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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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").
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.
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.)
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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
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.
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).
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.
"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.
* 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, ...
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_.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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?
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 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.
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.
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.
Umm... Perhaps a quibble, but I believe Lewis Fry Richardson invented scientific meteorology. Cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Fry_Richardson#Weather_forecasting
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.
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
Intelligence isn't heritable, so I guess Von Neumann just had a favorable environment growing up.
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.
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.)
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.
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").
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.
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.)
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.)
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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).
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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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.
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.
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, ...
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_.
> 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.
> 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.
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
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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!
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.
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?
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 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.
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.
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.
"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.