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John von Neumann was certainly involved in a lot of scientific discoveries, but from the review this looks more like a hagiography with a goal of rehabilitating

John von Neumann was certainly involved in a lot of scientific discoveries, but from the review this looks more like a hagiography with a goal of rehabilitating the reputation of an incredibly gifted scientist/mathematician whose coziness with the military-industrial complex remains controversial to this day. 'John von Neumann, the theorist of mutual assured destruction', is how many still view his record. 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.

sillysaurusx 5y ago
> 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 https://twitter.com/orzelc/status/1446414513465696256 EDIT: There's a shocking comment further downthread. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28811713 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.
- sudosysgen 5y ago
  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.
  - sillysaurusx 5y ago
    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.)
    - leephillips 5y ago
      Your "source" is a tweet that makes a claim with almost no justification.
    - sudosysgen 5y ago
      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_weapons 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.
sudosysgen 5y ago
Indeed. Von Neumann was an incredibly prolific scientist, and definitely one of the greatest geniuses in history, but that doesn't mean that he was always justified or right - he was still human, and had biases, and made mistakes. His work was still built upon by others who managed to gain understanding of the subject beyond what Neumann did, though certainly much more slowly, and he himself built upon the works of others. He was definitely a class or five above anyone that is likely reading this and probably even more above my own, but he was still a human.
random3 5y ago
Curious to learn more book recommendations. I enjoyed The Idea Factory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Idea_Factory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Idea_Factory), A mind at play (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Mind_at_Play https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Mind_at_Play)
sershe 5y ago
Why does the first part need to be rehabilitated? With whom is it controversial? I've never heard of this controversy before. 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.
- mr_toad 5y ago
  There would be no decapitation. If the allies were capable of surgically removing a government they would have done it with Germany or Japan. 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.
  - sershe 5y ago
    Sure; and there were massive civilian casualties in WWII. If WWII could be prevented at the cost of e.g. entirely obliterating Berlin in 1935, it would be "worth it", strictly as a matter of lives lost and saved. Would it prevent WWII? That's a valid subject for debate, and the debate would have gone differently in 1935 than now with the benefit of hindsight. Ditto for 1946.
slibhb 5y ago
> 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. 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.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- spacechild1 5y ago
  JvN argued for the extermination of the Russian population - which of course is one possible way to end the Soviet regime but hardly what any sane person would wish for.
epberry 5y ago
You have to place JVN in his time on this issue. If you were a person with first hand knowledge of the atomic weapons program, access to the highest levels of national security, and a normal person's view of foreign policy (as in you were not a diplomat or experienced on the world stage) it's a coin flip whether you would have argued for restraint or first strike. 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.
AndyMcConachie 5y ago
Here is the blurb from Amazon on it: 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. --- 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.
- Mandelmus 5y ago
  Could you recommend some notable history books related to computer science that don't fall into the Great Man history genre?
salviohexia 5y ago
Completely agree about the Richard Rhodes book being much better, and infinitely more interesting, than the 'lone genius trope that seems to feature heavily in the new von Neumann biog. Von Neumann may have been a 'genius', but he was a deeply flawed (and in many ways unsympathetic) character by all accounts. 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-bomb https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/632375787/klara-and-the...

sillysaurusx 5y ago

> 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 https://twitter.com/orzelc/status/1446414513465696256 EDIT: There's a shocking comment further downthread. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28811713 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.

sudosysgen 5y ago
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.
- sillysaurusx 5y ago
  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.)
  - leephillips 5y ago
    Your "source" is a tweet that makes a claim with almost no justification.
  - sudosysgen 5y ago
    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_weapons 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.

sudosysgen 5y ago

Indeed. Von Neumann was an incredibly prolific scientist, and definitely one of the greatest geniuses in history, but that doesn't mean that he was always justified or right - he was still human, and had biases, and made mistakes. His work was still built upon by others who managed to gain understanding of the subject beyond what Neumann did, though certainly much more slowly, and he himself built upon the works of others. He was definitely a class or five above anyone that is likely reading this and probably even more above my own, but he was still a human.

random3 5y ago

Curious to learn more book recommendations. I enjoyed The Idea Factory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Idea_Factory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Idea_Factory), A mind at play (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Mind_at_Play https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Mind_at_Play)

sershe 5y ago

Why does the first part need to be rehabilitated? With whom is it controversial? I've never heard of this controversy before. 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.

mr_toad 5y ago
There would be no decapitation. If the allies were capable of surgically removing a government they would have done it with Germany or Japan. 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.
- sershe 5y ago
  Sure; and there were massive civilian casualties in WWII. If WWII could be prevented at the cost of e.g. entirely obliterating Berlin in 1935, it would be "worth it", strictly as a matter of lives lost and saved. Would it prevent WWII? That's a valid subject for debate, and the debate would have gone differently in 1935 than now with the benefit of hindsight. Ditto for 1946.

slibhb 5y ago

> 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. 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.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
spacechild1 5y ago
JvN argued for the extermination of the Russian population - which of course is one possible way to end the Soviet regime but hardly what any sane person would wish for.

epberry 5y ago

You have to place JVN in his time on this issue. If you were a person with first hand knowledge of the atomic weapons program, access to the highest levels of national security, and a normal person's view of foreign policy (as in you were not a diplomat or experienced on the world stage) it's a coin flip whether you would have argued for restraint or first strike. 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.

AndyMcConachie 5y ago

Here is the blurb from Amazon on it: 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. --- 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.

Mandelmus 5y ago
Could you recommend some notable history books related to computer science that don't fall into the Great Man history genre?

salviohexia 5y ago

Completely agree about the Richard Rhodes book being much better, and infinitely more interesting, than the 'lone genius trope that seems to feature heavily in the new von Neumann biog. Von Neumann may have been a 'genius', but he was a deeply flawed (and in many ways unsympathetic) character by all accounts. 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-bomb https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/632375787/klara-and-the...