[HN Gopher] The man who tried to redeem the world with logic (2015)
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The man who tried to redeem the world with logic (2015)
Author : headalgorithm
Score : 118 points
Date : 2023-06-21 08:13 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (nautil.us)
(TXT) w3m dump (nautil.us)
| DiscourseFan wrote:
| I always mention this when there are articles about logical
| approaches to psychology that mention Freud: Freud was the first
| person to attempt to create an entirely physical theory of the
| psyche, and he attempted to understand psychological operations
| as a product of neurological reactions[0]. To be fair, not many
| in the early 20th century would know of this work, since it
| wasn't published until some years after Freud's death. But
| Psychoanalysis was developed out of the fact of his failure: that
| human relations, and human psychology, were "messy," they were
| unable to be accessed through traditional empirical means, and so
| there was a need to develop a new method of evaluating
| therapeutic subjects which, by dint of its subject, grew to be
| quasi-mystical (if you want the _deep_ Freudian mysticism, read
| "Beyond the Pleasure Principle."[1])
|
| But these myths, acknowledged as much by Freud, were in principle
| used not to describe reality, but to give a framework for
| _teaching analysis_ : for instructing others how to go about the
| therapeutic approach. No myth, no logic, no grammar is universal
| to the psyche; and yet humans live in interrelations, there is at
| some level a groundwork for both social and psychological life, a
| particular set of relations: Lacan, who came after Freud, heavily
| employed the use of pure math and logic in order to describe this
| set of relations, but these formulas were never meant to capture
| the "whole" thing, because one could never: they were only meant
| to give a framework for analysis, a framework for analyzing
| operations of human beings in their social world.
|
| Freud may not have been perfect or spoke the absolute truth: but
| there was never an absolute truth to speak about, and the success
| of HBO's myriad (and explicitly Freudian) Dramas I think
| demonstrates the validity of the method: just like Oedipus Rex
| was able to stimulate horror in its ancient audience, Freud was
| able to capture what it was about that play that triggered the
| reaction, and we can now easily recreate it over and over and
| over again. Honestly though, it is getting a little tiring to see
| psychological dramas rehashing the same co-ordinates over and
| over. I completely endorse moving away from his work to create
| something new, a reinterpretation if you will (just like with
| Lacan), but the outright dismissal is inappropriate and
| misguided, in my book.
|
| [0]http://users.clas.ufl.edu/burt/freud%20fleiss%20letters/2007..
| .
|
| [1]https://www.libraryofsocialscience.com/assets/pdf/freud_beyo..
| .
| irq-1 wrote:
| > No myth, no logic, no grammar is universal to the psyche;
|
| Logic is universal; it holds true for all regardless of
| language and environment. "AND" doesn't have different meanings
| by changing language or social environment. Children use "AND"
| easily, fluently and universally. What is that but "universal
| to the psyche"?
| [deleted]
| EGreg wrote:
| Inventor of Logban ?
| exrhizo wrote:
| Perhaps it's of use to others, The possibilities for healing were
| not as diverse then as they are now. Besides the clinical dbt or
| cbt, there are many coaches and bodyworkers with diverse
| offerings on how to transform trauma. Somatic practices like
| Hakomi, breathwork like holotropic. Many many options, all of
| which can have a contribution to healing.
| mandmandam wrote:
| [flagged]
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _A man who tried to redeem the world with logic (2015)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30275687 - Feb 2022 (19
| comments)
|
| _A man who tried to redeem the world with logic (2015)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26637134 - March 2021 (66
| comments)
|
| _Walter Pitts pioneered neural networks. Then he lit his entire
| PhD on fire_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15987076 -
| Dec 2017 (8 comments)
|
| _A Man Who Tried to Redeem the World with Logic_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13190601 - Dec 2016 (16
| comments)
|
| _The Man Who Tried to Redeem the World with Logic_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9003735 - Feb 2015 (23
| comments)
| slowmovintarget wrote:
| This story is told in part in _Models of the Mind_ by Grace
| Lindsay (excellent read on neurobiology and it 's echo in
| computer science: ML).
|
| Really interesting to read about.
| veltas wrote:
| Regarding this claim that Wiener's wife was conservative, and
| slandered Pitts (or his associates), there are some interesting
| answers on https://hsm.stackexchange.com/questions/184/ to the
| question of why Wiener broke off ties, including one that
| suggests that both Wiener and his wife were actually ardent
| socialists, and one that there were other difficulties working
| together that lead up to the break.
|
| It's stated as if fact in this article that it was slander, I
| don't know how reliable the source is. It's not too interesting
| to me, and it's sad all the same that Pitts drunk himself to
| death. It's always sad seeing academic or otherwise principled
| people broken by politics and social troubles, regardless of the
| full story, I'm fully sympathetic to it.
|
| If someone has more info on the actual sources here it would
| probably be of value for posterity.
| mandmandam wrote:
| "Dark Hero of the Information Age" is the book that I found,
| and it looks pretty legit to me. Multiple sources all say
| roundabout the same thing of Margaret, even their daughter.
|
| She accused her daughter of trying to seduce her husband after
| getting her ears pierced, ffs.
| hnbad wrote:
| It's only one answer and it doesn't give sources for its claim,
| so I'm not sure the claim about the Wieners being Trostkyists
| or socialists should be taken at their word.
|
| That said, according to his Wikipedia article, Norbert Wiener
| was a pacifist and didn't shy away from crediting Soviet
| researchers and sharing his work with them as with any other
| part of the international scientific community. Considering he
| was active during the McCarthy era, anything more tangible than
| that could have likely been career-ending so I would take those
| claims with a grain of salt.
|
| Given that these claims allegedly stem from Lettvin, who again
| according to his Wikipedia article strongly believed in
| individual rights but opposed the AAA&S withdrawing an award
| from someone for vocally supporting literal fascism (the
| article mentions Kropotkin as an early influence but the
| emphasis on "individual rights" reads more right-libertarian
| than socialist), and given the historical context
| (McCarthyism), I would read any such claim as an accusation and
| attempt at defamation rather than trivia.
|
| It's worth mentioning that the political spectrum is fuzzy and
| many-facetted and individuals can hold contradictory beliefs
| with regard to the ideologies they profess, especially when
| condensed to a one-dimensional gradient. It's entirely possible
| that Wiener's wife (or he himself) was conservative and yet an
| "ardent socialist". Pacifism is widely regarded as a leftist
| position (if only because it was often seen treasonous and
| "communism" was the label for the enemy). The Soviet Union
| (which seems relevant if the Wieners were interested in
| Trostky's ideas) was culturally conservative in many ways:
| while it was decades ahead in gender equality, queerness was
| seen as bourgeois perversion and "bohemian" lifestyles were
| largely seen as counter-revolutionary.
| stareatgoats wrote:
| This is a wonderful, well written story about people at the
| center of our profession in the early days. People more versed in
| CS history might be more familiar with the story than I was.
|
| In a way it explores a problem, or an understanding of the world
| which is still very much alive and well, but fraught with the
| same problems that Pitts experienced: The notions that we as
| humans can understand (and therefore command) reality at its
| core, using logic and mathematics.
|
| I don't have an issue with exploring the power of logic and
| mathematics to the fullest, but I'm now convinced that for our
| own mental wellbeing it would be beneficial to understand that
| everything has its limits: we can never understand and command
| everything.
|
| Reality will always surprise us, because reality is always
| larger.
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| To understand, yes. Who said anything about "to command"? And
| "therefore", even?
|
| Science is the quest for knowledge. That's all. It's greed and
| arrogance that try to boss everyone around and end up
| destroying the world.
| jxramos wrote:
| in brief, reality is a mystery with unbounded depths.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| When people say that academic politics are meaner and nastier
| than legislative politics, this is the kind of thing they're
| talking about. Just practically, if Pitts had known how to
| maintain a formal separation between his personal friendships and
| his professional relationships he might have been able to avoid
| all the problems with Wiener (who doesn't really come across in a
| very good light, blaming it all on his wife is a bit of a dodge
| of responsibility).
|
| Pitts comes across as a brilliant person who was perhaps
| emotionally unstable and over-involved with his work - in that,
| he seems to have fallen into depression in part because his view
| of how the world worked was sabotaged by the results of his
| experiments, so he set his dissertaion on fire and fell into
| alcoholism... (I can't imagine what Pitts would have thought of
| the rise of chaos theory in physical systems, aka 'sensitive
| dependence on initial conditions' which was largely discovered
| with the aid of computers, although Poincare sort of foresaw it).
|
| A rather tragic tale, but not one that is at all uncommon in the
| academic world.
| stevenwoo wrote:
| The very beginning kind of explains everything in my
| presumptive reading, his father was abusive and Pitts dove into
| books and via this obsession gave himself a college prep
| education by the age of fifteen and ran away from his family
| forever at age 15. Academic achievement wise, it's what many
| parents wants for their child, but the possible concentration
| on the one thing and the relationship history left him under
| leveled to deal with the rest of living.
| HarryHirsch wrote:
| _I can 't imagine what Pitts would have thought of the rise of
| chaos theory in physical systems, aka 'sensitive dependence on
| initial conditions' which was largely discovered with the aid
| of computers, although Poincare sort of foresaw it_
|
| He must have been aware of it - control theory involves
| feedback loops, and numerical robustness is what it's all
| about. Anti-aircraft rocketry was developed at that point, and
| Wiener was a central figure, he even called the field
| "cybernetics".
| jhedwards wrote:
| I have a small bit to add to the story of Pitts in the form of an
| article my grandfather, an ecologist, wrote with him in the
| Journal of Mammalogy: Dog Locates Winter Nests of Mammals[0]. The
| article reads as a charming account of scientists tramping around
| in the woods with a dog looking for mice. When I talked to my
| father about this article, however, I learned that this was an
| attempt by my grandfather to help Pitts and keep him
| psychologically grounded. I guess the woods made him feel a
| little bit better.
|
| [0] https://archive.org/details/sim_journal-of-
| mammalogy_1952-05...
| sdwr wrote:
| That makes me really sad to read. Analytical observation
| papering over a deep emotional hole. Reminds me of Euler.
| naillo wrote:
| (2015)
| amoss wrote:
| Very enjoyable and well-written story until:
|
| > After all, it had been Wiener who discovered a precise
| mathematical definition of information: The higher the
| probability, the higher the entropy and the lower the
| information content.
|
| This seems jarring wrong and a little digging reveals that in
| 1948 Weiner wrote:
|
| > the notion of information attaches itself very naturally to a
| classical notion in statistical mechanics: that of entropy
| [...] just as the amount of information in a system is a
| measure of its degree of organization, so the entropy of a
| system is a measure of its degree of disorganization; and the
| one is simply the negative of the other.
|
| The broad idea is there (and perhaps Weiner deserves credit for
| the observation), but it is the same year that Shannon
| published A Mathematical Theory of Communication, and two years
| later Weiner is quoted with the more precise description:
|
| > Just as entropy is a measure of disorganization, the
| information carried by a set of messages is a measure of
| organization. In fact, it is possible to interpret the
| information carried by a message as essentially the negative of
| its entropy, and the negative logarithm of its probability.
|
| The later quote using Shannon's definition. I've not seen
| information theory being credited to Weiner before and that
| makes me curious - what is the story here? Parallel invention
| is commonplace in scientific history, yet Weiner and Shannon
| are listed as collaborators in other sources.
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