John von Neumann
Article
John von Neumann is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 5 times across 5 issues between November 14, 2021 and April 05, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as “Anything that might lead to 20,000 clones of John von Neumann”; “many of the great geniuses of the past, including Bertrand Russell, Albert Einstein, and John von Neumann received tutoring like this”; “John von Neumann was the youngest ever lecturer at the University of Berlin”. It most often appears alongside Alan Turing, Albert Einstein, America.
Metadata
- Category: People
- Mention count: 5
- Issue count: 5
- First seen: November 14, 2021
- Last seen: April 05, 2023
Appears In
- Open Thread 198
- Contra Hoel On Aristocratic Tutoring
- The Low-Hanging Fruit Argument: Models And Predictions
- Book Review: The Man From The Future
- Most Technologies Aren’t Races
Related Pages
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- Alan Turing (2 shared issues)
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- Albert Einstein (2 shared issues)
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- America (2 shared issues)
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- Thomas Edison (2 shared issues)
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- Wikipedia (2 shared issues)
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- 1890s (1 shared issues)
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- 60s and 70s (1 shared issues)
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- AI (1 shared issues)
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- Ananyo Bhattacharya (1 shared issues)
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- ancient Greek (1 shared issues)
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- Andrea Dworkin (1 shared issues)
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- Arya (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
Anything that might lead to 20,000 clones of John von Neumann
He argues the most likely cause is the decline of “aristocratic tutoring” - an educational method typical among the ultra-rich of the past - and its replacement with normal public (or private) schools. The answer must lie in education somewhere [...] paradoxically there exists an agreed-upon and specific answer to the single best way to educate children, a way that has clear, obvious, and strong effects. The problem is that this answer is unacceptable. The superior method of education is deeply unfair and privileges those at the very top of the socioeconomic ladder. It’s an answer that was well-known historically, and is also observed by education researchers today: tutoring. […] Let us call [the] past form aristocratic tutoring, to distinguish it from a tutor you meet in a coffeeshop to go over SAT math problems while the clock ticks down. It’s also different than “tiger parenting,” which is specifically focused around the resume padding that’s needed for kids to meet the impossible requirements for high-tier colleges. Aristocratic tutoring was not focused on measurables. Historically, it usually involved a paid adult tutor, who was an expert in the field, spending significant time with a young child or teenager, instructing them but also engaging them in discussions, often in a live-in capacity, fostering both knowledge but also engagement with intellectual subjects and fields. He amply proves that many of the great geniuses of the past, including Bertrand Russell, Albert Einstein, and John von Neumann received tutoring like this, and suggests that its absence (more because of strengthening democratic norms than because people don’t have the money) might be why we don’t see figures of their stature anymore. II. I agree that this kind of tutoring sounds great. I wouldn’t be surprised if it has a big effect size. But it’s not the reason we have fewer geniuses. Why not? Suppose that half of past geniuses were tutored this way, and half weren’t. Even if every single genius who was tutored owed his genius entirely to the tutoring, the tutoring could only explain half of geniuses. That means that after the tutoring stopped, we would expect half as many geniuses. But Hoel is making a stronger claim: that there are almost no geniuses today. For aristocratic tutoring to explain that, we would need for almost all past geniuses to be aristocratically tutored. But as far as I can tell, that isn’t true. Probably well below half of them were. Just to give some examples: Isaac Newton went to a local school at at 12, and to Cambridge at 17. The Wikipedia page on his early life doesn't mention "tutor", except in the context of a college teacher. His adopted father was a country parson, and his family wasn't rich enough to do aristocratic tutoring even if they'd wanted to. Articles on his early life stress his self-motivated nature: he was constantly building things and observing things on his own time. Wolfgang Mozart was tutored, but primarily by his father, himself an excellent violinist. According to his Wikipedia article, "In his early years, Wolfgang's father was his only teacher". Mozart was already an obvious child prodigy by 6 or 7, and wrote his first symphony at 8. I can't find any evidence that non-family members contributed to his education. This kind of tutoring is still common; my wife learned cello from her grandmother, a professional music tutor. Charles Darwin went to a local school at age 8, switched to a boarding school at 9, spent a summer at age 16 following his father (a doctor) around as he treated patients, then went to medical school. He switched to regular college at Cambridge at 19, where he seemed to have a pretty traditional education. Wikipedia has a long article on his education, which doesn't mention the word "tutor" until college age, when he "spent the autumn term at home studying Greek with a tutor". Later in college, he "joined other Cambridge friends on a three-month "reading party" at Barmouth on the coast of Wales to revise their studies with private tutors". I don't think he had a stronger relationship with being tutored himself, especially not in childhood. His summer following his father around learning medicine was probably good for him, but not outside the bounds of what still happens today (I followed my father around learning medicine). Louis Pasteur was born "to a Catholic family of a poor tanner". He went to primary school at 8 and college at 16. I can't find any evidence he was tutored. Charles Dickens barely seems to have been educated at all. His family was so poor that he spent some of his childhood working in a sweatshop. During other periods they did a little better and he went to small lower-to-middle-class private schools. Dickens seems to have gotten most of his education by reading novels on his own. Thomas Edison grew up poor in Michigan. Again according to Wikipedia, "Edison was taught reading, writing, and arithmetic by his mother, who used to be a school teacher. He attended school for only a few months. However, one biographer described him as a very curious child who learned most things by reading on his own. As a child, he became fascinated with technology and spent hours working on experiments at home." Hoel argues that the decline in aristocratic tutoring is “why we stopped making Einsteins”. But then why did we stop making Newtons, Mozarts, Darwins, Pasteurs, Dickenses, and Edisons? III. One other argument: Hoel cites Holden Karnofsky’s Where’s Today’s Beethoven?, which suggests that music is a typical case of the genius decline. But aristocratic tutoring in music is alive and well. When my brother was identified as a piano prodigy, my (well-off but not absurdly rich) parents hired jazz musician Linda Martinez to tutor him. I asked around and this is apparently pretty common in music. In fact, it seems common across a variety of fields, especially those that aren’t taught in school and where success doesn’t make you too rich to need tutoring money (a friend brings up chess as another example). If aristocratic tutoring were a significant factor behind declining genius, we would expect to see a split: fields like science where tutoring is rare would lose their geniuses, whereas fields like music where tutoring is common would be as genius-filled as ever. But people use music as a typical example of a declining-genius field. So that can’t be it. IV. So what’s my explanation? You will not be surprised to hear it’s the maximally boring one, a combination of: Good ideas are getting harder to find. In 300 BC, if you noticed that the water level in your bathtub got higher when you got into it, you were allowed to run through the streets shouting “eureka!” and declare yourself to be a genius. Now you would need some 400 page mathematical proof drawing on the topology of eight-dimensional manifolds in order to get that kind of cred.
I don’t really know how to test these claims, especially the second. But for what it’s worth, John von Neumann was the youngest ever lecturer at the University of Berlin, and Terence Tao was the youngest ever professor at UCLA.
John von Neumann invented the digital computer. The fields of game theory and cellular automata. Important pieces of modern economics, set theory, and particle physics. A substantial part of the technology behind the atom and hydrogen bombs. Several whole fields of mathematics I hadn’t previously heard of, like “operator algebras”, “continuous geometry”, and “ergodic theory”.
This bothered me enough that I turned to a second von Neumann biography, Norman MacRae’s John Von Neumann: The Scientific Genius Who Pioneered The Modern Computer, Game Theory, Nuclear Deterrence, And Much More. I was delighted to find that MacRae had a completely straightforward explanation I had never heard before.
Inline links: John Von Neumann: The Scientific Genius Who Pioneered The Modern Computer, Game Theory, Nuclear Deterrence, And Much More
Most surprising, at least to me, John von Neumann was reportedly quite fun to be around - the life of the party. He used his prodigious memory not just for mathematical theorems but for an almost limitless amount of jokes and gossip. You can find a list of his favorite jokes in his brother’s biography. Here’s one:
Who “won” the computer “race”? Charles Babbage? Alan Turing? John von Neumann? Steve Jobs? Bill Gates? Again, it was a long path of incremental improvements. Jobs and Gates got rich, and their hometowns are big tech hubs, but other people have gotten even richer, and the world chip manufacturing center is in Taiwan now for some reason. The overall balance of power didn’t change (except maybe during a brief window when the Bombes broke Enigma) and today all developed countries have computers.