And specifically that the Ashkenazi have higher scores than Sephardic & Mizrahi Jews. If it were the Jewish religion requiring literacy, that should apply to all of them (and people should have noticed Jews were smarter than average much earlier).
While not quite at the Ashkenazi level, (no one is, except for maybe a few populations like Tamil Brahmins, Parsis, and maybe the Italian Jews), Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews are generally pretty smart, and in countries like Iraq, Iran, Morocco Jews have historically been a huge proportion of the educated and affluent people. Mountain Jews were overrepresented among billionaires in Russia. Within Israel the gap between Ashkenazi and other Jews in EA is only ~.5 SD https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/443926 which is smaller than the Ashkenazi-White gap in the US, and the wage gap is also smaller than the Ashkenazi-White gap in the US (there was a twitter thread by @HeTows at https://twitter.com/HeTows/status/1546928804089810945 about this). Indeed non-Ashkenazi have higher SES and EA than the white majority in the US and in France.
The Jewish religion requiring literacy is probably what it is, though not in the sense the environment people imagine. Less intelligent Jews were more likely to leave the community, and literary ability was culturally prized so smarter people had more kids. My guess is some of both effect. The culture drove selection for intelligence. Iraqi Jews are a high IQ population (again, not quite as high as Ashkenazi, but still high), but they are good spatially, unlike the Ashkenazi. There's an obvious reason, Jews in Europe were banned from a lot of professions requiring high spatial IQ, so people with high spatial IQ left. In the Middle East, it was more just the dumber ones couldn't afford the jizya and converted out.
If you are a Jewish man and can't read, you can't get Bar Mitzvahed. If you can't get Bar Mitzvahed, you can't get married. You aren't forced to leave the community, but you aren't going to have a lot of descendants. (Besides, where would you go? The US wasn't taking immigrants in the 1200s.)
I think being the member of a community outside the mainstream tends to bring forth a lot of creative intellectual ability in the appropriate environment. We associate gay men with being leaders in art and design, but it's obviously not genetic, and being good in art and design doesn't make you gay.
Tangential, but I am inclined to think there's a deeper correlation with gay men *caring more* about art and design; maybe it's purely cultural, hetero men in continental Europe care a lot more about fashion than Anglo hetero men, but I think there's something more fundamental there too.
(my hypothesis, fwiw, is that visual appearance matters more for attracting men than for attracting women, so gay men and hetero women on average care more about fashion and art and design than hetero men and gay
"If you are a Jewish man and can't read, you can't get Bar Mitzvahed. If you can't get Bar Mitzvahed, you can't get married."
No. That is not how any of this works. You turn 13 you are Bar Mitzvahed. Period. The party and the reading of the torah portion is not necessary. A Bar Mitzvah has nothing to do with getting married. I don't think that the Jewish marriage laws even require you to be 13 years old.
That's one of the problems / advantages of Judaism. Different groups have different practices. That's what I was taught at Hebrew school when I was a kid. Maybe they were wrong.
Trust me, these folk seem very invested in their just-so stories, to the point that I've had arguments that we should ignore the genetic evidence we do have in favour of IQ scores and cod racist typologies when it comes to intelligence.
That said, Scott has raised the idea of Ashkenazi genetic intelligence as an example of rare large-effect genes related to intelligence (all the data we have thus far seems to show that intelligence is massively polygenic and small-effect) that all correlate to really grody genetic diseases (either via partial dominance or tight linkage). I'm not sure what operable approaches you could draw out of such an argument, but it is at least a stab at a testable hypothesis.
>Trust me, these folk seem very invested in their just-so stories, to the point that I've had arguments that we should ignore the genetic evidence we do have in favour of IQ scores and cod racist typologies when it comes to intelligence.
This sounds terrible, sorry to hear you had to deal with that.
As an aside, the quotation that Unsigned Integer mentions is dismissive from Scott to the point of laziness. What does 'I side with Cochran' mean? That there are no effects from culture & history? In a charitable reading, it's emphasising one side of the story over the other one, but the idea that genetics operate in some independent world where you can give someone with von Neumann's genetic makeup any form of upbringing and they will miraculously become a genius on the basis of genetics is just foolhardy. Any social scientist would look at the genetic explanation on one side and the cultural / historical one on the other and think: 'Oh, so obviously it's both.'
I will bite that bullet and say that I believe that if you cloned Von Neumann and avoided malnutrition and head injuries the clone would prove unusually talented at whatever field they decided to pursue. I also think they'd test as a "genius" on any standard battery (and clear the threshold by a lot, the threshold is set very low). I don't think they'd be guaranteed to change the world.
I do think that a genuinely good education - lots of private tuition - helps, and luck always plays a huge part in everything, so our clone-Neumann given a very average American upbringing may merely become a very successful professional or small business owner.
There is no reason to think Jewish intelligence is different from any other intelligence.
If it is intelligence is highly heritable for American twins, Swedish conscripts or Brazilian babies fed on formula milk, it would require a leap to assume the same thing isn't true to some degree for Jews.
I recall that someone generated a dataset showing decent evidence for selection effects in the form of banking (i.e., lending at interest) being restricted to Jews in Europe and success in banking (as a proxy for higher IQ) being a predictor of higher fertility. I'll see if I can run it down later.
Haredi communities abroad are likely to also adopt embryo selection, Judaism is in favor of IVF (there are some links in those Metaculus questions). Haredi are insular and have high TFR.
That's right. You needed a flake-ass liberal "woke" community like Budapest or Prague to get that kind of intellectual performance. The right wing reaction was, as one might expect, quite brutal and effective.
I'd prefer a world where secular intellectuals have children and where conservative religious movements aren't commonplace, but a society with religious groups having children some of whom become apostate and fuel secular society is at least theoretically capable of a a stable equilibrium
I agree. I would like 25% income tax per child or something like that, which incentivizes everyone especially educated and affluent people to have more kids, plus state-subsidized embryo selection.
There's a common myth among some HBD people (often anti-Semitic ones) that Israeli Ashkenazim are less intelligent due to selective migration. Israel has low PISA but this is due to Israelis leaving large numbers of questions blank and skipping them https://conference.iza.org/conference_files/edu_2021/ofek-shanny_y31696.pdf
- it's a low-trust society. They do much better when bribed, and if you look at Israeli psychometric tests it's much more encouraging.
I'm curious about other Ashkenazi groups. It seems Budapest Ashkenazi > US Ashkenazi. How do Israeli Ashkenazi rank? Subdivide into Yishuv and Holocaust survivors? How about Haredi? Are they significantly different from the seculars? Yekkes vs Ostjuden? The ones form the Former Soviet Union? I would expect a priori those to be higher IQ because the upper classes were less likely to emigrate. Jews from the FSU also perform better for cultural reasons (in general, Europe >> post-Sputnik US in sciences, especially controlling for demographics and the US having Jews and Asians), but likely it's also genetic reasons, the population that left for the US and Israel in the 70's and circa-1990 is more drawn from the Muscovite upper class than from Anatevka.
It's an interesting question people should study further.
For the fact that they do: look at Page 44 of that paper. They skip and guess a lot of questions, even compared to their score (Jewish Israelis skip/guess more questions than Hispanic Americans and almost as many as Black Americans), and look at Page 14 for the discussion of "low endurance" in Israel. In this paper the scores go up by almost a whole standard deviation on some test after incentives (not financial because those are illegal, just higher grades) are given. It's +1 SD for Israeli Arabs, +.7 SD for Israeli Jews, they cite another paper where it's about +1/3 SD for US students, about +0 for Shanghai students on PISA (this is with financial incentives).
See also Page 43. Israeli Jews and Arabs alike do better on the first part of the test, whereas in the US you see the minorities doing worse in the later parts.
Why? The paper says "low intrinsic motivation". My guess is it's a product of the local culture. Israelis are aggressive, have low social trust, and take shortcuts (I say this a someone who is a big fan of Israel and Israelis). I'll give a couple stories from my Israeli advisor. The first story is that he said he could not give a take-home exam in Israel, because everyone would cheat. The second is that a pollster in Israel asked people, how did you vote in the last election, and the results were *completely* different from that of the last election (lots of people said they vote Labor and actually vote Likud). PISA to some extent measures trust, Romania is also a big under-performer on the PISA and it is low social trust.
This is generally true of both Jewish and Arab Israelis, it's a general fact about the Middle East.
Israelis also don't trust international organizations, and if you give them a test that counts for nothing by some organization, my guess is a lot of them will just check random answers and go outside to play with friends or something.
I can send you some data on the Israeli psychometric tests - they do well, and I'm told it's harder than the SAT, since there is an actual incentive there.
As an Israeli, who went through the educational system, I have another important point.
The educational system in Israel is dysfunctional, with all the sickness described in "The Case Against Education", but with a local flavor.
Teachers are not incentivized to teach well, and are not rewarded for investing in the pupils. The root cause of this is the teacher union, that insists on seniority based compensation. A starting teacher makes one of the lowest salaries in the Israeli economy, and Israeli kids are probably closer in their behavior to inner-city children rather than well-behaved western Europeans. In short, very hard and unrewarding work. Many, many young teachers leave after the first year. The survivors are basically cruising through at minimum effort. Those that can leave the system do - and thus there is a cooling effect on the proficiency of teachers, especially prominent in math teachers.
Bad math teachers lead to students bad at math, ergo low PISA test results.
Most mathematically inclined students that want to peruse a STEM degree realize mid-high school that they'll need to develop math skill independently, and take external courses or study online.
Right. Israeli kids have high rates of truancy in addition to high rates of leaving questions blank on PISA. They don't give a shit. They have very little incentive to do well on any tests or get good grades in high school, since universities are easy to get into. They act like inner-city children and don't take K-12 seriously. I've heard stories of Israeli kids slapping teachers and so on. https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/the-israeli-school-system-is-broken-and-it-needs-to-be-changed-immediately/
Because the country is so small, it's not hard to take STEM courses at a university as a high schooler, they are all within driving distance.
The scientific achievements though are great, as you would expect given the demographics. It's a good case study in how K-12 education really doesn't matter much. ;)
Low stakes tests like PISA probably differ from country to country on how hard the test-takers try.
Even high stakes tests can have motivation problems when low-scorers give up partway through and bubble in the rest of the way. That happened with the military's 105-page long AFQT in 1980. When they replaced it with an interactive computerized test that gave low scorers easier questions, they had less trouble with low scorers giving up.
Funny thing is that in Israel it’s illegal to give monetary incentives so they had to give grade incentives. In America and China they have monetary incentives. America got a PISA-style tests of +1/3 SD with $$$, on IQ tests you get like half that by motivating people (makes sense, IQ tests are more engaging than the long PISA word problems), China got basically +0 on PISA from $$$. Israel got +.8 on some PISA-like test (+.7 for Jews and +1.0 for Arabs) with just grade incentives.
Using such computer adaptive testing, one normally gives subjects items which they will have about 50% chance of getting right because that maximizes the item's informativeness. However, if the goal is both to minimize giving up AND measure the trait, one could have the system give subjects items they have an estimated 80% chance of getting right.
The problem with the Haredim is that they consider things like the arts and sciences to be distractions from the primary work of mankind on this earth, to read and study the word of god and carry on traditions. The Haredim were the other great reaction to Jewish emancipation in Europe. They may produce geniuses, but it is unlikely anyone outside the community would recognize them as such.
If they value intelligence and have lots of kids and at least a few of those kids become secular, then they are going to produce (recognized) geniuses even if the practicing ones are too insular to do things that the secular world cares about.
That does happen, but it's a pretty rough escape trajectory. Within the culture, education is minimal and knowledge about anything in the outside world - arts, sciences, culture - are excluded. Living a secular life isn't an obvious option. Even English literacy is rare since that is neither the language of the home or the language of religion. It's like being a refuge from North Korea except that North Koreans speak the same Korean as South Koreans which makes it easier.
So basically, just wait for Israel and diaspora Jewish communities to do embryo selection, which will likely happen in the second half of this century, Judaism is good on bioethics. This, combined with the high TFR of Israeli Jews (both secular and not) and of Orthodox Jews in the diaspora, will give you your wish. :)
I honestly expect embryo selection earlier than that, since the high rate of recessive genetic disorders means that embryo selection for avoiding known diseases is already common in Israel
Yeah, Israel has very advanced embryo selection via IVF, which everyone (including the Haredi) is on board with. They have advanced genetic screening, due to the high rate of genetic diseases in at least the Ashkenazi population. Israel doesn't have the "eugenics taboo" of the West, and Judaism is fine with embryo selection to enhance intelligence and health (it's less fine with enhancing physical appearance). Something like 10% of births in Israel already are through IVF and it's going up, because Israelis are still having ~3 kids but are having them later.
Shai Carmi did say that the Israeli health bureaucracy is cautious and is likely to wait for someone else to do some embryo selection for intelligence before subsidizing it on a large scale, though he agrees if it becomes common Israel is likely to be one of the first countries if not the first to do in on a large scale. The first adopters will be in the US or on some offshore havens, and then Israel will do it on a large scale.
He says polygenic embryo selection is currently not approved there but they will likely approve it for disease soon.
"So, how would we create a new generation of Martians? Can I get an ACX grant to start a new charter city exclusively for smart Ashkenazi Jews? Maybe require all the citizens to be born via IVF for optimal embryo selection?"
Don't forget the oppression and murdering as the kids get older. Ala "The Boys from Brazil."
I purchased the book to read about von Neumann's contributions to meteorology in context, then was disappointed to find the barest passing mention in the intro and none in the body (if the index is accurate).
Not that "scientific meteorology" has a definition, but Vilhelm Bjerknes is generally credited for first placing meteorology into the context of applied physics.
Richardson had a great idea, that if you know the current state of the atmosphere and you know the physics equations that govern its behavior, you ought to be able to predict its future state. He tried a demo; it didn't work.
With computers in the 1950s it might just be possible to calculate a forecast and finish the calculation before the forecasted weather came to pass. This possibility of useful forecasts led von Neumann and dynamical meteorologists like Charney and Platzman to team up to try to do it. It was a group effort, two tricks being to understand why it was essential to start with approximate equations rather than exact ones, and how to compute the numerical solutions with minimal computer resources and without the algorithm going numerically unstable. While von Neumann was irreplaceable for solving the prodigious techical challenges, the meteorological parts were mostly up to the meteorologists.
Hi, if you're looking for von Neumann's contributions to meteorology in context you would be better off reading a history of the subject. Paul Edward's "A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming" covers it.
Fantastic article. I love John von Neumann. Also, congrats on explicitly coming out as HBD. It's worth mentioning though that most Jews in Budapest survived the war though plenty were killed (see https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/budapest "more than 100,000" survived compared to ~200,000 at the beginning). It's not just the Holocaust, though of course the Holocaust was awful and had a big effect, but also cities being IQ shredders.
I don't know TFR data for Budapest, but I know BirthGauge has some tweets about Vienna having a sub-1.0 TFR in the early 20th century.
Cities gather high IQ people from the surrounding countryside and towns. But city people gather to work, not primarily to breed. So I wouldn't be surprised if cities are IQ shredders on a genetic level.
The famous example is Singapore, which purportedly attracts many smart people from elsewhere in South-East Asia and induces them to prioritise their career and not having children (this is obviously a shorthand wavey gesture at the exact mechanics of what depresses fertility rate, which are likely to be complex). Singapore's fertility rate is ~0.78, so if you're skimming the top 10% of people in SEA and subjecting them to that sort of pressure it's a form of truncation selection.
I haven't seen conventional wisdom that swings the other way re: inheritance. Maybe you're thinking of a general Geoffrey West Scale type argument that shows how cities increase productivity, # of entrepreneurs, ..., (and waste etc.)?
My understanding was that cities added value by cramming lots of highly productive people in one place, which increased the odds of some chance meeting producing a viable business, or patent, or book deal, or whatever - because you had many more chance meetings per unit time (and also a second-order effect where it therefore becomes more expensive to live in a city which adds selection pressure on the kind of person who can afford to move there and hence your average quality-per-chance-encounter is likely to be higher).
I assumed that also extended to a chance meeting meaning you fell in love and had lots of kids, but it sounds like you're suggesting cities independently assert a separate effect depressing fertility. It still sounds a bit to me like the effect direction is unclear though - having fewer children (average) with more productive partners (on average) doesn't seem to me to round off to 'IQ shredder'
It's quite obviously an IQ shredder at the population level:
Scenario 1, a country with no cities. Average IQ 100, TFR 2.0, average IQ of next generation 100.
Scenario 2, a country with a city with half the population. Average IQ of the city: 110. Average IQ of the countryside: 90. TFR of the city: 1.0, TFR of the countryside: 3.0. Assuming 60% heritability and 40% version to the mean, average IQ of the next generation is 106*0.25+94*0.75 = 97.
Numbers exaggerated to prove the point, but if higher IQ people have fewer people when they move to the city, them having those kids with other higher IQ people makes the problem worse not better.*
*Although it does also slightly increase population variance, so the tiny population of very-high-IQ people declines slower than it normally would if the population uniformly reduced its IQ.
Might also be worth noting that if there are some wide variety of traits which increase 'intelligence' in various domains, a cosmopolitan city with collisions between the most intelligent members of diverse populations may also substantially increase the *magnitude* of the intellectual elite's advantage. I.e. if Hungarian Jews have trait Y which increases intelligence, and separately Chinese people have trait Z, the fact that the city depresses their fertility does not change the fact that it is the only environment in which a person possessing Y+Z is likely to exist.
It looks like the human genome doesn't work like that based on the evidence so far (educational attainment is the best proxy for intelligence that we have polygenic scores for since it's easy to collect population-wide educational attainment data, and those scores seem to have components that are present in all populations with varying frequencies, not exclusively confined to certain continental regions), but you're right that that is hypothetically possible.*
*Another suggestion that it's unlikely is that history's catalogue of absolute-top-tier geniuses are not over-represented by people with cosmopolitan-unique ancestry combinations, AFAIK. Von Neumann was close to 100% Ashkenazi Jewish, Tesla was close to 100% Serbian, Newton was close to 100% English, etc
Your analysis doesn't take into account the increased chance of far-from-mean offspring from the higher IQ baseline and the potential for a ratcheting effect from assortative mating. Perhaps the benefits of cities is that it provides a greater means for differential outcomes due to IQ and assortative mating, enabling an IQ ratcheting effect.
The societal benefit from cities is pretty clearly the this-generation increase in productivity and technological invention that you get from concentrating talent.
They are still IQ shredders on a generation-on-generation view; even if the concentration of IQ resulted in an increase in +4 STDEV people in generation 2, that effect would fade away eventually due to regression to the mean, so by generation 5-10 the +4 STDEV (of the original average) population fraction would be lower than it would be otherwise (regression to the mean would be more powerful than the ratcheting effect).
Gut check 1: history's had a lot of million-plus person cities lasting for many generations. Of history's standout geniuses, how many were from lineages that had lived in cities for very long periods of time? Von Neumann's father was from a small city but then his grandfather and great-grandfather were from a small town called Ond; mother's side is 3 generations in Budapest, so mixed evidence. Tesla's family was quite rural. Newton's mother was born in "Market Overton in Rutland" and his father was born in "Colsterworth, South Kesteven District, Lincolnshire, England".
Gut check 2: the demographic that has the clearest evidence for an above-100 selection for IQ are Ashkenazi Jews. Enough Ashkenazi Jews migrated to NYC for us to be able to run a good experiment on whether that population concentrated in a mega-city for generations would result in a dazzling crop of geniuses by generation 5+. Signs point to no; Budapest's generation 1-2 outperformed NYC generation 5 because Budapest got the highest IQ Ashkenazi to start with (based on Scott's analysis).
Gut check 3: Some civilizations urbanized faster than others. The Roman megalopolis left no genetic trace in Italy (according to Razib Khan: https://razib.substack.com/p/they-came-they-saw-they-left-no-trace), and the long existence of Baghdad does not appear to have helped Iraq have more present-day geniuses than surrounding countries.
This argument, together with the worldwide trend toward urbanization in recent decades, predicts we should see a gradual decline in measured IQ scores. At least we should not see an increase.
But the observed Flynn effect is exactly the opposite. How do you reconcile this data with your reasoning?
Quite easily, given that IQ is genetics + environment (nutrition, mostly) and nutrition has improved dramatically over that time frame.
Two other key pieces of evidence that reinforce that:
(1) The Flynn effect stopped or even reversed in the rich world decades ago, right about when you'd expect gains from good nutrition to have reached 100% coverage
(2) Polygenic scores for educational attainment in Iceland, at least, show negative selection for the high-education traits over the last few generations. We haven't yet collected that data for more typical countries, but it fits with the expected pattern of declining (average genetic maximum potential for) intelligence.
Do people ever leave Singapore with the money they've earned to start a family the way people leave San Francisco for, say, Reno? But where do they go?
I'm not even sure that Singapore is such a big shredder nowadays, the TFR of Singapore is really low but so is the TFR of mainland Chinese and Chinese Malay, who I think are the biggest immigrant populations there.
> the TFR of Singapore is really low but so is the TFR of mainland Chinese and Chinese Malay
This by no means precludes Singapore still being a big IQ shredder. It can keep skimming smart people from low TFR populations as long as these source populations are much larger than it is.
Seeing that bit about Gábor Szegõ being Von Neumann's childhood math tutor reminded me of the fact that Dave Chalmers was apparently a childhood math tutor for Terence Tao.
There's also that photo of Erd\H{o}s and Tao in Adelaide. Erdos was visiting George and Esther Szekeres, Hungarian Jews from Budapest who moved to Adelaide.
I'll admit it actually took me a second to realize it was sarcastic — if you look around on e.g. Reddit, you'll find many people un-ironically endorsing this position or a close neighbor.
EDIT: I mean, even the comment directly below is suggesting that there can be no genetic component, because intermarriage or something.
I mean, I know this is ironic but he was surrounded by a *remarkable* collection of teachers, tutors, and mentors. I suspect you'd get at least solid results out of quite a few basically intelligent people in that scenario.
It's funny that, when discussing what made for an unusually rich crop of émigré talent from Budapest and thereabouts, Scott spends so little time looking for explanations that have anything to do with the education system in Budapest in the first third of the twentieth century. (It is still good, to judge from my Hungarian friends - and in fact some of its strengths as far as mathematics is concerned have remained constant.)
The fact that a large proportion of people in that group were of Jewish ancestry (or partly of Jewish ancestry, etc.) may in fact be partly a distraction. It's not just that 25% of the population of Budapest fell into that category, but that the percentage was presumably much larger for the middle class. What access to higher education did the working class? And what interest did the nobility have in excelling in studies?
As for genetic explanations - that is hard to either prove or disprove. One thing, though: intermarriage was statistically negligible everywhere before WWI - yet we see it happening quite a lot whenever somebody puts together a list of Great Jews - born before or after WWI, Hungarian or otherwise. It is not just that the lists include people whom Jews would not consider to be Jews if they were not famous, and that comparisons with proportions in the general population are flawed. It is also the case that this is fun to try to make fit with naïve versions of the genetic explanation ("Jews are smart"). Are we dealing with some magical substance that increases in power when diluted?
More sophisticated versions of the same hypothesis may survive this test, but they lack that nice primitive appeal.
I believe this theme of "Jews are smart" has come up before on this blog. Personally I would have liked to have learned more unique insights about the man himself rather than his general background.
There are some comments about this in there, in the quotes from MacRae's bio. But of course it's all hypothetical. Nobody knows just how or why a genius emerges.
Reminder that the contest essays consistently come on Friday and always have the disclaimer attached to them. (I remember last year making the same mistake when Scott posted his 1001 Nights review)
>It's funny that, when discussing what made for an unusually rich crop of émigré talent from Budapest and thereabouts, Scott spends so little time looking for explanations that have anything to do with the education system in Budapest in the first third of the twentieth century. (It is still good, to judge from my Hungarian friends - and in fact some of its strengths as far as mathematics is concerned have remained constant.)
Scott addressed this question at much more length years ago in this essay-
Yes, I read it back then. It is still very cursory. The conclusion is not that "education does nothin'" (he doesn't really learn or tell us much, or nearly anything, about the education system) but simply that it does not produce child prodigies. Fair enough. Of course most child prodigies anywhere go undiscovered, or go nowhere - and very few of them get the chance to learn Classical Greek!
Clearly there are environmental factors at play here outside the _formal_ education system - though part of them can be due to its effect on the parents' generation.
(a) I, for one, would like to know more about what was going in Budapest in the first third of the twentieth century.
(b) As he is forced to conclude in the cited post, it can't reduce to genetics *if seen at the very coarse level of the "ethnic group"* - similar concentrations, and higher ones, have been achieved since then.
The evidence suggests that in Budapest between 1900 and 1930, in at least some schools and the social environment around those schools (schuls, churches, playgrounds, maybe popular entertainment, street banter, jokes in newspapers, gossip) academic achievement was not disparaged as nerdy/unattractive/low-status, but just the opposite. It would not be surprising if in places where this held true, intelligent kids then tended to develop their intellectual strengths instead of prioritizing things that society incentivises elsewhere. Perhaps it's difficult to achieve such a high density so most such instances are more local: home schooled relatives from a large extended family in the UK, some cousins in a large Indian city who have a famous poet as an uncle and a professor as a role model, a small rural Iowa settlement with a school employing an unusually bookish teacher, and similar stories Scott has written about. At least some of this hypothesis should be testable.
Education does nothin'. I don't think a genetic explanation is at all hard to *evidence*; "proof" is a word often used for "God [or IQ] of the gaps"-style reaching.
Scott has, in fact, looked at this issue a lot; see below link.
Hybrid vigor is a thing but not all hybrid pairs have vigor. Jury's still out on humans I think, although we do have suggestive positive evidence from things like <the iconic Hawaiian look from the early 20th century being half Hawaiian half Japanese, or so something I read claimed, maybe James A. Michener's Hawaii?>
Hybrid vigor reduces the effect of problematic genes, but Ashkenazic Jews were and, to a large extent, still genetically isolated from the European population. If you look at the Martians, most of them had two Jewish parents, so both were from within that isolated group.
My guess is that it was because male Jews had to learn to read the Torah. No Jewish woman was going to marry a man who couldn't read, and a lot of Jewish men would think twice before marrying a woman so pig ignorant that she couldn't read enough to tutor the younger boys.
The Ashkenazic population actually had enormous contributions from surrounding groups (mostly women) in its founding stage. What you had was little inflow in 1500-1850, say.
If the educational system played a large role, shouldn't we expect to see lots of non-Jews rising to the highest echelons of math and science? AFAIK, all great Hungarian minds of the time were Jewish.
If you define "Jewish" very broadly (including what most Jews would think of as non-Jews: children of converts, people with some Jewish ancestry, etc.)., and choose who gets labelled "great", sure.
At any rate, as said before, the middle class in the capital city was heavily Jewish (under a broad definition of the term), and that's what is relevant; even secondary school wasn't a given at the time for children of the working class, far from it (... and the upper class would have had no incentive to try very hard). You will probably get a very clear majority if you narrow it down to the Bildungsburgerturm, i.e., the relatively comfortable subsector of the middle-class that owed its position to the education system and had a close symbiotic relationship with it. Class habitus runs in families, as do resources, obviously.
Are you saying that children of converts are well-represented in the usual examples of disproportionate Jewish achievement, of a magnitude such that positing a genetic component becomes unnecessary?
I would expect that, both in the more general question (representation in Nobels/20th-century prodigies/advanced degrees, etc) and in this particular case, there would be a negligible number of converts and that case can be safely ignored.
Too, I am curious as to how many examples there are of someone with, say, a single Jewish grandfather being counted as Jewish, in this context — I had assumed most "famously brainy" Jews are more Jewish than not, by ancestry; it makes sense to me — in general (and *especially* in the case of Jews) I expect far more endogamy than exogamy — but I'd be interested if you have evidence that's not the case.
(More specific still, I didn't think any of the "Martians" were converts or children of converts -- but I haven't really checked all that hard, either. Or, uh, at all. Still, there aren't very many converts to Judaism at any time or place, AFAIK.)
I’ve made this comment before on other posts, but the Jews in Hungary, particularly in Budapest, had a unique situation. Back in 1848, Hungarian Jews were seen as sympathetic to the wave of failed revolutions in that year. So the state decided to punish them by levying an onerous school tax. This was supposed to suck up any resources the Jewish community might put toward another revolution or other political ambitions. Jews were still largely segregated from everyone else, so for 50 years before 1900 Jews were essentially forced to build themselves the best schools money could buy.
Add to this the unwillingness of Hungarian landed gentry to sully their hands with any kind of work. The Jews stepped up to take on the industrialization and modernization of the country. And, for a time, a lot of the wealth they earned went back into schools. A smart Jewish boy born in the latter half of the 19th century had a unique opportunity for world-class schooling plus a worthy outlet for his ambitions. Not to mention the aforementioned feeling that all of this was rather precarious…
There are two things that make me skeptic about this line of “education technology” explanation.
First, it sounds a lot like an argument for protectionism in education. “Isolate you cormmunitity from outside influence/competition (also, strip it from funding) and you’ll get a great educational system.” Sounds fishy.
Second, this would imply that (i) Hungarian-Jews managed to set up an educational system so extraordinary that it would reliably produce Von Neumann level geniuses. (ii) the knowledge of how to set up that system was completely lost. And (iii), that despite decades of effort and trillions of dollars spent in education world wide, we have not been able to re-discover the recipe for this system.
The war might help you explain (ii), but still (i) and (iii) make me doubt that such an educational system ever existed, or that it could ever exist.
I think it’s more complex than this. Smart Jewish kids in Budapest didn’t just have access to unusually good educational resources, but the surrounding society made it possible for brilliant people to rack up unusually meaningful and measurable achievements. The Budapest Jews might have been no more or less extraordinary than their circumstances.
In surrounding countries, a the potential for growth was probably spread more evenly among upper-middle-class Christians and lower gentry. But in Hungary the social prohibitions against upper class Christians working in fields like industry and finance were unusually strong. At the same time that Jews were making economic progress due to those opportunities, they were gaining political enfranchisement. I can’t say for sure, but there’s nothing like the fervor of the newly-upwardly mobile to propel the next generation to great things. You can’t engineer the conditions that might have led to a spate of geniuses in early 20th century Budapest, which is why we haven’t.
I forgot to mention my source for the forced spending on Jewish education was Paul Lendvai’s “The Hungarians”:
This is interesting. Your account of the environment that Budapest Jews were faced with (which I agree with), is basically the one that we need to make the genetic explanation work. The smarter Jews, who presumably were already smart on average, faced little competition in banking and industry jobs which allowed them to amass large fortunes and have lots of children, e.g. 10+ children. The smartest of these 10+ children, who are the offspring of smart parents, would go off to profitable careers in business and industry, amass large fortunes, and have 10+ children of their own. In other words, the environment put strong selection pressures for intelligence on Jews. Repeat this process four or five times and you end up with "The Martians."
So I guess our disagreement is not really about what the environment was like, but about the causal mechanism through which said environment produced ultra-smart people. My model of the situation is: {environment} --> {genetic selection for intelligence} --> {Martians}. Whereas yours looks something like: {environment} --> {Martians}.
Assuming this is an accurate representation of the disagreement, I'd go back to the point I made earlier that we know of no environmental intervention that can reliably and sustainably raise intelligence (outside obvious things like nutrition and not hitting people in the head with a bat). The sad truth seems to be (as Fredie deBoer nicely summarizes here: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/education-doesnt-work-20) that people come with a maximum potential intelligence, in the same way that they come with a maximum potential height, and provided that some basic conditions are met (again, nutrition and not hitting with a bat), no environmental interventions that we know of can increase people's intelligence past their maximum potential intelligence.
Given this evidence, I'm inclined to think that the Martians simply had a higher maximum potential intelligence which was the result of genetic selection. The alternative is to assume that Hungarian Jews accidentally landed on an environmental-intervention sweet spot capable of consistently producing world class geniuses, but so sensitive that any departure from it yields people that are only kind of smart.
Given that one of our key signals that all these guys were unusually brilliant is the fact that they met on the Manhattan Project, I keep wondering if the rarity of combined factors that create people smart enough to invent weapons capable of wiping out humanity is a bug or a feature.
Do we have much evidence that Budapest Jews outperformed Vienna Jews, other than at the very highest levels of Manhattan Project fields (which could be due to the small sample size)? How about Jews in Prague, the third city of the Austro-Hungarian Empire?
On a per capita basis, how did German Jews perform relative to Austro-Hungarian Jews?
Scott addresses this issue in an old post about Hungarian-Jews over-achievement (https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-considered-as-hungarian-high-school-science-fair-project/), and he briefly mentions it here. He argues that "when we hear “there were X Nobel Prize winning German physicists in the early 1900s”, it sounds only mildly impressive. But when we hear “there were X Nobel Prize winning physicists from Budapest in the early 1900s”, it sounds kind of shocking. But the denominator isn’t the number of Germans vs. Hungarians, it’s the number of German Jews vs. Hungarian Jews, which is about the same."
All this is to say that it is probably not the Hungarian-Jew (HJ) education system that is doing most of the work here, and that there must be some other factor that explains the HJ's "overachievingness" which is also shared by German-Jews. Here, the genetic explanations seems to fit the bill.
Prague also produced a lot of smart Jews. Look at Hedy Lamarr. She had a theatrical education but taught herself enough about radio and electronics to do some serious inventing. She had a patent on what later became known as TDMA. She wasn't a science major, but she grew up in a freewheeling intellectual environment.
Jews don't get to consider who is a Jew and who is not a Jew. That's something the antisemites do. It's not like there's a Jewish pope who will excommunicate you in time to save you from a pogrom. It's like this for the Blacks in the US who were classified by racial laws passed by racists. There's no Black pope either.
Jews actually are very particular about membership (when it comes to people who are not famous). It goes strictly by the maternal line, and attempts to make that rule more flexible have met with enormous resistance. Of course someone can be non-Jewish according to the Jews and still be a target of antisemitism.
(There *is* excommunication (not excommunion), just not by a central authority.)
Reading this, I was struck by the fact that Albert Einstein is the person who has come to signify genius to the general public. I think he's a very good candidate - there are few historical thinkers who seem so consistently right and insightful about murky and controversial matters (Charles Darwin and Alan Turing are the other two that come to mind). (I think it's also notable that most prominent scientist have philosophical inclinations that would be considered empiricist, while Einstein is one of the very few post-Enlightenment figures that could naturally be thought of as rationalist, in the philosophical sense.)
But Von Neumann seems to have been a different thing altogether. This review doesn't even mention Von Neumann's important work in set theory. (If you've ever learned that the ordinal 0 is the empty set, that 1 is the set {0}, that 2 is the set {0, {0}}, ... that omega is the set {0, {0}, {0,{0}}, ...}, and so on - well, that's Von Neumann's definition, which is much, much easier to work with than Cantor's definition.) He seems to have been incredibly sharp and done important work across many disciplines. But he does seem to have this psychopathic/sociopathic streak, at all levels from his carelessness at driving to his naive game theory about nuclear war. So it's probably for the best that Einstein is the public face of scientific genius.
(It doesn't sound like Von Neumann was ever as casually cruel as Isaac Newton though.)
Which millions did Isaac Newton propose to murder? The worst I know about him was how he secretly wrote the Royal Society's report supposedly settling the Leibniz-Newton priority dispute [sic].
Von Neumann was a clearly first-rate mathematician, but it's not like he was Hilbert, or for that matter Ramanujan. In ergodic theory, as in computing, he benefitted from being an early entrant in the field.
Good point about millions. I was thinking of Newton's personal cruelty to people he knew, like Hooke, and to various criminals and rivals when he was in charge of the mint. Not actually as impactful as a nuclear strike on the Soviet Union, though revealing a different sort of character flaw.
It's true that within mathematics, Von Neumann was no Hilbert. But he's clearly much more influential (especially broadly) than Ramanujan. And while it's possible that Hilbert was also as important as Von Neumann in physics, Von Neumann also has direct work in economics and computer science that is incredibly influential there. There aren't many 20th century figures with as much directly influential work in as many different academic fields as Von Neumann. (Nor even as many sub-fields of math as Hilbert - though Von Neumann is close.)
I was bringing up Ramanujan as an example of "out of the blue" originality and depth, not in terms of influence; Hardy was quite right about both. Ramanujan has certainly been more influential than von Neumann in number theory, though :).
Again, von Neumann was an insightful early entrant in many fields. Of course von Neumann's Ergodic theorem is a basic result, but there's no point in pretending that it is difficult. Of course von Neumann was a founding figure of game theory, but, again, no mathematical difficulty at that stage. Obviously it is important to think about Hilbert spaces abstractly, but my (possibly deeply ignorant) impression is that von Neumann's contribution there was mainly that - axiomatization - and then of course he could use the basic theory, cleaned up by him, extremely well.
I'm sure some of his work can be classified as genuinely hard problem-solving - it is just that that part of his output seems to have a way of avoiding my path. Of course that may in part be a consequence of my ignorance, and again, difficulty is not the only measure of achievement in mathematics.
I think it's useful to compare Von Neumann's work to that of someone like Kolmogorov or Tarski. It's all the stuff that is important and foundational to a field, and seems in some sense straightforward (though mainly with the benefit of retrospect). It's not as original and deep and creative as the work of people like Gödel or Turing, but it's still extremely foundational, and there's just so *much* of it.
I think it may also be easy, with hindsight, to underestimate the level of intellect and originality necessary to *produce* an insight. Most of the mathematics I've learned has seemed obvious — once I've learned it.
I'm super smart, I acknowledge, but I have some small doubt that *even I* could have produced all of the knowledge in a modern university's mathematics department...
“Most mathematicians know one method. For example, Norbert Wiener had mastered Fourier transforms. Some mathematicians have mastered two methods and might really impress someone who knows only one of them. John von Neumann had mastered three methods: 1) A facility for the symbolic manipulation of linear operators, 2) An intuitive feeling for the logical structure of any new mathematical theory; and 3) An intuitive feeling for the combinatorial superstructure of new theories.” - Ulam
I suppose in some sense, that does explain why others said his work wasn't as deep/penetrating as e.g. Einsteins. Most of his tricks were making crisp what he already knew, not in finding something new. Still, that doesn't mean he didn't have a deep understanding of the subject.
Makes me wonder if he would have been a good philosopher. Looking briefly at his opinions on QM interpretations (in a SEP article), they seem much more sensible than e.g. Wigner or Heisenberg. But that's maybe 1 bit of info.
While those who solve hard problems deserve fame, there is much to be said as well for those who discover relatively easy problems that people hadn't noticed yet were even problems.
For example, Francis Galton probably wasn't a Gauss-level genius, but he was extremely productive into old age in a variety of fields, such as statistics, that had, for some reason, tended to attract less talent than had, say, mathematical physics. For example, Galton came up with the correlation coefficient in his mid-60s and the concept of "the wisdom of crowds" (the average of a lot of guesses is more likely to be correct than a single guess) at age 85 in 1907, two years after Einstein's theory of special relativity. Einstein had a whole lot more brainpower than Galton in the 1900s, but Galton was still coming up with new ideas because he was attuned to asking and then trying to answer fairly easy questions that, for whatever reason, nobody else had taken on before.
Somewhat like Galton, Von Neumann tended to take on fairly new fields, harder ones than Galton of course, and come up with solid first steps rather than ultimate insights: e.g., the Von Neumann computing architecture wasn't a genius breakthrough, but it was a lucid description of a workable system that enabled the American computer industry to get up and running fast.
Similarly, almost simultaneously, Von Neumann launched game theory in the mid-1940s by publishing a book on this novel topic that, remarkably, became a New York Times bestseller during WWII. Soon, a whole bunch of smart folks were working on game theory, including applying it to nuclear war strategy to come up with less disastrous ideas than Von Neumann had personally come up with.
If you do not think von Neumann's work had particular depth I would suggest you read through his collected works. He had plenty of it, and while in pure mathematics he might not have reached the level of insight of someone like Grothendieck, he still had enough to put him in the top tier of mathematicians without doubt, especially when you consider he only spent about 15 years of his life on pure mathematics.
I can't say I understand why people think von Neumann wanted to kill millions either, his viewpoint was that before the USSR developed their own nuclear weapons the US should use theirs to strike the USSR military and disable it. He went to math conferences in Moscow and I am sure he had plenty of friends there, so I have never understood why some people want to make him out to be some genocidal mad man who wanted to kill people.
Soviet propaganda, I suppose -- obviously, only an evil madman would want to attack the worker's paradise under the leadership of wise and benevolent comrade Stalin.
Preemptively nuking the soviets strikes me as entirely rational for the time. Almost impossible to fairly judge this without being blinded by hindsight.
This was my thought. If I say on Tuesday "There's a 70% chance of rain on Wednesday", but then it doesn't rain, you wouldn't necessarily say "Well, guess you were wrong, idiot".
Similarly, if Von Neumann says "There's a 70% the soviets nuke us if we don't nuke them first", then looking at all the close calls we experienced, I'm not sure I'd say that was an unreasonable estimate. Maybe we just got lucky?
I mean Jesus was woke to the long term consequences on human flourishing over time of choosing to play zero, and negative, sum minimax games 2000 years ago
For what it's worth, the people who are most impressed with von Neumann's accomplishments seem to be rationalists rather than people in his field(s). The physicists I know -- and I've asked directly about von Neumann -- generally feel that Einstein deserves his reputation as the "best" physicist, and the mathematicians I know usually point to one of the greats like Euler or Gauss.
I think this is true of Ramanujan as well. Really appealing to people who like a good Ubermensch story, less so to those only judging their body of work. (Not to diminish either of them, of course -- even getting to the point where most experts have an opinion on your body of work is an achievement most people will never earn.)
I would like to think that number theorists' opinion of Ramanujan is fairly objective :). It largely agrees with Hardy's: (a) amazingly talented man, (b) the pity - who knows what could have been, (c) he influenced the field nevertheless (partly through Hardy and Littlewood - he had a hand in the development of the circle method, for instance). Of course some of what seemed mysterious to Hardy really came from Ramanujan's having taught himself, and partly rediscovered, the theory of modular forms, to a point well beyond where Hardy had got. That adds to (b): Ramanujan should really have met Hecke as well.
I think in any particular field he touched, Von Neumann is seen as a very significant early figure, but not the biggest figure. I think this is a really interesting category of person. (The only other one that comes to mind is Dana Scott, who proved some very important results in many different subfields of mathematical logic, despite not being as influential in any one of them as superstars within that particular subfield. I just checked his wikipedia page and saw that he has a similar status in certain areas of theoretical computer science as in mathematical logic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dana_Scott .)
I'll second this. Professional physicist here, and I would rate Von Neumann as important, but certainly not among the top ten most important physicists in the 20th century. Maybe top fifty. My impression (on which I am happy to be corrected) is that the same is true in pretty much all the fields he touched*. Of course, being `top fifty in the century' in half a dozen distinct fields is nothing to sneeze at! But it's very different to Einstein, who was brought up upthread, who was indisputably the #1 most important physicist of the 20th century, possibly ever.
* Possibly in CS he would be top ten? Although I would guess still clearly behind Turing and Shannon?
The book actually quotes Mandelbrot on this (from in chapter 8):
'Von Neumann, when I was there at Princeton, was under extreme pressure from mathematicians, who were despising him for no longer being a mathematician; by the physicists, who were despising him for never having been a real physicist; and by everybody for having brought to Princeton this collection of low-class individuals called "programmers".'
In one of Dyson's books (Turing's Cathedral?) Freeman Dyson is quoted on this too saying the faculty at the Institute for Advanced Studies was full of snobs who disliked having lower class people like engineers work there. Similarly some of von Neumann's friends at the end of this MAA documentary on him talk about him spreading his talents "too thin" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQp70uqsBV4
Some of the people who gave quotes about how impressive von Neumann was were physicists, great ones in fact, Bethe and Wigner for example, both of whom won Nobel Prizes. Of course they were talking about intelligence in general, not as physicists, von Neumann wasn't really a physicist in the sense he mathematized things, I believe Wolfgang Pauli had the quote where he told von Neumann he would be a great physicist if physics was about proofs. Nevertheless most professionals won't really give any strict ranking of who was the greatest and so on because it's hard to give an objective account of different physicists from different times. How would you compare Newton and Einstein for example?
Well...Einstein was the most important physicist of the 20th century, possibly ever. Is there a field in which the same is true of Von Neumann? My guess would be CS is the most likely candidate, although even there presumably Turing and Shannon would rank higher?
That said, quantity has a quality all of its own, and being a major player in half a dozen fields is pretty remarkable! But if it is indeed true that there is no one field where Von Neumann is clearly THE key figure, then I would say that having Einstein as the `face of genius' instead of Von Neumann seems appropriate.
Interesting, I'd specifically prefer a major contributor to several different fields over the single biggest contributor to one for the "face of genius". It feels fairer!
"Einstein was the most important physicist of the 20th century"
I think such statements are very much up to taste. Stripped of publicity, I could easily argue for Max Planck to be the most important physicist of the 20th century. Or Niels Bohr? Pauli? Dirac? Feynman?
For computer science, one can easily argue that the von Neumann architecture is the basis of every computer and thus he is the most important computer scientist. Or one can argue as easily for someone else.
I would also say that's it is a bit arbitrary what we call a "field". Von Neumann is THE key figure in game theory. Is that a field?
No, sorry, this is not debatable. Between his contributions to relativity (special and general), quantum mechanics (photoelectric effect, EPR), and statistical physics, Einstein is clearly #1. There is no plausible case whereby Planck or Bohr or Pauli or Dirac is as important as Einstein. As for Feynman, stripped of publicity it is doubtful if he is even top ten (in the 20th century).
I did say CS was probably the best case for Von Neumann to be the key figure, but even there I think Turing and Shannon are more influential? I would appreciate a perspective from a computer scientist though.
Game theory feels too narrow to be a field (more of a subfield), and even there, isn't John Nash more important than Von Neumann?
I am CS researcher. But as you may have guessed from my previous post, I have no strong opinion on whether von Neumann was more or less influential than Turing or Shannon. I think the question is too ill-defined.
My instinctive response was colored by a sense that Von Neumann is vastly overhyped by internet rationalists, but my assessment of him is mainly based on his contributions to physics and it could be that just wasn’t his strongest suit.
Well, in computer science he *is* considered one of the founding fathers, that is not just internet hype. The von Neumann architecture is of course the one big thing that got his name. Every computer that has been built in the last 70 years uses the von Neumann architecture. But there are other things. Mergesort, one of the really fundamental algorithms, is by von Neumann.
If you force people to decide for a single name, then I would assume that the most frequent name would be Turing. But I do think that some would choose von Neumann, or Shannon. It also depends a lot on the background. People with electrical engineering background in CS might choose Shannon more often. And people with other backgrounds have other heroes.
I think you are badly underestimating Feynman, probably because you are overcompensating for his charisma and popularity. Feynman deserves the main credit for perturbative QFT, the foundation of particle physics. The path integral, in particular, is something almost no one else would have come up with. He also had many other important contributions: the beginnings of quantum gravity in terms of spin-2, the idea that became Fadeev-Poppov ghosts, the "beads on a stick" idea that eventually led to LiGO.
I'd say he certainly rates in the top five of the century, whereas Pauli and Planck do not.
No I don’t think I am underrating Feynman. I am aware of the contributions that you mention but I don’t think they amount to top five in the 20th century, or even top ten, unless you consider ‘physics’ synonymous with ‘theoretical high energy physics’, which I don’t. I agree Pauli and Planck don’t make the top ten either.
It also seems fair to note that Dirac (who does make my top 5) wrote down the path integral before Feynman, and Schwinger and Dyson were doing perturbative QFT before Feynman also.
Are your top 5 / top 10 basically from the Los Alamos crowd? Or are you thinking of people from elsewhere as well?
If I try to produce a list of top 20th century physicists, I end up with (in no particular order) Feynman, Einstein, Dirac, Bohr, Heisenberg, Fermi, Bethe, Schwinger, Oppenheimer, Dyson, Millikan(?), Planck, Pauli, and I think that's about it, but I'm not used to thinking about physics in terms of its "superheroes", and what I know about many of these is largely just what I remember from reading Gleick's bio of Feynman. By contrast, I don't follow who wins Nobel Prizes, and I'm probably prone to forget entire important subfields (I'm not counting string theory anyway, however), and I'm arguably going to lump some people into physics that you might not (e.g. astronomy, cosmology).
Von Neumann led the team that built the first general purpose stored program electronic computer. He was a key figure in CS. He created a something to study like like Watt did with the expansion driven steam engine. A lot of other people played critical roles in advancing the science, but VN & Watt created something that could drive those studies.
Most of the Soviet damage to Russia was already done by the 1950s. The US by a first strike would have done even more damage to the Russian people than the Soviets. On top of that, I think the extent of guilt and shame on the US would have left the US broken as well. No one wins a nuclear war.
I'm thinking of The Iron Curtain generally and, e.g.:
- The Warsaw Pact
- Stalin by himself
- Their support of the Chinese communists
- The Cold War
- Cuba
- The invasion of Czechoslovakia
- The invasion of Afghanistan
I think it's reasonable to also include a LOT, if not literally all, of the various (nasty) U.S. anti-communism 'efforts' around the world, e.g. Vietnam and Central America, in the list of terrible, awful tragedies that potentially could have been mostly averted had we nuked the Soviets when we had the chance.
Had we nuked the Soviets, North Korea would either never have happened, or we'd have been able to nuke the Chinese communists (or have credibly threatened to do so).
There is a WHOLE LOT of misery that seems, to me, to be directly attributable to the totalitarian ideology we DIDN'T destroy directly when we had a chance.
And, arguably, the U.S. did a _fantastic_ fucking job 'fixing' both Germany and Japan after WW2. If we'd nuked the Soviets first, before they developed nukes themselves, and then installed/setup something like we did in the other former Evil Empires, not only Russia itself, but much of the rest of the world, very well might be MUCH better off.
I think von Neumann very well might have expected a LOT of what eventually happened. He had a lot of up-close-and-personal experience of exactly how _bad_ communism and totalitarianism is in practice.
From 2001 to 2021, the US lead a war against the Taliban in Afghanistan using everything in the book except nukes. Air strikes. Sat intelligence. Gitmo. Occupation by ground forces for two decades. Drone strikes against gatherings of suspected terrorists and civilian bystanders. Infrastructure projects. Democracy. Training of local police and military forces.
We all know the outcome.
How confident are you that Communism could have been defeated just by nuking the USSR?
If you define it as an exchange of nuclear fire, agreed. If you include a war where only one side has & uses nukes, which a preemptive strike on the USSR would've been, then the US clearly won the only nuclear war to have occurred.
Did he literally mean first strike? Or an American invasion backed by the threat of nuclear strikes if significant resistance was encountered?
We got through the Cold War, and might even get through the next 20 years without nuclear war. But if someone considers nuclear war to be one of the worst things ever, the way to prevent it is to have a hegemon enforcing a unilateral NNPT on the rest of the world.
If life exists on other planets, I'm sure this is the way it's played out on lots of them. It's kind of surprising given what we know of human history that the US had a city-destroying weapon and then . . . just let other people get it, too.
At the end of WW2, the Soviet Union had superior conventional forces in Europe, and while America might have won a long war it would have been far too costly. Perhaps he meant an ultimatum first, but he definitely meant to launch nukes before engaging in conventional warfare.
>Destroying the _other_ Evil Empires sure seems to have worked out great IMO.
The ones which are demilitarized and occupied to this day, sure. Would America have been willing to Marshall Plan the nuked Soviets? Somehow I'm very much doubtful about that, and in the absence of it, I'd say that the total amount of misery in the world would only have been increased. But of course, almost nobody in the Definitely Non-Evil Empire would've given a shit, judging by how they steadily memory-hole unimportant de-evilified places like Iran or Libya.
Well, reading these comments one might get the impression that you are all but begging Putin to prove you (and von Neumann, retroactively) right. Be careful of what you wish for, I guess.
In 1951, when the Soviets succeeded in their first nuclear test, the US had (per https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.2968/062004017 ) 640 nukes. In 1957, when Sputnik 1 was launched, the US had ten times as many, and the USSR had 10% of that.
It is very hard to cause a regime change by air power alone. The Soviet leadership did likely not feel very protective of their civilian population and would probably not have stepped down to save Moscow. Morale bombings do not work. (see https://acoup.blog/2020/07/17/fireside-friday-july-17th-2020/ ) Even if you could magically kill every USSR soldier without touching any civilians, occupying the USSR would still be a rather large undertaking.
Dropping a few 100 nukes on population centers with the aim to slow Soviet industrial development to delay their nuke production would likely have delayed it a bit, but would IMHO not have stopped it permanently. It would also have cast the US as the global villain, normalized the use of preemptive nuclear strikes and pushed about every country in the world to acquire nukes and band together against the US.
If one looks at the graphs, fighting WWIII early is obviously more advantageous for the US than fighting it later, but the actual outcome of not having to fight it at all is still better.
Well, yes, but a lot of the argument is "how likely was the historical outcome of avoiding WW3 altogether"? The world came to the brink multiple times during the Cold War - is our timeline one that should have been predicted or one that got exceptionally lucky?
If you, in 1945, thought WW3 had a 50% chance of breaking out in the next few decades and knew that the earlier it was fought the better, would that have justified pre-emptive strike? what is the odds of war were 90%?
I don’t think he was wrong about nuclear war. In our timeline we’ve come to the brink of it at least three times (petrov, Cuban missile crisis, Able Archer), probably more that we don’t know about. And when he was proposing the first strike second strike capabilities weren’t even known of yet! We were damn lucky to not get a nuclear war in our timeline, from his position a first strike is pretty reasonable. Probably even higher expected utility, and I say that with the knowledge nuclear war didn’t happen!
Instituting a policy of building nukes gets a nuke was the right move in the late forties, if I got time traveled back there I’d tell them as much!
“ Instituting a policy of building nukes gets a nuke was the right move in the late forties”
Sounds plausible. Though I wonder about the capacities for verifying whether some country was instituting a policy of building nukes. Now that we’ve got all sorts of international atomic agencies, and spy satellites, and so on, verification is easy. But even now you sometimes get a North Korea that manages to sneak a nuke.
I don't know if it would have been possible for the United States to stop North Korea from building its nukes without using military force. (China might have been in a better position to do so...)
The book’s second chapter gets into von Neumann’s set theory contributions quite deeply. You might enjoy. His interests here would prove central to his work on computers, game theory etc.
The book’s second chapter gets into von Neumann’s set theory contributions quite deeply. You might enjoy. His interests here would prove central to his work on computers, game theory etc. It’s a theme I was really interested in. How did his earlier work shape his more practical work later on… I’ve spent some time on that.
That's easy for you to say now, because you know the Game Theory that von Neumann invented later.
Also, a first strike on the Soviet Union would *not* have killed millions. The whole point is that only the US had nuclear weapons. According to this [0] the casualties from Hiroshima and Nagasaki were about 200,000 people. I don't know which exact strategy you would use for preventing the Soviet Union from getting nuclear weapons but I think you could do it with about that number of casualties?
When you then consider the amount of misery and death that Soviet communism brought to the world, it's not entirely clear to me that von Neumann was wrong.
A first strike totally would have killed millions, either directly or in the war it started. Even if you try for a precision strike on their nuclear infrastructure (probably impossible given the limitations of US intelligence in the 40s and 50s), they're just going to shrug and send their armies to roll over Western Europe. Any attack against the Soviets is going to mean all-out war, both conventional and nuclear. And that in turn means the first strike needs to hit the broader Soviet industrial base as hard as it can.
von Neumann was wrong on this, but only because it turned out to be possible to win WWIII without directly fighting the Soviets. If that hadn't been possible, he would absolutely have been right, simply because of how much worse a later war would have been.
Since the Soviets only had the capability to roll up to Berlin >because< the Allies gave them enormous amounts of stuff (both civilian and military), the idea that they would have been capable of going to the Atlantic in the late 40s without that help is... not realistic.
They probably became somewhat more capable after rebuilding, i.e. the 50s, but I'm still doubtful of a European war actually being successful for them.
Since they had a lot of help from spies (yes, the Rosenbergs were correctly convicted) to produce their own bombs, I suspect that von Neumann urging a strike >before< they could get their own production running was likely the optimum solution.
The other problem would have been that there really was no appetite within the other Allies to continue the war, but this time against an opponent that had just been allied with them until yesterday...
> Since the Soviets only had the capability to roll up to Berlin >because< the Allies gave them enormous amounts of stuff (both civilian and military), the idea that they would have been capable of going to the Atlantic in the late 40s without that help is... not realistic.
The idea that you can nuke a country with one of the largest militaries and industrial bases in the world, fail to annihilate that military and industrial base (since the nuclear capabilities of the US in the 1946-49 period were not capable of this), and not expect a whole fuck of a lot of your people to die in the ensuing war, is way, way more unrealistic than anything else.
I completely grant that the Soviets greatly benefited from American logistical help in WWII, and that the Red Army was never quite as formidable as it looked on paper. But that still leaves it with all the stuff that we did give them, and a large and experienced Army. Against a US military presence that has been cut to the bone, and European powers that are bankrupt and focused on rebuilding. It's hard to remember just how bad the military situation was in the late 40s, but there's every chance that they could have gotten a lot further than you think.
And in any case, my point was more that you couldn't ignore the conventional aspects and just destroy the Soviet nuclear program.
Julius Rosenberg did spy, and Ethel was at least aware of it; that does not mean that the case against them was procedurally or materially correct (it wasn't). But that's a side issue that won't get resolved here.
People in this thread seem to be forgetting that the entire case of the Nuremberg Trials was based mainly on the proposition that aggressive warfare was illegal. Aggressive nuclear warfare is mass murder on top of it. Surely it is a good thing if there wasn't enough appetite for it.
Well, it wouldn't be "aggressive warfare" since it would be a response to Soviet aggression and had a defensive purpose. Soviets invaded Finland and Poland pre-war and occupied/controlled many other countries after. The same casus belli existed against the Soviets as there was with Germany.
Using that argument, you can justify aggressive warfare against just about every country - the U.S. most certainly included. It's a good thing international law is not determined by the comments section. Neither is foreign policy; one may sometimes think it could not get worse, but, well, apparently it could.
Given how Communism blighted the economic development of eastern & central Europe for 45 years (Hungary was on a level with Austria, diverged during Communism, is now converging strongly) and also slowed China's growth, *if* a nuclear war could have toppled the Soviets in the early 1950's (a very big if), it could easily have been a net-positive for human flourishing compared to our timeline, and definitely would have been a net-positive compared to the timelines where there were massive nuclear exchanges in the 1970's/1980's and/or where Communism won/was still around in Russia*. Truman+Eisenhower took a very large gamble that could well have been negative in expected value terms, based on the timeline that we've seen, but it came out positively for us.
*Even in our timeline, we're not done with Communism yet, as the Uyghurs and Tibetans will tell you.
There's SO many things that probably would have never happened or gone much better had we nuked the Soviets when we could have, e.g. basically all of the U.S.'s own (generally terrible) anti-communism 'efforts'.
I don't think Von Neumann ordinals are a good way to think about what ordinals are. Fundamentally, ordinals are order types of well-ordered sets. Von Neumann ordinals are a convenient representation for when you need to be able to have them as actual objects in your theory, and are nice for how they formalize the "an ordinal is the set of all smaller ordinals" way of thinking, but honestly, I think for most purposes it's perfectly fine for ordinals (and cardinals!) to be metatheoretical. Fundamentally an ordinal is an order type, not any particular representation of that order type.
A more straightforward answer to "why Hungary" is that the Hungarian Jews were integrating into mainstream society, whereas Eastern Jews were, like their Orthodox Jewish descendants in NYC today, holding themselves aloft from mainstream society, which included goyish academic institutions.(Though antisemitism certainly played some role in this also.) This can be seen in linguistic differences (the Hungarian Jews spoke Hungarian, while most Polish Jews spoke Yiddish) and in the fact that the Hungarian Jewish population declined during the interwar period while the Polish Jewish population increased.
This dazzlingly obvious in retrospect, and yet I've never heard it before. Admittedly, Jewish studies are not my forte, but if Scott mentioned this in his various treatments of the subject I do not recall. Is this a well-known observation in other circles?
Of course there were plenty of assimilated people in Warsaw or Czernowitz (or, almost by definition, St Petersburg or Moscow). Still - if Budapest was the place to go to assimate, then obviously migration to Budapest would have had a self-selection effect.
Both had about 200,000 Jews in the early 20th century. Vienna had Wolfgang Pauli and Lise Meitner, so it's not like it was nothing. I have a few guesses here. First of all, Austria, like Germany, was overall more urban and developed than Hungary, so there was more selection in who came to Budapest than in who came to Vienna. Austrian Jews might have been spread out over the cities, but in Budapest you had a concentration of high IQ people, and that gave you the highest IQ population with the biggest right tail. Second, Budapest seemed to have a good education system.
Plenty of Russian Jews were integrating into the mainstream society in the last decades of XIX and around the turn of XX century. Their push into goyish academic institutions was so strong that it produced a reaction on the part of the Russian government, establishing quotas and limiting access to education to the children of lower social classes (e.g. https://ru.wikisource.org/wiki/%D0%9E_%D1%81%D0%BE%D0%BA%D1%80%D0%B0%D1%89%D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0%B8_%D0%B3%D0%B8%D0%BC%D0%BD%D0%B0%D0%B7%D0%B8%D1%87%D0%B5%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%B3%D0%BE_%D0%BE%D0%B1%D1%80%D0%B0%D0%B7%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%B0%D0%BD%D0%B8%D1%8F). Zeev Jabotinsky mentions this a lot in his essays; according to contemporary reports, he was an enthusiastic integrator himself until the Chișinău pogrom, loved Russian literature etc. The difference was that the total Jewish population of the Pale of Settlement was so much larger than Hungarian or German, and the relatively primitive Russian economy and society had no capacity to absorb them. So they stayed poor and Jewish and emigrated to NYC in large numbers.
That piece, "Can We Survive Technology?" is really interesting. It definitely doesn't anticipate the changes of the 1970s, that made both atomic and chemical energy stop their growth before reaching the "unmetered" abundance he makes some reference to. And while the discussions of climate are definitely interesting and appropriately uncertain, they also seem like a moment in time, when people like Asimov and Herbert were still writing science fiction that assumed a Laplacian demon could predict the future with only more sophisticated observation and calculation, as opposed to the chaos and complexity ideas that became big in the 1970s, revealing that even tiny imprecisions in observation make impossible the idea of large-scale prediction of certain systems far into the future. It's also wild to see the discussion of the future of computing without using that word (instead using the phrase "automatic control").
The point about chaos lands flat when you remember one of von Neumann's most famous quotes is "All processes that are stable we shall plan. All processes that are unstable we shall compete in (for now)."
Seems like the simplest factor in von Neumann's childhood that could be replicated at home is involving young children with parents' work rather than elementary school. A naturally smart kid won't miss out on anything they can't catch up, and will get valuable exposure to their parents and their jobs, including complex words and concepts. This is suddenly much more possible due to remote work - a stay at home laptop professional who explains her job out loud to her kid as she does it may be more valuable than 1st grade.
Everyone I know who is capable of holding an engaging cross-disciplinary conversation grew up talking shop at the dinner table. (anecdata, yes, but I think this pattern is likely to hold under rigorous study).
I would also not necessarily say that all of the people I know who grew up learning from their parents' work were high IQ! This probably has massive benefits for children of all intelligences. The key here is the explanation--parents have to be willing to indulge curiosity and answer questions as they describe what they do.
Interestingly, at least up to the end of the last century, Hungary was still the world's leading center for abstract mathematics. American graduate students were sent there to study. I don't know if this has changed, but whatever the situation might be, it is bizarre that this tiny nation could be the world leader in any aspect of intellectual inquiry. Also, we should note, in the context of this review, that there are almost no Jews left in Hungary, so "being a Hungarian Jew" is not the explanation for this oddly ultra-high performance of Hungarians. (Oh, and Hungary is a poor country where middle-class dads often work 80 or more hours a week, so it probably is not explained by a lot of cultivation of intellectual life in the family.)
There are not that many Jews left in Hungary, but some of the ones that are are quite notable (e.g. Judit Polgar, or the Erd\H{o}s crowd's Vera T Sos, who is now 91).
There are certainly cultural factors as well. I mean, if you look at the sciences, in the last 30 years the 200 million White Americans have won I think 1 Fields Medals, while the UK and France each with 1/3 as many white people have won a bunch more medals. Jews in France and Russia have outperformed Jews in the US in math and science. Israel is a young nation and was underdeveloped for a while, but I think they are probably outperforming US Jews nowadays, at least among secular Ashkenazi. Again this is probably <100% environmental; the higher achieving and more urban demographics in the Old World, Jew and gentile, were probably more likely to stay in the Old World, but also >0% environmental.
Native-born Americans really are not interested in studying science. The education system is likely a lot of the problem, yes.
One hypothesis about environmental reasons for this: a more generous welfare state in Europe provides more economic security, which in turn makes it easier (both practically and psychologically) for more people to pursue intellectually fulfilling pursuits that don't earn a lot of money.
Perhaps, but top scientists are coming from good families anyway, and America was better about cultivating its own talent in the Sputnik period, so I’m skeptical.
A lot of it might be that there are lucrative career options available to Americans good at science and math - finance, the tech industry, and even medicine - that you don’t have in much of Europe. Doctors are paid less and you don’t have quant and software jobs like America.
I think the post-Sputnik US has done a bad job cultivating talent, and there isn’t a strong incentive to since it’s cheaper to just hire people off H1Bs.
I do think you’re into something, the US being more capitalist pushes more of its best minds into making money, which may well be a bad thing. I say this as someone who is generally pro-market. People like Thiel and Eric Weinstein say we should pay scientists more (which I as a pro-market scientist obviously like).
I’m just not sure the welfare state is the mechanism.
A better explanation is that post-1965 US made immigration from all over the world much easier. America started to tap into talent from places like China, India, Iran, Vietnam and so on to a much greater extent.
As the access to the world's talent pool vastly increased, there was less need to do much yourself as the US never had problems attracting the best and the brightest (at least up to now).
"Native-born Americans really are not interested in studying science. The education system is likely a lot of the problem, yes."
(Native born) Americans have been less interested in pure science than Europeans for pretty much the entire time America has existed.
The US has had great practical inventors:
*) Eli Whitney
*) Morse (telegraph)
*) Bell (telephone)
*) Edison
*) Wright Brothers
*) Ford
But historically the science was mostly done in Europe.
I think this is as much (or more) a cultural value issue than an education system. Americans have been focused on practical over theoretcial for a long time. Think ancient Rome vs Greece for an analogy.
The US didn't have much of an educational establishment until the late 19th century when all sorts of universities were founded. The Land Grant act in the 1860s got the ball rolling. Meanwhile, the Europeans had developed a university system in the middle ages, and it was quite mature and economically effective by the 18th century. The US still has an anti-intellectual bias. There's a long standing contempt for "book learning" embedded in US culture.
> Von Neumann loved driving very much but had never passed a test. At [his wife] Mariette’s suggestion, he bribed a driving examiner. This did nothing to improve his driving.
At long last answering the question of whether the inventor of game theory was CDT or EDT.
> Many philosophers, and many parts of common sense, favor causal decision theory (CDT), on which, roughly, you should pick the action that causes the best outcomes in expectation. I
> The most famous alternative is evidential decision theory (EDT), on which, roughly, you should choose the action you would be happiest to learn you had chosen.
Nice! I liked this one. It's interesting to me to see that von Neumann's view of technology is very similar to mine -- it's likely to destroy us in one way or another, but there's no alternative to proceeding with it. We just have to hope we can keep up with the problems it causes.
But we do have examples of societies that explicitly avoid advancing technology, and even those societies that don't do that still choose which technologies to prioritise. I am not totally convinced by his helplessness here.
I don't know, the way you describe him- getting into car crashes because he was trying to read while driving, and telling weird history-based wordplay jokes at parties- sounds *painfully* nerdy to me. He also hated sports and exercise, and never wore anything besides a suit and tie.
A funny (maybe related?) story I heard about him was that, despite inventing modern game theory, he was terrible at poker. So at least there was one semi-intellectual activity he was bad at.
That joke didn't strike me as particularly nerdy. It concerned very recent history that he and his listeners remembered (von Neumann's father was ennobled by one of the kaisers mentioned in the joke), and doesn't really involve wordplay; the punchline is that the police hypocritically believe the same opinion that they're punishing.
Not exercising and always wearing a suit and tie was very normal back then.
I did not like your concluding sentence: "This sounds suspiciously like the smartest man in the world admitting he’s not sure what to do." On the contrary, I found his last sentence to be the smartest advice and the most common-sensical advice one could give or get: "To ask in advance for a complete recipe would be unreasonable. We can specify only the human qualities required:
patience, flexibility, intelligence." That's the smart way to face the future. All the experience gained over the years guiding you to make an intelligent and flexible decision.
I read that as "even he can't come up with a genius instant solution, which means the problem is worth worrying about", not "he doesn't know what to do, so I guess he's fallible after all" as I think you have.
>In the late 1940s, America hadn’t thought through nuclear second strike doctrine. There was no “keep some nuclear bombs ready for revenge if an enemy first-strikes you”. Whoever launched a nuclear first strike would just win totally with no downside.
This was a technical limitation, not some flaw in their strategic thought. In the late 40s in particular, second strike really wasn't possible, because the bombs took too much care and feeding. Through the early 50s, the time between when a nuclear attack was ordered and when it could be carried out was generally measured in weeks, and the infrastructure for readying said attack would obviously be at the top of the target list. That said, there weren't enough bombs to actually destroy the Soviet Union, because nuclear weapons, particularly the early ones, aren't that destructive.
But it's also worth pointing out the enormous advantage the US had in nuclear weapons in the late 50s. In 1955, it's 2400 vs 200, in 1960 18000 vs 1600. And given the limitations of Soviet delivery systems, even in the later case there would be fairly minimal damage to the US, although Europe would suffer pretty badly. If you really believe the Soviets are an existential threat, and you have that kind of edge, it makes a lot of sense to push for a strike now, before they can redress that balance. (Eisenhower thought that the US would win by playing the long game, and he was right, which is why we never implemented this strategy.)
Also, in the 1940s, atomic bombs weren't seen as all that much more deadly than the thousand plane raids that were commonplace late in the war. One such raid killed 200,000 in Tokyo shortly before the atomic bombs ended the war with Japan. Having grown up with the hydrogen bomb and cold war, I was surprised when reading Vannevar Bush's "Modern Arms and Free Men" in which he downplayed the dangers of an atomic attack. I don't think his analysis was singular. Attitudes changed in the 1950s with the hydrogen bomb and a better understanding of the effects of radiation.
Against an enemy with no extant air force, like late-war Japan, conventional bombing was much more deadly, yes. But in a WW3 against the Soviets, one has to assume a competent air defence that can intercept the majority of bombers, so the difference between only needing to get one plane through to be a credible threat rather than needing to get hundreds through is very significant
Loved the review. I read 3/4th of this book, making notes. Then I misplaced the notebook in which I was making notes, and can't seem to continue!
Consider reading "A parent's guide to alternatives in education". It is an old book I read 18 years ago. Excellent summary of different types of schooling philosophies. There are many choices for keeping the early years pretty great.
If you are looking for a book to review on early childhood education I would recommend “Give Your Child a Superior Mind” by Siegfried Engelmann. Engelmann is the father of direct instruction.
I've gone down something of a rabbit hole looking into this comment. The book's been out of print for quite some time and only a few (very expensive!) copies appear to be for sale online. I can't find a scan or an ebook in any of the usual places.
The author himself has posted the first section of the book (which is an interesting read in itself) on his website:
He also explains why only the prologue is availble:
" I didn’t want to [put the rest of the book online] because a large part of the book provides instructional sequences for reading and math. We have better ways to teach these subjects now than we did back in 1966, so I resisted Jerry’s suggestion."
However, it's not particularly clear from his site what those 'better ways' actually are - or rather, to find instruction in as clear a format as the book itself promises. The book's table of contents can be found here:
And is very enticing. I am now very tempted to save up and buy one of the super-expensive US copies of the book. If anyone is able to point to a scan or other copy of the book, or to expand on what more modern equivalent resources might be, I'd be very grateful. Perhaps a point to raise in the next open thread...
Not sure if this will ping you but I finally got around to scanning the book "Give your child a Superior Mind'! Scan of the book is at this Drive link:
I read the first bit of this book and it's been really helpful. I've got no teaching/pedagogy experience and the way they lay out the lessons was helpful and is something I'm starting to do with my 20 month old.
One part of getting the little one to do complete responses was something we implement and changed from what we were doing before. Before we were happy if we had the exchange like this:
LO: Apple, give
Parent: Can you say 'please'?
LO: Please
Parent: Okay, here is the apple.
Instead, now we prompt them to do the full response eg:
LO: Apple, give
Parent: Can you say 'Apple, give, please'?
LO: Apple, give, please
Parent: Well done! Here is the apple.
Anecdotally little one is now better as saying 'please' for requests.
I appreciate as well the focus on just keeping your little person happy for the first 18 or so months - it was nice to not feel like I've missed the boat! Also some just fun notes on clarity:
Lesson - focus on clearly explaining the concept without analogy
"Do not indicate that 'A is for apple'. A is not for apple and it should never be presented in this manner because the relationship is obvious only to those who know how to read and can see that the first letter in the word apple is an A."
Lot's more like this, the lessons are great. The intro I was a bit more skeptical off (they do a long bit on great people that received direct instruction which just feels like a big survivorship bias problem) but the overall vibe and flow I really liked.
I've just put an order in at WOB where they apparently had 1 used copy left for an okay price ($25 AUD). No confirmation if it's shipped yet, estimated arrival time is up to 3 weeks! If I do get it I'll scan it and send you a link (and maybe upload it somewhere else to spread the love around!).
Please do, do, do keep pushing from your end though, I have a bad track record of following things through...
#Edit: also there's every chance that 1 available copy isn't actually available :-S
Thank you, that's very kind. I've been making some reasonable progress finding other resources in the same space. With a bit of luck I'll have time to write up a summary & share back here or in the next Open Thread.
I read the first bit of this book and it's been really helpful. I've got no teaching/pedagogy experience and the way they lay out the lessons was helpful and is something I'm starting to do with my 20 month old.
One part of getting the little one to do complete responses was a interesting lesson and something we implemented and changed from what we were doing before. Before my partner and I were happy if we had the exchange like this:
LO: Apple, give
Parent: Can you say 'please'?
LO: Please
Parent: Okay, here is the apple.
Instead, now we prompt them to do the full response eg:
LO: Apple, give
Parent: Can you say 'Apple, give, please'?
LO: Apple, give, please
Parent: Well done! Here is the apple.
Anecdotally little one is now better as saying 'please' for requests.
I appreciate as well the focus on just keeping your little person happy for the first 18 or so months - it was nice to not feel like I've missed the boat! Also some just fun notes on clarity:
Lesson - focus on clearly explaining the concept without analogy
"Do not indiciate that 'A is for apple'. A is not for apple and it should never be presented in this manner because the relationship is obvious only to those who know how to read and can see that the first letter in the word apple is an A."
Lot's more like this, the lessons are great. The intro I was a bit more skeptical off (they do a long bit on great people that received direct instruction which just feels like a big survivorship bias problem) but the overall vibe and flow I really liked.
If it is still possible to get his DNA and to get the mitochondria DNA and such from his living decedents...should we clone him? If we do, would we tell him who 'he was'? I'd think not so they can be free to become new people, maybe tell them when they're older.
I'd love to see a sci-fi or real science special school where we raise batches of historical geniuses to recreate that intellectual melting pot to some degree. As long as it was done humanely, it seems like something worth trying...who the heck else would we bother cloning?
I think some of the first cabs off the rank for historical cloning or at least a project to preserve the DNA of our best and brightest would be an interesting project. Is there a DNA collection for all the geniuses of our recent past? Is the window to save this information fast closing as their DNA degrades?
For fun part:
Instead it'll probably be useless wealthy egotists like Gates trying to transplant his mind into a cloned younger body like in many popular sci-fi series.
I've not heard of this concept before in terms of a 'seed banks' or perhaps 'mind reserves' for humanity's best minds. Someone might want to get onto that before our past greats are lost forever.
Instead money is 'wasted', in my view, on silly egotistical or purely artistic projects like a giant atomic clock buried in a mountain which we can only hope when the mana membrane breaks around earth in the future and when our primitive post collapse future discover it - they find out is has become some kind of important magical artefact at the Legendary rank - all after the ancient clock takes on impressive powers to those who are able to reach it near the core of the world's most dangerous fantasy monster dungeon below level 42.
Attempts to create genius sperm banks have been tried in the past, though they faced problems with both supply and demand.
As for direct cloning, IIUC it's doable to get DNA from someone's bones if they're 'merely' decades or centuries old; turning a full gene sequence into a viable embryo is still an immense challenge, though
These investigations into the martians never consider the overall context of late Austro-Hungarian society and culture. There was an equal amount of innovation in the arts (Klimt and Vienna secession, art nouveau, Schoenberg and music, etc.) The simple and obvious answer is that the martians were simply the mathematical achievers of the day, not that their ancestry or religion or whatever else was particularly special.
Otherwise, I read this book myself and didn’t care much for it. It focuses too much on the technical details and not enough on the man himself. If I wanted to read Wikipedia-quality explanations of scientific principles, I’d read Wikipedia.
It was Marie Curie, a Nobel Prize winner, whose daughter won a Nobel Prize, if you are looking for an example. There was also a high school chemistry teacher in the Bronx who had two girls in his classes, Yalow and Elion, both win Nobel Prizes, so we have examples for both nature and nurture.
If there were no nurture, just nature, how many times would we expect two Nobel winners to share a high school class? Birthday paradox says its doesn't take that many.
Turing's Cathedral gave a pretty good portrait of Von Neumann and his wife Klara who was one of the first programmers and led a pretty interesting life herself. It may not provide the level of detail you might desire and it followed a number of other characters from the era with a touching portrait of Stanislaw Ulam. I knew people who had met Von Neumann, and they said he was always the life of the party, a live fast-die young type. He spent World War II cranked on speed racing around the country from consulting gig to consulting gig.
Out of curiosity, was the innovation in the arts also disproportionately Jewish? Not Jewish at all? Your conclusion relies upon the artists not being Jewish but your comment doesn't specify either way?
Something which jumps out to me about von Neumann’s early years and later life is the confidence. At those dinners with his father, presenting his day’s experiences, I feel zero shame from the father and quite a bit of honest interest in and enjoyment of other people, children and life in general. I can think of “dinnertime educational scenarios” with much more punishment and much less zest, and those might have been counterproductive.
The sociopathic streak feels more like adrenaline to me. Physical and mental adrenaline.
One important question is if Max von Neumann was trying to create genius kids. I think he may have been trying to nourish and support even better than genius - a trajectory of up more than a reaching of a level. There is so much love there for the life of the mind but not at the expense of the body, art, jokes, speed and problem-solving. If one of his kids said something wrong I bet he smiled and answered with a question.
I’m also hoping that there will eventually be a bunch of little Scotts running around and although I hope they are well shielded from fame, it will be interesting to wonder what they’ll be like. An oppositional one who discovers that the best way to make dad mad is to be illogical? Someone inwardly occupied and not achievement-driven? A historian? A dance prodigy? Someone who introduces their entire boarding school to the finer points of mail-order drugs? One just doesn’t know who one will get! Growing up in a rationalist group house might be a good approximation of those Budapest salons though!
"You might expect someone who singlehandedly invented several fields of math to be at least a little aspie, but von Neumann defies the stereotypes. He loved parties, beautiful women, and fast cars. Especially the fast cars. According to Bhattacharya:"
[Proceeds to excerpt a passage which describes him driving like a stereotypical absent-minded professor, stimming and singing the while]
Also, while I've never cared much for cars beyond an aesthetic level, I know a fair few people who are palpably on the spectrum and are utterly obsessed with automobiles and their workings, so I don't think von Neumann's interest in them is terribly surprising
I don't think there's anything to suggest von Neumann was particularly obsessed with cars or their internal workings, just that he enjoyed driving them.
Correction: Wikipedia would seem to indicate that von Neumann was baptized in 1930, before he married his first wife. It is correct that he otherwise did not seem to show any religious inclinations before he invited a priest for consultation and to perform the last rites on his deathbed.
A lot of Jews converted. Look at Fritz Haber. It didn't help all that much with the antisemites. It never does. Look at what happened to the conversos and the Spanish Inquisition.
In Heim's biography of von Neumann and Wiener it quotes Oskar Morgenstern who says von Neumann was agnostic his entire life. Ulam's "Adventures of a Mathematician" says a similar thing.
As a parent of five, I found the focus on how-to-make-my-child-a-genius a bit funny. When you don't already have children there are just vague, but unlimited opportunities lying ahead. Reality comes only later. But even if reality is messier than anticipation it is also more interesting. The world would be very dull indeed if everyone got the children they wished for.
Right, but then, even if we get in the adjacent-to-annoying-beliefs-in-ethnic-supremacy alley, there's an obvious time-bound effect that we have to consider, and that I haven't seen discussed, either here or in Scott's earlier post: intermarriage between Jews and Gentiles has been real possibility for 200 or 250 years, yet it was a route only a tiny percentage took until WWI or so - in the US, in fact, it was a relatively small minority until a generation and a half ago, if I am not mistaken. At the same time, it was common among the bright. (Even formal conversion to Christianity was relatively common among them - a rarity otherwise.)
If there is a genetic cow here, it is long out of the barn (for cultural reasons, one might say).
Intermarriage wasn't much of an option until the early 19th century when European nations started emancipating the Jews, so 200 years or so is correct, but European Jews were still pretty much genetically isolated.
My first thought was that the book title must be a play on Burt Reynolds...The Man From Jupiter. Since von Neumann is a Martian and all. What's the deal with highly skilled extraterrestrial men?
I find it interesting that my cultural and educational upbringing was stuffed full of references to Newton, Einstein, Galileo, etc. - but von Neumann was never brought up at all. He's a figure I only learned existed once I'd already reached adulthood. Not even name-dropped in math classes. I wonder why not. Poor role model for children? A grudge about nuke-Russia hawkery?
Great review, I again thought this was a reader submitted one until you mentioned your previous analysis of The Martians. Also,
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I'm still working my way through the review, but I had to jump in to comment on this:
"it is unclear how much attention John ever paid in school. His brother writes about 'frequent complaints of his high school teachers to the effect that when he was asked what the assignment was for today, he did not know; but he then participated in discussions with full competence and knowledge of the subject.'"
That's why I'm skeptical of people who claim to have photographic memory. They often forget to remember things that would be very inconvenient to remember. Of course, that doesn't prove anything, either about Von Neumann or about photographic memory. I can think of a lot of reasons why someone with exceptional recall might sometimes not remember something, or pretend not to. And if the teacher(s) didn't write down the assignment, then maybe we're dealing with "phonographic" memory.
Edited to add: To be clear, I'm talking about popular notions of photographic memory, where someone supposedly sees something for one second and then recalls it with perfect detail. I do believe some people have better recall than others, and some recall is based on something we might call "photographic." It's just that so many people who I know who claim to have it just....don't inspire confidence, and their claims seem mostly self-serving. I should probably get over it.
I can't recall the exact book and I'm too lazy to find it but I remember reading that von Neumann also didn't remember faces too well either, his eidetic memory seemed to work only on symbols, and only when he actually wanted to remember them. This would fit in well with how none of his mathematical work was particularly visual. Bochner's National Academy of Sciences memoir notes that in fields where visualization is very useful, differential geometry, topology, etc von Neumann had no affinity with that kind of thinking.
"after a lifetime of culturally-Jewish atheism, he wished to be baptized" - I think von Neumann was baptized in 1930 before his first marriage. I do acknowledge that plenty of baptized Jews went on to a life of culturally-Jewish atheism. At any rate, I believe that on his deathbed he asked for the last rites to be administered. Something like Pascal's wager.
Yes, this is a famous story about Spinoza. The story goes that Spinoza decided to send his son to the general school, which was of course Christian, rather than the Jewish day school. One afternoon the boy remarks, "Today in school we learned about the Trinity". Spinoza gently explains to his son, "That's all mistaken, the God we don't believe in is one and indivisible and incorporeal."
* With respect to how significant genetics is as a factor, what of the Martians' children and siblings? Without looking it up, I expect they did decently well for themselves... but offhand, I can't think of two famous geniuses with the same last name. (Other than Pierre and Marie Curie, which is a false positive.)
* Probably I'm overly attuned to the signs given I'm diagnosed with it myself, but many of the things mentioned here are suggestive not of autism spectrum, but ADHD: thrill-seeking, being bad at driving (whether 'inherently' or due to being unable to do just one thing at a time!), the need for constant stimulation (the singing and steering wheel thing, the loud German music thing), the preference for chaotic environments, making contributions in several different fields instead of committing to just one, ...
Scattered quotes: "How do these families keep producing such talent, generation after generation? ... The other obvious answer is “genetics!” I think this one is right, but there are some mysteries here that make it less of a slam dunk. First, don’t genetics dilute quickly? ... The answer to the first question is really impressive assortative mating and having vast litters of children."
In other words, reversion to the mean implies that even in families where one person is a genius several standard deviations beyond normal intelligence, the rest are more likely just one or two standard deviations away from the mode. You can't really escape this, but if you have lots of smart people get together and have lots of kids you'll get lucky a few times. There is also an obivous social-environmental factor here, in that many of the geniuses in these families probably had hidden genius relatives who didn't have the ambition or circumstances to make it big.
On the second point, people mentioned the singing as an example of autistic stimming, but ADHD would make some sense (though Scott has also written on how ADHD is a fuzzy spectrum type disorder). To me the intuitive explanation is just that, like how it was on his deathbed, Von Neumann loved to think and push his brain, and that led him to engage with multiple things at a time.
Thanks. Not sure if I've read that post before, probably I just skimmed it (which I just did again).
> To me the intuitive explanation is just that, like how it was on his deathbed, Von Neumann loved to think and push his brain, and that led him to engage with multiple things at a time.
Dunno if you meant this as a competing or complementary explanation, but the two definitely aren't at odds. Like - walking through a peaceful, tranquil area, my internal state is rarely as peaceful and tranquil as my surroundings, because my mind is constantly going on around whatever idea, problem, or question it finds interesting or exciting lately. Whether or not it was for Von Neumann, this -can- be yet another form of stimulation-seeking.
And yeah, "it's a fuzzy spectrum/cluster kind of thing and maybe he was somewhere in the area" was what I had in mind as well.
Bhattacharya's book has a short section about how one of von Neumann's wives thought he had something like OCD, he had to flick drawers and light switches several times before he was happy.
Alas the citation for "Von Neumann Corner" leads nowhere (or rather to a vague reference to personal papers doubtless somewhere in the trackless caverns of Firestone Library) so I can't tell which corner it is. But I idly wonder if it might be the same intersection immortalized in the first chapter of Aho, Hopcroft, and Ullman's _Data Structures and Algorithms_.
I don't think that was the official street name, just a nick name that everyone used because he crashed often on it. If you wanted to research further you might look at von Neumann's house documents which you can find on the IAS systems: https://albert.ias.edu/
Minor thing: If I have it right, von Neumann was baptised in 1930 in order to marry in the Church. By all accounts his conversion THEN was perfunctory.
However, on his deathbed he asked for Extreme Unction, (aka the Anointing of the Sick) and had a priest hear his confession and administer viaticum (the Eucharist). Standard procedure for dying Catholics. None of this undercuts Scott's view that he here acted on the basis of low or middling credence in the Catholic faith, of course. Equally, such an act in the face of doubt, even strong doubt, may count as faith enough to make the proposition that he died a Catholic true.
It does seem like it may be a case of "Well, if I'm already a member I might as well get all the benefits before I go." Or perhaps it was sincere, who can read the human heart?
When I have tried to research further into his conversion I keep running into a quote by him, to his mother: "There probably has to be a God. Many things are easier to explain if there is than if there isn’t.” The trouble is I can't find a solid source for the quote, and nobody is quoting any further to say what exactly he thought was easier to explain and how. Wikipedia sources the quote to Norman MacRae's biography. It sounds like the kind of quote that gets made up and passed around, so I'd be curious to see what Norman wrote about it exactly.
It would have been a nice feather in the theist's cap if the smartest man in the world converted, but if he converted out of fear and a possibly addled brain its not much help.
The quote in Macrae's book is exactly that he said those words to his mother when hospitalized. On the topic of his religiousness, his good friend Stan Ulam notes in his "Adventures of a Mathematician" that he was completely agnostic his entire life until the end. Likewise in Heim's biography of von Neumann and Wiener, he quotes Oskar Morgenstern saying the same thing and with Morgenstern additionally saying that his sudden conversion shocked many of his friends and that it didn't agree with his "attitude, outlook and thinking when he was healthy".
Does anyone happen to know if E.T. Bell’s “Men of Mathematics” was extended to a third volume, perhaps by another author? I remember reading that Von Neumann rated himself as the third best mathematician with respect to his contemporaries.
I was just a kid and this was 20+ years ago. Would be grateful if someone knows the correct reference.
I don't believe "Men of Mathematics" was extended unfortunately which is a shame because it's a great book. About him rating himself as the third greatest mathematician, this claim used to be on an old version of [0] this web page but it seems to have been removed. I asked the website owner about it and he could only source it to this [1] so whether it is something he actually said I am unsure. Von Neumann seemed to generally be too modest to give explicit rankings to mathematicians but Raoul Bott says [2] one time that von Neumann told him that he had only known one great mathematician, David Hilbert, and that he felt inadequate in comparison to him. Aside from Hilbert the only other mathematician I know von Neumann gave heavy praise to was Gödel.
Thanks you! Very much appreciated-it has been driving me nuts.
Reference [1] is pretty much identical to what I remember reading and was published at about the right time, though I'm not sure what I was doing reading Nature as a teen.
Then Ulam was struck with violent illness, a “fantastic headache” that was “the most severe pain I had ever endured.” When Françoise finally roused a doctor and got her husband to the hospital, he was vomiting bile. “The surgeon performed a trepanation not knowing exactly where or what to look for. He did not find a tumor, but did find an acute state of inflammation of the brain. He told Françoise that my brain was bright pink instead of the usual gray. These were the early days of penicillin, which they applied liberally.”
Ulam lapsed into a coma. His wife, his doctors and his friends worried about brain damage. When he awoke a few days later, Ulam worried about it even more. “One morning the surgeon asked me what 13 plus 8 were. The fact that he asked such a question embarrassed me so much that I just shook my head. Then he asked what the square root of twenty was, and I replied: about 4.4. He kept silent, then I asked, ‘Isn’t it?’ I remember Dr. Rainey laughing, visibly relieved, and saying, ‘I don’t know.’ “
The idea about von Neumann's sense of responsibility, and his interest in global politics and the future of the world, remind me of this, in Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman:
> And 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!
Is that related to the atom bomb? Or a genuinely generic idea? Is that a response to something, some world-responsibility Feynman had exhibited before? I wish Feynman hadn't limited himself to a single paragraph. It's too sparse!
Although Feynman and von Neumann would have met each other on several occasions I think the time period they spent the most together would have been at Los Alamos so it could have been bomb related, although von Neumann enjoyed talking about lots outside of technical matters so it's just as easily possibly it's a generic idea.
The most interesting bit in the book, to me, was how von Neumann's early appreciation of the importance of computers and how he worked to keep them open and developing rather than having computers end up as the monopoly of one company for 20 years. Speeding up the development of computers this way was quite plausibly the most significant thing he did in a lifetime full of significant achievements.
For example, when Von Neumann later built his own computer at the Institute for Advanced Studies, he published numerous bulletins on what his team was doing to make it easier for others to build their own computers.
Eckert and Mauchly, who later founded Univac, wanted the computer patented, but Von Neumann published openly. Maybe he remembered the lesson of Watt and the Wright Brothers, a patent on too general a technology can inhibit innovation. Watt suppressed the use of high pressure steam and the Wright Brothers delayed US progress in aviation. Marconi was aware of this, so he invented the patent pool for radio technology in the 1920s.
I liked Von Neumann's analysis of the problem as relating to the size of the effects available to us. As technology progresses, the effect size increases, as the effect size increases, the danger of mistakes gets larger. Unfortunately "The most hopeful answer is that the human species has been subjected to similar tests before and seems to have a congenital ability to come through, after varying amounts of trouble" is not actually a hopeful answer (although it might have been the most hopeful answer available to him at the time). It's not hopeful because any amount of trouble can be catastrophic when the effect size is larger than the size of the ecosystem that supports survival.
The only approach that seems to me to have a chance of a modicum of success in the long run is to rapidly expand the size of the survival ecosystem. We need to develop the technology and political will to send out multiple, significant sized, independent generation ships or colonies with such a variety of governance systems and cultures that dangerous memes would be unlikely to spread easily between them. Physical and information communication between them and back to Earth would need to be infrequent and treated carefully, but with appropriate safeguards, the risk/reward would probably still work out that they could help each other and Earth.
I don't believe any other approach to existential risk is likely to work. At best we'll resolve the existential risks relating to our current technology, but effect sizes won't stop with those, they'll continue increasing, and to survive long term, humanity needs outposts continually beyond that increasing bubble of effect size.
"improv[ing] their kid’s chances of becoming the world’s smartest person"
as something seriously worth pursuing? The probability of becoming even one of the top 1000 smartest people in the world is so vanishingly small that even a large marginal increase in the likelihood of success probably isn't going to improve the absolute likelihood of success all that much. But depending on how seriously one pursues this goal it might end up requiring a huge amount of effort, not to mention stress. It's not keeping up with the Joneses, it's leaving the Joneses in the dust. And what's the payoff? One doesn't need to be an ubermensch to financially secure or have good degree of material comfort. More importantly, I don't at all think one needs to be a super genius to be happy or fulfilled.
If all someone wants is to be financially secure or have a good degree of material comfort, then what is the likelihood of their actually achieving anything worthwhile?
I mentioned material well-being as one potential payoff of being extremely intelligent, not as the only, or even most important, payoff.
What one considers worthwhile depends on what one values. If your goal is to make a seminal contribution in a primarily intellectual field, then being very intelligent might be a prerequisite, and being *extremely* intelligent is probably going to increase your chances of success by quite a bit.
But lots of other things are worthwhile. Art, sports, religion. And we don't have to look to a grand, civilizational scale, either. Most people place a lot of value on being a good parent, child, sibling, friend, or member of a community, and place comparatively little value on esoteric intellectual pursuits. I'm not disparaging esoteric intellectual pursuits -- that's how I earn a living. But I don't think that one necessarily needs to be many standard deviations from the mean in any dimension to achieve something worthwhile.
There was another comment about fostering an attitude of "upwards trajectory" instead of achieving a "set target level". The first one sounds a bit more compatible with happiness if the true upper limits are unknown.
In Obscure Pregnancy Interventions, Scott estimates that doing all of the interventions would gain an equivalent to ~2 IQ points. If your goal is to produce the smartest child in the world, that’s pretty significant—6.6 sigma outliers are about twice as likely as 6.7 outliers. It’s like buying two lottery tickets instead of one!
If I buy two lottery tickets, I'll definitely be out an extra $10 (or whatever a lottery ticket costs), and almost certainly still won't win the lottery.
More importantly than improving your child's intelligence/education I think improving their enjoyment of thinking and learning is definitely something worth pursuing.
One of Von Neumann's insights that I thought was mind blowing was regarding the heat generated by computation. If a computing system ends a calculation in a more orderly state than when it started, heat will be given off. This is irrespective of the physical attributes of the computing system, and sets a fundamental limit on computer power dissipation. The limit is almost unimaginably small but it is non zero.
I would not be surprised if this means that when I have an insight that allows me to order my thoughts more efficiently, my brain dissipates a small (virtually zero, and certainly undetectable) amount of heat.
It's possible that I misunderstand this concept. If so, I hope someone here will correct me.
"There are two major, closely related types of reversibility that are of particular interest for this purpose: physical reversibility and logical reversibility.[2]
A process is said to be physically reversible if it results in no increase in physical entropy; it is isentropic. There is a style of circuit design ideally exhibiting this property that is referred to as charge recovery logic, adiabatic circuits, or adiabatic computing (see Adiabatic process). Although in practice no nonstationary physical process can be exactly physically reversible or isentropic, there is no known limit to the closeness with which we can approach perfect reversibility, in systems that are sufficiently well isolated from interactions with unknown external environments, when the laws of physics describing the system's evolution are precisely known. "
Seems like a bit of recency bias to focus on the "Martians" as an exceptional nexus of genetic intelligence without considering previous intellectual nexuses that occurred. If this discussion had happened in the mid to late 19th century would the comment section be discussing how best to set up a super race of Scottish intellectuals? Or before that, French, Arabic, Greek, etc.
I don't doubt that intelligence is heritable to a large extent, but my guess would be that the groups of genes that can polygenetically lead to hyper-intelligence exist in most population groups, and it just comes down to figuring out what leads to that polygenetic configuration being both expressed and then nurtured properly to produce these intellectual nexuses.
"This sounds suspiciously like the smartest man in the world admitting he’s not sure what to do."
I think it's saying something much more concrete - that technological progress is chaotic and so investments in planning are much less useful than investments in better control systems. Don't build Maginot lines, develop better command structures. Fewer projects that require decade-long investments, more projects like Fast Grants that can quickly mobilize resources as needed. Response speed is everything.
Agree with "don't build Maginot lines", but I would replace "develop better command structures" with "heighten general preparedness for the future by investing in infrastructure & human capital". That is, invest in highly subsidized high-quality kindergartens, schools a la the Budapest high school, etc.; ditto regarding infrastructure (roads, harbors, city planning (beautiful Budapest again), internet broadband); and so on. Thus making our descendants having a heightened general ability to meet whatever (unknown/unknowable) challenges they will face in their future.
Here's a cute story on the risk of instead trying to guess in advance what particular stuff it will be nice to have available 30 years from now (the "Maginot line" investment strategy): During the economic crisis in the 1930's, the Norwegian government hired unemployed workers to plant a special type of trees, superior for making wooden skis. The government congratulated itself with its commitment to long-term planning, leaving forests of excellent ski-material to the People of the Future. Then, in the 1960s, came the fiberglass revolution, making wooden skis obsolete. (Caveat: I have never checked the sources for this story, but as journalists know one should never do, if the story is good.)
The line about von Neumann being the only one who ever understood quantum mechanics is badly wrong. There is one Great Mysterious Problem about QM, namely how it occurs that measuring a state in superposition of two or more possibilities gives us one of the results according to the Born probability rule. Some claim that MWI solves this (I think not).
This mystery is about why the Born Rule works, but empirically it certainly does. All the rest of QM, all the parts that enable you to calculate those probabilities and make predictions, is straightforward, well-established theory - thanks, in part, to von Neumann's formalization. You can fully understand it without any special genius. It's not noticably harder than, say, statistical mechanics. Every physics graduate is expected to know this stuff well. (Of course IRL most of them don't, because academia, but the serious learners do. Say the top 20%?)
So "undetstanding QM" in that sense is not any special claim. And when it comes to the Measurement Problem, von Neumann was as lost as the rest of us. He went so far as to suggest that the wavefunction collapses when a conscious mind becomes aware of the result!
It's worth noting that von Neumann wrote an influential paper on the measurement problem, so he may have a better claim to understanding why the Born Rule works than most other famous physicists.
I don't think von Neumann explicitly suggested that the wavefunction collapses when a conscious mind becomes aware of it, that is more the viewpoint of Wigner or London and Bauer, von Neumann only said that the conscious observer is one of potential possibilities for a "cut".
I doubt he couldn’t remember names, but maybe he couldn’t recognize faces.
Interestingly, Daniel Tammet is a savant with the ability to do Von Neumann-like mental calculations. He has an incredible memory (famously learning conversational Icelandic in 1 week.) He has prosopagnosia.
> Genetic studies on Jews have found no substantive evidence of a Khazar origin among Ashkenazi Jews. Doron Behar and other geneticists have concluded that such a link is unlikely, noting that it is difficult to test the Khazar hypothesis using genetics because there is lack of clear modern descendants of the Khazars that could provide a clear test of the contribution to Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry, but found no genetic markers in Ashkenazi Jews that would link them to peoples of the Caucasus/Khazar area.[7] This and other studies have instead found evidence that the Ashkenazi have mixed Near Eastern and Southern European/Mediterranean origins.
The other person who told me I wasn't Jewish was from the Nation of Islam. I'm going to assume you're also Nation of Islam. Why should I bother paying attention to possible differences?
Muhammed Ali of pugilism fame was a member if memory serves me correctly.
One two people have pointed out to you that you are not jewish in the biblical sense. You must surround yourself with fellow counterfeit jews or people of low intelligence.
Your assumptions would be incorrect, i am a member of the Black Hebrew Israelites.
I hope I don’t get dinged for not really adding anything to the conversation, but just wanted to say I think this is one of my favorite reviews yet, nice job!
Look, all this European stuff and Cold War history is fascinating. But how do *I*, an adult who has already been born and not gene-edited as an embryo, acquire some of the working memory, neural branching, extreme long-term memory, computational power, and other delicious powers of Von Neumann / the Martians? Do I gotta do highly-risky self-gene-therapy (e.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/biology/comments/7xge9e/this_dude_claims_to_have_diyed_gene_therapy_to/)? Install some open-source Neuralink alternative? Ideas, people! The wackier and riskier, the better. (Not a joke.)
John von Neuman had two brothers who don't seem to be distinguished enough to have their own wikipedia pages, so the odds of raising a "Martian" don't seem to be great. You might be able to improve the odds-- I think the freedom to learn (informal education) and contact with very intelligent adults should help,
I don't know how serious you are about getting similar results through any method of child-raising, but perhaps you should be thinking both about what if you get a world-bending genius, and what if you don't.
I'm tempted to think of the "Martians" as alien intervention, but that's just the result of reading a lot of science fiction, especially Doc Smith.
As for the sense of precariousness, a lot of people feel that these days for a number of reasons. I don't know whether it helps.
You can find Nicholas von Neumann's resume at the end of https://www.math.ru.nl/~mueger/vonneumann.pdf . Not going to win any Nobels but I would be pretty happy with a kid who turned out like that.
I've thought about Jews going through what I thought was a unique sorting process-- prosper in peace in the US, or get cultural dominance is Israel, but I didn't realize there was an earlier process for Hungary vs. the US.
The deathbed conversion seems so sad to me, for many reasons. Did one of the towering intellects of our time really believe he could trick God into granting him eternal life? For that matter, did Pascal really believe this? I've always assumed this was a joke.
Or is it that the fear of death increases with mental capacity? Does a profound intellect feel a proportionally greater sense of loss contemplating it's own nonexistence?
> Did one of the towering intellects of our time really believe he could trick God into granting him eternal life?
Imagine a woman who has struggled to build a life away from her abusive ex-partner for months or years, while said partner has worked hard to undermine her and take away her opportunities and friendship, until at last she just gives in and goes back to him. Has she "tricked" her ex partner into taking her back?
Why should it be any different when you instead yield to the omnipotent torturing narcissistic megalomaniac?
Well, obviously, God is not real, but if he is real, then logically you should worship him even though (arguably, especially because!) he's a huge asshole.
Sure. But you accused Von Neumann of being like a battered girlfriend returning her abuser and Von Neumann wasn’t returning to anything. He was born Jewish, was largely atheist as an adult and converted to Catholicism. We don’t know why, maybe Pascal’s wager.
A fascinating review! I think what it emphasizes about the whole genetic intelligence discussion is the extent to which most peoples' intellectual ceilings are gated behind environmental factors.
Perhaps also notable, but probably little known in America, is the Hungarian national soccer team of the 1950s, which was, by several metrics, the best the world has ever seen. Over the six years from 1950 to 1956 they played 69 games, won 58, drew 10 and lost just 1. The team coach - Gusztáv Sebes - was born in 1906 in Budapest, around the same time as the Martians you talk about here.
That's to say, it was not just science that people born in early 20th Century Hungary would go on to dominate. They did so in many fields, culturally, politically and scientifically.
One of the scariest parts of expecting a daughter next month is my peer group, tbh. There's a prevailing sense among non-immigrant, upper-middle-class, college educated folks that having expectations of your children sets them up for inevitable failure and destroys something vital about them.
I'll be honest that I don't have the stomach to raise a genius. I'm a product of that peer group and have no interest in deciding who my daughter will be before she draws breath. But I also recognize a tradeoff here: It sucks to have a parent force you to learn to play the violin when you have no interest in learning to play the violin. But it also sucks to have a parent bow to childish impulses, then discover at age 30 that you've never developed the mental tools to do hard things that would give you a lot of satisfaction. It's a conundrum that parents my age don't even seem to consider - in their minds, forcing children to do things they don't want to do is cruel, end of story.
Here's why that's scary to me: I don't think that I, personally, have much impact on how that conundrum gets resolved. I could be an individual hard-ass, just as a corrective measure but 1) I know me, no I can't, and 2) I think what makes expectation work is that it's the norm. Your parents being like "hey what math did you learn today" and expecting an answer can have some early impact, but peer effects take over eventually. What strikes me about all these great achiever stories is that they were absolutely *immersed* in achievement. It's not just that their parents were intelligent and quizzed them at dinner. It's that almost every person they met in their young lives was the sort of person who would quiz you at dinner. Parents can influence that, but absent extreme measures I'm unwilling to take, they can't, on their own, build an anti-mediocrity culture for their kids from scratch.
I agree with you that modeling is most powerful to set expectation. If your peer group is intellectually/professionally impressive and stories of hard work —> success are part of the lore of your social group, then kids will internalize it as normal for themselves without coercion. This is especially true for women/mothers modeling for girls. The challenge of parenting is teaching your kids to have the emotional fortitude to put in the work for achievement without the childhood of oldschool coercion by fear that lands a person in therapy as an adult. It comes from the subtle work of teaching emotional security and regulation so that children are not defeated by frustration/failure. Lots of buzzwords here but imo this stuff has some validity over a parent following their own personality and hacking it. (I am parent to a girl and worry about all this a lot too.)
As long as you are honest with them and try to get them to understand why they should do particular things you should be okay. As the sibling commenter notes, modeling is important, and to me this is because if you want to achieve great success in something you've gotta absolutely love it and spend all of your time on it. Okay maybe a slight exaggeration but if your child hates math it's very unlikely they're gonna be a mathematician. Modeling is useful because whether you like or don't like something is often very much influenced by the environment, and as such having a good circle around you that values hard work and other positive attributes like that it is more likely a child will want to emulate them and thus it is more likely they will want to achieve success and put in the work and effort to do so. I do agree though once they get older the wider world has a much bigger effect and unfortunately not for the positive in most cases.
> There's a prevailing sense among non-immigrant, upper-middle-class, college educated folks that having expectations of your children sets them up for inevitable failure and destroys something vital about them.
I have heard (in a different part of the world) well-meant warnings about how if your kids learn to read before they get to school, it will ruin their childhood. It didn't. Seems to me there are two reasons for saying this:
1) Some narcissistic parents actually ruin their kids' lives by pushing them to unrealistic goals, and taking away all their free time, hoping to become famous as "super moms".
2) A reminder that the nail that sticks out gets hammered down. Even if bringing out geniuses will make your kids happy -- or maybe especially then -- it will also gain them a lot of enemies. Some people just enjoy watching gifted people fail. Mediocrity seems like the safer way, at least until you get strong enough.
I think the proper solution is to try various things, without forcing them. If your child hates playing violin in general, just give up. If your child enjoys playing with musical instruments, but hates doing exercises, then maybe push a little towards doing those exercises, too. You win if you create a self-reinforcing loop -- the child learns to play a song nicely, gets positive feedback from audience, is motivated to learn another song...
> Your parents being like "hey what math did you learn today" and expecting an answer can have some early impact, but peer effects take over eventually.
To certain degree you can select the peers; for example your kids will probably spend a lot of time with the kids of your friends, so choose your friends accordingly. If possible, choose a better school. Or simply choose an unusual school, because that's where the people who want to remain average will not put their kids. (I suspect that like half of success of e.g. Montessori schools is what they do, and the other half is the classmates your child will get, all selected for having parents who want something special for their kids.)
And of course the math should be fun, at least during the first years. Like, various puzzles involving numbers, etc. At later age, perhaps there are some math clubs or competitions that your kids could join.
I had just finished reading this; well, actually listening to the audiobook. On the positive side the book does cover the many areas in which von Neumann contributed, and these are knowledgeably elucidated. However, I didn't find the book entirely satisfactory. I didn't find it added as much as I had hoped to my understanding of von Neumann as a person, nor even to his particular way of thinking, other than the results of that thinking. He worked here, he solved this, worked there, solved that, and so on. I felt there were gaps left unfilled.
I would contrast this to two other recently published biographies of major 20th century thinkers.
Cheryl Misak's Frank Ramsey: A Sheer Excess of Powers is a stunning tour-de-force of intellectual biography. Deeply detailed and scholarly and engagingly written, you are left feeling you know Ramsey as a person as well as the significance of his work.
Not quite as detailed but nonetheless insightful is Graham Farmelo's The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom. A deep thinking extreme introvert (probably) autistic, Dirac's genius and how it related to his whole person, is woven together well in this book.
I note that Scott's review refers to Von Neumann as the one person who understood quantum mechanics. I think a more widespread view among those who know is that Dirac might have a better claim on that crown. Of Dirac's book on the subject, it as been said, "you think you understand quantum mechanics. Then you read Dirac and you realize you don't understand quantum mechanics, but he does."
"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."
Ted Kaczynski seemed to aim for this solution. Even if you agreed with his conclusions and methods - I don't - living as a hermit in a cabin isn't exactly human freedom, either. So his solution didn't even make sense on its own terms ... which isn't surprising, since he was a bit, er, insane in the membrane.
"Knowing what we know now, this proved unnecessary. Partly this was because it turned out to be possible to develop a retaliatory capacity to discourage first strikes."
No, no, no! This did not "prove" unnecessary with hindsight!
Assume we ran 200k Monte Carlo simulation of our world from 1946 onwards.
Each timeline gets changed marginally to seed enough chaos for divergence, but not enough to be meaningfully different in a historical sense at that point in time. [knock over a tree, change a song on every radio station and you guarantee and all people born after '46 will be changed to randomized siblings]
Now in one group of 100k simluations, John von Neumann gets his wish and the Americans bombed the Russians. (the Neumann-intervention group)
And in another group of 100k simulations, in which they did not. (the Cold War-group or our group)
We run all 200k simulated timelines to 2022.
Now we evaluate them by various dimensions of utility (life expectancy, population size, average wealth)?
Which median timeline has higher life expectancy?
Which group has a higher percentage of humans being hapily on Mars and colonizing the stars already?
Which group has a higher percentage nuclear wastelands?
Now our timeline is in the latter category and it admittedly it has some perks.
It's nice that we didn't see more than one nuclear war (yet).
But is this representative of our group having better performance or did we get extremely lucky?
Of course, the default assumption is that we are closest to median-values in all regards within our group.
So I wrote a long, angry rant that the Cold War fucked us on so many levels, that it's a miracle we made it this far. And that this "being completely fucked with x-risks" is a feature of the Cold-War timelines, which is very common within the Cold War-group.
That it's overly optimistic to assume, that we're close to the median instead of far above average lucky.
Now run all simulations to 2050 and compare group performance again.
Anwyay, which group do you think has more timelines, in which humanity is still alive?
That's the standard at which you should evaluate John von Neuman's recommendation.
Not by taking the accident of our continued existence for granted.
[or without making the case, that this was no accident at least]
And I consider the idea that John von Neumann was wrong here, one hell of an extraordinary claim!
It does not compute.
Because if I had to pick a random timeline from either group to be born in at a random year from here '46 to 2022 (or a smaller range for the extinction-timelines in each), I'd certainly not chose ours.
And if you disagree, I'd love to read that argument.
But until you do, I don't think you can claim that he was wrong about this.
> Anwyay, which group do you think has more timelines, in which humanity is still alive?
Virtually all of them, since the nuclear capacity of both sides during the worst periods of the Cold War was never sufficient to wipe out humanity. (Nor would it, since there's no real reason for a US-USSR nuclear armageddon to rain down hellfire on Brazil, Kenya, or India.)
Well, I think that depends on assumptions about how survivable a nuclear winter would be. I'd point out that adding just a bit of randomness immediately does the random-sibling replacement for all newborns from then on. Brazil, Kenyia or India are not targets in our timeline. But that's also stemming from the decisionmaking or influence of the generation afterwards. You'd have to be pretty confident that our alliances and each national technology levels end up in similar places. That's a stretch for our group. But not plausible for the "Neumann intervention"-group, since that would have changed everything massively. But I see your point about humanity being generally hard to kill, with the caveat, that we have not been tested that hard, so difficult to say from our perspective. Maybe I should turn that into "How many timelines have a population > 1 billion". Or perhaps "How many timelines have seen billions/hundreds of millions perish in nuclear war or its aftereffects". I think, we can perhaps assume tens of millions dead from a nuclear first strike without nuclear opposition. Not sure about hundreds of millions. But I just don't see billions dead being a more common outcome.
A full model would have to account for all the various possibilities, likelihoods and conflict outcomes. But intuitively, I'd still strongly favor the Neumann-intervention group. I'd also probably chose a random timeline in the Neumann-intervention group over reincarnation randomly in our current timeline (though that's far harder to argue and depends mostly on the magnitued of future expected risks like a nuclear WW3 just happening within a couple decades anyway; I am pessimistic and very optimistic about Neumann-intervention timelines lessening or eradicating the scourge of totalitarianism and future risks).
What would you pick for those two choices, if you had to chose?
> What would you pick for those two choices, if you had to chose?
Our timeline. I don't think that the Neumann plan would actually remove the Soviet Union from the board in most scenarios, given the US's limited nuclear capabilities during the period when the USSR did not have nuclear weapons themselves. Therefore the Neumann plan causes WW3, geopolitically isolates the USA, and provides an obvious excuse for any Leninists as to why their system failed in a way that OTL denied them. Depending on circumstances it could even entrench the Stalinist boot into western Europe, rather than force it back to the Soviet borders.
Boils down to differing intuitions about what could or couldn't be done with the advantage.
Or how negative the consequences of such an action would be. And how terrible our current timeline and timeline-pool is. Unresolvable disagreement without having a good simulation. And then we'd probably just argue about the simulation rules endlessly.
But what on Earth is OTL? None of the acronyms quite make sense here:
Same choice, the no-war pool. I have a very strong intuition that, from WW1 on or so, offensive wars have a strong tendency to end poorly for the side that wages them, while defensive wars vary in their benefits but at least sometimes result in a country getting big benefits from them (e.g. Soviets getting half of Europe, US getting allies in the Pacific). It's hard to think of a substantially beneficial offensive war in the modern era - only the annexation of Hyderabad comes to mind. As to the specific questions:
> Which median timeline has higher life expectancy?
It's probably a wash. The USSR and USA's life expectancies weren't that far apart, and the USSR had better life expectancies than the former Soviet Republics in general. The Iron Curtain being pushed east or west doesn't seem likely to change life expectancies that much, especially considering the long-term negative impact of a war. Assuming, of course, we're talking life expectancy modulo a nuclear war (i.e. if there was a nuclear exchange in 1980, we're not counting it for today's life expectancy).
> Which group has a higher percentage of humans being hapily on Mars and colonizing the stars already?
Well, if we're talking in 2022, approximately none of them. Stretching out our timeline into the future, surviving USSR-type timelines are more likely to see them, since the space race was a major angle of competition between the USA and Soviet Union, and one that might continue into the future to push space development up marginally. On the other hand, maybe we get Nationalist China in some of the Neumann timelines, and they industrialize earlier than the PRC did (as Taiwan did), and that pushes the space timeline forward a bit? But overall, the underlying technologies to start colonizing Mars cannot realistically exist by today - we're still probably 10+ years out from doing a human Mars landing, and the long-term trends in relevant technology are pretty gradual and consistent. I don't think there will be substantial Martian colonies for at least a century (and that's very generous), by which point events in 1945-48 are long since washed out by the noise.
> Which group has a higher percentage nuclear wastelands?
Probably the Neumann group. There's no way that the US could reliably manage such a policy; one President nukes the Soviet Union, then the next promises to never do something like that again because of huge public and international backlash. As such, it doesn't prevent nuclear proliferation (it may do just the opposite), and creates a situation where nuclear first strikes have significantly less of a psychological taboo behind them - breaking a taboo once, historically, tends to lead to breaking it a second time (see, e.g., Caesar following up Sulla's abuse of the dictatorship by abusing the dictatorship himself until the Romans killed him and banned the dictatorship forever).
Neumann was also the first child of a young mother. A quick google search tells me she was born in 1881 or 1882. So she was around 22 when Von Neumann was born.
Likewise, Albert Einstein was the first child of a 21 year old mother. I haven't checked any other 'geniuses' but I wouldn't be surprised if being born to a young mother has (brain) health benefits.
I think, if that were the case, we'd already know this from the psychological birth-order effect literature. There are physical in-utero benefits to being a second-born (higher birth weight, taller iirc.). But they wash out when growing up, I believe.
It's a bit tough to figure this out, if it were so, given that young mothers correlate with low SES, since medieval times. Looking at the offspring of rich, young mothers would be interesting though. If you can find any these days :)
At the end, I’m not so sure Von Neumann is admitting to not knowing what to do. Rather, he seems to be making an earnest observation — that progress in mitigating existential risk will happen at the margin.
Sure, for someone as self-assured as Von Neumann this could be viewed as a victory in humility. But not in irresolution.
As for "where did the Hungarian Jews go", the Holocaust, low fertility, high immigration did a lot of it.
But a lot did seem to go to Israel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_Hungary#Number_of_survivors . Today many of Israel's leading politicians are Hungarian, Yair Lapid is Hungarian, Defense Minister Benny Gantz is half-Hungarian and half-Romanian, and Merav Michaeli is so Hungarian she is literally Rudolf Kastner's granddaughter.
"A Hungarian is someone who enters a revolving door behind you but comes out in front."
Are there any other periods or places where this kind of exceptional flowering of human genius occurred? Seventeenth century England? (Newton, Boyle, Hooke, Wren etc) Classical Greece?
I only saw this post a few hours ago which is a shame because you obviously reach a wider audience when you reply earlier and it's been over a week now. A comment on the book, for the popular audience I think the book does a great job, it's accessible, not too long and doesn't lionize von Neumann too much (well at least not as much as Macrae's book), nevertheless I still felt like there was quite a bit missing. My opinion is of course very biased as I've researched quite a bit of von Neumann's history too, and I still feel that the proper biography of von Neumann is yet to come. If you look at the suggested reading section on von Neumann's Wikipedia page there's about 30 books and of those about a dozen are either full or semi biographies of von Neumann, and yet despite that it still feels as if every single one of them has their own unique taste or flavor of how they tell the story, some focus on particular aspects of his work (computing or economics for example), others contrast (Heims) while others cover history of something else while also including significant biographical material (Goldstine and Poundstone). Yet I feel none of them give a complete in-depth (and by in-depth I am meaning STEM or math undergrad level knowledge) biography of von Neumann as a person and his work. The reasons for this are two-fold in my opinion. One, is that there is so much content to cover. If I took a random guess I would say you would need something close to 1000 pages to cover his life fully. He worked in so many areas that describing them all and von Neumann's contributions to them, in addition to his life, would obviously take up a lot of time and space. When the American Mathematical Society dedicated a journal volume to him after he died [1] they had 9(!) different authors write papers about his work and that only covered the technical work he did in mathematical topics. Writing about all these topics competently in addition to all the non-technical achievements he had in life would quite likely require multiple authors and a rather large, long project. Although von Neumann died relatively young and never published anything autobiographical the fact he did work in so many areas meant a lot of people knew him, and indeed I have probably close to 100 different interviews of various people who each describe their interactions with von Neumann. These interviews are a particularly gold mine for describing the more human side of von Neumann, especially since almost everyone who knew him personally is dead now, but synthesizing all this into a coherent narrative would take much work. In addition, most biographies written of him so far focus on his life once he moved to America, I am sure there is more to find if some historians went to Hungary and Germany and Switzerland where von Neumann lived/studied and digged into whatever archives they have there. Surprisingly, even parts of his life in America I feel are not well covered. Again looking at his Wikipedia page you see he worked/consulted for almost two-dozen government and military agencies, much of that is poorly covered aside from Sheehan's book which is a biography of someone else entirely. If one was to put in FOI requests to all those agencies for items related to von Neumann I am sure there would be a treasure trove of information, although I can imagine some of it would still be classified (particularly his technical work on nuclear weapons). Yet this has not happened, with the great irony being that the gathering of von Neumann's papers into his collected works was funded by the US Navy. Secondly, and this reason is related to the first, what publisher would take this on? Publishers probably set limits to how long a book should be and to what educational level the book should be written to, and I doubt many would be happy to take on a project that would result in a 1000 page book that would have portions that required some level of mathematical education. Nevertheless I have hope that some day a grand biography of Johnny will be written, as Bhattacharya says he is perhaps one of the most influential people of the 20th century and as such fully deserving of such an undertaking.
Eric Gilliam has a very interesting analysis of von Neumann's intelligence, based on Freeman Dyson's division of mathematicians into "birds" and "frogs":
"Unlike someone like Dirac, whose major contributions felt to many contemporaries as if he were conjuring mathematical laws of nature out of the sky, von Neumann’s process seems to be something that is much more replicable. While I have no hopes that one person can or should hope to replicate what he did, it is believable that many researchers, if properly encouraged to seek problems and collaborate in a way similar to von Neumann, could hope to replicate results as fantastic as his."
> For whatever reason, Eastern European Jews of the 19th century were unusually bright. The very brightest of this unusual group moved to Budapest, interbred with each other, and had one generation of totally unprecedentedly brilliant children before being wiped out.
I would have loved to answer something more detailed, but it's a tragedy for ... mankind. The bright ones... They're a dying culture.
Variants of this story also say that von Neumann had to be brought in to convince him otherwise.
Higher polygenic scores in Ashkenazi Jews.
It's literally a google search away.
Source?
And specifically that the Ashkenazi have higher scores than Sephardic & Mizrahi Jews. If it were the Jewish religion requiring literacy, that should apply to all of them (and people should have noticed Jews were smarter than average much earlier).
While not quite at the Ashkenazi level, (no one is, except for maybe a few populations like Tamil Brahmins, Parsis, and maybe the Italian Jews), Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews are generally pretty smart, and in countries like Iraq, Iran, Morocco Jews have historically been a huge proportion of the educated and affluent people. Mountain Jews were overrepresented among billionaires in Russia. Within Israel the gap between Ashkenazi and other Jews in EA is only ~.5 SD https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/443926 which is smaller than the Ashkenazi-White gap in the US, and the wage gap is also smaller than the Ashkenazi-White gap in the US (there was a twitter thread by @HeTows at https://twitter.com/HeTows/status/1546928804089810945 about this). Indeed non-Ashkenazi have higher SES and EA than the white majority in the US and in France.
The Jewish religion requiring literacy is probably what it is, though not in the sense the environment people imagine. Less intelligent Jews were more likely to leave the community, and literary ability was culturally prized so smarter people had more kids. My guess is some of both effect. The culture drove selection for intelligence. Iraqi Jews are a high IQ population (again, not quite as high as Ashkenazi, but still high), but they are good spatially, unlike the Ashkenazi. There's an obvious reason, Jews in Europe were banned from a lot of professions requiring high spatial IQ, so people with high spatial IQ left. In the Middle East, it was more just the dumber ones couldn't afford the jizya and converted out.
Cultural causes, genetic effects.
If you are a Jewish man and can't read, you can't get Bar Mitzvahed. If you can't get Bar Mitzvahed, you can't get married. You aren't forced to leave the community, but you aren't going to have a lot of descendants. (Besides, where would you go? The US wasn't taking immigrants in the 1200s.)
I think being the member of a community outside the mainstream tends to bring forth a lot of creative intellectual ability in the appropriate environment. We associate gay men with being leaders in art and design, but it's obviously not genetic, and being good in art and design doesn't make you gay.
Tangential, but I am inclined to think there's a deeper correlation with gay men *caring more* about art and design; maybe it's purely cultural, hetero men in continental Europe care a lot more about fashion than Anglo hetero men, but I think there's something more fundamental there too.
(my hypothesis, fwiw, is that visual appearance matters more for attracting men than for attracting women, so gay men and hetero women on average care more about fashion and art and design than hetero men and gay
women)
"If you are a Jewish man and can't read, you can't get Bar Mitzvahed. If you can't get Bar Mitzvahed, you can't get married."
No. That is not how any of this works. You turn 13 you are Bar Mitzvahed. Period. The party and the reading of the torah portion is not necessary. A Bar Mitzvah has nothing to do with getting married. I don't think that the Jewish marriage laws even require you to be 13 years old.
That's one of the problems / advantages of Judaism. Different groups have different practices. That's what I was taught at Hebrew school when I was a kid. Maybe they were wrong.
Where is the lack of data?
Genetics and intelligence data, and Jewish intelligence data are plentiful.
While I agree that finding the genetic mutations would be better evidence, its not the only evidence.
What are your priors?
First time here I assume?
Trust me, these folk seem very invested in their just-so stories, to the point that I've had arguments that we should ignore the genetic evidence we do have in favour of IQ scores and cod racist typologies when it comes to intelligence.
That said, Scott has raised the idea of Ashkenazi genetic intelligence as an example of rare large-effect genes related to intelligence (all the data we have thus far seems to show that intelligence is massively polygenic and small-effect) that all correlate to really grody genetic diseases (either via partial dominance or tight linkage). I'm not sure what operable approaches you could draw out of such an argument, but it is at least a stab at a testable hypothesis.
>Trust me, these folk seem very invested in their just-so stories, to the point that I've had arguments that we should ignore the genetic evidence we do have in favour of IQ scores and cod racist typologies when it comes to intelligence.
This sounds terrible, sorry to hear you had to deal with that.
As an aside, the quotation that Unsigned Integer mentions is dismissive from Scott to the point of laziness. What does 'I side with Cochran' mean? That there are no effects from culture & history? In a charitable reading, it's emphasising one side of the story over the other one, but the idea that genetics operate in some independent world where you can give someone with von Neumann's genetic makeup any form of upbringing and they will miraculously become a genius on the basis of genetics is just foolhardy. Any social scientist would look at the genetic explanation on one side and the cultural / historical one on the other and think: 'Oh, so obviously it's both.'
I will bite that bullet and say that I believe that if you cloned Von Neumann and avoided malnutrition and head injuries the clone would prove unusually talented at whatever field they decided to pursue. I also think they'd test as a "genius" on any standard battery (and clear the threshold by a lot, the threshold is set very low). I don't think they'd be guaranteed to change the world.
I do think that a genuinely good education - lots of private tuition - helps, and luck always plays a huge part in everything, so our clone-Neumann given a very average American upbringing may merely become a very successful professional or small business owner.
That seems like an isolated demand.
There is no reason to think Jewish intelligence is different from any other intelligence.
If it is intelligence is highly heritable for American twins, Swedish conscripts or Brazilian babies fed on formula milk, it would require a leap to assume the same thing isn't true to some degree for Jews.
I recall that someone generated a dataset showing decent evidence for selection effects in the form of banking (i.e., lending at interest) being restricted to Jews in Europe and success in banking (as a proxy for higher IQ) being a predictor of higher fertility. I'll see if I can run it down later.
https://www.metaculus.com/questions/9492/israeli-embryo-selection-for-intelligence/
https://www.metaculus.com/questions/9524/israeli-first-10-on-embryo-selection-for-iq/
Israel is 40% Ashkenazi, but the 40% is likely increasing due to the high TFR of Haredim. Perhaps we'll see Budapest-on-the-Mediterranean in our lifetimes (https://www.metaculus.com/questions/9785/10-embryo-selection-for-iq-when/).
Haredi communities abroad are likely to also adopt embryo selection, Judaism is in favor of IVF (there are some links in those Metaculus questions). Haredi are insular and have high TFR.
The haredi may be smart but its not necessarily going to be evident if they stay so strictly religious.
https://m.jpost.com/israel-news/israel-under-threat-by-lack-of-basic-education-for-ultra-orthodox-607396/amp
Right. I expect more attrition in the future though, at least in Israel. The trend there is in that direction.
That's right. You needed a flake-ass liberal "woke" community like Budapest or Prague to get that kind of intellectual performance. The right wing reaction was, as one might expect, quite brutal and effective.
I'd prefer a world where secular intellectuals have children and where conservative religious movements aren't commonplace, but a society with religious groups having children some of whom become apostate and fuel secular society is at least theoretically capable of a a stable equilibrium
I agree. I would like 25% income tax per child or something like that, which incentivizes everyone especially educated and affluent people to have more kids, plus state-subsidized embryo selection.
In any case, Israel has a high TFR even among seculars (in the developed world it's really only Israel, France, Czechia that have this), and the Haredi https://www.metaculus.com/questions/7513/-israeli-population-that-is-haredi-in-2050/ https://www.metaculus.com/questions/7571/haredi-share-of-israel-at-peak/ won't take over.
There's a common myth among some HBD people (often anti-Semitic ones) that Israeli Ashkenazim are less intelligent due to selective migration. Israel has low PISA but this is due to Israelis leaving large numbers of questions blank and skipping them https://conference.iza.org/conference_files/edu_2021/ofek-shanny_y31696.pdf
- it's a low-trust society. They do much better when bribed, and if you look at Israeli psychometric tests it's much more encouraging.
Also, Israel does not iodize salt https://www.metaculus.com/questions/8360/israel-mandates-salt-iodization-by-2030/ but hopefully will.
I'm curious about other Ashkenazi groups. It seems Budapest Ashkenazi > US Ashkenazi. How do Israeli Ashkenazi rank? Subdivide into Yishuv and Holocaust survivors? How about Haredi? Are they significantly different from the seculars? Yekkes vs Ostjuden? The ones form the Former Soviet Union? I would expect a priori those to be higher IQ because the upper classes were less likely to emigrate. Jews from the FSU also perform better for cultural reasons (in general, Europe >> post-Sputnik US in sciences, especially controlling for demographics and the US having Jews and Asians), but likely it's also genetic reasons, the population that left for the US and Israel in the 70's and circa-1990 is more drawn from the Muscovite upper class than from Anatevka.
It's an interesting question people should study further.
I can't find it in a casual skim of that paper - why do Israelis skip so many questions on PISA?
For the fact that they do: look at Page 44 of that paper. They skip and guess a lot of questions, even compared to their score (Jewish Israelis skip/guess more questions than Hispanic Americans and almost as many as Black Americans), and look at Page 14 for the discussion of "low endurance" in Israel. In this paper the scores go up by almost a whole standard deviation on some test after incentives (not financial because those are illegal, just higher grades) are given. It's +1 SD for Israeli Arabs, +.7 SD for Israeli Jews, they cite another paper where it's about +1/3 SD for US students, about +0 for Shanghai students on PISA (this is with financial incentives).
See also Page 43. Israeli Jews and Arabs alike do better on the first part of the test, whereas in the US you see the minorities doing worse in the later parts.
Why? The paper says "low intrinsic motivation". My guess is it's a product of the local culture. Israelis are aggressive, have low social trust, and take shortcuts (I say this a someone who is a big fan of Israel and Israelis). I'll give a couple stories from my Israeli advisor. The first story is that he said he could not give a take-home exam in Israel, because everyone would cheat. The second is that a pollster in Israel asked people, how did you vote in the last election, and the results were *completely* different from that of the last election (lots of people said they vote Labor and actually vote Likud). PISA to some extent measures trust, Romania is also a big under-performer on the PISA and it is low social trust.
This is generally true of both Jewish and Arab Israelis, it's a general fact about the Middle East.
Israelis also don't trust international organizations, and if you give them a test that counts for nothing by some organization, my guess is a lot of them will just check random answers and go outside to play with friends or something.
I can send you some data on the Israeli psychometric tests - they do well, and I'm told it's harder than the SAT, since there is an actual incentive there.
As an Israeli, who went through the educational system, I have another important point.
The educational system in Israel is dysfunctional, with all the sickness described in "The Case Against Education", but with a local flavor.
Teachers are not incentivized to teach well, and are not rewarded for investing in the pupils. The root cause of this is the teacher union, that insists on seniority based compensation. A starting teacher makes one of the lowest salaries in the Israeli economy, and Israeli kids are probably closer in their behavior to inner-city children rather than well-behaved western Europeans. In short, very hard and unrewarding work. Many, many young teachers leave after the first year. The survivors are basically cruising through at minimum effort. Those that can leave the system do - and thus there is a cooling effect on the proficiency of teachers, especially prominent in math teachers.
Bad math teachers lead to students bad at math, ergo low PISA test results.
Most mathematically inclined students that want to peruse a STEM degree realize mid-high school that they'll need to develop math skill independently, and take external courses or study online.
Right. Israeli kids have high rates of truancy in addition to high rates of leaving questions blank on PISA. They don't give a shit. They have very little incentive to do well on any tests or get good grades in high school, since universities are easy to get into. They act like inner-city children and don't take K-12 seriously. I've heard stories of Israeli kids slapping teachers and so on. https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/the-israeli-school-system-is-broken-and-it-needs-to-be-changed-immediately/
Because the country is so small, it's not hard to take STEM courses at a university as a high schooler, they are all within driving distance.
The scientific achievements though are great, as you would expect given the demographics. It's a good case study in how K-12 education really doesn't matter much. ;)
Low stakes tests like PISA probably differ from country to country on how hard the test-takers try.
Even high stakes tests can have motivation problems when low-scorers give up partway through and bubble in the rest of the way. That happened with the military's 105-page long AFQT in 1980. When they replaced it with an interactive computerized test that gave low scorers easier questions, they had less trouble with low scorers giving up.
Funny thing is that in Israel it’s illegal to give monetary incentives so they had to give grade incentives. In America and China they have monetary incentives. America got a PISA-style tests of +1/3 SD with $$$, on IQ tests you get like half that by motivating people (makes sense, IQ tests are more engaging than the long PISA word problems), China got basically +0 on PISA from $$$. Israel got +.8 on some PISA-like test (+.7 for Jews and +1.0 for Arabs) with just grade incentives.
Using such computer adaptive testing, one normally gives subjects items which they will have about 50% chance of getting right because that maximizes the item's informativeness. However, if the goal is both to minimize giving up AND measure the trait, one could have the system give subjects items they have an estimated 80% chance of getting right.
Not a great idea, that will lead to long tests where people get bored. You need financial incentives.
The problem with the Haredim is that they consider things like the arts and sciences to be distractions from the primary work of mankind on this earth, to read and study the word of god and carry on traditions. The Haredim were the other great reaction to Jewish emancipation in Europe. They may produce geniuses, but it is unlikely anyone outside the community would recognize them as such.
If they value intelligence and have lots of kids and at least a few of those kids become secular, then they are going to produce (recognized) geniuses even if the practicing ones are too insular to do things that the secular world cares about.
That does happen, but it's a pretty rough escape trajectory. Within the culture, education is minimal and knowledge about anything in the outside world - arts, sciences, culture - are excluded. Living a secular life isn't an obvious option. Even English literacy is rare since that is neither the language of the home or the language of religion. It's like being a refuge from North Korea except that North Koreans speak the same Korean as South Koreans which makes it easier.
So basically, just wait for Israel and diaspora Jewish communities to do embryo selection, which will likely happen in the second half of this century, Judaism is good on bioethics. This, combined with the high TFR of Israeli Jews (both secular and not) and of Orthodox Jews in the diaspora, will give you your wish. :)
That's interesting. What happens if you have a lot of smart kids in a low trust society with a bad educational system?
Bond villains.
Israel happens, lots of people just go to university early and learn stuff from the army.
I honestly expect embryo selection earlier than that, since the high rate of recessive genetic disorders means that embryo selection for avoiding known diseases is already common in Israel
Yeah, Israel has very advanced embryo selection via IVF, which everyone (including the Haredi) is on board with. They have advanced genetic screening, due to the high rate of genetic diseases in at least the Ashkenazi population. Israel doesn't have the "eugenics taboo" of the West, and Judaism is fine with embryo selection to enhance intelligence and health (it's less fine with enhancing physical appearance). Something like 10% of births in Israel already are through IVF and it's going up, because Israelis are still having ~3 kids but are having them later.
Shai Carmi did say that the Israeli health bureaucracy is cautious and is likely to wait for someone else to do some embryo selection for intelligence before subsidizing it on a large scale, though he agrees if it becomes common Israel is likely to be one of the first countries if not the first to do in on a large scale. The first adopters will be in the US or on some offshore havens, and then Israel will do it on a large scale.
He says polygenic embryo selection is currently not approved there but they will likely approve it for disease soon.
"So, how would we create a new generation of Martians? Can I get an ACX grant to start a new charter city exclusively for smart Ashkenazi Jews? Maybe require all the citizens to be born via IVF for optimal embryo selection?"
Don't forget the oppression and murdering as the kids get older. Ala "The Boys from Brazil."
Umm... Perhaps a quibble, but I believe Lewis Fry Richardson invented scientific meteorology. Cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Fry_Richardson#Weather_forecasting
I purchased the book to read about von Neumann's contributions to meteorology in context, then was disappointed to find the barest passing mention in the intro and none in the body (if the index is accurate).
Not that "scientific meteorology" has a definition, but Vilhelm Bjerknes is generally credited for first placing meteorology into the context of applied physics.
Richardson had a great idea, that if you know the current state of the atmosphere and you know the physics equations that govern its behavior, you ought to be able to predict its future state. He tried a demo; it didn't work.
With computers in the 1950s it might just be possible to calculate a forecast and finish the calculation before the forecasted weather came to pass. This possibility of useful forecasts led von Neumann and dynamical meteorologists like Charney and Platzman to team up to try to do it. It was a group effort, two tricks being to understand why it was essential to start with approximate equations rather than exact ones, and how to compute the numerical solutions with minimal computer resources and without the algorithm going numerically unstable. While von Neumann was irreplaceable for solving the prodigious techical challenges, the meteorological parts were mostly up to the meteorologists.
Hi, if you're looking for von Neumann's contributions to meteorology in context you would be better off reading a history of the subject. Paul Edward's "A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming" covers it.
Fantastic article. I love John von Neumann. Also, congrats on explicitly coming out as HBD. It's worth mentioning though that most Jews in Budapest survived the war though plenty were killed (see https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/budapest "more than 100,000" survived compared to ~200,000 at the beginning). It's not just the Holocaust, though of course the Holocaust was awful and had a big effect, but also cities being IQ shredders.
I don't know TFR data for Budapest, but I know BirthGauge has some tweets about Vienna having a sub-1.0 TFR in the early 20th century.
It would be better to write out your acronyms.
HBD = human biodiversity
IQ = intelligence quotient
TFR = total fertility rate
Guess the ban on HBD discussion has ended.
"cities being IQ shredders"
This is the opposite of conventional wisdom, as I understand it. Could you expand on it a little more please?
Cities gather high IQ people from the surrounding countryside and towns. But city people gather to work, not primarily to breed. So I wouldn't be surprised if cities are IQ shredders on a genetic level.
The famous example is Singapore, which purportedly attracts many smart people from elsewhere in South-East Asia and induces them to prioritise their career and not having children (this is obviously a shorthand wavey gesture at the exact mechanics of what depresses fertility rate, which are likely to be complex). Singapore's fertility rate is ~0.78, so if you're skimming the top 10% of people in SEA and subjecting them to that sort of pressure it's a form of truncation selection.
I haven't seen conventional wisdom that swings the other way re: inheritance. Maybe you're thinking of a general Geoffrey West Scale type argument that shows how cities increase productivity, # of entrepreneurs, ..., (and waste etc.)?
Yes that's exactly the argument I'm thinking of!
My understanding was that cities added value by cramming lots of highly productive people in one place, which increased the odds of some chance meeting producing a viable business, or patent, or book deal, or whatever - because you had many more chance meetings per unit time (and also a second-order effect where it therefore becomes more expensive to live in a city which adds selection pressure on the kind of person who can afford to move there and hence your average quality-per-chance-encounter is likely to be higher).
I assumed that also extended to a chance meeting meaning you fell in love and had lots of kids, but it sounds like you're suggesting cities independently assert a separate effect depressing fertility. It still sounds a bit to me like the effect direction is unclear though - having fewer children (average) with more productive partners (on average) doesn't seem to me to round off to 'IQ shredder'
It's quite obviously an IQ shredder at the population level:
Scenario 1, a country with no cities. Average IQ 100, TFR 2.0, average IQ of next generation 100.
Scenario 2, a country with a city with half the population. Average IQ of the city: 110. Average IQ of the countryside: 90. TFR of the city: 1.0, TFR of the countryside: 3.0. Assuming 60% heritability and 40% version to the mean, average IQ of the next generation is 106*0.25+94*0.75 = 97.
Numbers exaggerated to prove the point, but if higher IQ people have fewer people when they move to the city, them having those kids with other higher IQ people makes the problem worse not better.*
*Although it does also slightly increase population variance, so the tiny population of very-high-IQ people declines slower than it normally would if the population uniformly reduced its IQ.
Might also be worth noting that if there are some wide variety of traits which increase 'intelligence' in various domains, a cosmopolitan city with collisions between the most intelligent members of diverse populations may also substantially increase the *magnitude* of the intellectual elite's advantage. I.e. if Hungarian Jews have trait Y which increases intelligence, and separately Chinese people have trait Z, the fact that the city depresses their fertility does not change the fact that it is the only environment in which a person possessing Y+Z is likely to exist.
It looks like the human genome doesn't work like that based on the evidence so far (educational attainment is the best proxy for intelligence that we have polygenic scores for since it's easy to collect population-wide educational attainment data, and those scores seem to have components that are present in all populations with varying frequencies, not exclusively confined to certain continental regions), but you're right that that is hypothetically possible.*
*Another suggestion that it's unlikely is that history's catalogue of absolute-top-tier geniuses are not over-represented by people with cosmopolitan-unique ancestry combinations, AFAIK. Von Neumann was close to 100% Ashkenazi Jewish, Tesla was close to 100% Serbian, Newton was close to 100% English, etc
Your analysis doesn't take into account the increased chance of far-from-mean offspring from the higher IQ baseline and the potential for a ratcheting effect from assortative mating. Perhaps the benefits of cities is that it provides a greater means for differential outcomes due to IQ and assortative mating, enabling an IQ ratcheting effect.
The societal benefit from cities is pretty clearly the this-generation increase in productivity and technological invention that you get from concentrating talent.
They are still IQ shredders on a generation-on-generation view; even if the concentration of IQ resulted in an increase in +4 STDEV people in generation 2, that effect would fade away eventually due to regression to the mean, so by generation 5-10 the +4 STDEV (of the original average) population fraction would be lower than it would be otherwise (regression to the mean would be more powerful than the ratcheting effect).
Gut check 1: history's had a lot of million-plus person cities lasting for many generations. Of history's standout geniuses, how many were from lineages that had lived in cities for very long periods of time? Von Neumann's father was from a small city but then his grandfather and great-grandfather were from a small town called Ond; mother's side is 3 generations in Budapest, so mixed evidence. Tesla's family was quite rural. Newton's mother was born in "Market Overton in Rutland" and his father was born in "Colsterworth, South Kesteven District, Lincolnshire, England".
Gut check 2: the demographic that has the clearest evidence for an above-100 selection for IQ are Ashkenazi Jews. Enough Ashkenazi Jews migrated to NYC for us to be able to run a good experiment on whether that population concentrated in a mega-city for generations would result in a dazzling crop of geniuses by generation 5+. Signs point to no; Budapest's generation 1-2 outperformed NYC generation 5 because Budapest got the highest IQ Ashkenazi to start with (based on Scott's analysis).
Gut check 3: Some civilizations urbanized faster than others. The Roman megalopolis left no genetic trace in Italy (according to Razib Khan: https://razib.substack.com/p/they-came-they-saw-they-left-no-trace), and the long existence of Baghdad does not appear to have helped Iraq have more present-day geniuses than surrounding countries.
This argument, together with the worldwide trend toward urbanization in recent decades, predicts we should see a gradual decline in measured IQ scores. At least we should not see an increase.
But the observed Flynn effect is exactly the opposite. How do you reconcile this data with your reasoning?
Quite easily, given that IQ is genetics + environment (nutrition, mostly) and nutrition has improved dramatically over that time frame.
Two other key pieces of evidence that reinforce that:
(1) The Flynn effect stopped or even reversed in the rich world decades ago, right about when you'd expect gains from good nutrition to have reached 100% coverage
(2) Polygenic scores for educational attainment in Iceland, at least, show negative selection for the high-education traits over the last few generations. We haven't yet collected that data for more typical countries, but it fits with the expected pattern of declining (average genetic maximum potential for) intelligence.
Do people ever leave Singapore with the money they've earned to start a family the way people leave San Francisco for, say, Reno? But where do they go?
I'm not even sure that Singapore is such a big shredder nowadays, the TFR of Singapore is really low but so is the TFR of mainland Chinese and Chinese Malay, who I think are the biggest immigrant populations there.
Singapore's TFR is 0.9, Mainland China's TFR is 1.7, Malaysia's TFR is 1.9.
Singapore is still quite obviously an IQ shredder.
Mainland China is 1.3 and it's below Singapore-level in many cities like Shanghai, and Chinese-Malay TFR is also like 1.0.
> the TFR of Singapore is really low but so is the TFR of mainland Chinese and Chinese Malay
This by no means precludes Singapore still being a big IQ shredder. It can keep skimming smart people from low TFR populations as long as these source populations are much larger than it is.
Even if they survived, they might not have stayed in Budapest.
Seeing that bit about Gábor Szegõ being Von Neumann's childhood math tutor reminded me of the fact that Dave Chalmers was apparently a childhood math tutor for Terence Tao.
https://fragments.consc.net/djc/2006/08/fields_medals.html
Outstanding. I had never heard that before. But did Dave cry with joy for having such a pupil?
There's also that photo of Erd\H{o}s and Tao in Adelaide. Erdos was visiting George and Esther Szekeres, Hungarian Jews from Budapest who moved to Adelaide.
Intelligence isn't heritable, so I guess Von Neumann just had a favorable environment growing up.
Identical-twin studies are are said to demonstrate that intelligence is about 50% heritable.
Things aren't heritable or not-heritable absent context.
All human children inherit intelligence from their parents.
Neither is height or skin color then.
Interesting replies to what I assume is sarcasm.
I'll admit it actually took me a second to realize it was sarcastic — if you look around on e.g. Reddit, you'll find many people un-ironically endorsing this position or a close neighbor.
EDIT: I mean, even the comment directly below is suggesting that there can be no genetic component, because intermarriage or something.
Lmao, nice bait
I mean, I know this is ironic but he was surrounded by a *remarkable* collection of teachers, tutors, and mentors. I suspect you'd get at least solid results out of quite a few basically intelligent people in that scenario.
Your harping on this subject is tiresome, particularly when this post proves it isn't necessary here.
LOL
It's funny that, when discussing what made for an unusually rich crop of émigré talent from Budapest and thereabouts, Scott spends so little time looking for explanations that have anything to do with the education system in Budapest in the first third of the twentieth century. (It is still good, to judge from my Hungarian friends - and in fact some of its strengths as far as mathematics is concerned have remained constant.)
The fact that a large proportion of people in that group were of Jewish ancestry (or partly of Jewish ancestry, etc.) may in fact be partly a distraction. It's not just that 25% of the population of Budapest fell into that category, but that the percentage was presumably much larger for the middle class. What access to higher education did the working class? And what interest did the nobility have in excelling in studies?
As for genetic explanations - that is hard to either prove or disprove. One thing, though: intermarriage was statistically negligible everywhere before WWI - yet we see it happening quite a lot whenever somebody puts together a list of Great Jews - born before or after WWI, Hungarian or otherwise. It is not just that the lists include people whom Jews would not consider to be Jews if they were not famous, and that comparisons with proportions in the general population are flawed. It is also the case that this is fun to try to make fit with naïve versions of the genetic explanation ("Jews are smart"). Are we dealing with some magical substance that increases in power when diluted?
More sophisticated versions of the same hypothesis may survive this test, but they lack that nice primitive appeal.
I remember finding out that Olivia Newton-John was Max Born's granddaughter.
Joan Baez is cousin to physicist John Baez.
The lead singer of the Eels is Hugh Everetts son.
Joan Baez's Mexican dad was a fine physicist too, the co-inventor of the X-ray reflection microscope:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Baez
I believe this theme of "Jews are smart" has come up before on this blog. Personally I would have liked to have learned more unique insights about the man himself rather than his general background.
There are some comments about this in there, in the quotes from MacRae's bio. But of course it's all hypothetical. Nobody knows just how or why a genius emerges.
Agreed.
Can't believe it! Scott wrote this! Was going to give this my top vote in the contest.
It's telling isn't it - Scott's reviews usually have a little bit of magic dust sprinkled over them.
Reminder that the contest essays consistently come on Friday and always have the disclaimer attached to them. (I remember last year making the same mistake when Scott posted his 1001 Nights review)
This would be a great reminder if I could also consistently remember what day of the week it is :)
And, same on the 1k1
>It's funny that, when discussing what made for an unusually rich crop of émigré talent from Budapest and thereabouts, Scott spends so little time looking for explanations that have anything to do with the education system in Budapest in the first third of the twentieth century. (It is still good, to judge from my Hungarian friends - and in fact some of its strengths as far as mathematics is concerned have remained constant.)
Scott addressed this question at much more length years ago in this essay-
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-considered-as-hungarian-high-school-science-fair-project/
Yes, I read it back then. It is still very cursory. The conclusion is not that "education does nothin'" (he doesn't really learn or tell us much, or nearly anything, about the education system) but simply that it does not produce child prodigies. Fair enough. Of course most child prodigies anywhere go undiscovered, or go nowhere - and very few of them get the chance to learn Classical Greek!
Clearly there are environmental factors at play here outside the _formal_ education system - though part of them can be due to its effect on the parents' generation.
(a) I, for one, would like to know more about what was going in Budapest in the first third of the twentieth century.
(b) As he is forced to conclude in the cited post, it can't reduce to genetics *if seen at the very coarse level of the "ethnic group"* - similar concentrations, and higher ones, have been achieved since then.
The evidence suggests that in Budapest between 1900 and 1930, in at least some schools and the social environment around those schools (schuls, churches, playgrounds, maybe popular entertainment, street banter, jokes in newspapers, gossip) academic achievement was not disparaged as nerdy/unattractive/low-status, but just the opposite. It would not be surprising if in places where this held true, intelligent kids then tended to develop their intellectual strengths instead of prioritizing things that society incentivises elsewhere. Perhaps it's difficult to achieve such a high density so most such instances are more local: home schooled relatives from a large extended family in the UK, some cousins in a large Indian city who have a famous poet as an uncle and a professor as a role model, a small rural Iowa settlement with a school employing an unusually bookish teacher, and similar stories Scott has written about. At least some of this hypothesis should be testable.
Right - but testable how?
Education does nothin'. I don't think a genetic explanation is at all hard to *evidence*; "proof" is a word often used for "God [or IQ] of the gaps"-style reaching.
Scott has, in fact, looked at this issue a lot; see below link.
Hybrid vigor is a thing.
Well, obviously (though we are not dealing with population isolates here).
Note, however, how we are moving away from naïve hypotheses already (of the "forbidden thoughts" variety).
Hybrid vigor is a thing but not all hybrid pairs have vigor. Jury's still out on humans I think, although we do have suggestive positive evidence from things like <the iconic Hawaiian look from the early 20th century being half Hawaiian half Japanese, or so something I read claimed, maybe James A. Michener's Hawaii?>
Hybrid vigor reduces the effect of problematic genes, but Ashkenazic Jews were and, to a large extent, still genetically isolated from the European population. If you look at the Martians, most of them had two Jewish parents, so both were from within that isolated group.
My guess is that it was because male Jews had to learn to read the Torah. No Jewish woman was going to marry a man who couldn't read, and a lot of Jewish men would think twice before marrying a woman so pig ignorant that she couldn't read enough to tutor the younger boys.
The Ashkenazic population actually had enormous contributions from surrounding groups (mostly women) in its founding stage. What you had was little inflow in 1500-1850, say.
If the educational system played a large role, shouldn't we expect to see lots of non-Jews rising to the highest echelons of math and science? AFAIK, all great Hungarian minds of the time were Jewish.
If you define "Jewish" very broadly (including what most Jews would think of as non-Jews: children of converts, people with some Jewish ancestry, etc.)., and choose who gets labelled "great", sure.
At any rate, as said before, the middle class in the capital city was heavily Jewish (under a broad definition of the term), and that's what is relevant; even secondary school wasn't a given at the time for children of the working class, far from it (... and the upper class would have had no incentive to try very hard). You will probably get a very clear majority if you narrow it down to the Bildungsburgerturm, i.e., the relatively comfortable subsector of the middle-class that owed its position to the education system and had a close symbiotic relationship with it. Class habitus runs in families, as do resources, obviously.
Are you saying that children of converts are well-represented in the usual examples of disproportionate Jewish achievement, of a magnitude such that positing a genetic component becomes unnecessary?
I would expect that, both in the more general question (representation in Nobels/20th-century prodigies/advanced degrees, etc) and in this particular case, there would be a negligible number of converts and that case can be safely ignored.
Too, I am curious as to how many examples there are of someone with, say, a single Jewish grandfather being counted as Jewish, in this context — I had assumed most "famously brainy" Jews are more Jewish than not, by ancestry; it makes sense to me — in general (and *especially* in the case of Jews) I expect far more endogamy than exogamy — but I'd be interested if you have evidence that's not the case.
(More specific still, I didn't think any of the "Martians" were converts or children of converts -- but I haven't really checked all that hard, either. Or, uh, at all. Still, there aren't very many converts to Judaism at any time or place, AFAIK.)
Converts *from* Judaism. Who would then not be counted as Jews (if not famous).
Take Aage Bohr, for instance (and just off the top of my head; he can't be the only Nobel Prize winner in that particular pigeonhole).
I’ve made this comment before on other posts, but the Jews in Hungary, particularly in Budapest, had a unique situation. Back in 1848, Hungarian Jews were seen as sympathetic to the wave of failed revolutions in that year. So the state decided to punish them by levying an onerous school tax. This was supposed to suck up any resources the Jewish community might put toward another revolution or other political ambitions. Jews were still largely segregated from everyone else, so for 50 years before 1900 Jews were essentially forced to build themselves the best schools money could buy.
Add to this the unwillingness of Hungarian landed gentry to sully their hands with any kind of work. The Jews stepped up to take on the industrialization and modernization of the country. And, for a time, a lot of the wealth they earned went back into schools. A smart Jewish boy born in the latter half of the 19th century had a unique opportunity for world-class schooling plus a worthy outlet for his ambitions. Not to mention the aforementioned feeling that all of this was rather precarious…
There are two things that make me skeptic about this line of “education technology” explanation.
First, it sounds a lot like an argument for protectionism in education. “Isolate you cormmunitity from outside influence/competition (also, strip it from funding) and you’ll get a great educational system.” Sounds fishy.
Second, this would imply that (i) Hungarian-Jews managed to set up an educational system so extraordinary that it would reliably produce Von Neumann level geniuses. (ii) the knowledge of how to set up that system was completely lost. And (iii), that despite decades of effort and trillions of dollars spent in education world wide, we have not been able to re-discover the recipe for this system.
The war might help you explain (ii), but still (i) and (iii) make me doubt that such an educational system ever existed, or that it could ever exist.
I think it’s more complex than this. Smart Jewish kids in Budapest didn’t just have access to unusually good educational resources, but the surrounding society made it possible for brilliant people to rack up unusually meaningful and measurable achievements. The Budapest Jews might have been no more or less extraordinary than their circumstances.
In surrounding countries, a the potential for growth was probably spread more evenly among upper-middle-class Christians and lower gentry. But in Hungary the social prohibitions against upper class Christians working in fields like industry and finance were unusually strong. At the same time that Jews were making economic progress due to those opportunities, they were gaining political enfranchisement. I can’t say for sure, but there’s nothing like the fervor of the newly-upwardly mobile to propel the next generation to great things. You can’t engineer the conditions that might have led to a spate of geniuses in early 20th century Budapest, which is why we haven’t.
I forgot to mention my source for the forced spending on Jewish education was Paul Lendvai’s “The Hungarians”:
https://www.amazon.com/Hungarians-Thousand-Years-Victory-Defeat/dp/0691200270/ref=asc_df_0691200270/?tag=hyprod-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=509234950067&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=11823157615448090124&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=m&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9007216&hvtargid=pla-1258715692963&psc=1
This is interesting. Your account of the environment that Budapest Jews were faced with (which I agree with), is basically the one that we need to make the genetic explanation work. The smarter Jews, who presumably were already smart on average, faced little competition in banking and industry jobs which allowed them to amass large fortunes and have lots of children, e.g. 10+ children. The smartest of these 10+ children, who are the offspring of smart parents, would go off to profitable careers in business and industry, amass large fortunes, and have 10+ children of their own. In other words, the environment put strong selection pressures for intelligence on Jews. Repeat this process four or five times and you end up with "The Martians."
So I guess our disagreement is not really about what the environment was like, but about the causal mechanism through which said environment produced ultra-smart people. My model of the situation is: {environment} --> {genetic selection for intelligence} --> {Martians}. Whereas yours looks something like: {environment} --> {Martians}.
Assuming this is an accurate representation of the disagreement, I'd go back to the point I made earlier that we know of no environmental intervention that can reliably and sustainably raise intelligence (outside obvious things like nutrition and not hitting people in the head with a bat). The sad truth seems to be (as Fredie deBoer nicely summarizes here: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/education-doesnt-work-20) that people come with a maximum potential intelligence, in the same way that they come with a maximum potential height, and provided that some basic conditions are met (again, nutrition and not hitting with a bat), no environmental interventions that we know of can increase people's intelligence past their maximum potential intelligence.
Given this evidence, I'm inclined to think that the Martians simply had a higher maximum potential intelligence which was the result of genetic selection. The alternative is to assume that Hungarian Jews accidentally landed on an environmental-intervention sweet spot capable of consistently producing world class geniuses, but so sensitive that any departure from it yields people that are only kind of smart.
Given that one of our key signals that all these guys were unusually brilliant is the fact that they met on the Manhattan Project, I keep wondering if the rarity of combined factors that create people smart enough to invent weapons capable of wiping out humanity is a bug or a feature.
Thanks.
Do we have much evidence that Budapest Jews outperformed Vienna Jews, other than at the very highest levels of Manhattan Project fields (which could be due to the small sample size)? How about Jews in Prague, the third city of the Austro-Hungarian Empire?
On a per capita basis, how did German Jews perform relative to Austro-Hungarian Jews?
Scott addresses this issue in an old post about Hungarian-Jews over-achievement (https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-considered-as-hungarian-high-school-science-fair-project/), and he briefly mentions it here. He argues that "when we hear “there were X Nobel Prize winning German physicists in the early 1900s”, it sounds only mildly impressive. But when we hear “there were X Nobel Prize winning physicists from Budapest in the early 1900s”, it sounds kind of shocking. But the denominator isn’t the number of Germans vs. Hungarians, it’s the number of German Jews vs. Hungarian Jews, which is about the same."
All this is to say that it is probably not the Hungarian-Jew (HJ) education system that is doing most of the work here, and that there must be some other factor that explains the HJ's "overachievingness" which is also shared by German-Jews. Here, the genetic explanations seems to fit the bill.
Prague also produced a lot of smart Jews. Look at Hedy Lamarr. She had a theatrical education but taught herself enough about radio and electronics to do some serious inventing. She had a patent on what later became known as TDMA. She wasn't a science major, but she grew up in a freewheeling intellectual environment.
Jews don't get to consider who is a Jew and who is not a Jew. That's something the antisemites do. It's not like there's a Jewish pope who will excommunicate you in time to save you from a pogrom. It's like this for the Blacks in the US who were classified by racial laws passed by racists. There's no Black pope either.
Jews actually are very particular about membership (when it comes to people who are not famous). It goes strictly by the maternal line, and attempts to make that rule more flexible have met with enormous resistance. Of course someone can be non-Jewish according to the Jews and still be a target of antisemitism.
(There *is* excommunication (not excommunion), just not by a central authority.)
Reading this, I was struck by the fact that Albert Einstein is the person who has come to signify genius to the general public. I think he's a very good candidate - there are few historical thinkers who seem so consistently right and insightful about murky and controversial matters (Charles Darwin and Alan Turing are the other two that come to mind). (I think it's also notable that most prominent scientist have philosophical inclinations that would be considered empiricist, while Einstein is one of the very few post-Enlightenment figures that could naturally be thought of as rationalist, in the philosophical sense.)
But Von Neumann seems to have been a different thing altogether. This review doesn't even mention Von Neumann's important work in set theory. (If you've ever learned that the ordinal 0 is the empty set, that 1 is the set {0}, that 2 is the set {0, {0}}, ... that omega is the set {0, {0}, {0,{0}}, ...}, and so on - well, that's Von Neumann's definition, which is much, much easier to work with than Cantor's definition.) He seems to have been incredibly sharp and done important work across many disciplines. But he does seem to have this psychopathic/sociopathic streak, at all levels from his carelessness at driving to his naive game theory about nuclear war. So it's probably for the best that Einstein is the public face of scientific genius.
(It doesn't sound like Von Neumann was ever as casually cruel as Isaac Newton though.)
Which millions did Isaac Newton propose to murder? The worst I know about him was how he secretly wrote the Royal Society's report supposedly settling the Leibniz-Newton priority dispute [sic].
Von Neumann was a clearly first-rate mathematician, but it's not like he was Hilbert, or for that matter Ramanujan. In ergodic theory, as in computing, he benefitted from being an early entrant in the field.
Good point about millions. I was thinking of Newton's personal cruelty to people he knew, like Hooke, and to various criminals and rivals when he was in charge of the mint. Not actually as impactful as a nuclear strike on the Soviet Union, though revealing a different sort of character flaw.
It's true that within mathematics, Von Neumann was no Hilbert. But he's clearly much more influential (especially broadly) than Ramanujan. And while it's possible that Hilbert was also as important as Von Neumann in physics, Von Neumann also has direct work in economics and computer science that is incredibly influential there. There aren't many 20th century figures with as much directly influential work in as many different academic fields as Von Neumann. (Nor even as many sub-fields of math as Hilbert - though Von Neumann is close.)
I was bringing up Ramanujan as an example of "out of the blue" originality and depth, not in terms of influence; Hardy was quite right about both. Ramanujan has certainly been more influential than von Neumann in number theory, though :).
Again, von Neumann was an insightful early entrant in many fields. Of course von Neumann's Ergodic theorem is a basic result, but there's no point in pretending that it is difficult. Of course von Neumann was a founding figure of game theory, but, again, no mathematical difficulty at that stage. Obviously it is important to think about Hilbert spaces abstractly, but my (possibly deeply ignorant) impression is that von Neumann's contribution there was mainly that - axiomatization - and then of course he could use the basic theory, cleaned up by him, extremely well.
I'm sure some of his work can be classified as genuinely hard problem-solving - it is just that that part of his output seems to have a way of avoiding my path. Of course that may in part be a consequence of my ignorance, and again, difficulty is not the only measure of achievement in mathematics.
I think it's useful to compare Von Neumann's work to that of someone like Kolmogorov or Tarski. It's all the stuff that is important and foundational to a field, and seems in some sense straightforward (though mainly with the benefit of retrospect). It's not as original and deep and creative as the work of people like Gödel or Turing, but it's still extremely foundational, and there's just so *much* of it.
I think it may also be easy, with hindsight, to underestimate the level of intellect and originality necessary to *produce* an insight. Most of the mathematics I've learned has seemed obvious — once I've learned it.
I'm super smart, I acknowledge, but I have some small doubt that *even I* could have produced all of the knowledge in a modern university's mathematics department...
*Or could I have?*
No. No, probably not. Right? Unless...
Then you haven't learned enough mathematics!
But yes, contributions that are "obvious in hindsight" (axiomatizing Hilbert spaces, etc.) are also valuable.
That's probably fair, though I'd suspect there's a bit more depth and less breadth in Tarski or Kolmogorov.
“Most mathematicians know one method. For example, Norbert Wiener had mastered Fourier transforms. Some mathematicians have mastered two methods and might really impress someone who knows only one of them. John von Neumann had mastered three methods: 1) A facility for the symbolic manipulation of linear operators, 2) An intuitive feeling for the logical structure of any new mathematical theory; and 3) An intuitive feeling for the combinatorial superstructure of new theories.” - Ulam
I suppose in some sense, that does explain why others said his work wasn't as deep/penetrating as e.g. Einsteins. Most of his tricks were making crisp what he already knew, not in finding something new. Still, that doesn't mean he didn't have a deep understanding of the subject.
Makes me wonder if he would have been a good philosopher. Looking briefly at his opinions on QM interpretations (in a SEP article), they seem much more sensible than e.g. Wigner or Heisenberg. But that's maybe 1 bit of info.
Strange that things so apparently easy weren't developed until he came along, and that he did this so many times.
If Von Neumann had a drive to look for new fields where fundamental insights were possible, that's interesting, too.
Right.
While those who solve hard problems deserve fame, there is much to be said as well for those who discover relatively easy problems that people hadn't noticed yet were even problems.
For example, Francis Galton probably wasn't a Gauss-level genius, but he was extremely productive into old age in a variety of fields, such as statistics, that had, for some reason, tended to attract less talent than had, say, mathematical physics. For example, Galton came up with the correlation coefficient in his mid-60s and the concept of "the wisdom of crowds" (the average of a lot of guesses is more likely to be correct than a single guess) at age 85 in 1907, two years after Einstein's theory of special relativity. Einstein had a whole lot more brainpower than Galton in the 1900s, but Galton was still coming up with new ideas because he was attuned to asking and then trying to answer fairly easy questions that, for whatever reason, nobody else had taken on before.
Somewhat like Galton, Von Neumann tended to take on fairly new fields, harder ones than Galton of course, and come up with solid first steps rather than ultimate insights: e.g., the Von Neumann computing architecture wasn't a genius breakthrough, but it was a lucid description of a workable system that enabled the American computer industry to get up and running fast.
Similarly, almost simultaneously, Von Neumann launched game theory in the mid-1940s by publishing a book on this novel topic that, remarkably, became a New York Times bestseller during WWII. Soon, a whole bunch of smart folks were working on game theory, including applying it to nuclear war strategy to come up with less disastrous ideas than Von Neumann had personally come up with.
If you do not think von Neumann's work had particular depth I would suggest you read through his collected works. He had plenty of it, and while in pure mathematics he might not have reached the level of insight of someone like Grothendieck, he still had enough to put him in the top tier of mathematicians without doubt, especially when you consider he only spent about 15 years of his life on pure mathematics.
I can't say I understand why people think von Neumann wanted to kill millions either, his viewpoint was that before the USSR developed their own nuclear weapons the US should use theirs to strike the USSR military and disable it. He went to math conferences in Moscow and I am sure he had plenty of friends there, so I have never understood why some people want to make him out to be some genocidal mad man who wanted to kill people.
Soviet propaganda, I suppose -- obviously, only an evil madman would want to attack the worker's paradise under the leadership of wise and benevolent comrade Stalin.
Preemptively nuking the soviets strikes me as entirely rational for the time. Almost impossible to fairly judge this without being blinded by hindsight.
This was my thought. If I say on Tuesday "There's a 70% chance of rain on Wednesday", but then it doesn't rain, you wouldn't necessarily say "Well, guess you were wrong, idiot".
Similarly, if Von Neumann says "There's a 70% the soviets nuke us if we don't nuke them first", then looking at all the close calls we experienced, I'm not sure I'd say that was an unreasonable estimate. Maybe we just got lucky?
I mean Jesus was woke to the long term consequences on human flourishing over time of choosing to play zero, and negative, sum minimax games 2000 years ago
And look how that turned out for him.
Newton did have people tortured when he was in charge of the mint.
I think he holds the record for most forgers executed as Master of the Royal Mint, actually, thanks to his innovations in the design of coins
For what it's worth, the people who are most impressed with von Neumann's accomplishments seem to be rationalists rather than people in his field(s). The physicists I know -- and I've asked directly about von Neumann -- generally feel that Einstein deserves his reputation as the "best" physicist, and the mathematicians I know usually point to one of the greats like Euler or Gauss.
I think this is true of Ramanujan as well. Really appealing to people who like a good Ubermensch story, less so to those only judging their body of work. (Not to diminish either of them, of course -- even getting to the point where most experts have an opinion on your body of work is an achievement most people will never earn.)
I would like to think that number theorists' opinion of Ramanujan is fairly objective :). It largely agrees with Hardy's: (a) amazingly talented man, (b) the pity - who knows what could have been, (c) he influenced the field nevertheless (partly through Hardy and Littlewood - he had a hand in the development of the circle method, for instance). Of course some of what seemed mysterious to Hardy really came from Ramanujan's having taught himself, and partly rediscovered, the theory of modular forms, to a point well beyond where Hardy had got. That adds to (b): Ramanujan should really have met Hecke as well.
I think in any particular field he touched, Von Neumann is seen as a very significant early figure, but not the biggest figure. I think this is a really interesting category of person. (The only other one that comes to mind is Dana Scott, who proved some very important results in many different subfields of mathematical logic, despite not being as influential in any one of them as superstars within that particular subfield. I just checked his wikipedia page and saw that he has a similar status in certain areas of theoretical computer science as in mathematical logic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dana_Scott .)
I'll second this. Professional physicist here, and I would rate Von Neumann as important, but certainly not among the top ten most important physicists in the 20th century. Maybe top fifty. My impression (on which I am happy to be corrected) is that the same is true in pretty much all the fields he touched*. Of course, being `top fifty in the century' in half a dozen distinct fields is nothing to sneeze at! But it's very different to Einstein, who was brought up upthread, who was indisputably the #1 most important physicist of the 20th century, possibly ever.
* Possibly in CS he would be top ten? Although I would guess still clearly behind Turing and Shannon?
Von Neumann's real genius was in putting the computer into the public domain rather than letting Eckert & Mauchly patent it.
The book actually quotes Mandelbrot on this (from in chapter 8):
'Von Neumann, when I was there at Princeton, was under extreme pressure from mathematicians, who were despising him for no longer being a mathematician; by the physicists, who were despising him for never having been a real physicist; and by everybody for having brought to Princeton this collection of low-class individuals called "programmers".'
(The source given is this interview: https://youtu.be/U9kw6Reml6s?t=185 )
This may also contribute to the subsequent view of his accomplishments.
In one of Dyson's books (Turing's Cathedral?) Freeman Dyson is quoted on this too saying the faculty at the Institute for Advanced Studies was full of snobs who disliked having lower class people like engineers work there. Similarly some of von Neumann's friends at the end of this MAA documentary on him talk about him spreading his talents "too thin" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQp70uqsBV4
Some of the people who gave quotes about how impressive von Neumann was were physicists, great ones in fact, Bethe and Wigner for example, both of whom won Nobel Prizes. Of course they were talking about intelligence in general, not as physicists, von Neumann wasn't really a physicist in the sense he mathematized things, I believe Wolfgang Pauli had the quote where he told von Neumann he would be a great physicist if physics was about proofs. Nevertheless most professionals won't really give any strict ranking of who was the greatest and so on because it's hard to give an objective account of different physicists from different times. How would you compare Newton and Einstein for example?
Well...Einstein was the most important physicist of the 20th century, possibly ever. Is there a field in which the same is true of Von Neumann? My guess would be CS is the most likely candidate, although even there presumably Turing and Shannon would rank higher?
That said, quantity has a quality all of its own, and being a major player in half a dozen fields is pretty remarkable! But if it is indeed true that there is no one field where Von Neumann is clearly THE key figure, then I would say that having Einstein as the `face of genius' instead of Von Neumann seems appropriate.
Interesting, I'd specifically prefer a major contributor to several different fields over the single biggest contributor to one for the "face of genius". It feels fairer!
"Einstein was the most important physicist of the 20th century"
I think such statements are very much up to taste. Stripped of publicity, I could easily argue for Max Planck to be the most important physicist of the 20th century. Or Niels Bohr? Pauli? Dirac? Feynman?
For computer science, one can easily argue that the von Neumann architecture is the basis of every computer and thus he is the most important computer scientist. Or one can argue as easily for someone else.
I would also say that's it is a bit arbitrary what we call a "field". Von Neumann is THE key figure in game theory. Is that a field?
No, sorry, this is not debatable. Between his contributions to relativity (special and general), quantum mechanics (photoelectric effect, EPR), and statistical physics, Einstein is clearly #1. There is no plausible case whereby Planck or Bohr or Pauli or Dirac is as important as Einstein. As for Feynman, stripped of publicity it is doubtful if he is even top ten (in the 20th century).
I did say CS was probably the best case for Von Neumann to be the key figure, but even there I think Turing and Shannon are more influential? I would appreciate a perspective from a computer scientist though.
Game theory feels too narrow to be a field (more of a subfield), and even there, isn't John Nash more important than Von Neumann?
I am CS researcher. But as you may have guessed from my previous post, I have no strong opinion on whether von Neumann was more or less influential than Turing or Shannon. I think the question is too ill-defined.
I’ll take your word for it.
My instinctive response was colored by a sense that Von Neumann is vastly overhyped by internet rationalists, but my assessment of him is mainly based on his contributions to physics and it could be that just wasn’t his strongest suit.
Well, in computer science he *is* considered one of the founding fathers, that is not just internet hype. The von Neumann architecture is of course the one big thing that got his name. Every computer that has been built in the last 70 years uses the von Neumann architecture. But there are other things. Mergesort, one of the really fundamental algorithms, is by von Neumann.
If you force people to decide for a single name, then I would assume that the most frequent name would be Turing. But I do think that some would choose von Neumann, or Shannon. It also depends a lot on the background. People with electrical engineering background in CS might choose Shannon more often. And people with other backgrounds have other heroes.
I think you are badly underestimating Feynman, probably because you are overcompensating for his charisma and popularity. Feynman deserves the main credit for perturbative QFT, the foundation of particle physics. The path integral, in particular, is something almost no one else would have come up with. He also had many other important contributions: the beginnings of quantum gravity in terms of spin-2, the idea that became Fadeev-Poppov ghosts, the "beads on a stick" idea that eventually led to LiGO.
I'd say he certainly rates in the top five of the century, whereas Pauli and Planck do not.
No I don’t think I am underrating Feynman. I am aware of the contributions that you mention but I don’t think they amount to top five in the 20th century, or even top ten, unless you consider ‘physics’ synonymous with ‘theoretical high energy physics’, which I don’t. I agree Pauli and Planck don’t make the top ten either.
It also seems fair to note that Dirac (who does make my top 5) wrote down the path integral before Feynman, and Schwinger and Dyson were doing perturbative QFT before Feynman also.
Are your top 5 / top 10 basically from the Los Alamos crowd? Or are you thinking of people from elsewhere as well?
If I try to produce a list of top 20th century physicists, I end up with (in no particular order) Feynman, Einstein, Dirac, Bohr, Heisenberg, Fermi, Bethe, Schwinger, Oppenheimer, Dyson, Millikan(?), Planck, Pauli, and I think that's about it, but I'm not used to thinking about physics in terms of its "superheroes", and what I know about many of these is largely just what I remember from reading Gleick's bio of Feynman. By contrast, I don't follow who wins Nobel Prizes, and I'm probably prone to forget entire important subfields (I'm not counting string theory anyway, however), and I'm arguably going to lump some people into physics that you might not (e.g. astronomy, cosmology).
Von Neumann led the team that built the first general purpose stored program electronic computer. He was a key figure in CS. He created a something to study like like Watt did with the expansion driven steam engine. A lot of other people played critical roles in advancing the science, but VN & Watt created something that could drive those studies.
I'm not sure our world wouldn't be better had the U.S. nuked the Soviets when von Neumann proposed doing so.
No, but I'm not sure it _would_ be better either.
And faced with such utilitarian uncertainty I think it's reasonable to err on the side of not nuking anybody.
I'm not sure of that either – the Soviets were fucking terrible!
Destroying them might have prevented a LOT of misery and suffering (on net).
Most of the Soviet damage to Russia was already done by the 1950s. The US by a first strike would have done even more damage to the Russian people than the Soviets. On top of that, I think the extent of guilt and shame on the US would have left the US broken as well. No one wins a nuclear war.
I'm thinking of The Iron Curtain generally and, e.g.:
- The Warsaw Pact
- Stalin by himself
- Their support of the Chinese communists
- The Cold War
- Cuba
- The invasion of Czechoslovakia
- The invasion of Afghanistan
I think it's reasonable to also include a LOT, if not literally all, of the various (nasty) U.S. anti-communism 'efforts' around the world, e.g. Vietnam and Central America, in the list of terrible, awful tragedies that potentially could have been mostly averted had we nuked the Soviets when we had the chance.
Had we nuked the Soviets, North Korea would either never have happened, or we'd have been able to nuke the Chinese communists (or have credibly threatened to do so).
There is a WHOLE LOT of misery that seems, to me, to be directly attributable to the totalitarian ideology we DIDN'T destroy directly when we had a chance.
And, arguably, the U.S. did a _fantastic_ fucking job 'fixing' both Germany and Japan after WW2. If we'd nuked the Soviets first, before they developed nukes themselves, and then installed/setup something like we did in the other former Evil Empires, not only Russia itself, but much of the rest of the world, very well might be MUCH better off.
I think von Neumann very well might have expected a LOT of what eventually happened. He had a lot of up-close-and-personal experience of exactly how _bad_ communism and totalitarianism is in practice.
" Their support of the Chinese communists"
Morbid question: Is that about 50% of the death toll?
I've read estimated that Mao's great leap corpseward _by_ _itself_ killed between 15 million and 45 million people.
From 2001 to 2021, the US lead a war against the Taliban in Afghanistan using everything in the book except nukes. Air strikes. Sat intelligence. Gitmo. Occupation by ground forces for two decades. Drone strikes against gatherings of suspected terrorists and civilian bystanders. Infrastructure projects. Democracy. Training of local police and military forces.
We all know the outcome.
How confident are you that Communism could have been defeated just by nuking the USSR?
>"No one wins a nuclear war."
If you define it as an exchange of nuclear fire, agreed. If you include a war where only one side has & uses nukes, which a preemptive strike on the USSR would've been, then the US clearly won the only nuclear war to have occurred.
It is probably not a great idea to get a taste for it though.
Did he literally mean first strike? Or an American invasion backed by the threat of nuclear strikes if significant resistance was encountered?
We got through the Cold War, and might even get through the next 20 years without nuclear war. But if someone considers nuclear war to be one of the worst things ever, the way to prevent it is to have a hegemon enforcing a unilateral NNPT on the rest of the world.
If life exists on other planets, I'm sure this is the way it's played out on lots of them. It's kind of surprising given what we know of human history that the US had a city-destroying weapon and then . . . just let other people get it, too.
At the end of WW2, the Soviet Union had superior conventional forces in Europe, and while America might have won a long war it would have been far too costly. Perhaps he meant an ultimatum first, but he definitely meant to launch nukes before engaging in conventional warfare.
But if the point was to avoid being nuked and they never nuked us in reality, it seems unnecessary.
NOT 'stopping' the Soviets doesn't seem unnecessary. They caused maybe the most total amount of human misery ever.
Destroying the _other_ Evil Empires sure seems to have worked out great IMO.
>Destroying the _other_ Evil Empires sure seems to have worked out great IMO.
The ones which are demilitarized and occupied to this day, sure. Would America have been willing to Marshall Plan the nuked Soviets? Somehow I'm very much doubtful about that, and in the absence of it, I'd say that the total amount of misery in the world would only have been increased. But of course, almost nobody in the Definitely Non-Evil Empire would've given a shit, judging by how they steadily memory-hole unimportant de-evilified places like Iran or Libya.
They haven't nuked us YET. Putin probably has more nukes capable of reaching America than Khrushchev ever did.
It might be wise to bear that in mind.
Well, reading these comments one might get the impression that you are all but begging Putin to prove you (and von Neumann, retroactively) right. Be careful of what you wish for, I guess.
History isn't over yet.
In 1951, when the Soviets succeeded in their first nuclear test, the US had (per https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.2968/062004017 ) 640 nukes. In 1957, when Sputnik 1 was launched, the US had ten times as many, and the USSR had 10% of that.
It is very hard to cause a regime change by air power alone. The Soviet leadership did likely not feel very protective of their civilian population and would probably not have stepped down to save Moscow. Morale bombings do not work. (see https://acoup.blog/2020/07/17/fireside-friday-july-17th-2020/ ) Even if you could magically kill every USSR soldier without touching any civilians, occupying the USSR would still be a rather large undertaking.
Dropping a few 100 nukes on population centers with the aim to slow Soviet industrial development to delay their nuke production would likely have delayed it a bit, but would IMHO not have stopped it permanently. It would also have cast the US as the global villain, normalized the use of preemptive nuclear strikes and pushed about every country in the world to acquire nukes and band together against the US.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arms_race#/media/File:US_and_USSR_nuclear_stockpiles.svg
If one looks at the graphs, fighting WWIII early is obviously more advantageous for the US than fighting it later, but the actual outcome of not having to fight it at all is still better.
Well said.
Well, yes, but a lot of the argument is "how likely was the historical outcome of avoiding WW3 altogether"? The world came to the brink multiple times during the Cold War - is our timeline one that should have been predicted or one that got exceptionally lucky?
If you, in 1945, thought WW3 had a 50% chance of breaking out in the next few decades and knew that the earlier it was fought the better, would that have justified pre-emptive strike? what is the odds of war were 90%?
I don’t think he was wrong about nuclear war. In our timeline we’ve come to the brink of it at least three times (petrov, Cuban missile crisis, Able Archer), probably more that we don’t know about. And when he was proposing the first strike second strike capabilities weren’t even known of yet! We were damn lucky to not get a nuclear war in our timeline, from his position a first strike is pretty reasonable. Probably even higher expected utility, and I say that with the knowledge nuclear war didn’t happen!
Instituting a policy of building nukes gets a nuke was the right move in the late forties, if I got time traveled back there I’d tell them as much!
“ Instituting a policy of building nukes gets a nuke was the right move in the late forties”
Sounds plausible. Though I wonder about the capacities for verifying whether some country was instituting a policy of building nukes. Now that we’ve got all sorts of international atomic agencies, and spy satellites, and so on, verification is easy. But even now you sometimes get a North Korea that manages to sneak a nuke.
I don't know if it would have been possible for the United States to stop North Korea from building its nukes without using military force. (China might have been in a better position to do so...)
If you have the nukes and credibly threaten to use them, you can inspect the places you want by force.
It's a totally different world, worse in several ways. But it doesn't have the risk of nuclear war. I don't know how you weigh those things.
The book’s second chapter gets into von Neumann’s set theory contributions quite deeply. You might enjoy. His interests here would prove central to his work on computers, game theory etc.
The book’s second chapter gets into von Neumann’s set theory contributions quite deeply. You might enjoy. His interests here would prove central to his work on computers, game theory etc. It’s a theme I was really interested in. How did his earlier work shape his more practical work later on… I’ve spent some time on that.
> his naive game theory about nuclear war
That's easy for you to say now, because you know the Game Theory that von Neumann invented later.
Also, a first strike on the Soviet Union would *not* have killed millions. The whole point is that only the US had nuclear weapons. According to this [0] the casualties from Hiroshima and Nagasaki were about 200,000 people. I don't know which exact strategy you would use for preventing the Soviet Union from getting nuclear weapons but I think you could do it with about that number of casualties?
When you then consider the amount of misery and death that Soviet communism brought to the world, it's not entirely clear to me that von Neumann was wrong.
[0]: https://www.atomicarchive.com/resources/documents/med/med_chp10.html
A first strike totally would have killed millions, either directly or in the war it started. Even if you try for a precision strike on their nuclear infrastructure (probably impossible given the limitations of US intelligence in the 40s and 50s), they're just going to shrug and send their armies to roll over Western Europe. Any attack against the Soviets is going to mean all-out war, both conventional and nuclear. And that in turn means the first strike needs to hit the broader Soviet industrial base as hard as it can.
von Neumann was wrong on this, but only because it turned out to be possible to win WWIII without directly fighting the Soviets. If that hadn't been possible, he would absolutely have been right, simply because of how much worse a later war would have been.
Since the Soviets only had the capability to roll up to Berlin >because< the Allies gave them enormous amounts of stuff (both civilian and military), the idea that they would have been capable of going to the Atlantic in the late 40s without that help is... not realistic.
They probably became somewhat more capable after rebuilding, i.e. the 50s, but I'm still doubtful of a European war actually being successful for them.
Since they had a lot of help from spies (yes, the Rosenbergs were correctly convicted) to produce their own bombs, I suspect that von Neumann urging a strike >before< they could get their own production running was likely the optimum solution.
The other problem would have been that there really was no appetite within the other Allies to continue the war, but this time against an opponent that had just been allied with them until yesterday...
> Since the Soviets only had the capability to roll up to Berlin >because< the Allies gave them enormous amounts of stuff (both civilian and military), the idea that they would have been capable of going to the Atlantic in the late 40s without that help is... not realistic.
The idea that you can nuke a country with one of the largest militaries and industrial bases in the world, fail to annihilate that military and industrial base (since the nuclear capabilities of the US in the 1946-49 period were not capable of this), and not expect a whole fuck of a lot of your people to die in the ensuing war, is way, way more unrealistic than anything else.
I completely grant that the Soviets greatly benefited from American logistical help in WWII, and that the Red Army was never quite as formidable as it looked on paper. But that still leaves it with all the stuff that we did give them, and a large and experienced Army. Against a US military presence that has been cut to the bone, and European powers that are bankrupt and focused on rebuilding. It's hard to remember just how bad the military situation was in the late 40s, but there's every chance that they could have gotten a lot further than you think.
And in any case, my point was more that you couldn't ignore the conventional aspects and just destroy the Soviet nuclear program.
Von Neumann was aware the Soviets had spies in the Manhattan Project before that became public knowledge.
But did VN know who the Soviet spies were?
Von Neumann and Soviet spy Klaus Fuchs applied together for a patent on a type of H bomb in April 1946:
http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2013/08/23/the-spy-the-human-computer-and-the-h-bomb/#:~:text=One%20of%20the%20most%20enigmatic,and%20dates%20from%20April%201946.
Julius Rosenberg did spy, and Ethel was at least aware of it; that does not mean that the case against them was procedurally or materially correct (it wasn't). But that's a side issue that won't get resolved here.
People in this thread seem to be forgetting that the entire case of the Nuremberg Trials was based mainly on the proposition that aggressive warfare was illegal. Aggressive nuclear warfare is mass murder on top of it. Surely it is a good thing if there wasn't enough appetite for it.
Well, it wouldn't be "aggressive warfare" since it would be a response to Soviet aggression and had a defensive purpose. Soviets invaded Finland and Poland pre-war and occupied/controlled many other countries after. The same casus belli existed against the Soviets as there was with Germany.
Using that argument, you can justify aggressive warfare against just about every country - the U.S. most certainly included. It's a good thing international law is not determined by the comments section. Neither is foreign policy; one may sometimes think it could not get worse, but, well, apparently it could.
"his naive game theory about nuclear war"
Given how Communism blighted the economic development of eastern & central Europe for 45 years (Hungary was on a level with Austria, diverged during Communism, is now converging strongly) and also slowed China's growth, *if* a nuclear war could have toppled the Soviets in the early 1950's (a very big if), it could easily have been a net-positive for human flourishing compared to our timeline, and definitely would have been a net-positive compared to the timelines where there were massive nuclear exchanges in the 1970's/1980's and/or where Communism won/was still around in Russia*. Truman+Eisenhower took a very large gamble that could well have been negative in expected value terms, based on the timeline that we've seen, but it came out positively for us.
*Even in our timeline, we're not done with Communism yet, as the Uyghurs and Tibetans will tell you.
There's SO many things that probably would have never happened or gone much better had we nuked the Soviets when we could have, e.g. basically all of the U.S.'s own (generally terrible) anti-communism 'efforts'.
I don't think Von Neumann ordinals are a good way to think about what ordinals are. Fundamentally, ordinals are order types of well-ordered sets. Von Neumann ordinals are a convenient representation for when you need to be able to have them as actual objects in your theory, and are nice for how they formalize the "an ordinal is the set of all smaller ordinals" way of thinking, but honestly, I think for most purposes it's perfectly fine for ordinals (and cardinals!) to be metatheoretical. Fundamentally an ordinal is an order type, not any particular representation of that order type.
A podcast interview of the author, Ananyo Bhattacharya by Razib Khan:
https://unsupervisedlearning.libsyn.com/ananyo-bhattacharya-the-life-of-john-von-neumann
A more straightforward answer to "why Hungary" is that the Hungarian Jews were integrating into mainstream society, whereas Eastern Jews were, like their Orthodox Jewish descendants in NYC today, holding themselves aloft from mainstream society, which included goyish academic institutions.(Though antisemitism certainly played some role in this also.) This can be seen in linguistic differences (the Hungarian Jews spoke Hungarian, while most Polish Jews spoke Yiddish) and in the fact that the Hungarian Jewish population declined during the interwar period while the Polish Jewish population increased.
This dazzlingly obvious in retrospect, and yet I've never heard it before. Admittedly, Jewish studies are not my forte, but if Scott mentioned this in his various treatments of the subject I do not recall. Is this a well-known observation in other circles?
Of course there were plenty of assimilated people in Warsaw or Czernowitz (or, almost by definition, St Petersburg or Moscow). Still - if Budapest was the place to go to assimate, then obviously migration to Budapest would have had a self-selection effect.
But why Budapest rather than Vienna?
Both had about 200,000 Jews in the early 20th century. Vienna had Wolfgang Pauli and Lise Meitner, so it's not like it was nothing. I have a few guesses here. First of all, Austria, like Germany, was overall more urban and developed than Hungary, so there was more selection in who came to Budapest than in who came to Vienna. Austrian Jews might have been spread out over the cities, but in Budapest you had a concentration of high IQ people, and that gave you the highest IQ population with the biggest right tail. Second, Budapest seemed to have a good education system.
Plenty of Russian Jews were integrating into the mainstream society in the last decades of XIX and around the turn of XX century. Their push into goyish academic institutions was so strong that it produced a reaction on the part of the Russian government, establishing quotas and limiting access to education to the children of lower social classes (e.g. https://ru.wikisource.org/wiki/%D0%9E_%D1%81%D0%BE%D0%BA%D1%80%D0%B0%D1%89%D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0%B8_%D0%B3%D0%B8%D0%BC%D0%BD%D0%B0%D0%B7%D0%B8%D1%87%D0%B5%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%B3%D0%BE_%D0%BE%D0%B1%D1%80%D0%B0%D0%B7%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%B0%D0%BD%D0%B8%D1%8F). Zeev Jabotinsky mentions this a lot in his essays; according to contemporary reports, he was an enthusiastic integrator himself until the Chișinău pogrom, loved Russian literature etc. The difference was that the total Jewish population of the Pale of Settlement was so much larger than Hungarian or German, and the relatively primitive Russian economy and society had no capacity to absorb them. So they stayed poor and Jewish and emigrated to NYC in large numbers.
That piece, "Can We Survive Technology?" is really interesting. It definitely doesn't anticipate the changes of the 1970s, that made both atomic and chemical energy stop their growth before reaching the "unmetered" abundance he makes some reference to. And while the discussions of climate are definitely interesting and appropriately uncertain, they also seem like a moment in time, when people like Asimov and Herbert were still writing science fiction that assumed a Laplacian demon could predict the future with only more sophisticated observation and calculation, as opposed to the chaos and complexity ideas that became big in the 1970s, revealing that even tiny imprecisions in observation make impossible the idea of large-scale prediction of certain systems far into the future. It's also wild to see the discussion of the future of computing without using that word (instead using the phrase "automatic control").
The point about chaos lands flat when you remember one of von Neumann's most famous quotes is "All processes that are stable we shall plan. All processes that are unstable we shall compete in (for now)."
Seems like the simplest factor in von Neumann's childhood that could be replicated at home is involving young children with parents' work rather than elementary school. A naturally smart kid won't miss out on anything they can't catch up, and will get valuable exposure to their parents and their jobs, including complex words and concepts. This is suddenly much more possible due to remote work - a stay at home laptop professional who explains her job out loud to her kid as she does it may be more valuable than 1st grade.
Of course they'd need separate socialization.
+10 to this.
Everyone I know who is capable of holding an engaging cross-disciplinary conversation grew up talking shop at the dinner table. (anecdata, yes, but I think this pattern is likely to hold under rigorous study).
I would also not necessarily say that all of the people I know who grew up learning from their parents' work were high IQ! This probably has massive benefits for children of all intelligences. The key here is the explanation--parents have to be willing to indulge curiosity and answer questions as they describe what they do.
Interestingly, at least up to the end of the last century, Hungary was still the world's leading center for abstract mathematics. American graduate students were sent there to study. I don't know if this has changed, but whatever the situation might be, it is bizarre that this tiny nation could be the world leader in any aspect of intellectual inquiry. Also, we should note, in the context of this review, that there are almost no Jews left in Hungary, so "being a Hungarian Jew" is not the explanation for this oddly ultra-high performance of Hungarians. (Oh, and Hungary is a poor country where middle-class dads often work 80 or more hours a week, so it probably is not explained by a lot of cultivation of intellectual life in the family.)
There are not that many Jews left in Hungary, but some of the ones that are are quite notable (e.g. Judit Polgar, or the Erd\H{o}s crowd's Vera T Sos, who is now 91).
There are certainly cultural factors as well. I mean, if you look at the sciences, in the last 30 years the 200 million White Americans have won I think 1 Fields Medals, while the UK and France each with 1/3 as many white people have won a bunch more medals. Jews in France and Russia have outperformed Jews in the US in math and science. Israel is a young nation and was underdeveloped for a while, but I think they are probably outperforming US Jews nowadays, at least among secular Ashkenazi. Again this is probably <100% environmental; the higher achieving and more urban demographics in the Old World, Jew and gentile, were probably more likely to stay in the Old World, but also >0% environmental.
Native-born Americans really are not interested in studying science. The education system is likely a lot of the problem, yes.
One hypothesis about environmental reasons for this: a more generous welfare state in Europe provides more economic security, which in turn makes it easier (both practically and psychologically) for more people to pursue intellectually fulfilling pursuits that don't earn a lot of money.
Perhaps, but top scientists are coming from good families anyway, and America was better about cultivating its own talent in the Sputnik period, so I’m skeptical.
A lot of it might be that there are lucrative career options available to Americans good at science and math - finance, the tech industry, and even medicine - that you don’t have in much of Europe. Doctors are paid less and you don’t have quant and software jobs like America.
I think the post-Sputnik US has done a bad job cultivating talent, and there isn’t a strong incentive to since it’s cheaper to just hire people off H1Bs.
I do think you’re into something, the US being more capitalist pushes more of its best minds into making money, which may well be a bad thing. I say this as someone who is generally pro-market. People like Thiel and Eric Weinstein say we should pay scientists more (which I as a pro-market scientist obviously like).
I’m just not sure the welfare state is the mechanism.
A better explanation is that post-1965 US made immigration from all over the world much easier. America started to tap into talent from places like China, India, Iran, Vietnam and so on to a much greater extent.
As the access to the world's talent pool vastly increased, there was less need to do much yourself as the US never had problems attracting the best and the brightest (at least up to now).
Right, the economic incentive for developing scientific talent in the US is not as strong because of all the high-skill immigration.
Right, because it is the risk averse that are the well spring of innovation and discovery.
We aren’t taking entrepreneurs but pure mathematicians - who need a stable income.
Right, because innovative thinking and passionate study comes from risk averse mindsets.
It doesnt come from people worried about starving.
"Native-born Americans really are not interested in studying science. The education system is likely a lot of the problem, yes."
(Native born) Americans have been less interested in pure science than Europeans for pretty much the entire time America has existed.
The US has had great practical inventors:
*) Eli Whitney
*) Morse (telegraph)
*) Bell (telephone)
*) Edison
*) Wright Brothers
*) Ford
But historically the science was mostly done in Europe.
I think this is as much (or more) a cultural value issue than an education system. Americans have been focused on practical over theoretcial for a long time. Think ancient Rome vs Greece for an analogy.
The US didn't have much of an educational establishment until the late 19th century when all sorts of universities were founded. The Land Grant act in the 1860s got the ball rolling. Meanwhile, the Europeans had developed a university system in the middle ages, and it was quite mature and economically effective by the 18th century. The US still has an anti-intellectual bias. There's a long standing contempt for "book learning" embedded in US culture.
Hungary has 50,000+ Jews and has the 12th largest Jewish population in the world
> Von Neumann loved driving very much but had never passed a test. At [his wife] Mariette’s suggestion, he bribed a driving examiner. This did nothing to improve his driving.
At long last answering the question of whether the inventor of game theory was CDT or EDT.
…He did it to get a license, not to improve his skill?
Laughed out loud. Underrated comment
Can someone explain the joke here?
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GfHdNfqxe3cSCfpHL/the-absent-minded-driver
That discusses UDT/TDT but not "CDT" or "EDT". What do C & E stand for?
This post (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PcfHSSAMNFMgdqFyB/can-you-control-the-past) has a nice summary:
> Many philosophers, and many parts of common sense, favor causal decision theory (CDT), on which, roughly, you should pick the action that causes the best outcomes in expectation. I
> The most famous alternative is evidential decision theory (EDT), on which, roughly, you should choose the action you would be happiest to learn you had chosen.
Nice! I liked this one. It's interesting to me to see that von Neumann's view of technology is very similar to mine -- it's likely to destroy us in one way or another, but there's no alternative to proceeding with it. We just have to hope we can keep up with the problems it causes.
But we do have examples of societies that explicitly avoid advancing technology, and even those societies that don't do that still choose which technologies to prioritise. I am not totally convinced by his helplessness here.
I don't know, the way you describe him- getting into car crashes because he was trying to read while driving, and telling weird history-based wordplay jokes at parties- sounds *painfully* nerdy to me. He also hated sports and exercise, and never wore anything besides a suit and tie.
A funny (maybe related?) story I heard about him was that, despite inventing modern game theory, he was terrible at poker. So at least there was one semi-intellectual activity he was bad at.
That joke didn't strike me as particularly nerdy. It concerned very recent history that he and his listeners remembered (von Neumann's father was ennobled by one of the kaisers mentioned in the joke), and doesn't really involve wordplay; the punchline is that the police hypocritically believe the same opinion that they're punishing.
Not exercising and always wearing a suit and tie was very normal back then.
I did not like your concluding sentence: "This sounds suspiciously like the smartest man in the world admitting he’s not sure what to do." On the contrary, I found his last sentence to be the smartest advice and the most common-sensical advice one could give or get: "To ask in advance for a complete recipe would be unreasonable. We can specify only the human qualities required:
patience, flexibility, intelligence." That's the smart way to face the future. All the experience gained over the years guiding you to make an intelligent and flexible decision.
+1
I read that as "even he can't come up with a genius instant solution, which means the problem is worth worrying about", not "he doesn't know what to do, so I guess he's fallible after all" as I think you have.
I read this as Scott saying "the smartest man in history doesn't know what to do, we might just be boned"
Also a strong argument for the "let's try cloning 1,000 Von Neumanns" approach
>In the late 1940s, America hadn’t thought through nuclear second strike doctrine. There was no “keep some nuclear bombs ready for revenge if an enemy first-strikes you”. Whoever launched a nuclear first strike would just win totally with no downside.
This was a technical limitation, not some flaw in their strategic thought. In the late 40s in particular, second strike really wasn't possible, because the bombs took too much care and feeding. Through the early 50s, the time between when a nuclear attack was ordered and when it could be carried out was generally measured in weeks, and the infrastructure for readying said attack would obviously be at the top of the target list. That said, there weren't enough bombs to actually destroy the Soviet Union, because nuclear weapons, particularly the early ones, aren't that destructive.
But it's also worth pointing out the enormous advantage the US had in nuclear weapons in the late 50s. In 1955, it's 2400 vs 200, in 1960 18000 vs 1600. And given the limitations of Soviet delivery systems, even in the later case there would be fairly minimal damage to the US, although Europe would suffer pretty badly. If you really believe the Soviets are an existential threat, and you have that kind of edge, it makes a lot of sense to push for a strike now, before they can redress that balance. (Eisenhower thought that the US would win by playing the long game, and he was right, which is why we never implemented this strategy.)
Also, in the 1940s, atomic bombs weren't seen as all that much more deadly than the thousand plane raids that were commonplace late in the war. One such raid killed 200,000 in Tokyo shortly before the atomic bombs ended the war with Japan. Having grown up with the hydrogen bomb and cold war, I was surprised when reading Vannevar Bush's "Modern Arms and Free Men" in which he downplayed the dangers of an atomic attack. I don't think his analysis was singular. Attitudes changed in the 1950s with the hydrogen bomb and a better understanding of the effects of radiation.
Against an enemy with no extant air force, like late-war Japan, conventional bombing was much more deadly, yes. But in a WW3 against the Soviets, one has to assume a competent air defence that can intercept the majority of bombers, so the difference between only needing to get one plane through to be a credible threat rather than needing to get hundreds through is very significant
That sounds like the game theory Von Neumann would have come up with. (That's a compliment.)
Loved the review. I read 3/4th of this book, making notes. Then I misplaced the notebook in which I was making notes, and can't seem to continue!
Consider reading "A parent's guide to alternatives in education". It is an old book I read 18 years ago. Excellent summary of different types of schooling philosophies. There are many choices for keeping the early years pretty great.
If you are looking for a book to review on early childhood education I would recommend “Give Your Child a Superior Mind” by Siegfried Engelmann. Engelmann is the father of direct instruction.
I've gone down something of a rabbit hole looking into this comment. The book's been out of print for quite some time and only a few (very expensive!) copies appear to be for sale online. I can't find a scan or an ebook in any of the usual places.
The author himself has posted the first section of the book (which is an interesting read in itself) on his website:
https://www.zigsite.com/nonDI/prologue_to_give_your_child_a_superior_mind.html
He also explains why only the prologue is availble:
" I didn’t want to [put the rest of the book online] because a large part of the book provides instructional sequences for reading and math. We have better ways to teach these subjects now than we did back in 1966, so I resisted Jerry’s suggestion."
However, it's not particularly clear from his site what those 'better ways' actually are - or rather, to find instruction in as clear a format as the book itself promises. The book's table of contents can be found here:
http://postapocalyptichomeschool.blogspot.com/2012/04/englemanns-give-your-child-superior.html
And is very enticing. I am now very tempted to save up and buy one of the super-expensive US copies of the book. If anyone is able to point to a scan or other copy of the book, or to expand on what more modern equivalent resources might be, I'd be very grateful. Perhaps a point to raise in the next open thread...
Not sure if this will ping you but I finally got around to scanning the book "Give your child a Superior Mind'! Scan of the book is at this Drive link:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1bfZCwBUBlu4_lOQ_VYo_BTnoh2JW16Za/view?usp=sharing
Please let me know if that doesn't work.
I read the first bit of this book and it's been really helpful. I've got no teaching/pedagogy experience and the way they lay out the lessons was helpful and is something I'm starting to do with my 20 month old.
One part of getting the little one to do complete responses was something we implement and changed from what we were doing before. Before we were happy if we had the exchange like this:
LO: Apple, give
Parent: Can you say 'please'?
LO: Please
Parent: Okay, here is the apple.
Instead, now we prompt them to do the full response eg:
LO: Apple, give
Parent: Can you say 'Apple, give, please'?
LO: Apple, give, please
Parent: Well done! Here is the apple.
Anecdotally little one is now better as saying 'please' for requests.
I appreciate as well the focus on just keeping your little person happy for the first 18 or so months - it was nice to not feel like I've missed the boat! Also some just fun notes on clarity:
Lesson - focus on clearly explaining the concept without analogy
"Do not indicate that 'A is for apple'. A is not for apple and it should never be presented in this manner because the relationship is obvious only to those who know how to read and can see that the first letter in the word apple is an A."
Lot's more like this, the lessons are great. The intro I was a bit more skeptical off (they do a long bit on great people that received direct instruction which just feels like a big survivorship bias problem) but the overall vibe and flow I really liked.
I've just put an order in at WOB where they apparently had 1 used copy left for an okay price ($25 AUD). No confirmation if it's shipped yet, estimated arrival time is up to 3 weeks! If I do get it I'll scan it and send you a link (and maybe upload it somewhere else to spread the love around!).
Please do, do, do keep pushing from your end though, I have a bad track record of following things through...
#Edit: also there's every chance that 1 available copy isn't actually available :-S
Thank you, that's very kind. I've been making some reasonable progress finding other resources in the same space. With a bit of luck I'll have time to write up a summary & share back here or in the next Open Thread.
Not sure if this will ping you but I finally got around to this! Scan of the book is at this Drive link:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1bfZCwBUBlu4_lOQ_VYo_BTnoh2JW16Za/view?usp=sharing
Please let me know if that doesn't work.
I read the first bit of this book and it's been really helpful. I've got no teaching/pedagogy experience and the way they lay out the lessons was helpful and is something I'm starting to do with my 20 month old.
One part of getting the little one to do complete responses was a interesting lesson and something we implemented and changed from what we were doing before. Before my partner and I were happy if we had the exchange like this:
LO: Apple, give
Parent: Can you say 'please'?
LO: Please
Parent: Okay, here is the apple.
Instead, now we prompt them to do the full response eg:
LO: Apple, give
Parent: Can you say 'Apple, give, please'?
LO: Apple, give, please
Parent: Well done! Here is the apple.
Anecdotally little one is now better as saying 'please' for requests.
I appreciate as well the focus on just keeping your little person happy for the first 18 or so months - it was nice to not feel like I've missed the boat! Also some just fun notes on clarity:
Lesson - focus on clearly explaining the concept without analogy
"Do not indiciate that 'A is for apple'. A is not for apple and it should never be presented in this manner because the relationship is obvious only to those who know how to read and can see that the first letter in the word apple is an A."
Lot's more like this, the lessons are great. The intro I was a bit more skeptical off (they do a long bit on great people that received direct instruction which just feels like a big survivorship bias problem) but the overall vibe and flow I really liked.
> This sounds suspiciously like the smartest man in the world admitting he’s not sure what to do.
I was going to say it sounded more like watching the trees go by at 60 miles per hour and hoping one of them doesn't step in your path.
Superior tweet
If it is still possible to get his DNA and to get the mitochondria DNA and such from his living decedents...should we clone him? If we do, would we tell him who 'he was'? I'd think not so they can be free to become new people, maybe tell them when they're older.
I'd love to see a sci-fi or real science special school where we raise batches of historical geniuses to recreate that intellectual melting pot to some degree. As long as it was done humanely, it seems like something worth trying...who the heck else would we bother cloning?
I think some of the first cabs off the rank for historical cloning or at least a project to preserve the DNA of our best and brightest would be an interesting project. Is there a DNA collection for all the geniuses of our recent past? Is the window to save this information fast closing as their DNA degrades?
For fun part:
Instead it'll probably be useless wealthy egotists like Gates trying to transplant his mind into a cloned younger body like in many popular sci-fi series.
I've not heard of this concept before in terms of a 'seed banks' or perhaps 'mind reserves' for humanity's best minds. Someone might want to get onto that before our past greats are lost forever.
Instead money is 'wasted', in my view, on silly egotistical or purely artistic projects like a giant atomic clock buried in a mountain which we can only hope when the mana membrane breaks around earth in the future and when our primitive post collapse future discover it - they find out is has become some kind of important magical artefact at the Legendary rank - all after the ancient clock takes on impressive powers to those who are able to reach it near the core of the world's most dangerous fantasy monster dungeon below level 42.
Clone High was a thing you know.
Attempts to create genius sperm banks have been tried in the past, though they faced problems with both supply and demand.
As for direct cloning, IIUC it's doable to get DNA from someone's bones if they're 'merely' decades or centuries old; turning a full gene sequence into a viable embryo is still an immense challenge, though
These investigations into the martians never consider the overall context of late Austro-Hungarian society and culture. There was an equal amount of innovation in the arts (Klimt and Vienna secession, art nouveau, Schoenberg and music, etc.) The simple and obvious answer is that the martians were simply the mathematical achievers of the day, not that their ancestry or religion or whatever else was particularly special.
Otherwise, I read this book myself and didn’t care much for it. It focuses too much on the technical details and not enough on the man himself. If I wanted to read Wikipedia-quality explanations of scientific principles, I’d read Wikipedia.
Einstein had a bunch of descendants who were smart but not very smart.
It was Marie Curie, a Nobel Prize winner, whose daughter won a Nobel Prize, if you are looking for an example. There was also a high school chemistry teacher in the Bronx who had two girls in his classes, Yalow and Elion, both win Nobel Prizes, so we have examples for both nature and nurture.
If there were no nurture, just nature, how many times would we expect two Nobel winners to share a high school class? Birthday paradox says its doesn't take that many.
Turing's Cathedral gave a pretty good portrait of Von Neumann and his wife Klara who was one of the first programmers and led a pretty interesting life herself. It may not provide the level of detail you might desire and it followed a number of other characters from the era with a touching portrait of Stanislaw Ulam. I knew people who had met Von Neumann, and they said he was always the life of the party, a live fast-die young type. He spent World War II cranked on speed racing around the country from consulting gig to consulting gig.
thanks, I'll look into that
Out of curiosity, was the innovation in the arts also disproportionately Jewish? Not Jewish at all? Your conclusion relies upon the artists not being Jewish but your comment doesn't specify either way?
No, most of the bigger arts movements were society-wide. Jews seem to have been represented at roughly their % of the population.
Something which jumps out to me about von Neumann’s early years and later life is the confidence. At those dinners with his father, presenting his day’s experiences, I feel zero shame from the father and quite a bit of honest interest in and enjoyment of other people, children and life in general. I can think of “dinnertime educational scenarios” with much more punishment and much less zest, and those might have been counterproductive.
The sociopathic streak feels more like adrenaline to me. Physical and mental adrenaline.
One important question is if Max von Neumann was trying to create genius kids. I think he may have been trying to nourish and support even better than genius - a trajectory of up more than a reaching of a level. There is so much love there for the life of the mind but not at the expense of the body, art, jokes, speed and problem-solving. If one of his kids said something wrong I bet he smiled and answered with a question.
I’m also hoping that there will eventually be a bunch of little Scotts running around and although I hope they are well shielded from fame, it will be interesting to wonder what they’ll be like. An oppositional one who discovers that the best way to make dad mad is to be illogical? Someone inwardly occupied and not achievement-driven? A historian? A dance prodigy? Someone who introduces their entire boarding school to the finer points of mail-order drugs? One just doesn’t know who one will get! Growing up in a rationalist group house might be a good approximation of those Budapest salons though!
Scott says his talent for writing was just there-- appeared early with no special cultivation.
This was a great review! If you enjoyed it, you may enjoy my interview of the author on my podcast: https://youtu.be/faZI6OBOopE
"You might expect someone who singlehandedly invented several fields of math to be at least a little aspie, but von Neumann defies the stereotypes. He loved parties, beautiful women, and fast cars. Especially the fast cars. According to Bhattacharya:"
[Proceeds to excerpt a passage which describes him driving like a stereotypical absent-minded professor, stimming and singing the while]
Also, while I've never cared much for cars beyond an aesthetic level, I know a fair few people who are palpably on the spectrum and are utterly obsessed with automobiles and their workings, so I don't think von Neumann's interest in them is terribly surprising
I don't think there's anything to suggest von Neumann was particularly obsessed with cars or their internal workings, just that he enjoyed driving them.
Right, but my point was that his enjoying cars was not the defiance of stereotypes that Scott thought it was
Oh I must have misread you then, in that case I totally agree with you.
Correction: Wikipedia would seem to indicate that von Neumann was baptized in 1930, before he married his first wife. It is correct that he otherwise did not seem to show any religious inclinations before he invited a priest for consultation and to perform the last rites on his deathbed.
A lot of Jews converted. Look at Fritz Haber. It didn't help all that much with the antisemites. It never does. Look at what happened to the conversos and the Spanish Inquisition.
In Heim's biography of von Neumann and Wiener it quotes Oskar Morgenstern who says von Neumann was agnostic his entire life. Ulam's "Adventures of a Mathematician" says a similar thing.
As a parent of five, I found the focus on how-to-make-my-child-a-genius a bit funny. When you don't already have children there are just vague, but unlimited opportunities lying ahead. Reality comes only later. But even if reality is messier than anticipation it is also more interesting. The world would be very dull indeed if everyone got the children they wished for.
Yeah, it's always funny to watch non-parents agonise about what specific sequence of steps will push their child into greatness.
Please elaborate
Right, but then, even if we get in the adjacent-to-annoying-beliefs-in-ethnic-supremacy alley, there's an obvious time-bound effect that we have to consider, and that I haven't seen discussed, either here or in Scott's earlier post: intermarriage between Jews and Gentiles has been real possibility for 200 or 250 years, yet it was a route only a tiny percentage took until WWI or so - in the US, in fact, it was a relatively small minority until a generation and a half ago, if I am not mistaken. At the same time, it was common among the bright. (Even formal conversion to Christianity was relatively common among them - a rarity otherwise.)
If there is a genetic cow here, it is long out of the barn (for cultural reasons, one might say).
(The comment I was replying to seems to have disappeared.)
Intermarriage wasn't much of an option until the early 19th century when European nations started emancipating the Jews, so 200 years or so is correct, but European Jews were still pretty much genetically isolated.
My first thought was that the book title must be a play on Burt Reynolds...The Man From Jupiter. Since von Neumann is a Martian and all. What's the deal with highly skilled extraterrestrial men?
I find it interesting that my cultural and educational upbringing was stuffed full of references to Newton, Einstein, Galileo, etc. - but von Neumann was never brought up at all. He's a figure I only learned existed once I'd already reached adulthood. Not even name-dropped in math classes. I wonder why not. Poor role model for children? A grudge about nuke-Russia hawkery?
I had heard of him, as a cautionary tale.
We're more likely to learn about a person that did one very important thing than a person that did many medium important things.
Great review, I again thought this was a reader submitted one until you mentioned your previous analysis of The Martians. Also,
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This is what a book review should be like!
I'm still working my way through the review, but I had to jump in to comment on this:
"it is unclear how much attention John ever paid in school. His brother writes about 'frequent complaints of his high school teachers to the effect that when he was asked what the assignment was for today, he did not know; but he then participated in discussions with full competence and knowledge of the subject.'"
That's why I'm skeptical of people who claim to have photographic memory. They often forget to remember things that would be very inconvenient to remember. Of course, that doesn't prove anything, either about Von Neumann or about photographic memory. I can think of a lot of reasons why someone with exceptional recall might sometimes not remember something, or pretend not to. And if the teacher(s) didn't write down the assignment, then maybe we're dealing with "phonographic" memory.
Edited to add: To be clear, I'm talking about popular notions of photographic memory, where someone supposedly sees something for one second and then recalls it with perfect detail. I do believe some people have better recall than others, and some recall is based on something we might call "photographic." It's just that so many people who I know who claim to have it just....don't inspire confidence, and their claims seem mostly self-serving. I should probably get over it.
I can't recall the exact book and I'm too lazy to find it but I remember reading that von Neumann also didn't remember faces too well either, his eidetic memory seemed to work only on symbols, and only when he actually wanted to remember them. This would fit in well with how none of his mathematical work was particularly visual. Bochner's National Academy of Sciences memoir notes that in fields where visualization is very useful, differential geometry, topology, etc von Neumann had no affinity with that kind of thinking.
Funnily enough someone else in this comment section noted it! (although for names not faces) From Life's obituary: https://qualiacomputing.com/2018/06/21/john-von-neumann/
Again, a précis rather than a review. But interesting enough that I have ordered the book!
"after a lifetime of culturally-Jewish atheism, he wished to be baptized" - I think von Neumann was baptized in 1930 before his first marriage. I do acknowledge that plenty of baptized Jews went on to a life of culturally-Jewish atheism. At any rate, I believe that on his deathbed he asked for the last rites to be administered. Something like Pascal's wager.
The Jewish Atheist's Creed: There is only one god, even if he doesn't exist.
Yes, this is a famous story about Spinoza. The story goes that Spinoza decided to send his son to the general school, which was of course Christian, rather than the Jewish day school. One afternoon the boy remarks, "Today in school we learned about the Trinity". Spinoza gently explains to his son, "That's all mistaken, the God we don't believe in is one and indivisible and incorporeal."
Two thoughts:
* With respect to how significant genetics is as a factor, what of the Martians' children and siblings? Without looking it up, I expect they did decently well for themselves... but offhand, I can't think of two famous geniuses with the same last name. (Other than Pierre and Marie Curie, which is a false positive.)
* Probably I'm overly attuned to the signs given I'm diagnosed with it myself, but many of the things mentioned here are suggestive not of autism spectrum, but ADHD: thrill-seeking, being bad at driving (whether 'inherently' or due to being unable to do just one thing at a time!), the need for constant stimulation (the singing and steering wheel thing, the loud German music thing), the preference for chaotic environments, making contributions in several different fields instead of committing to just one, ...
On the first point, Scott has written on great families before: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/secrets-of-the-great-families
Scattered quotes: "How do these families keep producing such talent, generation after generation? ... The other obvious answer is “genetics!” I think this one is right, but there are some mysteries here that make it less of a slam dunk. First, don’t genetics dilute quickly? ... The answer to the first question is really impressive assortative mating and having vast litters of children."
In other words, reversion to the mean implies that even in families where one person is a genius several standard deviations beyond normal intelligence, the rest are more likely just one or two standard deviations away from the mode. You can't really escape this, but if you have lots of smart people get together and have lots of kids you'll get lucky a few times. There is also an obivous social-environmental factor here, in that many of the geniuses in these families probably had hidden genius relatives who didn't have the ambition or circumstances to make it big.
On the second point, people mentioned the singing as an example of autistic stimming, but ADHD would make some sense (though Scott has also written on how ADHD is a fuzzy spectrum type disorder). To me the intuitive explanation is just that, like how it was on his deathbed, Von Neumann loved to think and push his brain, and that led him to engage with multiple things at a time.
Thanks. Not sure if I've read that post before, probably I just skimmed it (which I just did again).
> To me the intuitive explanation is just that, like how it was on his deathbed, Von Neumann loved to think and push his brain, and that led him to engage with multiple things at a time.
Dunno if you meant this as a competing or complementary explanation, but the two definitely aren't at odds. Like - walking through a peaceful, tranquil area, my internal state is rarely as peaceful and tranquil as my surroundings, because my mind is constantly going on around whatever idea, problem, or question it finds interesting or exciting lately. Whether or not it was for Von Neumann, this -can- be yet another form of stimulation-seeking.
And yeah, "it's a fuzzy spectrum/cluster kind of thing and maybe he was somewhere in the area" was what I had in mind as well.
Bhattacharya's book has a short section about how one of von Neumann's wives thought he had something like OCD, he had to flick drawers and light switches several times before he was happy.
Try Irene Curie.
Alas the citation for "Von Neumann Corner" leads nowhere (or rather to a vague reference to personal papers doubtless somewhere in the trackless caverns of Firestone Library) so I can't tell which corner it is. But I idly wonder if it might be the same intersection immortalized in the first chapter of Aho, Hopcroft, and Ullman's _Data Structures and Algorithms_.
I don't think that was the official street name, just a nick name that everyone used because he crashed often on it. If you wanted to research further you might look at von Neumann's house documents which you can find on the IAS systems: https://albert.ias.edu/
> My wife and I are trying to conceive
Good luck!!
Minor thing: If I have it right, von Neumann was baptised in 1930 in order to marry in the Church. By all accounts his conversion THEN was perfunctory.
However, on his deathbed he asked for Extreme Unction, (aka the Anointing of the Sick) and had a priest hear his confession and administer viaticum (the Eucharist). Standard procedure for dying Catholics. None of this undercuts Scott's view that he here acted on the basis of low or middling credence in the Catholic faith, of course. Equally, such an act in the face of doubt, even strong doubt, may count as faith enough to make the proposition that he died a Catholic true.
It does seem like it may be a case of "Well, if I'm already a member I might as well get all the benefits before I go." Or perhaps it was sincere, who can read the human heart?
When I have tried to research further into his conversion I keep running into a quote by him, to his mother: "There probably has to be a God. Many things are easier to explain if there is than if there isn’t.” The trouble is I can't find a solid source for the quote, and nobody is quoting any further to say what exactly he thought was easier to explain and how. Wikipedia sources the quote to Norman MacRae's biography. It sounds like the kind of quote that gets made up and passed around, so I'd be curious to see what Norman wrote about it exactly.
It would have been a nice feather in the theist's cap if the smartest man in the world converted, but if he converted out of fear and a possibly addled brain its not much help.
The quote in Macrae's book is exactly that he said those words to his mother when hospitalized. On the topic of his religiousness, his good friend Stan Ulam notes in his "Adventures of a Mathematician" that he was completely agnostic his entire life until the end. Likewise in Heim's biography of von Neumann and Wiener, he quotes Oskar Morgenstern saying the same thing and with Morgenstern additionally saying that his sudden conversion shocked many of his friends and that it didn't agree with his "attitude, outlook and thinking when he was healthy".
> But you don’t read a von Neumann biography to learn more about the invention of ergodic theory.
Speak for yourself, sir.
Does anyone happen to know if E.T. Bell’s “Men of Mathematics” was extended to a third volume, perhaps by another author? I remember reading that Von Neumann rated himself as the third best mathematician with respect to his contemporaries.
I was just a kid and this was 20+ years ago. Would be grateful if someone knows the correct reference.
I don't believe "Men of Mathematics" was extended unfortunately which is a shame because it's a great book. About him rating himself as the third greatest mathematician, this claim used to be on an old version of [0] this web page but it seems to have been removed. I asked the website owner about it and he could only source it to this [1] so whether it is something he actually said I am unsure. Von Neumann seemed to generally be too modest to give explicit rankings to mathematicians but Raoul Bott says [2] one time that von Neumann told him that he had only known one great mathematician, David Hilbert, and that he felt inadequate in comparison to him. Aside from Hilbert the only other mathematician I know von Neumann gave heavy praise to was Gödel.
[0]: https://fabpedigree.com/james/gmat200.htm
[1]: http://michorlab.dfci.harvard.edu/publications/Nature2002.pdf
[2]: https://books.google.com/books?id=bVFTDwAAQBAJ&q=neumann
Thanks you! Very much appreciated-it has been driving me nuts.
Reference [1] is pretty much identical to what I remember reading and was published at about the right time, though I'm not sure what I was doing reading Nature as a teen.
Then Ulam was struck with violent illness, a “fantastic headache” that was “the most severe pain I had ever endured.” When Françoise finally roused a doctor and got her husband to the hospital, he was vomiting bile. “The surgeon performed a trepanation not knowing exactly where or what to look for. He did not find a tumor, but did find an acute state of inflammation of the brain. He told Françoise that my brain was bright pink instead of the usual gray. These were the early days of penicillin, which they applied liberally.”
Ulam lapsed into a coma. His wife, his doctors and his friends worried about brain damage. When he awoke a few days later, Ulam worried about it even more. “One morning the surgeon asked me what 13 plus 8 were. The fact that he asked such a question embarrassed me so much that I just shook my head. Then he asked what the square root of twenty was, and I replied: about 4.4. He kept silent, then I asked, ‘Isn’t it?’ I remember Dr. Rainey laughing, visibly relieved, and saying, ‘I don’t know.’ “
Richard Rhodes, Dark Sun
Dark Sun was the most terrifying book I ever read.
Supposedly Erdos grilled Ulam in mathematics shortly after his coma and pronounced Ulam to be in sufficiently good shape.
The idea about von Neumann's sense of responsibility, and his interest in global politics and the future of the world, remind me of this, in Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman:
> And 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!
Is that related to the atom bomb? Or a genuinely generic idea? Is that a response to something, some world-responsibility Feynman had exhibited before? I wish Feynman hadn't limited himself to a single paragraph. It's too sparse!
Although Feynman and von Neumann would have met each other on several occasions I think the time period they spent the most together would have been at Los Alamos so it could have been bomb related, although von Neumann enjoyed talking about lots outside of technical matters so it's just as easily possibly it's a generic idea.
The most interesting bit in the book, to me, was how von Neumann's early appreciation of the importance of computers and how he worked to keep them open and developing rather than having computers end up as the monopoly of one company for 20 years. Speeding up the development of computers this way was quite plausibly the most significant thing he did in a lifetime full of significant achievements.
Right.
For example, when Von Neumann later built his own computer at the Institute for Advanced Studies, he published numerous bulletins on what his team was doing to make it easier for others to build their own computers.
Eckert and Mauchly, who later founded Univac, wanted the computer patented, but Von Neumann published openly. Maybe he remembered the lesson of Watt and the Wright Brothers, a patent on too general a technology can inhibit innovation. Watt suppressed the use of high pressure steam and the Wright Brothers delayed US progress in aviation. Marconi was aware of this, so he invented the patent pool for radio technology in the 1920s.
I liked Von Neumann's analysis of the problem as relating to the size of the effects available to us. As technology progresses, the effect size increases, as the effect size increases, the danger of mistakes gets larger. Unfortunately "The most hopeful answer is that the human species has been subjected to similar tests before and seems to have a congenital ability to come through, after varying amounts of trouble" is not actually a hopeful answer (although it might have been the most hopeful answer available to him at the time). It's not hopeful because any amount of trouble can be catastrophic when the effect size is larger than the size of the ecosystem that supports survival.
The only approach that seems to me to have a chance of a modicum of success in the long run is to rapidly expand the size of the survival ecosystem. We need to develop the technology and political will to send out multiple, significant sized, independent generation ships or colonies with such a variety of governance systems and cultures that dangerous memes would be unlikely to spread easily between them. Physical and information communication between them and back to Earth would need to be infrequent and treated carefully, but with appropriate safeguards, the risk/reward would probably still work out that they could help each other and Earth.
I don't believe any other approach to existential risk is likely to work. At best we'll resolve the existential risks relating to our current technology, but effect sizes won't stop with those, they'll continue increasing, and to survive long term, humanity needs outposts continually beyond that increasing bubble of effect size.
Unless these outposts were extremely far from Earth, and each other, I think this is just introducing a novel existential threat.
This was my favorite book review contest entry so far
:-P
Not entirely on topic, but why do you see
"improv[ing] their kid’s chances of becoming the world’s smartest person"
as something seriously worth pursuing? The probability of becoming even one of the top 1000 smartest people in the world is so vanishingly small that even a large marginal increase in the likelihood of success probably isn't going to improve the absolute likelihood of success all that much. But depending on how seriously one pursues this goal it might end up requiring a huge amount of effort, not to mention stress. It's not keeping up with the Joneses, it's leaving the Joneses in the dust. And what's the payoff? One doesn't need to be an ubermensch to financially secure or have good degree of material comfort. More importantly, I don't at all think one needs to be a super genius to be happy or fulfilled.
If all someone wants is to be financially secure or have a good degree of material comfort, then what is the likelihood of their actually achieving anything worthwhile?
I mentioned material well-being as one potential payoff of being extremely intelligent, not as the only, or even most important, payoff.
What one considers worthwhile depends on what one values. If your goal is to make a seminal contribution in a primarily intellectual field, then being very intelligent might be a prerequisite, and being *extremely* intelligent is probably going to increase your chances of success by quite a bit.
But lots of other things are worthwhile. Art, sports, religion. And we don't have to look to a grand, civilizational scale, either. Most people place a lot of value on being a good parent, child, sibling, friend, or member of a community, and place comparatively little value on esoteric intellectual pursuits. I'm not disparaging esoteric intellectual pursuits -- that's how I earn a living. But I don't think that one necessarily needs to be many standard deviations from the mean in any dimension to achieve something worthwhile.
There was another comment about fostering an attitude of "upwards trajectory" instead of achieving a "set target level". The first one sounds a bit more compatible with happiness if the true upper limits are unknown.
In Obscure Pregnancy Interventions, Scott estimates that doing all of the interventions would gain an equivalent to ~2 IQ points. If your goal is to produce the smartest child in the world, that’s pretty significant—6.6 sigma outliers are about twice as likely as 6.7 outliers. It’s like buying two lottery tickets instead of one!
If I buy two lottery tickets, I'll definitely be out an extra $10 (or whatever a lottery ticket costs), and almost certainly still won't win the lottery.
*whoosh*
:-)
How confident are you that the IQ distribution is perfectly Gaussian out to seven standard deviations? This seems highly dubious to me.
It's almost certainly not.
It was a semi-humorous way of saying "improve your kid's intelligence/education/achievement"
More importantly than improving your child's intelligence/education I think improving their enjoyment of thinking and learning is definitely something worth pursuing.
One of Von Neumann's insights that I thought was mind blowing was regarding the heat generated by computation. If a computing system ends a calculation in a more orderly state than when it started, heat will be given off. This is irrespective of the physical attributes of the computing system, and sets a fundamental limit on computer power dissipation. The limit is almost unimaginably small but it is non zero.
I would not be surprised if this means that when I have an insight that allows me to order my thoughts more efficiently, my brain dissipates a small (virtually zero, and certainly undetectable) amount of heat.
It's possible that I misunderstand this concept. If so, I hope someone here will correct me.
Reversible computing seeks to evade this issue.
"There are two major, closely related types of reversibility that are of particular interest for this purpose: physical reversibility and logical reversibility.[2]
A process is said to be physically reversible if it results in no increase in physical entropy; it is isentropic. There is a style of circuit design ideally exhibiting this property that is referred to as charge recovery logic, adiabatic circuits, or adiabatic computing (see Adiabatic process). Although in practice no nonstationary physical process can be exactly physically reversible or isentropic, there is no known limit to the closeness with which we can approach perfect reversibility, in systems that are sufficiently well isolated from interactions with unknown external environments, when the laws of physics describing the system's evolution are precisely known. "
Seems like a bit of recency bias to focus on the "Martians" as an exceptional nexus of genetic intelligence without considering previous intellectual nexuses that occurred. If this discussion had happened in the mid to late 19th century would the comment section be discussing how best to set up a super race of Scottish intellectuals? Or before that, French, Arabic, Greek, etc.
I don't doubt that intelligence is heritable to a large extent, but my guess would be that the groups of genes that can polygenetically lead to hyper-intelligence exist in most population groups, and it just comes down to figuring out what leads to that polygenetic configuration being both expressed and then nurtured properly to produce these intellectual nexuses.
"This sounds suspiciously like the smartest man in the world admitting he’s not sure what to do."
I think it's saying something much more concrete - that technological progress is chaotic and so investments in planning are much less useful than investments in better control systems. Don't build Maginot lines, develop better command structures. Fewer projects that require decade-long investments, more projects like Fast Grants that can quickly mobilize resources as needed. Response speed is everything.
Agree with "don't build Maginot lines", but I would replace "develop better command structures" with "heighten general preparedness for the future by investing in infrastructure & human capital". That is, invest in highly subsidized high-quality kindergartens, schools a la the Budapest high school, etc.; ditto regarding infrastructure (roads, harbors, city planning (beautiful Budapest again), internet broadband); and so on. Thus making our descendants having a heightened general ability to meet whatever (unknown/unknowable) challenges they will face in their future.
Here's a cute story on the risk of instead trying to guess in advance what particular stuff it will be nice to have available 30 years from now (the "Maginot line" investment strategy): During the economic crisis in the 1930's, the Norwegian government hired unemployed workers to plant a special type of trees, superior for making wooden skis. The government congratulated itself with its commitment to long-term planning, leaving forests of excellent ski-material to the People of the Future. Then, in the 1960s, came the fiberglass revolution, making wooden skis obsolete. (Caveat: I have never checked the sources for this story, but as journalists know one should never do, if the story is good.)
The line about von Neumann being the only one who ever understood quantum mechanics is badly wrong. There is one Great Mysterious Problem about QM, namely how it occurs that measuring a state in superposition of two or more possibilities gives us one of the results according to the Born probability rule. Some claim that MWI solves this (I think not).
This mystery is about why the Born Rule works, but empirically it certainly does. All the rest of QM, all the parts that enable you to calculate those probabilities and make predictions, is straightforward, well-established theory - thanks, in part, to von Neumann's formalization. You can fully understand it without any special genius. It's not noticably harder than, say, statistical mechanics. Every physics graduate is expected to know this stuff well. (Of course IRL most of them don't, because academia, but the serious learners do. Say the top 20%?)
So "undetstanding QM" in that sense is not any special claim. And when it comes to the Measurement Problem, von Neumann was as lost as the rest of us. He went so far as to suggest that the wavefunction collapses when a conscious mind becomes aware of the result!
It's worth noting that von Neumann wrote an influential paper on the measurement problem, so he may have a better claim to understanding why the Born Rule works than most other famous physicists.
I don't think von Neumann explicitly suggested that the wavefunction collapses when a conscious mind becomes aware of it, that is more the viewpoint of Wigner or London and Bauer, von Neumann only said that the conscious observer is one of potential possibilities for a "cut".
So EA project - clone John Von Neuman?
Did Von Neumann have prosopagnosia?
Life’s Obituary claims Von Neumann “could rarely remember a name.”
https://qualiacomputing.com/2018/06/21/john-von-neumann/
I doubt he couldn’t remember names, but maybe he couldn’t recognize faces.
Interestingly, Daniel Tammet is a savant with the ability to do Von Neumann-like mental calculations. He has an incredible memory (famously learning conversational Icelandic in 1 week.) He has prosopagnosia.
How did you find out about this group?
Should you be dinged for anti-semitism, making a claim with no supporting evidence, or both?
Anti Semitism? The Lebovitz surname is of Askenazi origin so you need not worry dear, as you are not a Semite.
Some people are suggesting Jew-hatred or Judenhasse because "anti-Semitism" confuses matters.
The problem you have is that you are not jewish.
You are a Euro-jew. Your line comes from the Mongol Turk's that switched faith in the 8th century.
You are neither a Semite or jewish.
So, you fail, again.
You don’t like the Jews. And also the Jews aren’t Jews? **shrug**
I never said that i disliked the jew. I just pointed out that most of those that call themselves jew these days are in fact counterfeit jews.
Mostly Edomites.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khazar_hypothesis_of_Ashkenazi_ancestry
> Genetic studies on Jews have found no substantive evidence of a Khazar origin among Ashkenazi Jews. Doron Behar and other geneticists have concluded that such a link is unlikely, noting that it is difficult to test the Khazar hypothesis using genetics because there is lack of clear modern descendants of the Khazars that could provide a clear test of the contribution to Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry, but found no genetic markers in Ashkenazi Jews that would link them to peoples of the Caucasus/Khazar area.[7] This and other studies have instead found evidence that the Ashkenazi have mixed Near Eastern and Southern European/Mediterranean origins.
I'm definitely going to take the word of a jew on Wikipedia. . . . .. . . thanks fren.
The other person who told me I wasn't Jewish was from the Nation of Islam. I'm going to assume you're also Nation of Islam. Why should I bother paying attention to possible differences?
The Nation of Islam.
Muhammed Ali of pugilism fame was a member if memory serves me correctly.
One two people have pointed out to you that you are not jewish in the biblical sense. You must surround yourself with fellow counterfeit jews or people of low intelligence.
Your assumptions would be incorrect, i am a member of the Black Hebrew Israelites.
This is tiresome and unedifying; Scott, please ban this troll before it wastes anyone else’s time
You no likey the truth?
> The jews have caused more trouble for humanity
[citation needed]
I hope I don’t get dinged for not really adding anything to the conversation, but just wanted to say I think this is one of my favorite reviews yet, nice job!
One of your favourites..... of Scott's reviews?
For what it's worth, I actually attempted to teach myself Ergodic Theory in highschool and college but never got beyond the basics.
Look, all this European stuff and Cold War history is fascinating. But how do *I*, an adult who has already been born and not gene-edited as an embryo, acquire some of the working memory, neural branching, extreme long-term memory, computational power, and other delicious powers of Von Neumann / the Martians? Do I gotta do highly-risky self-gene-therapy (e.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/biology/comments/7xge9e/this_dude_claims_to_have_diyed_gene_therapy_to/)? Install some open-source Neuralink alternative? Ideas, people! The wackier and riskier, the better. (Not a joke.)
John von Neuman had two brothers who don't seem to be distinguished enough to have their own wikipedia pages, so the odds of raising a "Martian" don't seem to be great. You might be able to improve the odds-- I think the freedom to learn (informal education) and contact with very intelligent adults should help,
I don't know how serious you are about getting similar results through any method of child-raising, but perhaps you should be thinking both about what if you get a world-bending genius, and what if you don't.
I'm tempted to think of the "Martians" as alien intervention, but that's just the result of reading a lot of science fiction, especially Doc Smith.
As for the sense of precariousness, a lot of people feel that these days for a number of reasons. I don't know whether it helps.
You can find Nicholas von Neumann's resume at the end of https://www.math.ru.nl/~mueger/vonneumann.pdf . Not going to win any Nobels but I would be pretty happy with a kid who turned out like that.
Thanks for the pointer, that feels quite close to the pulse. Compared to all the polished just-so stories this messy narrative seems more insightful.
I've thought about Jews going through what I thought was a unique sorting process-- prosper in peace in the US, or get cultural dominance is Israel, but I didn't realize there was an earlier process for Hungary vs. the US.
The deathbed conversion seems so sad to me, for many reasons. Did one of the towering intellects of our time really believe he could trick God into granting him eternal life? For that matter, did Pascal really believe this? I've always assumed this was a joke.
Or is it that the fear of death increases with mental capacity? Does a profound intellect feel a proportionally greater sense of loss contemplating it's own nonexistence?
Are there no atheists in hospice?
He was terrified of dying. I thought he converted earlier.
> Did one of the towering intellects of our time really believe he could trick God into granting him eternal life?
Imagine a woman who has struggled to build a life away from her abusive ex-partner for months or years, while said partner has worked hard to undermine her and take away her opportunities and friendship, until at last she just gives in and goes back to him. Has she "tricked" her ex partner into taking her back?
Why should it be any different when you instead yield to the omnipotent torturing narcissistic megalomaniac?
Weird comment because it assumes the existence of God.
Well, obviously, God is not real, but if he is real, then logically you should worship him even though (arguably, especially because!) he's a huge asshole.
Sure. But you accused Von Neumann of being like a battered girlfriend returning her abuser and Von Neumann wasn’t returning to anything. He was born Jewish, was largely atheist as an adult and converted to Catholicism. We don’t know why, maybe Pascal’s wager.
I'm responding to the claim that deathbed conversions to win Pascal's Wager are "tricking" God. God isn't tricked, he's getting what he wants.
A fascinating review! I think what it emphasizes about the whole genetic intelligence discussion is the extent to which most peoples' intellectual ceilings are gated behind environmental factors.
Perhaps also notable, but probably little known in America, is the Hungarian national soccer team of the 1950s, which was, by several metrics, the best the world has ever seen. Over the six years from 1950 to 1956 they played 69 games, won 58, drew 10 and lost just 1. The team coach - Gusztáv Sebes - was born in 1906 in Budapest, around the same time as the Martians you talk about here.
That's to say, it was not just science that people born in early 20th Century Hungary would go on to dominate. They did so in many fields, culturally, politically and scientifically.
This was great. Thanks. "Genius in the Shadows" a biography of Leo Szilard is also a fun read about another one of the 'Martians'.
One of the scariest parts of expecting a daughter next month is my peer group, tbh. There's a prevailing sense among non-immigrant, upper-middle-class, college educated folks that having expectations of your children sets them up for inevitable failure and destroys something vital about them.
I'll be honest that I don't have the stomach to raise a genius. I'm a product of that peer group and have no interest in deciding who my daughter will be before she draws breath. But I also recognize a tradeoff here: It sucks to have a parent force you to learn to play the violin when you have no interest in learning to play the violin. But it also sucks to have a parent bow to childish impulses, then discover at age 30 that you've never developed the mental tools to do hard things that would give you a lot of satisfaction. It's a conundrum that parents my age don't even seem to consider - in their minds, forcing children to do things they don't want to do is cruel, end of story.
Here's why that's scary to me: I don't think that I, personally, have much impact on how that conundrum gets resolved. I could be an individual hard-ass, just as a corrective measure but 1) I know me, no I can't, and 2) I think what makes expectation work is that it's the norm. Your parents being like "hey what math did you learn today" and expecting an answer can have some early impact, but peer effects take over eventually. What strikes me about all these great achiever stories is that they were absolutely *immersed* in achievement. It's not just that their parents were intelligent and quizzed them at dinner. It's that almost every person they met in their young lives was the sort of person who would quiz you at dinner. Parents can influence that, but absent extreme measures I'm unwilling to take, they can't, on their own, build an anti-mediocrity culture for their kids from scratch.
I agree with you that modeling is most powerful to set expectation. If your peer group is intellectually/professionally impressive and stories of hard work —> success are part of the lore of your social group, then kids will internalize it as normal for themselves without coercion. This is especially true for women/mothers modeling for girls. The challenge of parenting is teaching your kids to have the emotional fortitude to put in the work for achievement without the childhood of oldschool coercion by fear that lands a person in therapy as an adult. It comes from the subtle work of teaching emotional security and regulation so that children are not defeated by frustration/failure. Lots of buzzwords here but imo this stuff has some validity over a parent following their own personality and hacking it. (I am parent to a girl and worry about all this a lot too.)
As long as you are honest with them and try to get them to understand why they should do particular things you should be okay. As the sibling commenter notes, modeling is important, and to me this is because if you want to achieve great success in something you've gotta absolutely love it and spend all of your time on it. Okay maybe a slight exaggeration but if your child hates math it's very unlikely they're gonna be a mathematician. Modeling is useful because whether you like or don't like something is often very much influenced by the environment, and as such having a good circle around you that values hard work and other positive attributes like that it is more likely a child will want to emulate them and thus it is more likely they will want to achieve success and put in the work and effort to do so. I do agree though once they get older the wider world has a much bigger effect and unfortunately not for the positive in most cases.
> There's a prevailing sense among non-immigrant, upper-middle-class, college educated folks that having expectations of your children sets them up for inevitable failure and destroys something vital about them.
I have heard (in a different part of the world) well-meant warnings about how if your kids learn to read before they get to school, it will ruin their childhood. It didn't. Seems to me there are two reasons for saying this:
1) Some narcissistic parents actually ruin their kids' lives by pushing them to unrealistic goals, and taking away all their free time, hoping to become famous as "super moms".
2) A reminder that the nail that sticks out gets hammered down. Even if bringing out geniuses will make your kids happy -- or maybe especially then -- it will also gain them a lot of enemies. Some people just enjoy watching gifted people fail. Mediocrity seems like the safer way, at least until you get strong enough.
I think the proper solution is to try various things, without forcing them. If your child hates playing violin in general, just give up. If your child enjoys playing with musical instruments, but hates doing exercises, then maybe push a little towards doing those exercises, too. You win if you create a self-reinforcing loop -- the child learns to play a song nicely, gets positive feedback from audience, is motivated to learn another song...
> Your parents being like "hey what math did you learn today" and expecting an answer can have some early impact, but peer effects take over eventually.
To certain degree you can select the peers; for example your kids will probably spend a lot of time with the kids of your friends, so choose your friends accordingly. If possible, choose a better school. Or simply choose an unusual school, because that's where the people who want to remain average will not put their kids. (I suspect that like half of success of e.g. Montessori schools is what they do, and the other half is the classmates your child will get, all selected for having parents who want something special for their kids.)
And of course the math should be fun, at least during the first years. Like, various puzzles involving numbers, etc. At later age, perhaps there are some math clubs or competitions that your kids could join.
I had just finished reading this; well, actually listening to the audiobook. On the positive side the book does cover the many areas in which von Neumann contributed, and these are knowledgeably elucidated. However, I didn't find the book entirely satisfactory. I didn't find it added as much as I had hoped to my understanding of von Neumann as a person, nor even to his particular way of thinking, other than the results of that thinking. He worked here, he solved this, worked there, solved that, and so on. I felt there were gaps left unfilled.
I would contrast this to two other recently published biographies of major 20th century thinkers.
Cheryl Misak's Frank Ramsey: A Sheer Excess of Powers is a stunning tour-de-force of intellectual biography. Deeply detailed and scholarly and engagingly written, you are left feeling you know Ramsey as a person as well as the significance of his work.
Not quite as detailed but nonetheless insightful is Graham Farmelo's The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom. A deep thinking extreme introvert (probably) autistic, Dirac's genius and how it related to his whole person, is woven together well in this book.
I note that Scott's review refers to Von Neumann as the one person who understood quantum mechanics. I think a more widespread view among those who know is that Dirac might have a better claim on that crown. Of Dirac's book on the subject, it as been said, "you think you understand quantum mechanics. Then you read Dirac and you realize you don't understand quantum mechanics, but he does."
Thoughtful and interesting comment
"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."
Ted Kaczynski seemed to aim for this solution. Even if you agreed with his conclusions and methods - I don't - living as a hermit in a cabin isn't exactly human freedom, either. So his solution didn't even make sense on its own terms ... which isn't surprising, since he was a bit, er, insane in the membrane.
How do you know, he still isn't insane the membrane?
Is he your penpal and he makes sense to you now?
;)
"Knowing what we know now, this proved unnecessary. Partly this was because it turned out to be possible to develop a retaliatory capacity to discourage first strikes."
No, no, no! This did not "prove" unnecessary with hindsight!
Assume we ran 200k Monte Carlo simulation of our world from 1946 onwards.
Each timeline gets changed marginally to seed enough chaos for divergence, but not enough to be meaningfully different in a historical sense at that point in time. [knock over a tree, change a song on every radio station and you guarantee and all people born after '46 will be changed to randomized siblings]
Now in one group of 100k simluations, John von Neumann gets his wish and the Americans bombed the Russians. (the Neumann-intervention group)
And in another group of 100k simulations, in which they did not. (the Cold War-group or our group)
We run all 200k simulated timelines to 2022.
Now we evaluate them by various dimensions of utility (life expectancy, population size, average wealth)?
Which median timeline has higher life expectancy?
Which group has a higher percentage of humans being hapily on Mars and colonizing the stars already?
Which group has a higher percentage nuclear wastelands?
Now our timeline is in the latter category and it admittedly it has some perks.
It's nice that we didn't see more than one nuclear war (yet).
But is this representative of our group having better performance or did we get extremely lucky?
Of course, the default assumption is that we are closest to median-values in all regards within our group.
So I wrote a long, angry rant that the Cold War fucked us on so many levels, that it's a miracle we made it this far. And that this "being completely fucked with x-risks" is a feature of the Cold-War timelines, which is very common within the Cold War-group.
That it's overly optimistic to assume, that we're close to the median instead of far above average lucky.
Now run all simulations to 2050 and compare group performance again.
Anwyay, which group do you think has more timelines, in which humanity is still alive?
That's the standard at which you should evaluate John von Neuman's recommendation.
Not by taking the accident of our continued existence for granted.
[or without making the case, that this was no accident at least]
And I consider the idea that John von Neumann was wrong here, one hell of an extraordinary claim!
It does not compute.
Because if I had to pick a random timeline from either group to be born in at a random year from here '46 to 2022 (or a smaller range for the extinction-timelines in each), I'd certainly not chose ours.
And if you disagree, I'd love to read that argument.
But until you do, I don't think you can claim that he was wrong about this.
> Anwyay, which group do you think has more timelines, in which humanity is still alive?
Virtually all of them, since the nuclear capacity of both sides during the worst periods of the Cold War was never sufficient to wipe out humanity. (Nor would it, since there's no real reason for a US-USSR nuclear armageddon to rain down hellfire on Brazil, Kenya, or India.)
Well, I think that depends on assumptions about how survivable a nuclear winter would be. I'd point out that adding just a bit of randomness immediately does the random-sibling replacement for all newborns from then on. Brazil, Kenyia or India are not targets in our timeline. But that's also stemming from the decisionmaking or influence of the generation afterwards. You'd have to be pretty confident that our alliances and each national technology levels end up in similar places. That's a stretch for our group. But not plausible for the "Neumann intervention"-group, since that would have changed everything massively. But I see your point about humanity being generally hard to kill, with the caveat, that we have not been tested that hard, so difficult to say from our perspective. Maybe I should turn that into "How many timelines have a population > 1 billion". Or perhaps "How many timelines have seen billions/hundreds of millions perish in nuclear war or its aftereffects". I think, we can perhaps assume tens of millions dead from a nuclear first strike without nuclear opposition. Not sure about hundreds of millions. But I just don't see billions dead being a more common outcome.
A full model would have to account for all the various possibilities, likelihoods and conflict outcomes. But intuitively, I'd still strongly favor the Neumann-intervention group. I'd also probably chose a random timeline in the Neumann-intervention group over reincarnation randomly in our current timeline (though that's far harder to argue and depends mostly on the magnitued of future expected risks like a nuclear WW3 just happening within a couple decades anyway; I am pessimistic and very optimistic about Neumann-intervention timelines lessening or eradicating the scourge of totalitarianism and future risks).
What would you pick for those two choices, if you had to chose?
> What would you pick for those two choices, if you had to chose?
Our timeline. I don't think that the Neumann plan would actually remove the Soviet Union from the board in most scenarios, given the US's limited nuclear capabilities during the period when the USSR did not have nuclear weapons themselves. Therefore the Neumann plan causes WW3, geopolitically isolates the USA, and provides an obvious excuse for any Leninists as to why their system failed in a way that OTL denied them. Depending on circumstances it could even entrench the Stalinist boot into western Europe, rather than force it back to the Soviet borders.
Fair enough. What about which pool, you'd pick?
Boils down to differing intuitions about what could or couldn't be done with the advantage.
Or how negative the consequences of such an action would be. And how terrible our current timeline and timeline-pool is. Unresolvable disagreement without having a good simulation. And then we'd probably just argue about the simulation rules endlessly.
But what on Earth is OTL? None of the acronyms quite make sense here:
https://acronyms.thefreedictionary.com/OTL
EDIT: ah... our timeline, I think. Nvm /:
Same choice, the no-war pool. I have a very strong intuition that, from WW1 on or so, offensive wars have a strong tendency to end poorly for the side that wages them, while defensive wars vary in their benefits but at least sometimes result in a country getting big benefits from them (e.g. Soviets getting half of Europe, US getting allies in the Pacific). It's hard to think of a substantially beneficial offensive war in the modern era - only the annexation of Hyderabad comes to mind. As to the specific questions:
> Which median timeline has higher life expectancy?
It's probably a wash. The USSR and USA's life expectancies weren't that far apart, and the USSR had better life expectancies than the former Soviet Republics in general. The Iron Curtain being pushed east or west doesn't seem likely to change life expectancies that much, especially considering the long-term negative impact of a war. Assuming, of course, we're talking life expectancy modulo a nuclear war (i.e. if there was a nuclear exchange in 1980, we're not counting it for today's life expectancy).
> Which group has a higher percentage of humans being hapily on Mars and colonizing the stars already?
Well, if we're talking in 2022, approximately none of them. Stretching out our timeline into the future, surviving USSR-type timelines are more likely to see them, since the space race was a major angle of competition between the USA and Soviet Union, and one that might continue into the future to push space development up marginally. On the other hand, maybe we get Nationalist China in some of the Neumann timelines, and they industrialize earlier than the PRC did (as Taiwan did), and that pushes the space timeline forward a bit? But overall, the underlying technologies to start colonizing Mars cannot realistically exist by today - we're still probably 10+ years out from doing a human Mars landing, and the long-term trends in relevant technology are pretty gradual and consistent. I don't think there will be substantial Martian colonies for at least a century (and that's very generous), by which point events in 1945-48 are long since washed out by the noise.
> Which group has a higher percentage nuclear wastelands?
Probably the Neumann group. There's no way that the US could reliably manage such a policy; one President nukes the Soviet Union, then the next promises to never do something like that again because of huge public and international backlash. As such, it doesn't prevent nuclear proliferation (it may do just the opposite), and creates a situation where nuclear first strikes have significantly less of a psychological taboo behind them - breaking a taboo once, historically, tends to lead to breaking it a second time (see, e.g., Caesar following up Sulla's abuse of the dictatorship by abusing the dictatorship himself until the Romans killed him and banned the dictatorship forever).
Neumann was also the first child of a young mother. A quick google search tells me she was born in 1881 or 1882. So she was around 22 when Von Neumann was born.
Likewise, Albert Einstein was the first child of a 21 year old mother. I haven't checked any other 'geniuses' but I wouldn't be surprised if being born to a young mother has (brain) health benefits.
I think, if that were the case, we'd already know this from the psychological birth-order effect literature. There are physical in-utero benefits to being a second-born (higher birth weight, taller iirc.). But they wash out when growing up, I believe.
It's a bit tough to figure this out, if it were so, given that young mothers correlate with low SES, since medieval times. Looking at the offspring of rich, young mothers would be interesting though. If you can find any these days :)
Our host has been pushing that birth-order effects are real, prompted by the fact that so many of his readers are first-born.
Stuff
Sorry. Perhaps another quibble, but I recently read the book and Neuman's ethnicity wasn't nearly as much discussed as it was in the review.
Contest reviews just don't hit like Scott's do!
At the end, I’m not so sure Von Neumann is admitting to not knowing what to do. Rather, he seems to be making an earnest observation — that progress in mitigating existential risk will happen at the margin.
Sure, for someone as self-assured as Von Neumann this could be viewed as a victory in humility. But not in irresolution.
As for "where did the Hungarian Jews go", the Holocaust, low fertility, high immigration did a lot of it.
But a lot did seem to go to Israel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_Hungary#Number_of_survivors . Today many of Israel's leading politicians are Hungarian, Yair Lapid is Hungarian, Defense Minister Benny Gantz is half-Hungarian and half-Romanian, and Merav Michaeli is so Hungarian she is literally Rudolf Kastner's granddaughter.
https://hungarytoday.hu/three-ministers-hungarian-origin-new-israeli-government-gantz-michaeli-lapid/
"A Hungarian is someone who enters a revolving door behind you but comes out in front."
Are there any other periods or places where this kind of exceptional flowering of human genius occurred? Seventeenth century England? (Newton, Boyle, Hooke, Wren etc) Classical Greece?
There are only 366 birthdays. There are a lot more high schools. If you count chemistry teachers, you get even lower odds.
I only saw this post a few hours ago which is a shame because you obviously reach a wider audience when you reply earlier and it's been over a week now. A comment on the book, for the popular audience I think the book does a great job, it's accessible, not too long and doesn't lionize von Neumann too much (well at least not as much as Macrae's book), nevertheless I still felt like there was quite a bit missing. My opinion is of course very biased as I've researched quite a bit of von Neumann's history too, and I still feel that the proper biography of von Neumann is yet to come. If you look at the suggested reading section on von Neumann's Wikipedia page there's about 30 books and of those about a dozen are either full or semi biographies of von Neumann, and yet despite that it still feels as if every single one of them has their own unique taste or flavor of how they tell the story, some focus on particular aspects of his work (computing or economics for example), others contrast (Heims) while others cover history of something else while also including significant biographical material (Goldstine and Poundstone). Yet I feel none of them give a complete in-depth (and by in-depth I am meaning STEM or math undergrad level knowledge) biography of von Neumann as a person and his work. The reasons for this are two-fold in my opinion. One, is that there is so much content to cover. If I took a random guess I would say you would need something close to 1000 pages to cover his life fully. He worked in so many areas that describing them all and von Neumann's contributions to them, in addition to his life, would obviously take up a lot of time and space. When the American Mathematical Society dedicated a journal volume to him after he died [1] they had 9(!) different authors write papers about his work and that only covered the technical work he did in mathematical topics. Writing about all these topics competently in addition to all the non-technical achievements he had in life would quite likely require multiple authors and a rather large, long project. Although von Neumann died relatively young and never published anything autobiographical the fact he did work in so many areas meant a lot of people knew him, and indeed I have probably close to 100 different interviews of various people who each describe their interactions with von Neumann. These interviews are a particularly gold mine for describing the more human side of von Neumann, especially since almost everyone who knew him personally is dead now, but synthesizing all this into a coherent narrative would take much work. In addition, most biographies written of him so far focus on his life once he moved to America, I am sure there is more to find if some historians went to Hungary and Germany and Switzerland where von Neumann lived/studied and digged into whatever archives they have there. Surprisingly, even parts of his life in America I feel are not well covered. Again looking at his Wikipedia page you see he worked/consulted for almost two-dozen government and military agencies, much of that is poorly covered aside from Sheehan's book which is a biography of someone else entirely. If one was to put in FOI requests to all those agencies for items related to von Neumann I am sure there would be a treasure trove of information, although I can imagine some of it would still be classified (particularly his technical work on nuclear weapons). Yet this has not happened, with the great irony being that the gathering of von Neumann's papers into his collected works was funded by the US Navy. Secondly, and this reason is related to the first, what publisher would take this on? Publishers probably set limits to how long a book should be and to what educational level the book should be written to, and I doubt many would be happy to take on a project that would result in a 1000 page book that would have portions that required some level of mathematical education. Nevertheless I have hope that some day a grand biography of Johnny will be written, as Bhattacharya says he is perhaps one of the most influential people of the 20th century and as such fully deserving of such an undertaking.
[1]: https://www.ams.org/journals/bull/1958-64-03/
Eric Gilliam has a very interesting analysis of von Neumann's intelligence, based on Freeman Dyson's division of mathematicians into "birds" and "frogs":
https://freaktakes.substack.com/p/john-von-neumann-a-strange-kind-of
"Unlike someone like Dirac, whose major contributions felt to many contemporaries as if he were conjuring mathematical laws of nature out of the sky, von Neumann’s process seems to be something that is much more replicable. While I have no hopes that one person can or should hope to replicate what he did, it is believable that many researchers, if properly encouraged to seek problems and collaborate in a way similar to von Neumann, could hope to replicate results as fantastic as his."
That's definitely true.
> For whatever reason, Eastern European Jews of the 19th century were unusually bright. The very brightest of this unusual group moved to Budapest, interbred with each other, and had one generation of totally unprecedentedly brilliant children before being wiped out.
I would have loved to answer something more detailed, but it's a tragedy for ... mankind. The bright ones... They're a dying culture.