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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   38429 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 27, 2023

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Why is it always Von Neumann? Last I recall he was a physicist, not a brilliant leader, warlord or businessman who solves coordination problems.

Because Von Neumann could do shit like argue convincingly with an expert on Byzantine history after someone gave him a set of encyclopedias on said history, he read the books once and could remember everything in them well enough to give the expert trouble. At dinner parties people would call out books, and he'd just start reciting them from memory until someone told him to stop. He didn't train to do any of this, it was just an incidental fact about his brain. He revolutionised a bunch of separate branches of mathematics and physics by the time he died at 53, and he wasn't some social recluse like Dirac, he was apparently quite socially adept.

I am entirely sure that if Von Neumann had tried his hand at business instead of being obsessed by physics (like a lot of smart people get), he'd have been one of the best businessmen of all time. Same thing for pretty much any other field. The anecdotes about him really do point at his brain being a completely unambiguous upgrade to the normal human brain, with basically no downsides.

Upgrade perhaps, but still looks like to be an upgrade primarily in the areas where he can just do his own thing, once allocated resources, and drop a breakthrough paper. Allocating resources sounds like a bigger problem to be when moving towards superhumanity.

So Von Neumann really was the original Nth-Dimensional Hyperbeing In A Skin Suit, and not John Carmack?

I mean, he did make crucial technical developments for the atomic bomb. That's sort of warlord-like.

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