The keeps alternating between the person and the achievement, digging quite a bit to give a picture of all the different disciplines JVN was involved in.
Plus a lot of interesting trivia. For instance, did you know that he met his second wife Klára Dán, the first person to implement Monte Carlo, in... Monte Carlo?
The audio book is very good too, but you'll want to look at some of the pictures.
Repeating platitudes about democracy isn't really much of a reposte to Einstein, though.
And that isn't the bandy about the false equivocation that despotism is the answer - I think they've both stupid fucking ideas. Maybe we can make Platonic robot AI overlords, a la The Republic's Guardians (I say this mostly joking).
But no, democracy isn't clearly the answer at all, and for that matter I don't think it can work well in a multicultural society, where you just get tyranny of the majority anyway.
Not sure you fully appreciate how stupid the average person is. It is literally impossible to get many men to think at all, let alone think ‘beyond themselves’.
Thankfully you've provided an example further down the thread, so my comparatively weak intellect doesn't need to do very much inference:
>As an example, it is within the realm of possibility that Israel or the United States use nukes on Iran, and there would be pretty strong logical/rational justifications for doing so.
Iran has promoted hostile rhetoric against Israel since the latter's inception as a state (with a brief thawing of relations during the Shah's time in power). You could reasonably say that its anti-Israeli stance is one of the two fundamental foreign policy positions of Iran, alongside containing the expansion of Saudi influence in the region.
Despite this (and despite having nearly 10x the population), Iran's ability to project power anywhere beyond its immediate borders has been limited to funding Islamic fundamentalist proxy groups. They have no functional nuclear weapons, and no capability to target Israel with a conventional land or sea attack. A real threat to Israel's sovereignty is neither credible nor imminent enough to warrant an Israeli preemptive nuclear strike (assuming such a justification can exist, as you're suggesting).
It's undeniable that the Soviet Union perceived the US to be an existential threat to its sovereignty. For some reason though, I find it unlikely that you would describe a preemptive Soviet nuclear strike on the US as "rational and reasonable" from their perspective, despite fulfilling many of the same criteria as your example: a hostile power outside of reach of a conventional attack, whose foreign policy is molded around precipitating your failure as a state (with the added qualification that such a power could actually deliver on this goal in a tangible way).
With an "imagination" like that, we can do nothing more than hope you're far from the reins of power.
The Cold War isn't applicable because both sides had the capacity to destroy the other - look up mutually assured destruction if you need to.
That's completely different from a case of, say, Israel preemptively nuking Iran to protect itself - permanently - from an Iran that is both actively seeking to develop nuclear weapons for itself and has on many occasions made clear that it will use them to wipe Israel off the face of the earth once it gets them.
Those are not at all similar situations, if it isn't obvious.
You guys can try to play dumb mind games with this but it turns out there aren't any true blanket statements about morality and what's evil and that ultimately the rational and realistic choices (viz., those made in self-defence) are apt to offend many of you funny people.
You are saying there are rational reasons for taking actions that would have killed a significant proportion of the world; reasons which in hindsight were wrong and unnecessary. Sounds evil to me.
Go read the comment I was replying to a few times until you understand it. Nothing I said refers to hindsight bias. I'm saying there are absolutely situations in which a nuclear first strike would be rational, reasonable, and make complete logical and moral sense for the country undertaking the first strike.
As an example, it is within the realm of possibility that Israel or the United States use nukes on Iran, and there would be pretty strong logical/rational justifications for doing so.
You can identify with a side without being one of them. I am neither, nor from the ME. There is no reasonable justification to use weapons that can kill so many so indiscriminately. By anyone. So yes, advocating for their use may be characterised by some as evil.
In your opinion. But making blanket statements to the effect that every preemptive use of nukes is evil is smallminded and laughable.
It's pretty simple: If State A peddles a religion that promotes the extermination of all non-believers of said religion, and if State A itself claims that State B has no right to exist and ought to be wiped off the face of the earth (and indeed that State B will do what it can to make sure that State A is wiped off the face of the earth) out of principle, then State B has every logical and reasonable right to take action against State A before State A can destroy State B. It's really quite simple. Mankind isn't one big brotherhood, and modern global civilisation is in many respects a zero sum affair. It is absolutely rational for stronger powers to eliminate weaker powers whose stated goals are to eventually destroy those stronger powers. It's really just a form of self-defence. The notion of 'innocent people dying' is something you've made up in your head as relevant when that just isn't part of contemplating an existential threat.
Obviously people like you might find that offensive, but that doesn't affect the calculus lol.
Just don't try to paint it as some enlightened "rational" higher form of thought, as if trying to find peaceful solutions is somehow stupid. Just revel in the hate, and show everyone that you are exactly the same as those you pretend to be against.
We've had about seventy years to build up a political taboo against the use of nuclear weapons, which turned out to be an important guarantee of sustained peace in the Cold War environment we ultimately ended up in. But von Neumann passed away in 1957 when we were only first developing that taboo. There would have been close to zero moral compunction against using the atomic bomb against Nazi Germany had it been ready in time. And the communist regimes in Russia and China exceeded even Nazi Germany in the amount of mass murder they committed, and if you also count the degree to which they impoverished not only themselves but the countries in their spheres of influence for decades, the continued existence of communism throughout the 1950's and beyond has been arguably the greatest humanitarian disaster in human history. And if anything, someone in the early 1950's would have expected even worse; the Soviet Union was not quite as tyrannical and murderous after Stalin than it was under him, and the same is true for China after Mao.
Von Neumann's remarks also took place in an era before we allowed the Soviets to arm themselves to the degree that they posed a serious nuclear threat to the United States. The pop culture notion that a nuclear war between the US and Soviet Union would entail both sides completely eliminating each other in the first day of hostilities was arguably never completely accurate, but especially in the early 1950's it was not even close to true. Again, we know from hindsight that allowing the Soviet Union to build a massive arsenal of ICBM's and hydrogen bombs (neither of which they had in the early 1950's) didn't lead to them actually using those weapons against us, but that was arguably an extremely lucky break for us and from von Neumann's perspective, eliminating that threat before it manifested wasn't a totally unreasonable option.
Instead it turned out that the entire free world spent the next half century living in absolute terror of nuclear war, followed by the extremely happy surprise of the Soviet Union completely disintegrating between 1989 and 1991. Again, this was a really lucky break. And it was also a lucky break that the massive Soviet nuclear arsenal stayed under the control of a sane, democratic Russian government that never reverted to authoritarianism or corruption and developed strong institutions to ensure that those weapons could never fall into the wrong hands. We'd be in for a really rough future if that arsenal ended up in the hands of a corrupt dictator who consolidated power to the point of eliminating any possible succession plan, thus guaranteeing a massive crisis when he inevitably died of old age.
> We'd be in for a really rough future if that arsenal ended up in the hands of a corrupt dictator who consolidated power to the point of eliminating any possible succession plan, thus guaranteeing a massive crisis when he inevitably died of old age.
If you're going to be a corrupt dictator, that perceived dead man's switch of succession chaos is a good way to die of old age?
> Von Neumann's remarks also took place in an era before we allowed the Soviets to arm themselves to the degree that they posed a serious nuclear threat to the United States. The pop culture notion that a nuclear war between the US and Soviet Union would entail both sides completely eliminating each other in the first day of hostilities was arguably never completely accurate, but especially in the early 1950's it was not even close to true.
Actually, Von Neumann coined and pushed for mutually-assured destruction, so it didn't matter if it wasn't in popular culture; He himself was possibly the most familiar with the concept of anyone. So it's not correct that he made these comments without proper context. He was wrong to be violently anti-communist, but MAD ended up being a crucial doctrine.
I still think von Neumann would have still preferred for the US to eliminate the threat of communism before they were able to develop their own deterrent, regardless of his role in developing the MAD doctrine.
Soviets/Communists were hand in hand together just a few years later from Neumann's death, 1962 in fact, probably even months to years earlier as we know now that the Communists did successfully transport nuclear armaments to Cuba, fully capable of launched.
The question (that we know the answer to as well) during that period is if they would pull the trigger, and from a few parties involved, they would have. Neumann was right in my opinion, and the Communists of the world at the time were absolutely a hazard to humanity, at the very least the humanity that lived in North America.
I truly think the only reason why we are here today is MAD.
I think the more accurate thing was first hand experience with authoritarianism and totalitarianism. Stalin and Hitler were two sides of the same coin.
It's interesting that the very first question - the very first question, in the mid-1950s! - to von Neumann is about STEM education, and his answer is, we need more people, and we need more & better education. And we need it badly.
Now I'll pause here to say that, when we praise a guy like von Neumann, it can have a distancing effect. If for example I say "this site needs a better UI," it's something we'll usually take at face value, on its merits. But if, say, Elon Musk says the same thing, it becomes more like trivia associated with Elon Musk, not a statement we think through by itself.
If we treat von Neumann like a guy with authority speaking on the topic of science education, then you could take his words, almost without any change, repeat them in 2023, and find they are as true now as they were then. As food for thought, I'd say, if you consider von Neumann to be a personal hero, then consider honoring him by doing what you can for science education.
I agree that we need more and better STEM education but I'm not sure we're in the same place we were in the 1950's. There were huge education reform programs after Sputnik that added more homework and introduced lab science at the high school level, and the goal of these programs was to provide a foundation for future scientists and engineers. In later decades, different goals have been prioritized; rather than providing a foundation for the brightest minds to become the scientific leaders of the future, education policy since the 1960's started to focus more and more on using education to improve social equality and improve the lot of disadvantaged populations. In recent years, the latter approach has reached the reductio ad absurdum of some school districts abolishing eighth grade algebra classes for reasons of racial equity.
What I am genuinely curious about is how similar the current state of STEM education is to the state before Sputnik. My impression is that Sputnik was a massive sea change that never actually got completely reversed; for instance, I've heard that before Sputnik, high schools weren't even teaching trigonometry, let alone calculus. I've found sources that attribute lab science in K-12 to the Sputnik reforms, as well as an increase in homework (which had actually been abolished by 1900's progressives). And if that's true, then yes, let's still improve science education, but let's also acknowledge that things possibly aren't quite as bad as they were in von Neumann's time.
The Mathematical Association of America put together a documentary of John von Neumann in 1966, and they mentioned in it that this was the only footage they were able to find of him.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/oct/13/the-man-from-t...
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-man-from-th...
https://archive.ph/6zyWn
sample: https://www.amazon.com/Man-Future-Visionary-Life-Neumann/dp/...
https://www.amazon.com/Man-Future-Visionary-Life-Neumann/dp/...