A Man from the Future: Why Johnny Can't Stop Abstracting
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[0] https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/44425/turings-cathe...
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49936439
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. There were almost no textbooks in the early 1970s. When Knuth's Fundamental Algorithms came out, it was great to finally see what had previously been folklore on mimeographed sheets in an actual book.
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
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.
This is why he 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?
I also wrote about why I liked the book so much:
https://henrikwarne.com/2024/07/07/john-von-neumann-the-man-...
- 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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50250271
"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.
However, maybe it will help people dig into his life ala his daughter's memoir (who recently died unfortunately) or some of the letters ams/lms published back in 2005.
The house always wins.
It's important to recall that an all-knowing God isn't necessarily very compassionate, or even rational. Some of the people I've known who knew the most have been the biggest assholes. Or insane.
What if there's a god, but he punishes humans for believing he exists, just for fun? Where's your wager now?
That's the equivalent of Russell's teapot - an imagined, unfalsifiable proposition.
But Pascal's wager was anchored to specific attested propositions: specifically, the gospel of Jesus (repent of sin and call to him, he's paid for it and will save you from judgment and eternal separation from God if you do) rooted in the historical events of his verbal claim to be the son of God, followed by his death and resurrection, witnessed by many. You may agree or disagree, but what you are affirming or denying is at least concrete and specific.
Right, but that's the problem with it. It assumes that there are only two possibilities: no god, or the god of the New Testament.
Betting that Pascal's god exists isn't the safe choice that the wager makes it out to be, because it's equally possible that some other god exists (or just some other version of the Abrahamic god, say Allah or the pre-messiah god of Israel) and your faith in Jesus is just going to piss him off.
Believe in Jesus all you want, but Pascal's Wager is a pretty terrible reason to do so.
Edit to add: Your description is also not even the only possible New Testament god. Some (myself included) would argue that that particular image of god was painted more by Paul than by Jesus.
I don't think so. It isn't concerned with giving any description or shape to the negative case, just an invitation to consider a particular positive case.
There are positive cases for other gospels and worldviews... there's nothing wrong with invitations to engage with one or another.
As science has shown, the truth is best discerned by considering each theory individually (and continually) against evidence. Not "dark matter sounds cool, I think that's true, not MOND" but rather considering each individually for internal consistency and against observation and predictiveness.
"It does not make any difference how beautiful your guess is, it does not make any difference how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is — if it disagrees with experiment, it is wrong." --Richard Feynman
If you want to do a fun thought experiment, you might accept that axiom.
If you genuinely believe that an eternal future of unbearable torture hinges on your choice, you might want to cover your philosophical bases a bit more thoroughly.
So yeah, Christianity has some axioms, but it doesn't ask people to merely accept them on faith; that's a mischaracterization. The invitation is to consider (a) how good the evidence really is for your current worldview, and then (b) how good is the evidence for Christianity's truth claims.
Pascal goes one further and suggests considering what you have to gain and lose either way -- which may have been helpful for some when the alternative was mere atheism or unbelief in Christianity, but I disagree that it's helpful in all cases. People coming from Islam have a tremendous amount to lose, including their family, community, livelihood, reputation, and the risk of being condemned eternally by Allah for committing shirk in embracing Christianity, if Islam is true.
I think a better question to ask, whatever someone's background, is "do you want to know the truth, even if it turns out you don't believe it now, and are you willing to follow it no matter what the cost?"
I don't understand. Is it a rhetorical statement from your part?
How can you know that what you are being told is the truth? If it can be proven, then there is no need to be told or to doubt it. If it can't be proven (or at least observed), then by definition, it is a belief, not a truth.
Also why would you agree to learn the truth if you're not going to believe it?
The problem is you can't do this with made up bullshit because the creators of said bullshit can create any number of paradoxes to trap you.
Reality at least has to be self consistent.
Are you saying the case for Scientology can't fail when considering its internal consistency and correspondence to reality?
I would think its positive case isn't that strong... it's more like an attack chain with an arbitrary payload (including money extraction) for minds with certain vulnerabilities than a coherent set of truth claims (let alone truth claims with at least some evidence in favor).
Certainly there are specific propositions that someone will or has attested to that a god exists that will punish you for believing in the Christian god.
Sure, if you insist there is more reason to suspect the existence of the Christian god than other gods, then your decision is already made for you; it was not my understanding that Pascal's wager was based on that assumption, but I guess it was implicitly, sure, while explicitly claiming to be based on a clean slate of assumptions. Which makes it even sillier.
The supposed asymmetry only holds in a framework that assumes the Christian God as the only possibility. The point is that it's possible for there to be a god that isn't Yahweh, and that god might sentence you to eternal torment for believing in Yahweh, so in fact believing in Yahweh can result in infinite cost, destroying the value of the wager.
The hypothetical god who punishes believers of a Christian God is a legitimate objection to Pascal's wager, but it doesn't establish the original assertion I objected to. You're confusing demonstrating that the asymmetry isn't guaranteed with demonstrating that it requires Christianity to be the only possibility. Those are two entirely different claims.
Or in a stronger argument. It only works when you're the only possible infinity that exists with the set of possible requirements. The moment another infinity exists that has even a single conflicting requirement then it falls apart.
Using language we can create infinite conflicting infinities which makes Pascals wager a weak argument in a generalized set.
Now, if someone vibe coded up Roko's basalisk into a real entity that was copying humans and torturing them for eternity that's a different story, at least until someone made a second incompatible basalisk.
I may be misinterpreting this but
Lol, wut.
Almost nothing in common with a 17th century French philosopher in Christian Europe
I can't prove that Huitzilopochtli doesn't exist, so I occasionally eat a hobo's still-beating heart, just in case.
EDIT: My bad, I missed that Neumann asked to be baptised, so he wasn't going back to the Judaism of his ancestors through his Pascal's Wager-esque step.
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.
Anglo evangelicalism constrained its meaning to something like "intellectual assent", for its own purposes (in my opinion, it made for better sales models) some time in the nineteenth century. And as you essentially point out, intellectual assent is fairly meaningless.
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.
The claim in the article is he remembered everything he read perfectly, which is wild. But another source claim he specifically memorized the Dickens book to train his English, which sounds more likely.
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?!
It's like complaining that humans have begun writing in the same language as Claude's English output.
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 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.
Why? They admitted they only read section headers in their sibling comment. They did not read the section they complained about until after people called them out for making up stuff.
>> My apologies, I was skimming initially and, from just the headings it appeared to fit that pattern I've seen everywhere lately.
They admitted they made up their complaint based on bad pattern matching and not reading. If they had read it they would have realized the section described the opposite of their made up complaint.
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.
It's not an invented quote, here's an Archive copy of the source:
https://archive.org/details/ETC3234/page/669/mode/2up