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Comment by sillysaurusx | Hacker News Reader

> whose coziness with the military-industrial complex remains controversial to this day.

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.

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It’s not controversial during WWII, the pinnacle of human conflict. The war effort was a goal of almost everyone active. The nuclear race was on and many had to flee Europe. Even in normal circumstances, culturally people just didn’t care as much about human life back then.

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.

> Criticizing that from the comfortable perspective of today... doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

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.

Sanctity of life occurred gradually, and is in part a luxury of abundance.

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.

> Sanctity of life occurred gradually, and is in part a luxury of abundance.

"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.

He didn't do anything wrong, or hide from his work, or opinions however. He's merely guilty of a wrong opinion, based on a bad call of a plausible future that didn't happen.

Let's not forget how close to war we came during the "bay of pigs" era.

well put, or more succinctly hindsight is 20/20.

I think this is an overstatement. I don't think his mistake came close to delaying the development of QM for a "few decades". On the contrary, he was a major contributor to the mathematical foundations of QM, and, on balance, certainly advanced the field more than he retarded it, even considering his blunder.

> The bigger criticism of Von Neumann is that he set back quantum mechanics for a few decades: https://twitter.com/orzelc/status/1446414513465696256

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.

If it seems like the first power to create nuclear bombs will use it and basically annihilate the other, then the only logical step would be to preemptively use it.

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.

Do you think that enthusiastically egging on the nuclear holocaust of tens of million of people for ultimately no good reason (and that's the best case scenario of his proposal, it could have been even worse as he seriously underestimated the Soviet Union) is not a bad thing?

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.

As I already said, I know nothing about Von Neumann's history. You'll have to fill me in before I can answer that question, since you didn't really say what happened.

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.)

He ended up not being the decisive factor, but as the above said, he advocated for a nuclear first strike on the Soviet Union, and was already part of the nuclear decision-making process - he was invited to participate in the decision for which cities to strike in Japan but was ultimately overruled because he suggested to hit target with no military importance and high concentrations of civilians. He thought (very wrongly) that coexistence with the Soviets was impossible and that they had to be eliminated as soon as possible.

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.

> He thought (very wrongly) that coexistence with the Soviets was impossible and that they had to be eliminated as soon as possible.

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.

Keep in mind Von Neumann was ethnically Jewish and the fact that the Jews he would have grown up with went from respected citizens to extermination in a matter of years might have affected him. I have no idea if that is the case but the fatalist, apocalyptic attitude you reference is the kind of thing you occasionally hear from Jews profoundly warped by the atrocities of that era.

> 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!

So you'd be fine helping them design weapons that could exterminate a populace but you wouldn't advocate actually using them?

I’ve thought carefully about it for a long time. I still change my mind from time to time, but currently, the view is that we need to own the space before others do.

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.

OK, but let's be serious, I don't think anyone's asking you to design AI-powered weapons ("hey, this guy has trained GPT-2, he must have the skillz to design smart cluster munitions!").

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.

There would be no negative consequences for you if you failed to take an upskirt picture. But if a country falls behind in weapons technology, then its very existence is imperilled.

On that, please see my point in my second comment above about considering a realistic scenario.

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 would contest the claim that being an asshole is something that “happens to” a person, rather than something that the person chooses to do.

I don't think that anyone ever chooses to be an asshole. I think people realise that they've been assholes, or they don't. I agree that people become assholes through things they do by choice, but I don't think anybody does something only an asshole would with the express purpose of being an asshole.

I'm naive, huh?

Do you think Lincoln was a lunatic?

I think Lincoln didn't have access to an arsenal that could end humanity if used in the wrong way, so I don't know if the comparison is warranted.

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).

Lincoln refused to coexist with the Confederates.

I’d put refusing to coexist with Communists on that level, and they actually took over von Neumann’s home country.

The United States of America is preserved today - intact - specifically because Lincoln valued coexisting with the confederates above almost all else. He made clear even in his first inaugural address that the preservation of the Union was paramount.

There is an incredibly important distinction between fighting against the ignorant temper tantrum of your brothers and sisters and exterminating them all.

> I think Lincoln didn't have access to an arsenal that could end humanity if used in the wrong way, so I don't know if the comparison is warranted.

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.

This is quite wrong. The plans were to drop hundreds of nukes. Those were definitely in the right order of magnitude to potentially end humanity. Certainly enough to kill the vast majority of the USSR.

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.

> The plans were to drop hundreds of nukes. Those were definitely in the right order of magnitude to potentially end humanity.

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.

What makes Lincoln a lunatic?

It's not sporting to only present bait as your argument. Just go ahead and outline what you are trying to say.

I don’t think he was one.

I think JvN deserves at least some benefit of the doubt. As far as I am aware there is little unbiased impartial information about these meetings discussing the targets for nuclear strikes.

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.

It’s easy to determine a “good decision” retroactively.

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.

I'd suggest you look over the distance from the USSR to the USA to see how such an attack would have played out. There was no such possibility u til ICBMs at which time MAD was a thing.

It makes no sense to preemptively strike them. It's a monstrous instinct.

When he made those comments, Stalin was still alive. You have the benefit of 70 years of hindsight and the knowledge that the Soviet Union moderated after Stalin’s death and collapsed entirely of its own accord a few decades later.

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.

> 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?

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.

> The context was that Von Neumann was advocating the extermination of the Russian population, not their regime.

I don't think that's accurate. 1950 was before hydrogen bombs.

Von Neumann was ethnically Jewish and his relatives or friends literally went from respected citizens to extermination in unfathomably short order; so one would not be surprised if his calculus pertaining to collateral damage in decimating the Nazis would be rather unforgiving.

That's an explanation, but it's still wrong. It's a very dangerous thing to justify ethnic revanchism.

Definitely does not make for justification but I am helping us understand why [hopefully hyperbolic] comments of a political nature by Von Neumann [or other Jewish contemporaries] are often rather objectionable by universal or nominal moral standards.

Stalin is the guy who executed people who didn't abandon the idea of worldwide communism. He moderated the foreign policy of the USSR. He was also the guy who expended a lot of political capital and burned quite a few bridges to propose defensive alliances with Western countries, betraying those who wanted to plunge them into revolution.

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.

I would love to hear of any exchange between Einstein and Von Neumann. Einstein was famously contemptuous of soldiers.

> ...as to why nuking the USSR would have had a huge negative impact.

Japan has done ok.

Japan got two small nukes, the proposals were for ~300 significantly bigger ones.

Your "source" is a tweet that makes a claim with almost no justification.

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