Posted by suopspaces 11 hours ago
The average Wikipedia contributor (even ignoring the possibility that they might be a robot) is not an exceptionally good writer, because very few people are exceptionally good writers, because that's what "exceptionally" means.
> I told Banach about an expression Johnny had used with me in Princeton before stating some non-Jewish mathematician's result, "Die Goim haben den folgenden satz beweisen" (The goys have proved the following theorem). Banach, who was pure goy, thought it was one of the funniest sayings he had ever heard. He was enchanted by its implication that if the goys could do it, then Johnny and I ought to be able to do it better. Johnny did not invent this joke, but he liked it and we started using it.
https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2021/12/adventures-of-mathemat...
The Martians (of which von Neumann is usually the most regarded) were mostly Hungarian jews. It's a point on which some people have mused, so it's easy for the thought to point in that direction when von Neumann is brought up.
I had a girlfriend once who joked that Elon Musk was an alien and needs help developing the technology to get home.
Please do NOT disrespect Leo Szilard and von Neumann by comparing their greatness to a lowly scammer
In other words, if you don't have a dog, you're gay. (If you know the comic)
Whether some people have really superior intellects is completely irrelevant for the rest of the humans unless they distribute to the others some useful products of their intellect.
Von Neumann is one of the hundreds of people from the past who have left a priceless intellectual heritage to me and to the remainder of the mankind, so I am indebted and grateful to them.
I have no reason to feel any debt or gratitude to any of the employees of OpenAI or Anthropic.
Jane Street has published a few useful articles, so I have some gratitude towards them, but none of those was even remotely similar in importance to any page written by von Neumann.
It raises questions like, is it even possible to work for a company while getting credit for world-changing results?
And it implies that at any point in time, there might be thousands of Neumanns in the world, and that initial conditions matter a lot more than ability.