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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
Let's not forget how close to war we came during the "bay of pigs" era.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
So you'd be fine helping them design weapons that could exterminate a populace but you wouldn't advocate actually using them?
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.
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.
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'm naive, huh?
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).
I’d put refusing to coexist with Communists on that level, and they actually took over von Neumann’s home country.
There is an incredibly important distinction between fighting against the ignorant temper tantrum of your brothers and sisters and exterminating them all.
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.
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.
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.
It's not sporting to only present bait as your argument. Just go ahead and outline what you are trying to say.
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.
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.
It makes no sense to preemptively strike them. It's a monstrous instinct.
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.
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.
I don't think that's accurate. 1950 was before hydrogen bombs.
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.
Japan has done ok.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.