Yet another Hacker News

A Man from the Future: Why Johnny Can't Stop Abstracting

47 points aray07 2 hours ago 20 comments

FLeXMurphy 1 hour ago | parent

> Johnny remained a game theorist to the end. After a lifetime of culturally Jewish atheism, he asked to be baptized. His daughter attributed it to Pascal's Wager: a small probability of a much better afterlife, against a trivial cost.

The house always wins.

roarcher 1 hour ago | parent

I've always thought that surely an all-knowing god would consider Pascal's Wager to be rather mercenary and insincere, and it wouldn't count.

jrochkind1 1 hour ago | parent

Or maybe he'd even penalize you for it.

It's important to recall that an all-knowing God isn't necessarily very compassionate, or even rational. Some of the people I've known who knew the most have been the biggest assholes. Or insane.

What if there's a god, but he punishes humans for believing he exists, just for fun? Where's your wager now?

TimTheTinker 1 hour ago | parent

> What if there's a god, but he punishes humans for believing he exists, just for fun? Where's your wager now?

That's the equivalent of Russell's teapot - an imagined, unfalsifiable proposition.

But Pascal's wager was anchored to specific attested propositions: specifically, the gospel of Jesus (repent of sin and call to him, he's paid for it and will save you from judgment and eternal separation from God if you do) rooted in the historical events of his verbal claim to be the son of God, followed by his death and resurrection, witnessed by many. You may agree or disagree, but what you are affirming or denying is at least concrete and specific.

roarcher 56 minutes ago | parent

> But Pascal's wager was anchored to specific attested propositions: specifically, the gospel of Jesus

Right, but that's the problem with it. It assumes that there are only two possibilities: no god, or the god of the New Testament.

Betting that Pascal's god exists isn't the safe choice that the wager makes it out to be, because it's equally possible that some other god exists (or just some other version of the Abrahamic god, say Allah or the pre-messiah god of Israel) and your faith in Jesus is just going to piss him off.

Believe in Jesus all you want, but Pascal's Wager is a pretty terrible reason to do so.

Edit to add: Your description is also not even the only possible New Testament god. Some (myself included) would argue that that particular image of god was painted more by Paul than by Jesus.

TimTheTinker 11 minutes ago | parent

> It assumes that there are only two possibilities: no god, or the god of the New Testament.

I don't think so. It isn't concerned with giving any description or shape to the negative case, just an invitation to consider a particular positive case.

There are positive cases for other gospels and worldviews... there's nothing wrong with invitations to engage with one or another.

As science has shown, the truth is best discerned by considering each theory individually (and continually) against evidence. Not "dark matter sounds cool, I think that's true, not MOND" but rather considering each individually for internal consistency and against observation and predictiveness.

"It does not make any difference how beautiful your guess is, it does not make any difference how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is — if it disagrees with experiment, it is wrong." --Richard Feynman

Maxatar 55 minutes ago | parent

Pascal's wager was not at all anchored to any specific attestations, you are taking his wager and reinterpreting it to give it some kind of legitimacy that it never originally held. The entire point of the wager was to justify belief in the absence of sufficient evidence, by appealing to the asymmetry between infinite reward and finite cost. If your now arguing that Christianity is more credible because of historical evidence, so be it and stick to it but you've abandoned Pascal's wager and moved on to an entirely different argument.

anonymous908213 32 minutes ago | parent

> by appealing to the asymmetry between infinite reward and finite cost

The supposed asymmetry only holds in a framework that assumes the Christian God as the only possibility. The point is that it's possible for there to be a god that isn't Yahweh, and that god might sentence you to eternal torment for believing in Yahweh, so in fact believing in Yahweh can result in infinite cost, destroying the value of the wager.

Maxatar 26 minutes ago | parent

Not at all. The asymmetry holds whenever the other possibilities don't introduce an opposing infinite penalty for belief. There could be countless other gods who are indifferent to Christian belief, reward it, or impose only finite penalties, and the asymmetry would remain intact.

The hypothetical god who punishes believers of a Christian God is a legitimate objection to Pascal's wager, but it doesn't establish the original assertion I objected to. You're confusing demonstrating that the asymmetry isn't guaranteed with demonstrating that it requires Christianity to be the only possibility. Those are two entirely different claims.

lazyasciiart 48 minutes ago | parent

A god who didn't like rules lawyering would ruin a lot of people's plans https://www.npr.org/2019/05/13/721551785/a-fishing-line-enci...

TFNA 45 minutes ago | parent

Judaism has, outside some mystical currents, less of an emphasis on "well, do you really believe?" than in Christianity, and more of an emphasis on rule-following (and studying how to navigate those rules) as the basic bargain between God and man.

EDIT: My bad, I missed that Neumann asked to be baptised, so he wasn't going back to the Judaism of his ancestors through his Pascal's Wager-esque step.

roarcher 36 minutes ago | parent

True, but I believe Pascal was specifically talking about the Christian god, was he not? Ironically, Jesus clearly claims that what truly matters to god is your intentions, as in the goodness of your heart. I would argue that Paul came along later and dumbed that idea down to "do you really believe?", which is what Pascal based his wager on.

tombert 25 minutes ago | parent

I never really understood Pascal's Wager.

Maybe I'm just weird, but I can't actually choose what I believe. I can choose to go to church and I can choose to say I believe and I can choose to donate money to some religious institution, but I don't think I'm capable of believing something that I think is dumb.

rcxdude 23 minutes ago | parent

Yeah, this is one of the more subtle issues with Pascal's wager.

psvv 7 minutes ago | parent

I see it as more of a rationalization. When you already believe something, you look for intellectual reasons to justify that belief. Pascal's Wager feel like that to me. Its main power is hardening an existing belief rather than swaying an undecided mind.

willguest 1 hour ago | parent

I recently read 'Maniac' by Benjamin Labatut, which also tracks the life of Johnny von Neumann. It is a wonderful read - very eloquently put together, giving accounts of the man from the perspectives of several people in his life.

Not only does it capture the alien-like genius of the protagonist, but also described his particular emotional and social character in a way that I have not seen written elsewhere. Highly recommended.

henrik_w 53 minutes ago | parent

I read The man From the Future a few years ago, and I highly recommend it! John von Neumann was such a fascinating and influential character. If you are interested in the modern history of mathematics, computers, game theory and more, pick up a copy.

I also wrote about why I liked the book so much:

https://henrikwarne.com/2024/07/07/john-von-neumann-the-man-...

nish__ 17 minutes ago | parent

> Budapest around 1900 produced an absurd cluster of minds: von Neumann, Eugene Wigner, Edward Teller, Leo Szilard, Paul Erdős, Theodore von Kármán, George Pólya.

Not to mention Nikola Tesla about 20 years prior.

> When several of them turned up at Los Alamos and realized they had gone to high school together, Szilard joked that Hungary was a cover story for a Martian landing.

What if there actually are people who go to Mars in the future but regret it and the only way for them to come back to Earth is to invent a time machine and be reborn as a mathematical supergenius. That would explain this at least:

> At six, Janos (the OG hungarian name for Johnny) could divide eight-digit numbers in his head and hold a conversation in ancient Greek. He later added Latin, French, German, English, and Yiddish. The rumor was that he remembered everything he ever read. Many years later Herman Goldstine decided to test this by asking him to recite "A Tale of Two Cities." Von Neumann started on chapter one and had to be asked to stop fifteen minutes later.

lern_too_spel 5 minutes ago | parent

> That would explain this at least:

There are more pedestrian explanations. https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/john-von-neumann-s...

seemaze 8 minutes ago | parent

I always recommend Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe[0] by George Dyson when John von Neumann comes up, it's a fabulous read.

[0] https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/44425/turings-cathe...