[HN Gopher] Margaret Mead, John von Neumann, and the Prehistory ...
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Margaret Mead, John von Neumann, and the Prehistory of AI
Author : arbesman
Score : 97 points
Date : 2024-03-19 13:15 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (resobscura.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (resobscura.substack.com)
| munificent wrote:
| _> In fact, American men like it in a state of continual
| breakdown so they can fix it_
|
| I feel seen.
| xanderlewis wrote:
| As does every desktop Linux user ever.
| jhbadger wrote:
| I'm actually quite impressed with Mead's recollections of von
| Neumann and the early cybernetic movement here. She is generally
| remembered today for her perhaps too naive belief in the sexual
| utopia of 1920s Samoa, but it is clear from this that she had
| other interests.
| throw4847285 wrote:
| You could fill a phone book with Mead's other interests. LSD,
| semiotics, Dr. Spock, polyamory, folk music, Episcopal prayer
| books, race and intelligence, you name it. To make an
| unsupportable hyperbolic claim, she might be the most important
| academic of the 20th Century.
| harvey9 wrote:
| I thought she was remembered for not retracting when shown to
| be wrong about Samoa.
| leafmeal wrote:
| See my comment above, but the short of it is that it seems
| she didn't retract because she probably was not wrong.
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39759898
| leafmeal wrote:
| I think it's worth pointing out that your impression of Mead
| might be shaped by a strong critic who worked hard to
| invalidate her work and erase her legacy. This section of her
| Wikipedia article sums it up pretty well. Essentially, more
| recent reviews of the research bears out Mead's conclusions.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Mead#Criticism_by_Der...
|
| Another interesting tangent about Mead was her almost foray
| into LSD research which I learned about from this submission
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39328747
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| I don't see how that shows that "free love" is supported by
| credible scientific research.
|
| Worth noting is that Mead herself had an adulterous past.
| Sexual misbehavior can produce feelings of guilt and disgust
| with oneself, and one (unhealthy) way to try to cope with
| that guilt is to rationalize one's misbehavior. If Samoans,
| seen through modern Western eyes as a representation of the
| "pure state of nature", can be shown to be promiscuous, then,
| according to this highly tendentious and fallacious
| interpretation, promiscuity must be "natural", the state of
| nature, and it is the West, or perhaps even "civilization" in
| general, with its weird sexual hangups, that is in error. So
| why feel guilty?
|
| Of course, as the aforementioned expose shows, there were
| Samoan police records of men with broken jaws or whatever
| that contrary to Mead's account, Samoan men expressed exactly
| the kind of reaction to their wives' adulterous affairs as
| one would expect. Not that contrary evidence would change
| anything anyway.
|
| Aldous Huxley admitted to a similar rationalizing process,
| but one that was even more deeply offensive from a
| metaphysical point of view. He admitted that the real reason
| he and those of his generation and his milieu celebrated a
| nihilistic view of life is to rationalize their own
| promiscuity. If nothing means anything, then why not sleep
| around? Of course, he later had the honesty to admit his
| motives.
|
| Alfred Kinsey is another one we can add to the list. Kinsey
| himself suffered from sexual pathologies, and his "studies"
| were riddled with selection bias wherein the selection of
| those he interviewed skewed heavily toward sex criminals and
| people with various sexual disorders. Never mind the sexual
| abuse of children he engaged in.
|
| We could add Reich, Freud, Satre,... to the list.
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| Are you slut shaming Margaret Mead?
| bbor wrote:
| I don't think people are so simple - that Aldous Huxley
| joked about wanting more sex doesn't convince me that's
| truly the driving force of his entire life. And, just
| practically speaking, a smart scientist man could live a
| sex-filled emotionless life at that time, and still
| today... you don't need to be a nihilist to go on Ashley
| Madison or seek a Sugar Baby.
|
| More substantively, it seems like you're endorsing a view
| that Wikipedia sums up as anti scientific and biased. I
| hate to dismiss someone so blithely but it _is_ fairly
| strongly worded. To quote the spiciest parts:
| Freeman's book was controversial in its turn and was met
| with considerable backlash and harsh criticism from the
| anthropology community, but it was received
| enthusiastically by communities of scientists who believed
| that sexual mores were more or less universal across
| cultures. Later in 1983, a special session of Mead's
| supporters in the American Anthropological Association (to
| which Freeman was not invited) declared it to be "poorly
| written, unscientific, irresponsible and misleading." Some
| anthropologists who studied Samoan culture argued in favor
| of Freeman's findings and contradicted those of Mead, but
| others argued that Freeman's work did not invalidate Mead's
| work because Samoan culture had been changed by the
| integration of Christianity in the decades between Mead's
| and Freeman's fieldwork periods. Eleanor Leacock
| traveled to Samoa in 1985 and undertook research among the
| youth living in urban areas. The research results indicate
| that the assertions of Derek Freeman were seriously flawed.
|
| At the least, I think we should all agree that no one was
| out to "prove the way humanity should be", just explore
| non-western ways of life. And I believe the consensus among
| gender theorists and anthropologists is that western
| sexuality _is_ arbitrary in many ways. That's not a
| condemnation of every single part of it, especially
| dishonest adultery as you seem focused on, but it's
| certainly a reason to investigate non-western society's
| IMO.
| jhbadger wrote:
| But you can't really dismiss criticism of her work as being
| from just a bitter rival. Whatever his personal motivation
| for doing it, Freeman and later anthropologists talked to
| Samoans themselves (some of whom were alive when Mead was
| doing her study of their society) and they didn't agree with
| Mead's description of them.
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| > it is clear from this that she had other interests.
|
| Why wouldn't she have other interests? And who is generally
| remembering this way? I think you've been missing out on a
| great mind and a great woman.
| verticalscaler wrote:
| This part made me chuckle: In the episode.. I
| mentioned a detail I encountered in my research that stuck with
| me. I think it may be the earliest reference to the "simulation
| hypothesis": the idea that the observable universe could be a
| computer simulation. Wikipedia will tell you that this theory
| dates to 2003.
|
| Surely not. Maybe I'm misunderstanding something.
| FooBarBizBazz wrote:
| The book "Dark Hero of the Information Age: In Search of Norbert
| Wiener The Father of Cybernetics" by Conway & Siegelman spends
| some time on this.
| jcgrillo wrote:
| I was hoping someone would mention this. What a great book.
| uberdru wrote:
| Why is this considered the "prehistory" of AI? It's the actual
| history of AI. . .
| bbor wrote:
| Heh I came in for the same point but decided to give the author
| the benefit of the attention-grabbing-headline, so to speak. AI
| started in earnest in 1950 with the rest of CS IMO, so
| technically this is "extremely early AI history", but you can
| see how they were basically just positing stuff at this point.
| I mean "we didn't use the word planet back then" really threw
| me for a loop.
|
| Also these days "prehistory of AI" means "pre-2010", according
| to the LLM industry!
| lsh123 wrote:
| AI history starts from Newton gradient descent ;)
| uberdru wrote:
| More like Plato. But cybernetics and systems theory seem
| more apt models, and, most interestingly, they derive as
| much from anthropology as from math. . . .
| uberdru wrote:
| I don't know. It likely goes much further back. The main
| problem is that there is no commonly accepted definition of
| "intelligence". So to add the modifier "artificial" (an
| equally fraught term) is just to muddle the topic.
|
| "Artificial Intelligence" is in the end just a metaphor, one
| that folds quickly under scrutiny.
| ghaff wrote:
| The field is usually dated to a 1956 workshop at Dartmouth
| College. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dartmouth_workshop
|
| Obviously it was building on earlier work.
| bbor wrote:
| Great point! I cite Turing so much that I feel like I
| _have_ to start it with "Can Machines Think?", but that's
| definitely the more historically valid answer. It certainly
| is if you ask Dartmouth lol, they have a whole page for it.
|
| On the topic of "incredible women historians of AI", this
| article by Grace Solomonoff was posted here a while back
| and blew my mind. Would highly recommend for anyone
| interested in the minds that started this whole kerfuffle.
|
| https://spectrum.ieee.org/dartmouth-ai-workshop
| ghaff wrote:
| Mostly coincidentally--although there were one or two
| overlapping participants--Cognitive Science is usually
| dated to an MIT conference a few months later. (Although
| I don't think it was called that yet.)
| bbor wrote:
| Benjamin Labutut's The MANIAC -- an experimental novel about von
| Neumann told in bite-sized historical vignettes.
|
| So excited to get this book, coming in tomorrow! Fun to see it
| randomly mentioned. This was when he had three or
| four drinks. He spoke of computers with some awe. And the real
| distinction is the people who feel awe for computers. They're
| nuts.
|
| Heh always good to see philosophy crossing over into other
| fields. This is quintessential analytic / "purely scientific"
| arrogance, and I love it. Thank god these days the AI researchers
| have some among them who have a healthy respect for the unknown
| and the unknowable, like Ilya. But I always chuckle seeing
| engineers with such an attitude, like everyone else is just too
| dumb to get it.
|
| Fantastic article, learned a lot, thanks for posting! I would
| give credit for "first to posit the simulation hypothesis" to
| Plato or Descartes, but I'll leave that for another thread lol.
| As it stands, this is pretty compelling research to edit the
| official wiki page IMO...
| somewhereoutth wrote:
| > Mead: You know that you're in control of it. The American
| attitude toward the machine is that it's something we make and
| it's something we can fix. In fact, American men like it in a
| state of continual breakdown so they can fix it, I'm inclined to
| think. But, all the way, from sort of, futuristic and cubistic,
| kind of painting and attitudes in World War I, and after World
| War I, in Europe, [there's] this fear of the machine. And either
| the dynamism of the machine so you and your plane dive to death,
| or some nonsense, or, that the machine was going to take over,
| was much stronger. But in the average American, this is not [the
| case]. And most of these people were Americans.
|
| World War 1 brought death in Europe on an industrial scale,
| metered out by artillery and the machine [gun]. Might explain
| Europeans' attitudes to 'the machine'.
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