Margaret Mead, John von Neumann, and the Prehistory of AI | Hacker News Reader

Margaret Mead, John von Neumann, and the Prehistory of AI

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134 pointsarbesman36 comments

  Benjamín Labutut’s The MANIAC — an experimental novel about von Neumann told in bite-sized historical vignettes.

So excited to get this book, coming in tomorrow! Fun to see it randomly mentioned.

  This was when he had three or four drinks. He spoke of computers with some awe. And the real distinction is the people who feel awe for computers. They’re nuts.

Heh always good to see philosophy crossing over into other fields. This is quintessential analytic / “purely scientific” arrogance, and I love it. Thank god these days the AI researchers have some among them who have a healthy respect for the unknown and the unknowable, like Ilya. But I always chuckle seeing engineers with such an attitude, like everyone else is just too dumb to get it.

Fantastic article, learned a lot, thanks for posting! I would give credit for “first to posit the simulation hypothesis” to Plato or Descartes, but I’ll leave that for another thread lol. As it stands, this is pretty compelling research to edit the official wiki page IMO…

Yeah, but neither Plato nor Descartes proposed a mechanism… both might have suggested “automata” but the concept of general purpose computers seems essential for imagining the world being based on a mechanism.

> Mead: You know that you’re in control of it. The American attitude toward the machine is that it's something we make and it’s something we can fix. In fact, American men like it in a state of continual breakdown so they can fix it, I’m inclined to think. But, all the way, from sort of, futuristic and cubistic, kind of painting and attitudes in World War I, and after World War I, in Europe, [there’s] this fear of the machine. And either the dynamism of the machine so you and your plane dive to death, or some nonsense, or, that the machine was going to take over, was much stronger. But in the average American, this is not [the case]. And most of these people were Americans.

World War 1 brought death in Europe on an industrial scale, metered out by artillery and the machine [gun]. Might explain Europeans' attitudes to 'the machine'.

Great episode of the Lawfare podcast recently where Shane Harris interviewed Benjamin Breen about his book, Tripping on Utopia, which tells the story of how Mead’s research into expanded consciousness and psychedelics.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-lawfare-podcast/id...

The book "Dark Hero of the Information Age: In Search of Norbert Wiener The Father of Cybernetics" by Conway & Siegelman spends some time on this.

I was hoping someone would mention this. What a great book.

Haven't read this yet, but I did just read (and would certainly recommend) 'Building the Second Mind - 1956 and the Origins of Artificial Intelligence Computing'[1] by Rebecca Skinner of UC Berkeley.

[1] https://escholarship.org/uc/item/88q1j6z3

This part made me chuckle:

  In the episode.. I mentioned a detail I encountered in my research that stuck with me. I think it may be the earliest reference to the “simulation hypothesis”: the idea that the observable universe could be a computer simulation. Wikipedia will tell you that this theory dates to 2003.

Surely not. Maybe I'm misunderstanding something.

Indeed, the demon of Descartes predates the Brain in Vat hypothesis put forward in modern terms, using a computer, by Hilary Putnam around 1968 (same year?! idk..)

Greg Bear in the 1987 novel “Eon” describes a virtual “afterlife“ where both the world and the people in it are simulated.

He also describes a theory where you could design a system in such a way that the simulated people wouldn’t be able to tell the true state of the world.

And (spoiler alert) he also introduces an Alien race that has discovered algorithms that let them subvert the simulation.

I'm actually quite impressed with Mead's recollections of von Neumann and the early cybernetic movement here. She is generally remembered today for her perhaps too naive belief in the sexual utopia of 1920s Samoa, but it is clear from this that she had other interests.

You could fill a phone book with Mead's other interests. LSD, semiotics, Dr. Spock, polyamory, folk music, Episcopal prayer books, race and intelligence, you name it. To make an unsupportable hyperbolic claim, she might be the most important academic of the 20th Century.

I thought she was remembered for not retracting when shown to be wrong about Samoa.

See my comment above, but the short of it is that it seems she didn't retract because she probably was not wrong. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39759898

I think it’s worth pointing out that your impression of Mead might be shaped by a strong critic who worked hard to invalidate her work and erase her legacy. This section of her Wikipedia article sums it up pretty well. Essentially, more recent reviews of the research bears out Mead’s conclusions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Mead#Criticism_by_Der...

Another interesting tangent about Mead was her almost foray into LSD research which I learned about from this submission https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39328747

I don't see how that shows that "free love" is supported by credible scientific research.

Worth noting is that Mead herself had an adulterous past. Sexual misbehavior can produce feelings of guilt and disgust with oneself, and one (unhealthy) way to try to cope with that guilt is to rationalize one's misbehavior. If Samoans, seen through modern Western eyes as a representation of the "pure state of nature", can be shown to be promiscuous, then, according to this highly tendentious and fallacious interpretation, promiscuity must be "natural", the state of nature, and it is the West, or perhaps even "civilization" in general, with its weird sexual hangups, that is in error. So why feel guilty?

Of course, as the aforementioned expose shows, there were Samoan police records of men with broken jaws or whatever that contrary to Mead's account, Samoan men expressed exactly the kind of reaction to their wives' adulterous affairs as one would expect. Not that contrary evidence would change anything anyway.

Aldous Huxley admitted to a similar rationalizing process, but one that was even more deeply offensive from a metaphysical point of view. He admitted that the real reason he and those of his generation and his milieu celebrated a nihilistic view of life is to rationalize their own promiscuity. If nothing means anything, then why not sleep around? Of course, he later had the honesty to admit his motives.

Alfred Kinsey is another one we can add to the list. Kinsey himself suffered from sexual pathologies, and his "studies" were riddled with selection bias wherein the selection of those he interviewed skewed heavily toward sex criminals and people with various sexual disorders. Never mind the sexual abuse of children he engaged in.

We could add Reich, Freud, Satre,... to the list.

Are you slut shaming Margaret Mead?

I don’t think people are so simple - that Aldous Huxley joked about wanting more sex doesn’t convince me that’s truly the driving force of his entire life. And, just practically speaking, a smart scientist man could live a sex-filled emotionless life at that time, and still today… you don’t need to be a nihilist to go on Ashley Madison or seek a Sugar Baby.

More substantively, it seems like you’re endorsing a view that Wikipedia sums up as anti scientific and biased. I hate to dismiss someone so blithely but it is fairly strongly worded. To quote the spiciest parts:

  Freeman's book was controversial in its turn and was met with considerable backlash and harsh criticism from the anthropology community, but it was received enthusiastically by communities of scientists who believed that sexual mores were more or less universal across cultures. Later in 1983, a special session of Mead's supporters in the American Anthropological Association (to which Freeman was not invited) declared it to be "poorly written, unscientific, irresponsible and misleading." Some anthropologists who studied Samoan culture argued in favor of Freeman's findings and contradicted those of Mead, but others argued that Freeman's work did not invalidate Mead's work because Samoan culture had been changed by the integration of Christianity in the decades between Mead's and Freeman's fieldwork periods.

  Eleanor Leacock traveled to Samoa in 1985 and undertook research among the youth living in urban areas. The research results indicate that the assertions of Derek Freeman were seriously flawed.

At the least, I think we should all agree that no one was out to “prove the way humanity should be”, just explore non-western ways of life. And I believe the consensus among gender theorists and anthropologists is that western sexuality is arbitrary in many ways. That’s not a condemnation of every single part of it, especially dishonest adultery as you seem focused on, but it’s certainly a reason to investigate non-western society’s IMO.

But you can't really dismiss criticism of her work as being from just a bitter rival. Whatever his personal motivation for doing it, Freeman and later anthropologists talked to Samoans themselves (some of whom were alive when Mead was doing her study of their society) and they didn't agree with Mead's description of them.

It seems Mead and Freeman experienced a slice of life from different parts of Samoa, which was summed up for me in this part of the wikipedia article:

"Samoan culture had been changed by the integration of Christianity in the decades between Mead's and Freeman's fieldwork periods" ... "Leacock pointed out that Mead's famous Samoan fieldwork was undertaken on an outer island that had not been colonialized. While Freeman had undertaken fieldwork in an urban slum plagued by drug abuse, structural unemployment, and gang violence." [1]

Note that doesn't necessarily mean that Freeman's island perfectly resembled Mead's island prior to its urbanization – I'd wager, rather, that Samoan society was diverse!

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Mead#Criticism_by_Der...

> it is clear from this that she had other interests.

Why wouldn't she have other interests? And who is generally remembering this way? I think you've been missing out on a great mind and a great woman.

There is a broad motivation, by some, to disbelieve that a woman deserves to be called a great mind. I’m surprised, but they come out in droves on HN.

I know it's inappropriate to say it but I honestly find myself increasingly alienated from the community here and the single reason for it is the frequent and pervasive dismissal of women.

It’s a small number of people, really. It seems to be based on woke backlash as well as general misogyny.

It depresses me because I look around at my fellow engineers at work and wonder how many of them are secretly posting misogynistic BS on Hackernews.

My concern is how many of the coders downplaying things like the risks of deepfakes are also operating and profiting from the many revenge porn websites etc.

That and simply how self-reinforcing it all is. The more hostile these discussions are to women's experiences the fewer women who will push through and take part in the conversation, meaning we just press ahead in the safety of our own homogeneity.

> In fact, American men like it in a state of continual breakdown so they can fix it

I feel seen.

As does every desktop Linux user ever.

Why is this considered the "prehistory" of AI? It's the actual history of AI. . .

Heh I came in for the same point but decided to give the author the benefit of the attention-grabbing-headline, so to speak. AI started in earnest in 1950 with the rest of CS IMO, so technically this is “extremely early AI history”, but you can see how they were basically just positing stuff at this point. I mean “we didn’t use the word planet back then” really threw me for a loop.

Also these days “prehistory of AI” means “pre-2010”, according to the LLM industry!

AI history starts from Newton gradient descent ;)

More like Plato. But cybernetics and systems theory seem more apt models, and, most interestingly, they derive as much from anthropology as from math. . . .

I don't know. It likely goes much further back. The main problem is that there is no commonly accepted definition of "intelligence". So to add the modifier "artificial" (an equally fraught term) is just to muddle the topic.

"Artificial Intelligence" is in the end just a metaphor, one that folds quickly under scrutiny.

The field is usually dated to a 1956 workshop at Dartmouth College. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dartmouth_workshop

Obviously it was building on earlier work.

Great point! I cite Turing so much that I feel like I have to start it with “Can Machines Think?”, but that’s definitely the more historically valid answer. It certainly is if you ask Dartmouth lol, they have a whole page for it.

On the topic of “incredible women historians of AI”, this article by Grace Solomonoff was posted here a while back and blew my mind. Would highly recommend for anyone interested in the minds that started this whole kerfuffle.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/dartmouth-ai-workshop

Mostly coincidentally--although there were one or two overlapping participants--Cognitive Science is usually dated to an MIT conference a few months later. (Although I don't think it was called that yet.)

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