A new biography of John von Neumann
economist.com
economist.com
John von Neumann's record illustrates why brilliant scientists may not be the best architects of foreign policy. In particular, von Neumann's belief in the inevitability of nuclear war led him to call for a first strike against Soviet cities before they could develop a nuclear arsenal. This is a rather difficult political-moral-ethical position to rehabilitate. One also gets the sense that a JvN was a bit stingy with sharing credit on major breakthroughs in computing.
Generally I find these 'heroic genius' books about scientific personalities to get stale over time, while books that focus on the discoveries themselves and the many people who contributed are far more interesting and historically accurate. Richard Rhodes's excellent work on the American and Soviet nuclear weapons programs is an example of the latter approach.
Why is it controversial? I know nothing of Von Neumann, but it doesn't seem like a bad thing. "Coziness" could mean a lot of things, but personally even if Von Neumann was taking the military industrial complex out on a date every Tuesday, I wouldn't see a problem with it.
Is the implication that the military was influencing his integrity as a scientist?
The bigger criticism of Von Neumann is that he set back quantum mechanics for a few decades: https://twitter.com/orzelc/status/1446414513465696256
EDIT: There's a shocking comment further downthread. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28811713
I retract my claim that the bigger criticism was his treatment of QM. The bigger criticism is that Von Neumann was a lunatic – I try not to call names, but advocating the extermination of a population is the dealbreaker threshold of niceness for me.
Had he managed to convince the president, he would have been one of the people with the worst impact on humanity (and science incidentally) of all history, perhaps even dooming us all.
My criticism had a source which clearly explained what he did and why it had a negative impact. You may want to do the same thing, or I think no one will be impressed with your claim that Neumann personally was the decisive factor in killing a bunch of people that would've been dead a century later anyway. (Just a little joke.)
Here are sources if you want:
"Von Neumann, four other scientists, and various military personnel were included in the target selection committee that was responsible for choosing the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as the first targets of the atomic bomb. [...] The cultural capital Kyoto, which had been spared the bombing inflicted upon militarily significant cities, was von Neumann's first choice"
"He was quoted in 1950 remarking, "During a Senate committee hearing he described his political ideology as "violently anti-communist, and much more militaristic than the norm". 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://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_von_Neumann#Nuclear_weapo...)
I don't think that I need to give sources as to why nuking the USSR would have had a huge negative impact.
Jeez. To drop all jokes, this guy is a lunatic. I'm not sure why people aren't pointing to this as a decisive criticism, since no amount of genius can excuse the idea that civilians need to be attacked or that populations can't coexist and need to be exterminated.
This is the first I've heard of any of this. My "coziness" with the military industrial complex would be to help design weapons using AI. I'm simply fine with that. I wouldn't be advocating for the extermination of a population! That's not military-industrial coziness, that's psychopathy.
The whole point of joining the military industrial complex is to advocate the opposite of what is represented here. That's the only way that real change can be made. Focus on military targets, not civilian populations. Remind people that although the goal is victory, the war will end one day (i.e. coexistence is never impossible). And so on.
In general, if someone is trying to exterminate a population, then I believe that they fall under the lunatic umbrella, and that the umbrella should come down like a Venus fly trap and gobble all of them up. On balance, if we did this to every such person throughout history, then history may have fared better. There are zero populations of humans that need an exterminator (at least, an exterminator of humans).
I’d put refusing to coexist with Communists on that level, and they actually took over von Neumann’s home country.
There is an incredibly important distinction between fighting against the ignorant temper tantrum of your brothers and sisters and exterminating them all.
Neither did the US in 1950. You’re thinking of H-bombs, which didn’t exist until 1952.
> In general, if someone is trying to exterminate a population
Which is not, in the context of 1950, what von Neumann was advocating. He was advocating for the use of strategic bombing in a campaign to topple a totalitarian regime that murdered tens of millions of people anyway. Which is what most people agreed was a good idea with the Nazis five years previous.
There is no strategic use of nuclear weapons against a nuclear armed country. The plan was a war of extermination. Strategically at the time the majority of the military was in the GDR, not even in the USSR.
I'm not sure where you're getting a plan to drop hundreds of nukes on the Soviet Union in 1950 from Von Neumann--source?
In any case, these weren't hydrogen bombs. There were probably hundreds of relatively legitimate military targets in the USSR in 1950 that could be usefully attacked with nuclear weapons with yields in the tens of kilotons (versus the hundreds to thousands of kilotons of hydrogen bombs). It's a big country and you could drop hundreds of nuclear weapons in the right parts of it without destroying population centers. The Soviets themselves did that with their own testing.
> There is no strategic use of nuclear weapons against a nuclear armed country.
Which the USSR barely qualified as in 1950. Plus, they had few reliable ways of delivering those nuclear arms to US soil. That's the point of attacking them in 1950 as opposed to waiting until they had a large nuclear arsenal and the ability to reach the United States.
It's not sporting to only present bait as your argument. Just go ahead and outline what you are trying to say.
So you'd be fine helping them design weapons that could exterminate a populace but you wouldn't advocate actually using them?
Suppose you had the option to help discover and design the first nukes. Would it have been better to refuse, and wait for Russia to design them? The early efforts were crucial.
If it were possible to ban AI weapons across all countries for the rest of eternity, I would of course refuse to work on them. But that’s a bit like designing a society with the assumption everyone will be honest.
So let's see something more realistic. Have you ever, I don't know, stolen your buddy's new bike because if you don't, somebody else will? Or taken an upskirt picture because people do that kind of thing? Or thrown a burger wrapper out a car window because everybody does it? Are there things you simply find disagreeable or repulsive and you won't do them because you simply don't want to?
Or do you really go around in life trying to maximise your asshole potential, just because you assume everyone else will, too? I am genuinely curious because I certainly don't, I try to minimise my asshole potential, first of all because I don't want to be an asshole. I don't care if other people are assholes. The world is full of assholes. But I am me, not them. YMMV.
Additionally, I believe that being an asshole is a negative consequence (of one's choices in life?) in and of itself. In a sense, I think it's the worse thing that can possibly happen to a person, to be an asshole.
I'm naive, huh?
Additionally, H-bombs didn’t even exist in 1950. A nuclear strike on the Soviet Union in 1950 would have been devastating but not as catastrophic as you would imagine today. It would have been closer to the Second World War—a bloody and devastating piece of business to be sure, but once it was all over, most of the people involved agreed that it had been worth fighting.
If the Nazis won WWII, don’t you think it would be worth at least considering using nuclear weapons in a war to destroy their regime before they developed a competitive nuclear arsenal of their own? Or would you have argued for coexistence with them? The Soviet Union in 1950 was very much the moral equivalent of that situation.
He was pretty evil, but Stalin was much more moderate on exporting communism by military force than the norm - his invasions were mostly about maintaining the national security of the USSR.
The US by 1950 had hundreds of nuclear bombs. It would have been devastatig, the fallout would have been horrifying, and the famines that would follow would be the largest in the history of humanity.
>If the Nazis won WWII, don’t you think it would be worth at least considering using nuclear weapons in a war to destroy their regime before they developed a competitive nuclear arsenal of their own? Or would you have argued for coexistence with them? The Soviet Union in 1950 was very much the moral equivalent of that situation.
If it was the Nazis, I would, because there plan after winning WW2 involved killing 200+ million people. Say what you will about Stalin and he truly was evil, he had no plans of world conquest, much less of genociding hundreds of millions and literally enslaving a billion people.
That's a fascinating question. I'm not sure what to say.
EDIT: Ah, my response is "That's an unfair comparison." The context was that Von Neumann was advocating the extermination of the Russian population, not their regime. I agree that it would be worth considering the strategic options at the time, but that the strategic options should not include the extermination of the entire German population.
I don't think that's accurate. 1950 was before hydrogen bombs.
Japan has done ok.
On what basis would one assume that the Soviets would not initiate an attack as soon as they could? In an extreme, but very much possible at the time view of the world, it was a either-or question which power remains - in that context it very much makes sense to preemptively strike them, even if that is a hard and brutal decision.
It makes no sense to preemptively strike them. It's a monstrous instinct.
Most information was published well after JvN has died. He also had no chance to comment even in the last years of his life. (Apparently the military was near him in hospital to make sure he didn't reveal any secrets)
e.g. JvN's recommendation to bomb Kyoto is usually supported with a quote from a book that was written by the general who ran the Manhattan project and published his account of the events five years after von Neumann's death. I wouldn't be surprised if the general was doing at least some white washing in the early sixties as the peace movement was gaining momentum.
More recently, looking at how various US agencies and departments reacted to accusations of human rights abuses in say Iraq, it's very easy to imagine that JvN's comments on the topic where either ripped out of context or exaggerated.
So again, while it's very clear how someone with an extremely scientific mindset like von Neumann's would through outrageous comments around during a brainstorming session or during a heated argument. I'd really try to withhold any judgment on this until I see the full transcripts of these meetings.
Really skeptical of this. Not only did he write a famous "little book" on QM (which is still readable to this day), but hidden variable theories are pretty much disproved in QM. So even if he was wrong about the theorem, he was still right about the principle. There's a wikipedia on it here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden-variable_theory
I spent a long time studying QM and never heard of anyone taking hidden-variable theories seriously so I don't know what this tweet is about.
Criticizing that from the comfortable perspective of today or even halfway to the sixties, doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Also being smart apparently doesn’t help much in predicting the future.
There's a difference between criticism and understanding. We can understand why people felt and acted the way they did in a given time period, but that doesn't mean that we need to sympathize with them or that they are somehow immune from criticism.
Individuals are not just a victim of our circumstances, and morals about the sanctity of human life are far older than the 20th century and appear in times of deep discomfort as well as times of comfort.
If you want to criticize, imho, criticize someone who actually did wrong. Those who expressed an opinion found to be a bad call almost a century in the future aren’t worth the bother in my opinion.
We were incredibly lucky to have JvN.
"Thou Shalt Not Kill" was not a product of an abundant, decadent society, and I promise you that Neumann had heard of it.
I agree that Neumann gave humanity great scientific and technological gifts that brought us into the modern era, but so did Wernher von Braun. Both also used their gifts to cause suffering and destruction on a massive scale.
We can't just whitewash their history; given their intelligence we must admit that they knew what they were doing and what they were angling for. And it still matters, because very intelligent and clever people in today's world are building weapons and killing machines, and hiding behind the same excuses.
Let's not forget how close to war we came during the "bay of pigs" era.
And it doesn’t seem like an out of the world assumption that if the Soviets would have created it before, they would have used that - and that is also a fair assumption that the world would be better under faulty capitalism with proper democracy than a single-party dictatorship.
First, a decapitating strike against Soviet Union /could/ have made sense given the information at the time - imagine you could decapitate Germany in 1935, how many lives would that have saved? Hindsight is 20/20, before that you couldn't be 100% sure that one of the two architects of WWII was not going to try again.
Second, I personally really like Feynman's quote on von Neumann "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.". I think it's one of the best takes on these issues in most cases.
The prevailing military doctrine at the time was ‘total war’, and it was implemented with strategic bombing campaigns. The weapons were so inaccurate that they simply kept dropping bombs until everything was destroyed.
Any war on the Soviet Union, either nuclear or with conventional firebombing would have caused massive civilian casualties.
I don't think it's a hard position to rehabilitate. What people find so outrageous are not von Neumann's views about geopolitics and nuclear weapons but his attitude. They object to the cheerful terms in which he advocated for the use of nuclear weapons.
And fair enough. But, attitude aside, there's nothing obviously wrong with arguing that the US should have used its nuclear monopoly to secure the independence of Eastern Europe or even to end the Soviet regime.
I've been learning about the Dulles brothers recently and the most hawkish Americans of this time period were a lot more hawkish than the neocons of today. I am very glad that cooler heads prevailed but I don't know that it should be such a knock on his reputation that he was in a different camp.
An exhilarating new biography of John von Neumann: the lost genius who invented our world.
The smartphones in our pockets and computers like brains. The vagaries of game theory and evolutionary biology. Self-replicating moon bases and nuclear weapons. All bear the fingerprints of one remarkable man: John von Neumann.
Born in Budapest at the turn of the century, von Neumann is one of the most influential scientists to have ever lived. His colleagues believed he had the fastest brain on the planet - bar none. He was instrumental in the Manhattan Project and helped formulate the bedrock of Cold War geopolitics and modern economic theory. He created the first ever programmable digital computer. He prophesied the potential of nanotechnology and, from his deathbed, expounded on the limits of brains and computers - and how they might be overcome.
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It does sound like a Great Man history, and as someone who reads a lot of histories I usually don't waste my time on Great Man histories. I'll read the reviews when it actually comes out, but you're probably right. It does not look promising.
I'm currently working on a book/photobook that’s being published in spring next year about his second wife, Klara Dán von Neumann. Klara’s a very interesting figure, but has remained very much in the shadow of her more famous husband. Despite having had little formal education, she taught herself how to programme, and wrote code for Monte Carlo simulations of various hydrogen bomb models on the ENIAC as a consultant for Los Alamos in the late 1940s and early ‘50s.
The book is also about other women programmers and the relationship between early computers, simulation tools like Monte Carlo, and the impact of hydrogen bomb testing in the Marshal Islands. For anyone interested in Klara’s story or the other inter-connected subjects, the book is currently available for pre-order via a Kickstarter campaign:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/632375787/klara-and-the...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Martians_(scientists)
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My favorite interaction is of von Neumann with Shannon regarding the coining of entropy:
What von Neumann Said to Shannon When Shannon first derived his famous formula for information, he asked von Neumann what he should call it and von Neumann replied “You should call it entropy for two reasons: first because that is what the formula is in statistical mechanises but second and more important, as nobody knows what entropy is, whenever you use the term you will always be at an advantage!
http://www.spatialcomplexity.info/what-von-neumann-said-to-s...
"It is unwise for the beginner and may or may not be fruitless for the expert to seek a link with entropy in physics."
It even predicts a direct equivalence between the unit of bit and Joules per Kelvin with the entropy produced in the erasure of a bit being equal to 9.6e-24 J/K
Unless I'm making some mistake, you can even use computer science principles combined with Landauer's limit to solve Maxwell's Demon.
I don't think you would have been disappointed :-)
Documentary (with English subtitles ) https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RuwnywSpl40
Documentary (in French) https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QQui90ZGobo
Some people might do or were something that I won't like. I have learned to not let that influence me in way, and be comfortably ambivalent.
I especially felt bad after I came to know that Richard Feynman slept with many of his friends' wives and tried to sleep with even more of them. He burnt a lot of bridges this way. One Physicist had told me that Feynman hit on his wife twice, and when discouraged by the wife, he let it go as a perfect gentleman.
Despite this, Feynman remains one of my most revered icons and his picture still hangs on my wall.
I don't overlook what he did or try to find some naive justification. I know he was this way and that does not make his mind less fascinating to me.
Having a picture of von Neumann is in no way a red flag as much as having a picture of, or the name of a particular past US President would.
If you're going to indict people for having immoral sex, you'll have to indict probably 90%. If you include trying to have immoral sex, how many would pass your test?
I know the wives were equally guilty. He seduced but never ever forced to anyone's knowledge.
He often committed these acts of adultery when he was welcomed as a guest at someone's home.
Having adventures on the bed with the wives of the people who invited you in their homes- pretty low to me.
The women were adult and consenting, but it is still betraying the trust of people.
If all these were to happen with the consent of the husbands, although it would be extremely weird and unnatural, not to mention- immoral, by the standard of the stark majority of any society, I wouldn't have given it any thought at all.
Also in some blogs and articles. I cannot find these now.
That being said, there are quite a few historical figures (Einstein, Penrose, Hawking, Ramanujan, Bertrand Russel, Grothendieck) that are nowhere as morally questionable as many, though they are all flawed people.
On a purely intellectual level I doubt that you would be disappointed though they are all human in the end.
What kind of conversations could we hope to have with someone like von Neumann or Turing?
Early in the Cold War -- while the US had a nuclear monopoly -- Von Neumann was a strong proponent of an all-out, surprise first strike against the USSR by the US. "With the Russians it is not a question of whether but of when. If you say why not bomb them tomorrow, I say why not today? If you say today at 5 o'clock, I say why not one o'clock?"
[1] The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Richard Rhodes https://www.amazon.com/Making-of-Atomic-Bomb-audiobook/dp/B0...
The author also has a book about the hydrogen bomb too:
https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Sun-Making-Hydrogen-Bomb/dp/0684...
Once the book centers itself around Leo Szilard, things start to pick up. Having said this, I agree with the previous comment. The book is amazing. Disclaimer: I listened to it in audiobook format through Audible
Bought the paperback version so I could refer back to favorite parts.
Rhodes' personal story is really interesting. CSPAN did a great interview with him many years ago - highly recommended.
There is a German guy (Ulf Hashagen) who has done some excellent biographical research about von Neumann. I hope he writes a full length biography some day, since there doesn't seem to be one now. Meanwhile, the best overview article I know of is Stanislaw Ulam's profile in the AMS Bulletin published shortly after von Neumann's death, in the special issue devoted to him:
https://projecteuclid.org/journals/bulletin-of-the-american-...
that pretty much sums things up, doesn't it.
First of all, on the biography. So far for me the biographies written about von Neumann have two key problems to me:
1) They avoid his mathematical work and focus on his work in game theory, computing, nuclear weapons, etc. I find this a bit problematic because despite all his other achievements, von Neumann was fundamentally a mathematician who applied his skills in mathematics and logic to other fields to great success, however before all this he first made many substantial contributions to pure mathematics. Now the question is how can one author cover these broad areas that von Neumann contributed to at a reasonable level? I'm not really sure it can be done, even von Neumann's colleagues themselves weren't fully aware of the extent of his work. For example I remember reading some interview of one where they said he never made any contributions to number theory, yet von Neumann early in his career did publish at least two papers on the field, one on algebraic number theory and another on transcendental number theory. So perhaps multiple authors, each covering their specialty would work better if they can make their chapters weave together nicely. Another problem is what level should it be. I personally would like it to be around STEM major level mathematics so you can properly introduce some concepts however I understand most authors wouldn't do this because it decreases their possible audience.
2) Not much research is done into what technical work he did in defence and for private companies (particularly IBM). From the biographies I've read they all happily cover how von Neumann was this greatly respected figure and how he lead this committee and that committee and how on his deathbed he had the chiefs of all the armed forces and the chiefs of staff there too but that isn't really covering the actual technical work he did there (a good reference for his government consultancies is `A Fiery Peace in a Cold War`). He obviously consulted widely in the military, CIA, NSA, etc, military establishment in general but in terms of technical work not much is there, presumably because all the records are hidden or classified. I can understand why some of his work even today might remain that way (particularly his work on nuclear weapons) but I've yet to have seen anyone try send a FOI request to various agencies and see what they can fish out given that he died over 60 years ago. He did spend a lot of time on these things post WW2 so it would be interesting to see what he did actually contribute to beyond his position on committees and advocacy.
I notice several other comments on this page I think I can make a educated comment on as well.
First about his views on communism. As a child in Hungary von Neumann lived through several revolutions, one communist and another antisemitic. He was at risk of attack from both groups, from the communists for being part of a wealthy family and from antisemites and far righters for being a Jew. Safe to say I can imagine this ordeal while he was a teenager didn't leave a good taste in his mouth, especially as he had to move around the country to avoid being attacked and potentially killed. His remark about bombing them at a certain o'clock was from 1950, just as communism was being spread quite forcefully through violence around Europe and you can imagine why he wanted to prevent this from happening, especially considering the USA would probably lose a conventional war at this time, however they still did maintain a monopoly on nuclear weapons (for a short period). I would also like to note that for whatever reason he seemed to believe nuclear war was inevitable, and made an admission on his death bed that he believed nuclear war was "absolutely certain" to occur in the future and that everyone would die from it. This might help explain his comments if he sincerely believed nuclear war was inevitable anyway (luckily it wasn't). I would also note that he visited Moscow for a conference in 1935 and I'm sure he had many friends there, so views that he wanted to exterminate civilians for the sake of it or whatever would also be clearly wrong.
Second on the Kyoto scenario. Despite wikipedia claiming so, scanning Macrae's biography shows no indication that von Neumann had Kyoto as his first choice, but rather one of 4 cities he voted for. From what I understand the targeting of Kyoto was first added for technical reasons, and did in fact have strategic value, however the targeting committee did also note that perhaps a city full of intellectuals would more likely appreciate the significance of the bomb and hence advocate for a more peaceful solution (http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2014/08/08/kyoto-misconceptio...).
Third on the good upbringing argument. A good way to see how special von Neumann was compared to other mathematicians and scientists is to get their opinions themselves, unfortunately most are long dead however several history projects do include information on this. This [1] is a good example. Basically everyone who mentions von Neumann notes that his speed and rapidity is bar absolutely none, however one of them (Edward McShane) does quote fellow Princeton mathematician Solomon Lefschetz in saying that they paid too much respect to von Neumann because of his upbringing and in particular he had the finest tutoring by Hungarian mathematicians as a child. However a counterexample to this is simple. If it was just that, then why has no one like von Neumann come up in the past 100+ years? Especially considering how material conditions and access to information have only improved since the early 1900s when von Neumann grew up.
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20011126182532/http://infoshare1...
Overall I think von Neumann is someone particularly unique. Not because of his creativity, nor because of insight, sure he may have had these qualities but so did many other people. What is unique about him is his speed. Looking at some of these interviews on several occasions it seems that von Neumann was literally making up new proofs for some theorem on the spot. Whether he thought about them beforehand or whether he did truly make them up on the spot is of course in question, but it seems he did it often enough one might could not be blamed for believing that the latter version is what he really did. I would also note a strange fascination that HN seems to have with von Neumann, as I see him here quite regularly and I can understand for some the worship is excessive, so it is important to note even someone of his caliber can make mistakes, the most important one I believe is already mentioned in this thread which is the mathematicization of the measurement problem. Everyone can make mistakes, and absolutely no one is immune from this.
> By the age of eight, von Neumann was familiar with differential and integral calculus
> At the age of 15, he began to study advanced calculus under the renowned analyst Gábor Szegő. On their first meeting, Szegő was so astounded with the boy's mathematical talent that he was brought to tears.
> By the age of 19, von Neumann had published two major mathematical papers, the second of which gave the modern definition of ordinal numbers, which superseded Georg Cantor's definition.
Yeah right.
Sure his privilege helped. But a lot of people all through the world had that amount of privilege or more.
How many von Neumans are there?
In the real world 99% of parents don't have the time to teach their child anything beyond how to speak and walk and answer their questions. 90%+ of parent's don't even remember how to efficiently factor integers or any math beyond arithmetic.
Certainly very few people have this level of genius, but if Von Neumann were to be born to an average milieu it is impossible he would have been able to reach those milestones.
Does percentage make more sense here or absolute number? It depends on your context. I would say in this argument, it seems more certain that Von Neumann's success, which is always a function of both nature and nurture, can probably be attributed more to nature. Or, perhaps most likely, it's a rare event of talent meets incredible luck.
It's certainly a meeting of nature and nurture.
"if Von Neumann were to be born to an average milieu it is impossible he would have been able to reach those milestones."
Come on now. Ramanujan was still doing arithmetic by the age of 10.
Unarguably Ramanujan was held back as his mathematical progress very strongly, and was not too far above that of his peers until he attended High School.
And the worst is that Ramanujan himself was incredibly privileged compared to the Indian average, being able to live in an urban milieu. Were he in an average rural, peasant context he would have been held back even more. Not to mention, he was a Brahmin, the highest caste in India.
As far as Ramanujan, it's not arguable either that if he had been recognized early and given proper opportunities, he would have been even more prolific and have made even greater contributions. It took him 10 years for his genius to be recognized locally! And that was as a Brahmin to an urban family, imagine how hard it would have been if he was a Vaishiya born to farmers - he might have never been recognized, and we would have lost his contributions.
If you believe that without being 100% self-made you're crap, that's your point of view, not mine.
As for your edit, extreme intelligence is not really correlated to income. In fact, once you leave the median by a standard deviation, there is almost no impact anymore, and even less when you start controlling for social factors. What is moreso correlated is low intelligence and low income. Descendance is a much, much stronger impact.
"As for your edit, extreme intelligence is not really correlated to income."
A very poor person could rise up to the status of Neumann, they'd just need significantly more innate intelligence, which is a very tall order.
"they'd just need significantly more innate intelligence, which is a very tall order."
I think wealth helps but through a different mechanism to what you're thinking. Avoiding malnutrition is the big one. A secondary point is avoiding the need to work and being able to focus on intellectual passions, which many average-wealth people can do. Adding more money to the picture doesn't help beyond a baseline. Ramanujan was fairly poor but still had enough family wealth to be able to eat enough food and dedicate a lot of time to his passion.
Yeah, they’re too busy coaching their kids’ sports teams.
I have seen parents buying their kids Playstations and taking them to expensive vacations in 5/7 star hotels and are content about "doing a lot" for their kids.
I have also seen parents really investing time in their kids' future. Teaching them programming, foreign languages, advanced (for their age as per some regulatory bodies) math, etc.
Any wonder why the kids from the next group will turn out to be more successful statistically?
There is also nuance in this. Almost nobody (statistically) grows up to be geniuses from these families. But they certainly tend to have more accomplished lives.
I know a lot of parents, basically almost all parents that I know of, enroll their kids in all sorts of things.
They are admitted into schools where you speak only English, they are admitted into swimming school, karate, painting, singing, dance class, you name it.
My cousin's kid is enrolled into five extra-curricular classes. She is 7.
I have been seeing this for decades now. Despite being born into upper middle class homes, and having their parents shower money on stuff, most kids grow up to be vastly uninteresting individuals.
- Most of them speak grammatically incorrect, Indian-style English.
- Many struggle to find jobs even in the low-paying strata of the private sector.
- Most of them don't go to top schools since almost any college that matters takes admission through meritocratic channels (academic test scores and/or admission tests)
I have seen a lot of these rich babies fail in life.
Privilege never equals achievement.
There is always some element of genetics involved.
Hard work matters more than genetics, I believe so. But the influence of genes is not trivial.
Genes + extreme hard work + good environment provide a baseline for true genius.
Beyond that, yes he was incredibly accomplished, very prolific, and supremely intelligent, but it is important to remember that he was still human and not some kind of transcendant being outside of earthly considerations.
There are no shortages of people in these threads who genuinely believe that Neumann was supremely intelligent, beyond the conception of regular people. I'm sure you'll find them. It's not even unique to Neumann.
Nothing. They put effort into his education because of his brilliancy, and your standard Jewish-American household could do the same thing.
People can recall pages from books if they put the effort, and regular people routinely do - an average person can memorize thousands of pages. Again it's that he could do it faster that's exceptional.
And they would be right. This sort of genius is not only nurture and hard work, but nature as well. Like no matter what I do in my life, I will never even approach that level.
Of course he is still human, and someone will born (rarely though) that will achieve similar feats, but let’s be honest and just say that what he did is well beyond the reach of the average people.
I can follow a math example’s solution, but that doesn’t necessarily mean I could solve it alone.
No need to get all riled up about fairness.