Posted by aray07 13 hours ago
[0] https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/44425/turings-cathe...
Not to mention Nikola Tesla about 20 years prior.
> When several of them turned up at Los Alamos and realized they had gone to high school together, Szilard joked that Hungary was a cover story for a Martian landing.
What if there actually are people who go to Mars in the future but regret it and the only way for them to come back to Earth is to invent a time machine and be reborn as a mathematical supergenius. That would explain this at least:
> At six, Janos (the OG hungarian name for Johnny) could divide eight-digit numbers in his head and hold a conversation in ancient Greek. He later added Latin, French, German, English, and Yiddish. The rumor was that he remembered everything he ever read. Many years later Herman Goldstine decided to test this by asking him to recite "A Tale of Two Cities." Von Neumann started on chapter one and had to be asked to stop fifteen minutes later.
There are more pedestrian explanations. https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/john-von-neumann-s...
Computer science used to be tiny. In the late 1970s, AI was a few tens of people at MIT, at Stanford, and at CMU, with a few smaller groups elsewhere. I met about half the greats of my generation, as did everyone else who was serious. There were almost no textbooks in the early 1970s. When Knuth's Fundamental Algorithms came out, it was great to finally see what had previously been folklore on mimeographed sheets in an actual book.
I was involved with Autodesk in its very early days. Even went to the founding meeting. The feeling was that PCs were finally getting big enough to be interesting. The founders were all mainframe programmers, and the people who came up from 4K memory on an 8088 had no idea how to organize a big program. But mainframe people did.
There was a vast emptyness in the product space ready to be filled. Products considered were a window manager ("AutoScreen"), a text editor (Kern Sibbald actually built that), a database, and a CAD program. None of those existed yet as successful products. CAD was picked because the productivity gain was so huge vs. paper and pencil drafting. At the time, the state of the art in drawing editing was drawing on mylar and using an electric eraser to delete. Then you ran the Mylar master through a big copier to make blueprints or whiteprints. A CAD system on a PC was a very easy sell.
So all you had to do was make it work. No need to overcome the noise level of a thousand similar "apps".
I remarked to myself how much the speaker sounded like Ren Hoëk, from The Ren and Stimpy Show. Then I looked up the name of the channel host: Károly Zsolnai-Fehér.
I thought to myself: Huh. Hungarian. That explains the mathematical prowess—and the voice. (Ren's voice is a pastiche of Hungarian actor Peter Lorre.)
Not only does it capture the alien-like genius of the protagonist, but also described his particular emotional and social character in a way that I have not seen written elsewhere. Highly recommended.
- people can be slightly better than a given random observer, because they learned and prioritise to pay attention. They are better at recalling memorable and minor details, especially in short term memory and in memorable situations that a lot of people share long term. They will still forget long term information that is irrelevant.
- any such person and also observer can easily talk themselves into the belief that their skill must be absolute, especially since the observer will largely only test from his own inferior dataset.
- once the belief takes hold (because people love a good story), observers tend to look less for flaws and more for further confirmations to keep mythologising people.
"Can we survive technology?" got me thinking about our industry's upheaval. Software engineering's receiving the disruption it so proudly inflicted on other industries.. not reaping what it sowed; rather just the natural order of things.
Acceptance and moving with change is all that can work. Obstructing; denying; ignoring progress.. you'll lose your edge, your relevance, your value to others, and your job. Progress won't wait for us to like it. We must move fast enough to survive change.
Junior engineers for example? Suddenly too junior to be hired? Great! They, and you, can access multiple answer boxes with every PhD ever, and with a bit of creativity, they can leverage that. The best will survive on their own - the rest we should help along. Let's create tools and structures and institutions and help junior engineers finish their education to marketable levels. Let's help them find efficiencies and get there in the same duration. We shouldn't compel companies to preserve a hiring pipeline; now should we incrementally upgrade university educations. Better to go to kids in schools & universities and stimulate their creativity, get them using new tools in new ways, finding efficiencies - because that's what today and tomorrow's jobs will be about. Institutions will adopt the good ideas in time.
We have a responsibility to invest in - and invent - ways of bringing people along.
I also wrote about why I liked the book so much:
https://henrikwarne.com/2024/07/07/john-von-neumann-the-man-...
This is why he was dismissed in so far as foreign policy was concerned, where nuance and patience takes precedence over cold, calculating game theory. Not only would it not have been feasible (Russia is huge), but it would have led to follow on effects by possibly pulling the US into potentially another world war. This is evidence you can be a genius in some areas and wrong in others.
Maybe there's some context that suggests otherwise?