9 ms·
Finding Peter Putnam
- morninglight 1y agoSorry, this was no Vivian Maier. Not even close.
- olddustytrail 1y agoYour comment could have been so much better. I'd not heard of Vivian Maier but her photography sounds fascinating. I don't know why you think it's related to a philosopher because you didn't say. You can improve your comment with just a little more effort.
- dang 1y agoI'm guessing the association is that these are two figures who weren't famous in their lifetimes and became known later. You're right that putting down one figure is not a good way to introduce another. It would be better to submit the most interesting online article about Vivian Maier, so we could have a thread about her in her own right. Edit: turns out we've had quite a few! though not very large ones: What Vivian Maier saw in color (2018) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43239046 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43239046 - March 2025 (11 comments) Vivian Maier, One of the Best Street Photographers of the 20th Century - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40930530 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40930530 - July 2024 (1 comment) What Vivian Maier Saw in Color (2018) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19498483 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19498483 - March 2019 (17 comments) Vivian Maier - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19358138 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19358138 - March 2019 (5 comments) Camera Obscura: A biography of street photographer Vivian Maier - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15214955 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15214955 - Sept 2017 (5 comments) Digging Deeper into Vivian Maier's Past - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10886162 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10886162 - Jan 2016 (1 comment) Man Buys 10k Undeveloped Negatives, Discovers Important Street Photographers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9750598 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9750598 - June 2015 (1 comment) Misplaced: Ethics and the Photographs of Vivian Maier - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9084386 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9084386 - Feb 2015 (1 comment) Vivian Maier's undeveloped film on hold amid legal fight - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8906719 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8906719 - Jan 2015 (8 comments) Vivian Maier: Amazing unknown street photographer - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2256750 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2256750 - Feb 2011 (4 comments) Vivian Maier: A life's work seen for first time - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2127744 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2127744 - Jan 2011 (51 comments)
- tiagod 1y ago> It’s easy to say why someone is wrong, Putnam said. The hard part is figuring out why they’re right. And everyone is right. Everyone has some central insight, hard won by the consistency-making mechanism of the brain, built of past experiences, cast as motor predictions, a pattern that repeats, sustains itself in the chaos. Our job is to pan for it like gold, sift it into our own nervous systems, reconcile the resulting contradiction, become something new.
- 4b11b4 1y agowow
- nopelynopington 1y ago> The neighborhood was quiet. There was a chill in the air. The scent of Spanish moss hung from the cypress trees. Plumes of white smoke rose from the burning cane fields and stretched across the skies of Terrebonne Parish. The man swung a long leg over a bicycle frame and pedaled off down the street. I stopped halfway through this paragraph and just googled Peter Putnam. If I want an article to take hours to get to the point I'll go read a recipe blog.
- verisimi 1y agoThanks. > If I want an article to take hours to get to the point I'll go read a recipe blog. I don't appreciate all the extra text in recipe blogs either.
- chrisweekly 1y agoIMHO, narrative prose in an article about someone's life is MUCH more appropriate than its use in a recipe.
- patcon 1y agoGood god, the perpetual disdain of default HN for narrative exposition is so deep-rooted. Y'all know humans are kinda "made of" stories, right? Stories are the unit layer that we add on top of biological structure. It's not "data" Imho it is essentially self-loathing of the human condition to valorise raw data and detest linear narrative as much as this crowd seems to do EDIT: Narrative is the wings, without which data cannot travel through enough of the bell curve of minds. Being anti-story is being anti-democratic is toward authoritarianism. </ hot-take>
- plemer 1y agoYou loathing others’ preferences /= them self-loathing. Presumptuous and insulting.
- cwmoore 1y agoI hate this (extremely popular) take. Narrative is suasion, not substance. The storytellers know of no other way to tell the audience what is important, so the medium is the message. EDIT: and…the trope anticlimactic downvotes seal the drama
- fumeux_fume 1y agoIf your fishing net is constructed just right--so as to pick out the many interesting gems in this article, you will be glad to know Gefter has also published a book that revolves around John Wheeler.
- nissomon 1y agoA captivating read, bringing life to a very interesting character. Thank you for posting this. I do wonder about Putnam's research though. Has it been looked into by experts in the field more recently? The article doesn't really give an answer to this.
- refactor_master 1y agoI agree, it was a very interesting read, though not very information dense. The article vaguely gestures at something that approaches what we now know as “reinforcement learning”, but it seems like Putnams theories were developed entirely in parallel, and those two worlds never intersecting?
- triska 1y agoI second this! What a fascinating read! Regarding the point about current research, I found in the article: "Gary Aston-Jones, head of the Brain Health Institute at Rutgers University, told me he was inspired by Putnam to go into neuroscience after Clarke gave him one of Putnam’s papers. “Putnam’s nervous system model presaged by decades stuff that’s very cutting edge in neuroscience,” Aston-Jones said, and yet, “in the field of neuroscience, I don’t know anybody that’s ever heard of him.”"
- khakimov 1y agoAfter this article last week started to read his work (some available here https://www.peterputnam.org/ https://www.peterputnam.org/) What a life, what a character.
- myst 1y agohttps://www.peterputnam.org https://www.peterputnam.org
- golly_ned 1y agoWhat a beautiful article about a fascinating man -- I'd be glad to read a full biography.
- IdealeZahlen 1y agoWow, I always thought Hilary was the only Putnam to come up with a computational theory of mind.
- iandanforth 1y ago"Every game needs a goal. In a Turing machine, goals are imposed from the outside. For true induction, the process itself should create its own goals. And there was a key constraint: Putnam realized that the dynamics he had in mind would only work mathematically if the system had just one goal governing all its behavior. That’s when it hit him: The goal is to repeat. Repetition isn’t a goal that has to be programmed in from the outside; it’s baked into the very nature of things—to exist from one moment to the next is to repeat your existence. “This goal function,” Putnam wrote, “appears pre-encoded in the nature of being itself.” So, here’s the game. The system starts out in a random mix of “on” and “off” states. Its goal is to repeat that state—to stay the same. But in each turn, a perturbation from the environment moves through the system, flipping states, and the system has to emit the right sequence of moves (by forming the right self-reinforcing loops) to alter the environment in such a way that it will perturb the system back to its original state." I'm a big fan of this line of thinking. I've been arguing for years that RL should be based in homeostasis and this seems right along those lines. I wish I could have talked with him!
- gramie 1y agoThat was a fascinating article. I have no doubt that Putnam's work is far beyond me -- considering that it is beyond leading academics in the field -- but I appreciate the description of a man who tried his best to find the right path for himself, even if it was at odds with what the world expected of him.
- olddustytrail 1y agoWhen first I saw the title I was thinking "how can he be forgotten when I've heard of the Putnam prize", but it's a totally different Putnam. And according to my friendly neighbourhood LLM, they're not immediately related.
- kruffalon 1y agoI like how his theory* of the mind basically states that humans intrinsically are OK and everything is fine. --- * if it's simplification in the article is correct and I understand that simplification correctly
- demaga 1y agoBeautifully written article about an interesting man. Hats off to Amanda (article author) for her determination! But this story is also a great reminder on the importance of readability. I can't name Putnam a genius if his works were so incomprehensible, that even best of the best had trouble deciphering them. Just like you wouldn't call programmer a genius if he wrote his best work in brainfuck. I guess he never intended his works to be read. So I won't.
- jinlisp 1y agoIf Putnam was really a genius I think he would have been able to communicate precisely some of this insight to mere mortals. It seems that he taught the same course during 10 years and that seems time enough to mature a good introduction to his ideas. Being ineffable don't entitle you to being a genius. What seems clear is that he was in the right moment and with the right people to produce a great theory of the mind, he was thinking about defining the mind as a creator of heuristic for generating inductive rules, that is a very interesting idea, also that seems related to cellular automata and homeostasis, fixed point theory, error recovery and many other ideas that we, with our ability to look back in time, can see are located in their neighborhood. Recently we are using LLMs to produce heuristic or rules to generate python programs to explore proofs or new models, so the gems is still alive. The field he was interested in it is full of little diamonds waiting for someone to find them, but perhaps he just put his foot in the door without entering (or creating) the field he was trying to envision. It could be that his paper could reveal some intuition that could guide us in a new search for meaning but from this post there is no any hint about that beyond such a desire.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]