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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   2198 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for May 31, 2024

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Anecdota on Von Neumann I find interesting, pulled from different sites

Equally, von Neumann had no interest in sport and, barring long walks (always in a business suit), he would avoid any form of vigorous physical exercise for the rest of his life. When his second wife, Klari, tried to persuade him to ski, he offered her a divorce. ‘If being married to a woman, no matter who she was, would mean he had to slide around on two pieces of wood on some slick mountainside,’ she explained, ‘he would definitely prefer to live alone and take his daily exercise, as he put it, “by getting in and out of a pleasantly warm bathtub.”

It is interesting that the smartest man who ever lived did not engage in any physical exercise short of walking.

he claimed he had low sales resistance, and so would have his wife come clothes shopping with him

He was not a skilled poker player

Did his genius come at the expense of social awareness? Maybe. I find the idea of zero sum cognition utterly fascinating.

He famously always wore a grey oxford 3 piece suit, including when playing tennis with Stanislaw Ulam, or when riding a donkey down the Grand Canyon

I felt that he was sometimes somewhat peculiar that he would be impressed by government officials or generals and so on. If a big uniform appeared that made more of an impression than it should have. It was odd.

Parties and nightlife held a special appeal for von Neumann. While teaching in Germany, von Neumann had been a denizen of the Cabaret-era Berlin nightlife circuit.”

Playing tennis in a 3-piece suit is just about the most insane thing I've ever heard.

Do keep in mind that while it's still bizarre it was probably less bizarre at the time - back in the day wearing a suit was much closer to default behavior, and therefore this may have been an eccentricity, but not as far off from appropriate.

I don't think his cognition was literally zero-sum. It's more of a marginal utility question. If spending X additional mental effort on social graces provides you with M utilons and spending it on thinking about math provides you with N utilons with M << N because people are willing to put up with your eccentricity, then even if you have virtually boundless mental effort it makes sense to spend it all on thinking about math.

He basically spent enough of his cognition on social graces to graduate from "insane" to "eccentric" and then considered the problem solved.

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