Nash's game theory dissertation was something von Neumann considered obvious and not particularly noteworthy, if I remember my lore right. He was among the first game theorists, focusing more on collaborative games than pure strategic/competitive games.

Einstein built on the shoulders of Riemann, Gauss, and others when considering the universe might be non-Euclidean!

All brilliant people, many singular minds of great repute, yet, all improved by the rest.

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dempedempe 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Saying that von Neumann was one of the first game theorists undersells it.

He wrote the original book on game theory! The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior with Oskar Morgenstern.

Relatedly, MAD was his conception as well.

	▲	mrandish 41 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> He wrote the original book on game theory! I always found it endearing that von Neumann loved playing poker with friends but was admittedly terrible at it, regularly losing money.

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senderista 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I believe Nash himself didn't consider it particularly noteworthy either, and was far prouder of his work in pure math (like the Nash embedding theorem).

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anthonypasq 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

another famous piece of Von Neumann lore is that he constantly advocated nuking the Soviets.

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sillysaurusx 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I was wondering if someone would mention this.

It's interesting how much worse off the world would be if the smartest people were in charge of it.

What ultimately blocked his nuke proposals? (Why didn't anyone listen?) I'm curious about whatever failsafe that was.

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estearum 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

1. Big assumption that the world would be worse off in that alternative future, no?

2. Probably what blocked his proposals is that most people are loath to murder millions of other people (especially if they have ~any other option, including "do nothing")

	▲	myth_drannon 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It's all psychological inertia. For example even if they knew that Communism would cause tens of millions of deaths they would not nuke USSR.

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hn_acc1 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Not sure that it would be worse than letting the other end of the spectrum be in charge of it, as we've seen..

	▲	IAmBroom 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		We can't know. As an extreme example, antisemitism was so commonly palatable that an open admirer of Hitler, Charles Lindbergh, was a very serious candidate for the presidency. Today, open antisemitism can get one's career derailed in much of the world. Would that be true without the eye-opening shock that the news of the concentration camps produced? IN NOW WAY was the Holocaust forgivable, but we simply cannot say if the world today would be "more moral on average" or "less moral on average". Maybe Jews would feel and be far less safe today in predominantly Christian countries. Maybe not. All we can say for certain is that the horrors enacted upon the Holocaust victims were evil. As we can surely say that murdering many millions of people living in the USSR would be.

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5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[deleted]

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senderista 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Even Bertrand Russell briefly advocated this. "Better dead than Red."