and those not doing so are occasionally slaughtered at scale, then prudent people will parrot orthodoxy".
Pascal's Wager if you read the entire book is more intricate than choosing to believe. He also argues that by practicing as if you believed, you may feel as if the choice is true and find God that way.
Yeah but then that sort of invalidates the wager right?
The premise is that it's trivial cost to believe with very high potential reward and no downside if you're wrong. That's simply not true; if it turns out that there isn't a God, and if it turns out that there is no heaven or hell, and that this is the only life we get, then you have wasted everything for a false premise.
I recently read 'Maniac' by Benjamin Labatut, which also tracks the life of Johnny von Neumann. It is a wonderful read - very eloquently put together, giving accounts of the man from the perspectives of several people in his life.
Not only does it capture the alien-like genius of the protagonist, but also described his particular emotional and social character in a way that I have not seen written elsewhere. Highly recommended.
I looked at the description and this part: "Braiding fact with fiction, Benjamín Labatut takes us on a journey to the frontiers of rational thought" - gave me pause. The Braiding fact with fiction part. Are there clear demarcations between fact and fiction?
No, because it is a historical novel. You have to blend fact and fiction in that, not because you are trying to deceive people, but you have to recreate conversations that were never recorded, get inside the characters' heads to figure out what they were thinking, etc.
Seconding this. Maniac is a beautifully written book about von Neumann. It also led me to Benjamin Labatut's When We Cease to Understand the World, another great read.
I read The man From the Future a few years ago, and I highly recommend it!
John von Neumann was such a fascinating and influential character. If you are interested in the modern history of mathematics, computers, game theory and more, pick up a copy.
> Budapest around 1900 produced an absurd cluster of minds: von Neumann, Eugene Wigner, Edward Teller, Leo Szilard, Paul Erdős, Theodore von Kármán, George Pólya.
Not to mention Nikola Tesla about 20 years prior.
> When several of them turned up at Los Alamos and realized they had gone to high school together, Szilard joked that Hungary was a cover story for a Martian landing.
What if there actually are people who go to Mars in the future but regret it and the only way for them to come back to Earth is to invent a time machine and be reborn as a mathematical supergenius. That would explain this at least:
> At six, Janos (the OG hungarian name for Johnny) could divide eight-digit numbers in his head and hold a conversation in ancient Greek. He later added Latin, French, German, English, and Yiddish. The rumor was that he remembered everything he ever read. Many years later Herman Goldstine decided to test this by asking him to recite "A Tale of Two Cities." Von Neumann started on chapter one and had to be asked to stop fifteen minutes later.
It's worth keeping in mind in the 1900s the bar for novelty was much lower. Today you'd have to learn vastly more to even stand a chance of making a single contribution , let alone as many as he had done.
That's true at the beginning of a new field. I'm noted for some advances in network architecture. But when I did that, everybody working on the Internet could meet in one large classroom.
If you were reasonably good, you could make major progress.
Computer science used to be tiny. In the late 1970s, AI was a few tens of people at MIT, at Stanford, and at CMU, with a few smaller groups elsewhere. I met about half the greats of my generation, as did everyone else who was serious.
I was involved with Autodesk in its very early days. Even went to the founding meeting. The feeling was that PCs were finally getting big enough to be interesting. The founders were all mainframe programmers, and the people who came up from 4K memory on an 8088 had no idea how to organize a big program. But mainframe people did.
There was a vast emptyness in the product space ready to be filled. Products considered were a window manager ("AutoScreen"), a text editor (Kern Sibbald actually built that), a database, and a CAD program. None of those existed yet as successful products.
CAD was picked because the productivity gain was so huge vs. paper and pencil drafting. At the time, the state of the art in drawing editing was drawing on mylar and using an electric eraser to delete. Then you ran the Mylar master through a big copier to make blueprints or whiteprints.
A CAD system on a PC was a very easy sell.
So all you had to do was make it work. No need to overcome the noise level of a thousand similar "apps".
A former optical engineering prof was the first person to build a raytracer on a computer (using a rudimentary spreadsheet, probably Lotus 123). To minimize memory usage, he rewrote the Zernike polynomials as [0:N-1] from the traditional [1:N] form.
Still today, you have to a priori know which system is being used to know what Z(2) refers to, because of his influence. And it was a trivial raytracer - but not compared to cosine lookup tables.
I remarked to myself how much the speaker sounded like Ren Hoëk, from The Ren and Stimpy Show. Then I looked up the name of the channel host: Károly Zsolnai-Fehér.
I thought to myself: Huh. Hungarian. That explains the mathematical prowess—and the voice. (Ren's voice is a pastiche of Hungarian actor Peter Lorre.)
This book is fantastic. Highly recommended if you have any interest in how the stored program computer came to be. The Dyson name apparently led to unrivaled access to first-hand accounts.
I saw your recommendation in another von Neumann thread[0] and ended up buying both books. Now you're here again! That publisher should be sending you royalty checks.
> Then the last paragraph suggesting he would want to ban AI.
The article doesn't say that, though. Here's the last paragraph quoted in full:
>> And then he names the qualities required: "patience, flexibility, intelligence". So, here is von Neumann, the master of abstraction, with no abstraction to offer. Maybe through his bout of applying minimax reasoning to nuclear strategy, he learned what a formal model is worth when the assumptions are shaky and the stakes are civilizational.
Please point out where in here Murat claims that von Neumann would ban AI?
In fact, the preceding paragraphs (the rest of that section) show that von Neumann would not be in favor of banning AI, or any particular technology. It's an argument for intelligent and deliberate action, not bans. Where he does talk about bans, he talks about their futility.
My apologies, I was skimming initially and, from just the headings it appeared to fit that pattern I've seen everywhere lately.
I agree with you that upon closer reading, this hypothetical JVN isn't arguing for a ban, but you could certainly read
> He goes on to say that a ban would have to be worldwide to work
> What safeguard remains? Apparently only day-to-day — or perhaps year-to-year — opportunistic measures, a long sequence of small, correct decisions. [...]
and
> The only safety possible is relative, and it lies in an intelligent exercise of day-to-day judgment.
as an argument for regulation.
And it does feel like a doomer narrative.
> For progress there is no cure. Any attempt to find automatically safe channels for the present explosive variety of progress must lead to frustration.
Also, while we glorify JVN's intellect, let's not forget that all his reasoning resulted in him publicly arguing for the nuclear annihilation of a vast country of people.
I'll give the commenter the benefit of the doubt. While reading the piece, which wasn't as easy as it ought to have been, I kept wondering what the "point" was. Ultimately, the whole piece just seems a little pointless. It was just stuff, and more stuff. All without an obvious or even a subtle point. Just stuff, without any hint of an author's shadow being on it.
I know I try to find a pattern (or a point) where it may not exist. People will read into things like this what they will; sometimes they're right, and sometimes they're seeing a pattern that's not there.
My take-away is that the original post smelled like a bunch of AI generated nonsense, with light human editing; strictly with a view to nerd-sniping only. Von Neumann is catnip.
It says you can't ban AI and shouldn't try. There is no general solution except a worldwide ban of technology itself. What you can do is local and incremental and based on good judgement, patience, intelligence, etc.
These days content is frequently rewritten/invented based on the whims of whoever has the right intelligence connections. Apparently we should just accept this, and the version of the article I was shown has him saying we should accept this:
"In looking for a solution, it is well to exclude one pseudosolution at the start. The crisis will not be resolved by inhibiting this or that apparently particularly obnoxious form of technology. For one thing, the parts of technology, as well as of the underlying sciences, are so intertwined that in the long run nothing less than a total elimination of all technological progress would suffice for inhibition."
This is an invented quote trying to appeal to von Neumann's authority, since the author doesn't have enough of their own authority to write it in their own name, or even under a pseudonym. They're hoping you'll let them keep turning every page on the Internet into an ad for their intelligence prodict or "research."
However, the version I read doesn't include a last paragraph that he would want to ban AI. (You write: "Then the last paragraph suggesting he would want to ban AI.")
Can you summarize your recollection of the version (ad) that you were shown?
Clearly, there is a reason Von Neumann spent so much time on this 'zero-sum' formulation of the problem, specifically in economics. Clearly he must have believed this was representative to a significant extent, especially given his interest in pragmatic problems.
It would make no sense for an intelligent person to work on an economics problem which doesn't model reality.
Big fan of VnM theorem, which this article alludes to in passing. I think it asks a really great question: "can we make good decisions under uncertainty?" And the answer turns out to be "Yes" with some caveats.
Any cognitive scientists here, or actual people with eidetic memory, who can comment how the brain would store everything you ever read or heard and how it can be recalled? What does it feel like to be able to recall and recite the entire text of a Tale of Two Cities?
I would imagine that such people stay off opine and commentary style forums because their instant capacity to recall authoritative sources makes wrongful and derivative discussion tedious. To some extent, with the speed of LLM search and recovery today, we might all be heading that way. Indeed, interesting HN traffic of late appears to have waned. No doubt someone will say I'm hallucinating and all's normal. No, I'm not hallucinating.
That's sadly impossible, because the brain, as a limited number of cells, cannot store infite data. The problem lies in the people observing them, but you have some fun mechanisms (and a few of the commonly known fallacies and biases) at work here, that can all contribute to that perceived effect/illusion. Consider the following ideas:
- people can be slightly better than a given random observer, because they learned and prioritise to pay attention. They are better at recalling memorable and minor details, especially in short term memory and in memorable situations that a lot of people share long term. They will still forget long term information that is irrelevant.
- any such person and also observer can easily talk themselves into the belief that their skill must be absolute, especially since the observer will largely only test from his own inferior dataset.
- once the belief takes hold (because people love a good story), observers tend to look less for flaws and more for further confirmations to keep mythologising people.
There are many people who remember everything they have done, read, or experienced: those born with the hyperthymesia disorder. They'll remember every meal they've eaten, and the day they ate it, among other things.
There must be a limit to human memory, but we haven't found it yet.
Memories are highly compressed, anyways. So remembering all conversations and experiences probably requires fewer neurons than you'd expect.
He advocated an immediate preemptive nuclear strike on the USSR: "If you say why not bomb them tomorrow, I say why not today? If you say today at five o'clock, I say why not one o'clock?"
This is why was dismissed in so far as foreign policy was concerned, where nuance and patience takes precedence over cold, calculating game theory. Not only would it not have been feasible (Russia is huge), but it would have led to follow on effects by possibly pulling the US into potentially another world war. This is evidence you can be a genius in some areas and wrong in others.
That quote doesn't sound like advocacy of an immediate strike to me. That "if" is massive, and going into the details of why you're not already attacking is very likely to give you reasons that keep making you not attack.
Maybe there's some context that suggests otherwise?
What beautiful writing. I had no idea JVN did so many things..
"Can we survive technology?" got me thinking about our industry's upheaval. Software engineering's receiving the disruption it so proudly inflicted on other industries.. not reaping what it sowed; rather just the natural order of things.
Acceptance and moving with change is all that can work. Obstructing; denying; ignoring progress.. you'll lose your edge, your relevance, your value to others, and your job. Progress won't wait for us to like it. We must move fast enough to survive change.
Junior engineers for example? Suddenly too junior to be hired? Great! They, and you, can access multiple answer boxes with every PhD ever, and with a bit of creativity, they can leverage that. The best will survive on their own - the rest we should help along. Let's create tools and structures and institutions and help junior engineers finish their education to marketable levels. Let's help them find efficiencies and get there in the same duration. We shouldn't compel companies to preserve a hiring pipeline; now should we incrementally upgrade university educations. Better to go to kids in schools & universities and stimulate their creativity, get them using new tools in new ways, finding efficiencies - because that's what today and tomorrow's jobs will be about. Institutions will adopt the good ideas in time.
We have a responsibility to invest in - and invent - ways of bringing people along.
I instantly lose respect to any man that "drove crowded roads like a maniac, and got bored and slowed down on open ones. He wrecked a car roughly every year"
I suspect some of these anecdotes are false, 15 mins of tale of two cities, 8 digit division in your head?
This gives a sense of embellishment by a clueless layman who think very smart people can memorize every single thing they ever do. Computers memorize well, very smart humans, it’s not clear if they memorize any better than a man of the street. I was struck by a fields medalist recent comment that he sometimes struggle remembering proofs he wrote himself in the past.
Memorizing books is absolutely possible. A great book about it is Moonwalking with Einstein (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moonwalking_with_Einstein), written by a journalist who was a skeptic but ended becoming a competitive mnemonicist himself. Some people intuitively learn the techniques early in life, and for some of them it becomes a habit.
Same thing applies to mental arithmetic. There are techniques for doing this. IIRC, ironically there's a famous case of someone who claimed to have memorized some hundreds of thousands digits of Pi but was suspected of using mental arithmetic techniques when reciting them.
Still, your point stands. People do embellish these kinds of stories based on stereotypes. It's certainly possible, but any particular anecdote may still be suspect.
I found the book too introductory and pop flavoured. It lives too much by quotes and little stories about him, some misrepresented or partly myths, which gives a false understanding of his character and contributions.
73 comments
[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 10.2 ms ] threadThe house always wins.
Maybe I'm just weird, but I can't actually choose what I believe. I can choose to go to church and I can choose to say I believe and I can choose to donate money to some religious institution, but I don't think I'm capable of believing something that I think is dumb.
Unless you live in a brutal theocracy, it's difficult to describe just how powerful institutionalized Christianity was at the time. Likewise the scale of religion-themed violence. A couple generations before Pascal's birth (in France), the Catholic-vs.-Protestant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Wars_of_Religion had kill off something between 10% and 25% of the population of France.
Pascal's own religious beliefs changed several times - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blaise_Pascal#Religious_conver...
The Wager was published after Pascal's death, in an edited collection of his notes - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pens%C3%A9es
In many ways, I'd interpret the Wager as saying "if professing quiet belief in the current local orthodoxy is relatively cheap, and those not doing so are occasionally slaughtered at scale, then prudent people will parrot orthodoxy".
The premise is that it's trivial cost to believe with very high potential reward and no downside if you're wrong. That's simply not true; if it turns out that there isn't a God, and if it turns out that there is no heaven or hell, and that this is the only life we get, then you have wasted everything for a false premise.
Not only does it capture the alien-like genius of the protagonist, but also described his particular emotional and social character in a way that I have not seen written elsewhere. Highly recommended.
I also wrote about why I liked the book so much:
https://henrikwarne.com/2024/07/07/john-von-neumann-the-man-...
Not to mention Nikola Tesla about 20 years prior.
> When several of them turned up at Los Alamos and realized they had gone to high school together, Szilard joked that Hungary was a cover story for a Martian landing.
What if there actually are people who go to Mars in the future but regret it and the only way for them to come back to Earth is to invent a time machine and be reborn as a mathematical supergenius. That would explain this at least:
> At six, Janos (the OG hungarian name for Johnny) could divide eight-digit numbers in his head and hold a conversation in ancient Greek. He later added Latin, French, German, English, and Yiddish. The rumor was that he remembered everything he ever read. Many years later Herman Goldstine decided to test this by asking him to recite "A Tale of Two Cities." Von Neumann started on chapter one and had to be asked to stop fifteen minutes later.
There are more pedestrian explanations. https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/john-von-neumann-s...
Computer science used to be tiny. In the late 1970s, AI was a few tens of people at MIT, at Stanford, and at CMU, with a few smaller groups elsewhere. I met about half the greats of my generation, as did everyone else who was serious.
I was involved with Autodesk in its very early days. Even went to the founding meeting. The feeling was that PCs were finally getting big enough to be interesting. The founders were all mainframe programmers, and the people who came up from 4K memory on an 8088 had no idea how to organize a big program. But mainframe people did.
There was a vast emptyness in the product space ready to be filled. Products considered were a window manager ("AutoScreen"), a text editor (Kern Sibbald actually built that), a database, and a CAD program. None of those existed yet as successful products. CAD was picked because the productivity gain was so huge vs. paper and pencil drafting. At the time, the state of the art in drawing editing was drawing on mylar and using an electric eraser to delete. Then you ran the Mylar master through a big copier to make blueprints or whiteprints. A CAD system on a PC was a very easy sell.
So all you had to do was make it work. No need to overcome the noise level of a thousand similar "apps".
Still today, you have to a priori know which system is being used to know what Z(2) refers to, because of his influence. And it was a trivial raytracer - but not compared to cosine lookup tables.
I remarked to myself how much the speaker sounded like Ren Hoëk, from The Ren and Stimpy Show. Then I looked up the name of the channel host: Károly Zsolnai-Fehér.
I thought to myself: Huh. Hungarian. That explains the mathematical prowess—and the voice. (Ren's voice is a pastiche of Hungarian actor Peter Lorre.)
“DON’T TOUCH IT! IT’S THE HISTORY ERASER BUTTON, YOU FOOL!”
— Von Neumann, probably
[0] https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/44425/turings-cathe...
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49936439
So much content out there atm nudging very hard for AI regulation.
The article doesn't say that, though. Here's the last paragraph quoted in full:
>> And then he names the qualities required: "patience, flexibility, intelligence". So, here is von Neumann, the master of abstraction, with no abstraction to offer. Maybe through his bout of applying minimax reasoning to nuclear strategy, he learned what a formal model is worth when the assumptions are shaky and the stakes are civilizational.
Please point out where in here Murat claims that von Neumann would ban AI?
In fact, the preceding paragraphs (the rest of that section) show that von Neumann would not be in favor of banning AI, or any particular technology. It's an argument for intelligent and deliberate action, not bans. Where he does talk about bans, he talks about their futility.
I agree with you that upon closer reading, this hypothetical JVN isn't arguing for a ban, but you could certainly read
> He goes on to say that a ban would have to be worldwide to work
> What safeguard remains? Apparently only day-to-day — or perhaps year-to-year — opportunistic measures, a long sequence of small, correct decisions. [...]
and
> The only safety possible is relative, and it lies in an intelligent exercise of day-to-day judgment.
as an argument for regulation.
And it does feel like a doomer narrative.
> For progress there is no cure. Any attempt to find automatically safe channels for the present explosive variety of progress must lead to frustration.
Also, while we glorify JVN's intellect, let's not forget that all his reasoning resulted in him publicly arguing for the nuclear annihilation of a vast country of people.
I know I try to find a pattern (or a point) where it may not exist. People will read into things like this what they will; sometimes they're right, and sometimes they're seeing a pattern that's not there.
My take-away is that the original post smelled like a bunch of AI generated nonsense, with light human editing; strictly with a view to nerd-sniping only. Von Neumann is catnip.
"In looking for a solution, it is well to exclude one pseudosolution at the start. The crisis will not be resolved by inhibiting this or that apparently particularly obnoxious form of technology. For one thing, the parts of technology, as well as of the underlying sciences, are so intertwined that in the long run nothing less than a total elimination of all technological progress would suffice for inhibition."
This is an invented quote trying to appeal to von Neumann's authority, since the author doesn't have enough of their own authority to write it in their own name, or even under a pseudonym. They're hoping you'll let them keep turning every page on the Internet into an ad for their intelligence prodict or "research."
However, the version I read doesn't include a last paragraph that he would want to ban AI. (You write: "Then the last paragraph suggesting he would want to ban AI.")
Can you summarize your recollection of the version (ad) that you were shown?
That is a strange thing to say, especially now.
Clearly, there is a reason Von Neumann spent so much time on this 'zero-sum' formulation of the problem, specifically in economics. Clearly he must have believed this was representative to a significant extent, especially given his interest in pragmatic problems.
It would make no sense for an intelligent person to work on an economics problem which doesn't model reality.
So Newton was wasting everybody’s time with the gravity malarky after all?!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50250271
- people can be slightly better than a given random observer, because they learned and prioritise to pay attention. They are better at recalling memorable and minor details, especially in short term memory and in memorable situations that a lot of people share long term. They will still forget long term information that is irrelevant.
- any such person and also observer can easily talk themselves into the belief that their skill must be absolute, especially since the observer will largely only test from his own inferior dataset.
- once the belief takes hold (because people love a good story), observers tend to look less for flaws and more for further confirmations to keep mythologising people.
There must be a limit to human memory, but we haven't found it yet.
Memories are highly compressed, anyways. So remembering all conversations and experiences probably requires fewer neurons than you'd expect.
This is why was dismissed in so far as foreign policy was concerned, where nuance and patience takes precedence over cold, calculating game theory. Not only would it not have been feasible (Russia is huge), but it would have led to follow on effects by possibly pulling the US into potentially another world war. This is evidence you can be a genius in some areas and wrong in others.
Maybe there's some context that suggests otherwise?
"Can we survive technology?" got me thinking about our industry's upheaval. Software engineering's receiving the disruption it so proudly inflicted on other industries.. not reaping what it sowed; rather just the natural order of things.
Acceptance and moving with change is all that can work. Obstructing; denying; ignoring progress.. you'll lose your edge, your relevance, your value to others, and your job. Progress won't wait for us to like it. We must move fast enough to survive change.
Junior engineers for example? Suddenly too junior to be hired? Great! They, and you, can access multiple answer boxes with every PhD ever, and with a bit of creativity, they can leverage that. The best will survive on their own - the rest we should help along. Let's create tools and structures and institutions and help junior engineers finish their education to marketable levels. Let's help them find efficiencies and get there in the same duration. We shouldn't compel companies to preserve a hiring pipeline; now should we incrementally upgrade university educations. Better to go to kids in schools & universities and stimulate their creativity, get them using new tools in new ways, finding efficiencies - because that's what today and tomorrow's jobs will be about. Institutions will adopt the good ideas in time.
We have a responsibility to invest in - and invent - ways of bringing people along.
This gives a sense of embellishment by a clueless layman who think very smart people can memorize every single thing they ever do. Computers memorize well, very smart humans, it’s not clear if they memorize any better than a man of the street. I was struck by a fields medalist recent comment that he sometimes struggle remembering proofs he wrote himself in the past.
Same thing applies to mental arithmetic. There are techniques for doing this. IIRC, ironically there's a famous case of someone who claimed to have memorized some hundreds of thousands digits of Pi but was suspected of using mental arithmetic techniques when reciting them.
Still, your point stands. People do embellish these kinds of stories based on stereotypes. It's certainly possible, but any particular anecdote may still be suspect.
It's like complaining that humans have begun writing in the same language as Claude's English output.