[HN Gopher] Finding Peter Putnam
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Finding Peter Putnam
Author : dnetesn
Score : 61 points
Date : 2025-06-28 10:27 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (nautil.us)
(TXT) w3m dump (nautil.us)
| morninglight wrote:
| Sorry, this was no Vivian Maier.
|
| Not even close.
| olddustytrail wrote:
| Your comment could have been so much better. I'd not heard of
| Vivian Maier but her photography sounds fascinating. I don't
| know why you think it's related to a philosopher because you
| didn't say.
|
| You can improve your comment with just a little more effort.
| dang wrote:
| I'm guessing the association is that these are two figures
| who weren't famous in their lifetimes and became known later.
|
| You're right that putting down one figure is not a good way
| to introduce another. It would be better to submit the most
| interesting online article about Vivian Maier, so we could
| have a thread about her in her own right.
|
| Edit: turns out we've had quite a few! though not very large
| ones:
|
| _What Vivian Maier saw in color (2018)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43239046 - March 2025
| (11 comments)
|
| _Vivian Maier, One of the Best Street Photographers of the
| 20th Century_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40930530
| - July 2024 (1 comment)
|
| _What Vivian Maier Saw in Color (2018)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19498483 - March 2019
| (17 comments)
|
| _Vivian Maier_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19358138 - March 2019 (5
| comments)
|
| _Camera Obscura: A biography of street photographer Vivian
| Maier_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15214955 - Sept
| 2017 (5 comments)
|
| _Digging Deeper into Vivian Maier 's Past_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10886162 - Jan 2016 (1
| comment)
|
| _Man Buys 10k Undeveloped Negatives, Discovers Important
| Street Photographers_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9750598 - June 2015 (1
| comment)
|
| _Misplaced: Ethics and the Photographs of Vivian Maier_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9084386 - Feb 2015 (1
| comment)
|
| _Vivian Maier 's undeveloped film on hold amid legal fight_
| - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8906719 - Jan 2015 (8
| comments)
|
| _Vivian Maier: Amazing unknown street photographer_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2256750 - Feb 2011 (4
| comments)
|
| _Vivian Maier: A life 's work seen for first time_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2127744 - Jan 2011 (51
| comments)
| tiagod wrote:
| > It's easy to say why someone is wrong, Putnam said. The hard
| part is figuring out why they're right. And everyone is right.
| Everyone has some central insight, hard won by the consistency-
| making mechanism of the brain, built of past experiences, cast
| as motor predictions, a pattern that repeats, sustains itself
| in the chaos. Our job is to pan for it like gold, sift it into
| our own nervous systems, reconcile the resulting contradiction,
| become something new.
| nopelynopington wrote:
| > The neighborhood was quiet. There was a chill in the air. The
| scent of Spanish moss hung from the cypress trees. Plumes of
| white smoke rose from the burning cane fields and stretched
| across the skies of Terrebonne Parish. The man swung a long leg
| over a bicycle frame and pedaled off down the street.
|
| I stopped halfway through this paragraph and just googled Peter
| Putnam.
|
| If I want an article to take hours to get to the point I'll go
| read a recipe blog.
| verisimi wrote:
| Thanks.
|
| > If I want an article to take hours to get to the point I'll
| go read a recipe blog.
|
| I don't appreciate all the extra text in recipe blogs either.
| chrisweekly wrote:
| IMHO, narrative prose in an article about someone's life is
| MUCH more appropriate than its use in a recipe.
| patcon wrote:
| Good god, the perpetual disdain of default HN for narrative
| exposition is so deep-rooted.
|
| Y'all know humans are kinda "made of" stories, right? Stories
| are the unit layer that we add on top of biological structure.
| It's not "data"
|
| Imho it is essentially self-loathing of the human condition to
| valorise raw data and detest linear narrative as much as this
| crowd seems to do
|
| EDIT: Narrative is the wings, without which data cannot travel
| through enough of the bell curve of minds. Being anti-story is
| being anti-democratic is toward authoritarianism. </ hot-take>
| cwmoore wrote:
| I hate this (extremely popular) take.
|
| Narrative is suasion, not substance.
|
| The storytellers know of no other way to tell the audience
| what is important, so the medium is the message.
|
| EDIT: and...the trope anticlimactic downvotes seal the drama
| plemer wrote:
| You loathing others' preferences /= them self-loathing.
| Presumptuous and insulting.
| dzink wrote:
| The only truly scarce thing for living creatures is time. The
| HN crowd expects respect of that so a disclaimer would help
| filter people with the wrong expectations.
| patcon wrote:
| I do agree, both approaches are valid to seek. Setting
| expectations with disclaimers would be helpful so people
| can enter willingly instead of perpetually critiquing via
| comment. I don't like a culture of bashing/minimising one
| approach, which I admittedly have just participated in.
|
| But in my defence, I'm in a "punching up" mode here, in the
| minority sense. I'd probably argue for valorising data more
| in an arts space.
|
| But something about the current tech world-builders not
| having respect for narrative makes me frustrated and
| afraid. How can we ever build things that account for parts
| of minds and life that we don't respect. (I sense a lack of
| respect for why and how narrative has been the vehicle of
| so much human progress and growth)
| Henchman21 wrote:
| Please keep in mind that the people who are anti-story are
| the same folks who view human interaction as a "problem to be
| solved". They're the outliers in society who make the rest of
| our lives easier. But they have gained way too much power in
| this world and are intent on dooming us all to their cold,
| dark, inhuman world.
| bitwize wrote:
| [flagged]
| golly_ned wrote:
| How was the comment ableist?
| gausswho wrote:
| A million years ago around a campfire, I watched grandpa
| try to tell my child his favorite story. It wasn't going
| smoothly as he would like. I lovingly watched him
| persist. At some point he sighed and met my sympathetic
| gaze. It was time to kick embers and turn in.
| FredPret wrote:
| Maybe it's the pacing of the article that's off. Feels
| like it's wasting one's time with self-indulgent prose.
|
| The short story in your comment, OTOH, is very much
| better. I can see the scene, my mind has filled in some
| details, and it took only a couple seconds to read.
| gausswho wrote:
| I think pacing is more aptly the issue than narrative.
| Perhaps even more specifically, the load-bearing first
| couple sentences dive right into establishing a complex
| setting before any other context is established. Even as
| I may enjoy narrative, I rarely enjoy effortful fumbling
| around in the dark unless it's with Joseph Conrad or
| Vladimir Nabokov.
| dang wrote:
| Can you please not cross into personal attack or general
| nastiness, even when an article is bad or you feel it is?
| We're trying for something else on this site.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| nopelynopington wrote:
| I am not anti story. I am in fact, a fiction writer. I live
| for stories. But there's a time and a place. And I think
| pigeonholing everyone who opines "tldr" as some sort of
| robotic fascist who wants all human discourse in binary or
| whatever is reductionist and moronic. I'm not burning
| books, I just thought an article should get to the bloody
| point
| vinceguidry wrote:
| > Please keep in mind that the people who are anti-story
| are the same folks who view human interaction as a "problem
| to be solved".
|
| Yes. But your next statement is nonsense.
|
| > They're the outliers in society who make the rest of our
| lives easier.
|
| Nothing about Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg made our lives
| easier. All they've done is made the social contract worse,
| making our lives harder, not easier. They've given
| lucrative jobs to a few, but all their market offerings
| gave the world is distraction and misery, in the case of
| Facebook, and flashy status symbols to chase, in the case
| of Tesla. They crowded out the market for competitors, so
| people can't have truly useful solutions to the problems
| Zuck and Musk claimed to solve.
|
| Ask yourself why Chinese electric cars would be banned from
| the US market and you're getting there. Musk bought a
| social network with the explicit aim of making it worse,
| and more than succeeded.
| vinceguidry wrote:
| You'll never cut through this attitude. It is, as you say,
| perpetual. HN is their safe space, hence the strong reaction
| you're receiving. You're going to have to learn how to
| operate within the mindset if you want pleasant interactions
| here. Learn to appreciate the dull rationalistic mental
| sludge.
|
| Putnam himself would feel perfectly comfortable here.
| golly_ned wrote:
| The guy who was disciplined for reading poetry on duty
| during WWII, who threw away his commissioned abstract
| sculpture would feel perfectly comfortable on a forum
| clearly hostile to anything that isn't a hard fact or a
| short thinkpiece about engineering management or an
| explanation of rust's reference counter?
| vinceguidry wrote:
| I like to think that the things that drove him away from
| society and caused him to seclude himself from it are the
| very things this community values and seeks to protect.
| gorjusborg wrote:
| The irony is that you noped out of an article about someone
| whose life's worth of thought led him to believe that you
| can't understand how someone is right without understanding
| their circumstances.
|
| Your post is a sort of sad admission that your attitude will
| prevent you from seeing the beauty in everyone.
|
| You do you though. I am sure there is a reason you are this
| way ;)
| nopelynopington wrote:
| I will do me but I'm future I won't tell anyone, and I
| think that's better for all of us
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| It was approaching 9 AM one early summer morning,
| uncharacteristically cool. The city was quiet as drops of dew
| hang heavily from the blades of grass and the flower petals,
| still fresh in their memory of the visitations of bees from
| the day before. The only sound was the sound of typing, as a
| comment was posted to HN expressing support for the GP.
| There's a time and place for literary exposition. Maybe this
| magazine is the right place and most of their audience
| appreciates it, but it's also OK to feel put off by it when
| you're curious and hoping to learn something.
| patcon wrote:
| Haha ok this was good.
|
| It's messy. Anyone who claims one way (myself included) is
| probably Very Wrong On The Internet
| bitwize wrote:
| That is indeed a take so spicy as to be shartworthy.
| Disliking this glurgy, fluff-laden narrative article style
| does not make one a soulless cryptofascist robot. One could
| imagine a different format for the article that front-loads
| the interesting bits and then delves into background detail,
| rather than forcing the reader to wade through pages of lit-
| fic-wannabe padding to get to the money shot. Articles used
| to be written this way all the time, but that was before
| writers and magazines were paid by the ad view.
| cwmoore wrote:
| Take out the flying duck "sh***rthy" and you will have made
| an excellent series of points.
| gramie wrote:
| I'm not a very critical reader*. When I read something, I
| don't have conversations with myself about "this could be
| better if..." or "the writer shouldn't have..." Instead, I
| accept what has been proffered and at the end decide if it
| had value for me.
|
| * unless I make a conscious effort to, like when I'm asked
| to review someone's work
| nopelynopington wrote:
| Narrative is great but not everything needs a narrative. And
| I'll admit an article about someone who tried to reconcile
| the rational brain with the emotional mind is maybe such a
| place, but I just wasn't in the mood. Maybe I should have
| kept my experience to myself
| croes wrote:
| But the narrative has to be captivating.
|
| Didn't seem to captivate OP.
| dang wrote:
| Can you please make your substantive points without putting
| down the rest of the community? This is in the site
| guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
|
| It's much, much (did I say much?) too easy to turn a handful
| of unpleasant datapoints into an entire theory-of-the-
| community--almost always one that presents it as somehow
| depraved or wretched. It's understandable, but it makes for
| tedious conversation. That's why that guideline is in there.
| vinceguidry wrote:
| Yes, the quoted section is rather overwrought, but I didn't
| know it was there. Why? I skimmed right over it. Your ability
| to take in information would be greatly improved if you can
| train your brain to be non-reactive to such things.
| notjoemama wrote:
| I dunno, just because I know to scroll down on recipe.com
| doesn't mean it's not irritating each time. It's like web
| advertising. I can look past it most of the time but I still
| gravitate to sites that use less or none. I think its a valid
| response to a bad writing pattern.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| If you stopped halfway through this paragraph, how did you know
| what it said?
| nopelynopington wrote:
| I stopped halfway, googled the guy, then came back and copied
| the first paragraph. It's not some great conspiracy
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| OK I figured that's what happened, I mean, interesting time
| saving strategy..
| golly_ned wrote:
| [flagged]
| nopelynopington wrote:
| Good point, it wasn't very helpful
| dang wrote:
| Please don't cross into personal attack, regardless of how
| wrong another user is or you feel they are.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| southernplaces7 wrote:
| Yet you took the time to then go to this site, open a comment
| box and clog up a potentially informative thread with yet
| another bit of "interaction optimization" bullshit over a very
| human, often atmospheric desire to creatively express words.
|
| Wouldn't it have been easier to just keep reading a bit longer?
| croes wrote:
| Interestingly he doesn't seems to have a wiki article, the only
| Peter Putman there is a bodybuilder
| mythrwy wrote:
| I did the same thing except I pasted the link into GPT and had
| it summarize.
|
| Personally unless I'm reading fiction I don't care for
| backstory and setting.
| dang wrote:
| " _Please don 't pick the most provocative thing in an article
| or post to complain about in the thread. Find something
| interesting to respond to instead._"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| nissomon wrote:
| A captivating read, bringing life to a very interesting
| character. Thank you for posting this.
|
| I do wonder about Putnam's research though. Has it been looked
| into by experts in the field more recently? The article doesn't
| really give an answer to this.
| refactor_master wrote:
| I agree, it was a very interesting read, though not very
| information dense. The article vaguely gestures at something
| that approaches what we now know as "reinforcement learning",
| but it seems like Putnams theories were developed entirely in
| parallel, and those two worlds never intersecting?
| triska wrote:
| I second this! What a fascinating read!
|
| Regarding the point about current research, I found in the
| article:
|
| _" Gary Aston-Jones, head of the Brain Health Institute at
| Rutgers University, told me he was inspired by Putnam to go
| into neuroscience after Clarke gave him one of Putnam's papers.
|
| "Putnam's nervous system model presaged by decades stuff that's
| very cutting edge in neuroscience," Aston-Jones said, and yet,
| "in the field of neuroscience, I don't know anybody that's ever
| heard of him.""_
| fumeux_fume wrote:
| If your fishing net is constructed just right--so as to pick out
| the many interesting gems in this article, you will be glad to
| know Gefter has also published a book that revolves around John
| Wheeler.
| khakimov wrote:
| After this article last week started to read his work (some
| available here https://www.peterputnam.org/) What a life, what a
| character.
| myst wrote:
| https://www.peterputnam.org
| golly_ned wrote:
| What a beautiful article about a fascinating man -- I'd be glad
| to read a full biography.
| IdealeZahlen wrote:
| Wow, I always thought Hilary was the only Putnam to come up with
| a computational theory of mind.
| iandanforth wrote:
| "Every game needs a goal. In a Turing machine, goals are imposed
| from the outside. For true induction, the process itself should
| create its own goals. And there was a key constraint: Putnam
| realized that the dynamics he had in mind would only work
| mathematically if the system had just one goal governing all its
| behavior.
|
| That's when it hit him: The goal is to repeat. Repetition isn't a
| goal that has to be programmed in from the outside; it's baked
| into the very nature of things--to exist from one moment to the
| next is to repeat your existence. "This goal function," Putnam
| wrote, "appears pre-encoded in the nature of being itself."
|
| So, here's the game. The system starts out in a random mix of
| "on" and "off" states. Its goal is to repeat that state--to stay
| the same. But in each turn, a perturbation from the environment
| moves through the system, flipping states, and the system has to
| emit the right sequence of moves (by forming the right self-
| reinforcing loops) to alter the environment in such a way that it
| will perturb the system back to its original state."
|
| I'm a big fan of this line of thinking. I've been arguing for
| years that RL should be based in homeostasis and this seems right
| along those lines. I wish I could have talked with him!
| Xmd5a wrote:
| Being machines
| gramie wrote:
| That was a fascinating article. I have no doubt that Putnam's
| work is far beyond me -- considering that it is beyond leading
| academics in the field -- but I appreciate the description of a
| man who tried his best to find the right path for himself, even
| if it was at odds with what the world expected of him.
| olddustytrail wrote:
| When first I saw the title I was thinking "how can he be
| forgotten when I've heard of the Putnam prize", but it's a
| totally different Putnam.
|
| And according to my friendly neighbourhood LLM, they're not
| immediately related.
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