I spent today reading Dyson’s Turing’s Cathedral. One point he made in passing a number of times, but which I had generally ignored, was that the socialite Von Neumann almost always wore a suit. I also learned he managed to marry an heiress before correctly cutting all ties with Europe well before 1939, and Dyson seems to imply he arranged for no patents to be taken out on his computer work due to his hefty consulting contracts with IBM.
Epistemic & instrumental rationality: Von Neumann has it.
(Except for his wife reporting that he was superstitious about closing drawers and turning on lights but that sounded like OCD-like tendencies to me, and there is his dying conversion to Catholicism—but his son argues that it was a Pascalian move on his part, so...)
I spent today reading Dyson’s Turing’s Cathedral. One point he made in passing a number of times, but which I had generally ignored, was that the socialite Von Neumann almost always wore a suit. I also learned he managed to marry an heiress before correctly cutting all ties with Europe well before 1939, and Dyson seems to imply he arranged for no patents to be taken out on his computer work due to his hefty consulting contracts with IBM.
Epistemic & instrumental rationality: Von Neumann has it.
(Except for his wife reporting that he was superstitious about closing drawers and turning on lights but that sounded like OCD-like tendencies to me, and there is his dying conversion to Catholicism—but his son argues that it was a Pascalian move on his part, so...)