Comment by ZhuanXia | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ZhuanXia | Hacker News Reader

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>Would this diminish our view of his legacy, for him to come "down to earth"?

I doubt it. Consider how the greatest minds of the 20th century thought of him:

"I have known a great many intelligent people in my life. I knew Planck, von Laue and Heisenberg. Paul Dirac was my brother in law; Leo Szilard and Edward Teller have been among my closest friends; and Albert Einstein was a good friend, too. But none of them had a mind as quick and acute as Jansci [John] von Neumann. I have often remarked this in the presence of those men and no one ever disputed me."

— Nobel Laureate Eugene Wigner

"You know, Herb, how much faster I am in thinking than you are. That is how much faster von Neumann is compared to me."

— Nobel Laureate Enrico Fermi to his former PhD student Herb Anderson.

"One of his remarkable abilities was his power of absolute recall. As far as I could tell, von Neumann was able on once reading a book or article to quote it back verbatim; moreover, he could do it years later without hesitation. He could also translate it at no diminution in speed from its original language into English. On one occasion I tested his ability by asking him to tell me how The Tale of Two Cities started. Whereupon, without any pause, he immediately began to recite the first chapter and continued until asked to stop after about ten or fifteen minutes."

— Herman Goldstine, mathematician and computer pioneer.

"I always thought Von Neumann’s brain indicated that he was from another species, an evolution beyond man."

— Nobel Laureate Hans A. Bethe.

In his final days, Neumann tragically lost his genius to brain cancer. His friend Edward Teller said this about it:

“I think that von Neumann suffered more when his mind would no longer function, than I have ever seen any human being suffer."

Gwern has a funny essay about cloning Von Neumann here: https://www.gwern.net/Embryo-selection#glue-robbers-sequenci...

As Neumann seemed to be god-like intelligent, highly personable, and very kind, if we were to clone any historical figure, he seems like a good bet!

He also said something like “if we can nuke them today, why wait till tomorrow?”, referring to the Soviets.

Cut him some slack for having grown up with the Red Terror in Hungary.

Then he must also had lived through White Terror: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Terror_(Hungary)

There is no slack to cut. There is literally nothing worse in human history than communism. He was simply right about it.

In Warsaw, after the war, when it fell under Soviet occupation, a popular opposition slogan was Truman, Truman, spuść ta bania, bo to nie do wytrzymania which roughly translates to Truman, Truman, drop the nukes, because we can't take this any more. Irradiated ruins were preferable to communism.

My grandparents lived through both communism and WWII. To them, the war was much worse.

I asked a friend what growing up under communism was like. She said 'shabby'

I don't think condemning millions the horrors of war is worth saving them from a shabby existence.

Have you considered that perhaps that was a rhetorical statement uttered by some, and killing them and their political opponents and millions of others may not have been actually what they wanted?

The historical context for that statement is it was made when America had a monopoly on nuclear weapons and Stalin's Soviet Union, a dictatorship of incomparable authoritarianism and delusion, was on the cusp of developing such weapons. Few would have predicted that a nuclear war would not occur once that happened. Under these circumstances, a first strike followed by occupation may have been rational. And given the complete insanity, cruelty and dehumanizing brutality of Soviet policy in the following 50 years, it's possible American occupation of the Soviet union would have saved many lives on net. See East vs West Berlin, for example. His position on first-strike was not very irrational given what was known at the time. Even in hindsight, it is hard to say either way.

It's a good thing that decisions to massacre hundreds of millions of people isn't made like this, then.

Many highly rational people get sucked into making decisions merely on math, ignoring the ethical aspects. Ironically, on HN that decision making process is often mirrored and so discussions tend to fall into the same trap.

You know, that's pretty much exact same argument for liberating those poor Iraqis, let's see how well it went.

(Except that liberating Russians would have gone a whole lot worse. You would end up liberating half of Eastern Europe, and probably the whole Germany, along the way.)

„John von Neumann was "violent anti-communist and much more militaristic than the norm", according to his own words from one of the Senate committee hearings. He was an advocate of the "preventive war" strategy (against USSR), and was quoted in 1950: "If you say why not bomb [the Soviets] tomorrow, I say, why not today. If you say today at five o'clock, I say why not one o'clock?" ” https://www.quora.com/What-were-John-von-Neumanns-political-...

We forget that Khrushchev had literally said "We will bury you", banging his shoe on the table on international TV. He wasn't fucking around. Von Neumann knew many, many people tortured, killed, or sent to the gulag by the Soviets.

So the proposed solution to stop them being tortured, killed and sent to the gulag was to nuke the and hundreds of millions others so they'd be dead before that could happen?

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