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The duties of John von Neumann's assistant (1993)
- M_Bakhtiari 9y agoIn some ultra-low power distance societies, places like Sweden, the idea that anyone, no matter how important, is ever entitled to an assistant or secretary is almost anathema. Imagine if von Neumann had been required to do all of that in addition to making his own airline and hotel reservations, as is the case for many university professors these days.
- Ma8ee 9y agoIn Sweden and in other places, everything, including the universities, is nowadays run by economists. Since university professors don't produce anything that has any immediate monetary value it of course make perfect sense to save money by replacing administrative personel that costs money with the professors time, which is free since the professors pay their own sallaries with external funding.
- corpMaverick 9y ago> run by economists I am confused. Perhaps you meant to say managers, administrators or bureaucrats ?
- M_Bakhtiari 9y agoFormally they're the ones with the job descriptions, but under New Public Management it's the economists that are the ultimate arbiters of truth.
- eesmith 9y agoCould you confirm that first statement? That is, when I visited Sweden for a consulting job about 15 years ago, there was definitely a secretary for the group I visited. She helped organize the paperwork for the visit, booked my hotel and taxi, etc. The word for secretary in Swedish is "sekreterare", and a search of the Uppsala University domain find things like https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=sv&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.uu.se%2Fjobb%2Fdetaljsida%2F%3FpositionId%3D78401&edit-text= https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=sv&tl=en&js=y&prev... : > Being the Secretary-General's secretary means helping coordinate, plan and prepare meetings, travel and reception of foreign and domestic guests as well as coordinate, prepare and plan other commitments. For example, involve helping to prepare information, book and plan trips and meetings, and to be responsible for the calendar as well as ex. certain world surveillance. > You will also be responsible for calls, mailing and agenda appointments, and telephone answering services as well as daily office tasks such as copying, billing, updating of records, ordering office supplies, and providing easier computer support, etc.
- Arnt 9y agoThere was a secretary for the group, not for any one professor. If you'd visited in, say, 1925 the professors in the group might've had one secretary each.
- eesmith 9y agoCertainly there's a trend away from private secretaries. But the original statement was specifically about "ultra-low power distance societies, places like Sweden", and the process you mention is also taking place in the US, which (I believe) is not in that category. Moreover, the statement added "the idea that anyone, no matter how important, is ever entitled to an assistant or secretary is almost anathema [in Sweden]." Yet I easily found a job position for a personal secretary. That's why I would like a confirmation that M_Bakhtiari's observation is based on something stronger than hearsay or an assumption of how Sweden compares to not-as-low-power distance societies like the US.
- Arnt 9y agoI suppose it's taking place everywhere where assistant labour is expensive. Faster in the places where having a private secretary is old-fashioned, like Sweden.
- beojan 9y agoThat has more to do with those secretaries being replaced by computers than anything else. When everyone can type, and mistakes are easily corrected, you don't need people whose only job is to type anymore.
- Arnt 9y agoI'm Norwegian, not Swedish, but AIUI the societal trends were similar. There's been a trend towards typing ability, yes, but hardly decisive. The old secretaries would do the bulk of e.g. organising conferences or the professor's travel, that's needs typing but not only typing. The trend (in .no/.se etc) towards equality, against certain symbols of prestige, mattered a great deal. A long time ago having a secretary was a symbol of power, appropriate for Professor Dr. Lundman. At some point forgoing one became a symbol of modernity, and private secretaries became much less common, and the universities reorganised to provide specialised services such as ticket purchasers and maybe grant application writers instead of private secretaries.
- mseebach 9y agoThe idea that anyone is entitled to a secretary, that a secretary is a kind of status symbol, is rightfully falling out of fashion, and not just in Sweden. But it's not being replaced by nothing, it being replaced by (non-personal) function staff that offloads specific tasks. The department has student relations officers that deal with scheduling, enrollment, tracking grades etc, the university has a travel office, email and digital calendars, available on mobile devices, simply removes a significant part of the need for secretaries in the first place - and professors have TAs (who would probably be responsible for a good chunk of the tasks described today). They just don't have general-purpose personal staff.
- narag 9y agoreplaced by (non-personal) function staff that offloads specific tasks And it's more practical since it works even if people in those positions gets sick or are away for holidays.
- M_Bakhtiari 9y ago> The idea that anyone is entitled to a secretary, that a secretary is a kind of status symbol, is rightfully falling out of fashion, and not just in Sweden. Indeed, the opposite error, seen in many ultra-high power distance societies, is arguably worse: when a secretary and a desk not facing a wall becomes an end in itself and nothing of value is produced. > But it's not being replaced by nothing, it being replaced by (non-personal) function staff that offloads specific tasks. Those things have been around for a long time, but treating it as a replacement rather than a complement to general-purpose secretaries means there will be no-one to do the more open-ended tasks, or tasks specific to the work of a particular person or group.
- mseebach 9y ago> there will be no-one to do the more open-ended tasks, or tasks specific to the work of a particular person or group. Staffs still exists. It's not unheard of for a manager in a company to instruct his department to undertake some particular task. Sometimes that's practically all "business development" does. In larger firms, there is often an "office of the CEO" which has a number of people working on particular tasks for the top management, often with a title like "special projects", and often seconded from staff offices with the relevant skills.
- microtherion 9y agoOne amusing aside in that article was that one of the professors who appear to have received the budget to pay an assistant to nothing was Oswald Veblen. His uncle Thorstein Veblen surely would have had a field day with this idea.
- danieltillett 9y agoThe original this is taken from is better [0]. 0. https://www.maa.org/sites/default/files/pdf/upload_library/22/Ford/Lorch219-230.pdf https://www.maa.org/sites/default/files/pdf/upload_library/2...
- Philipp__ 9y agoThis is beautiful. Really interesting reading. Thanks.
- reallymental 9y agoIt __is__ better. It helps him explain his case as to why he chose to accept the Cutting Travelling Fellowship rather than work for Von Neumman, and he also mentions that the job was later split into 4 parts. The original link on the other hand just dismisses this as "he fled to Hungary". True, but an incomplete truth.
- pm215 9y agoMmm. In particular it notes that (a) in previous years the assistant had been only expected to do the first two parts of the job description and (b) after Lorch turned it down they ended up dividing the work between four assistants. So it's more of an example of an over-ambitious job description than the reality of being an assistant to von Neumann...
- quietbritishjim 9y agoWow, the ending is brutal: > At the end of May I left Szeged. I was grateful for all he had done, but it was only much later that I appreciated reasonably well his contribution to my education. On the overnight train from Budapest to Venice, a young Hungarian man accompanied by a young woman kindly asked me in poor German to leave them the compartment for the night. They had just been married that day and were beginning their honeymoon. On arrival at Venice the next morning, he opened the corridor window and got off the train, while his bride, who spoke only Hungarian, lowered their suitcase through the window. Then a terrible thing happened. The train pulled out, with her still on it. The poor girl was cut off from everything that she knew, everything she had been living with. I knew what she felt. Hadn't I too just been cut off from my previous life?
- johan_larson 9y agoI wonder how long his assistants lasted.
- stiff 9y agoIt is worth noting that Paul Halmos was an assistant of von Neumann's: http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Halmos.html http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Halmos.h...
- jonstewart 9y agoThanks, this was a good read.
- raverbashing 9y agoWhile academia is a place of good ideas and discussions, the power-distance and the use of students as very cheap labour with the promise of a higher place of importance someday is a dark side of it Low skilled workers are treated better and more fairly than Graduate Students in a lot of occasions
- jacquesm 9y agoAcademia is stuck in the past in that sense. And it is already hurting them in quite a few disciplines where 'being published' is great but trumped by 'being able to afford a normal life'. So it filters out people that are willing to put their lives on hold in order to have their names at the top of a couple of papers. Some of them find that the lives they put on hold can not be put together again after a decade. Graduate students are as a rule underpaid, overworked and if they're unlucky harassed to boot and all that for the privilege of having someone else then finally take most or even all of the credit for all the hard work.
- jonathanstrange 9y agoAcademia is similar to many other fields in that you roughly get what you pay for. That doesn't mean you can't save some money here or there or that money is not wasted here or there, but as a rule of thumb this generally holds. My biggest quirk about the universities and institutes I've worked for so far is not the way they deal with grad students or postdocs, it's about seemingly 'unimportant' issues. Things like large, noisy, shared offices, lack of whiteboards, unnecessary bureaucracy, and lack of paid linguistic editing. At universities money tends to be saved at the wrong end, private businesses are much better at creating productive environments. Especially the constant lack of office space is hampering productivity. The priorities tend to be wrong (outside of a few centers of excellence), focused on getting as many researchers as possible. Instead they should spend a bit less on human resources and a bit more on a good work environment. At least that's my personal experience and opinion.
- arcanus 9y agoMoving from a top research group to a fortune 500 company just last year, I couldn't agree with you more. I had great resources in some places (access to the finest minds in my field, for example) and was completely hamstrung in others (a hard salary cap as an assistant researcher, extreme difficulty getting a new whiteboard installed in my office, etc) Industry isn't perfect either but seems to be better at recognizing that researchers are best used in the role they were trained for and not doing ancillary work.
- gumby 9y agoWhat they don't tell you is that at the Institute for Advanced Study the poor assistant had to use the same filing cabinet for his list of duties, to do list, and all of Von Neumann's correspondence and papers. While up at Harvard the assistants were given separate cabinets to make their lives easier. But woe betide the poor assistant who tried to put a file in the wrong cabinet!
- canaanical 9y agoThis is an excellent and under-appreciated joke. Bravo.
- dgacmu 9y agoPlease feel free to include in your comedy CV that you managed to sneak this one past a computer science professor until the third read-through. Kudos. :)
- mark_l_watson 9y agoAs a young post doc at the Institute for Advance Study, my Dad knew von Neuman, who according to my Dad, tended to work late at night and work with loud music playing - very much like young hackers today!
- MattConfluence 9y agoI've read a funny anecdote (no idea whether it is accurate) that von Neumann's loud gramophone music was a big source of frustration for his office neighbor, Albert Einstein.
- dwringer 9y agoI remember reading a similar anecdote in the book Turing's Cathedral, where it suggested that von Neumann had a particular preference for loud marches. It also makes me think about what Stanislaw Ulam wrote of von Neumann[1]: "If one has to divide mathematicians, as Poincaré proposed, into two types—those with visual and those with auditory intuition—Johnny perhaps belonged to the latter." [1] http://www.ams.org/journals/bull/1958-64-03/S0002-9904-1958-10189-5/S0002-9904-1958-10189-5.pdf http://www.ams.org/journals/bull/1958-64-03/S0002-9904-1958-...
- miobrien 9y agoInteresting. Not completely similar but somewhat interesting, here's an interview where Feynman admits to not being "great" (for lack of a better word) at music. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqtuNXWT0mo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqtuNXWT0mo “Lot’s of people love music and I never could carry a tune.”
- KKKKkkkk1 9y agoIt was traditional belief that Einstein's assistant did nothing. The only requirement for him was to be a Jewish exile from Nazi Germany. Einstein's assistant Kemeny ended up designing the BASIC language and being one of the founding fathers of computer science. His assistant Rosen ended up being president of Ben Gurion Univesity and co-founding the Israeli Academy of Sciences. Based on their accomplishments, seems to me like their religion was not the only requirement made of them.
- jorgec 9y agoI think the context is they did nothing as assistants.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- sp332 9y agoI think "Jewish" in this case refers to whatever racial criteria Germany was using to choose people to exterminate, not religion.
- sp527 9y agoIf you read it closely, it seems like fluency in advanced mathematics and significantly above-average IQ were implicit criteria. At least that was my takeaway.
- sethherr 9y agoThis was posted within today, not 1993. Title fix?
- detaro 9y agoIt almost entirely consists of a quote from a 1993 document, the fact that someone quoted this in an e-mail today is comparatively unimportant.
- sethherr 9y agoHmmm. If you think what the source (Plover’s shitpost blog, not an email) provides is not beneficial, then I’d think the link should be to the original document. I, on the other hand, think his selection and publication of this excerpt has merit and is useful. His framing of the quote is what drew me to read it in the first place.
- knbknb 9y agoIn the German Wikipedia there is a photograph of the lecture timetable, University of Berlin, 1928. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/31/NeumannVonMargitta.jpg/410px-NeumannVonMargitta.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/31/Ne... Von Neumann's scheduled his lectures as follows - Wed and Sunday (!) 9-11 am; - Friday 3.30-5pm - Tue 7-9pm (Invited Talks / Faculty Seminar) - Mon 4-5 pm I think that was uncommon even in the old days.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]