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March 20, 2005
Some Quotes
Paul Graham, Summer Founders FAQ: “Getting rich is hard but doable. Getting a fun job is hard but doable. Trying to solve both problems simultaneously approaches impossible.”
Schlake: “Um, you only have to sort something once in Python to hate it. There isn’t really any growing. The hatred of sort springs fully formed from the eyebrow of Guido.”
Finally, a biggie from my new hero, Dr. Jacob Bronowski, whose book The Ascent of Man I finished last night:
… Round about midnight I had his answer. Well, John von Neumann always slept very late, so I was kind and I did not wake him until well after ten in the morning. When I called his hotel in London, he answered the phone in bed, and I said, ‘Johnny, you’re quite right.’ And he said to me, ‘You wake me up early in the morning to tell me that I’m right? Please wait until I’m wrong.’
If that sounds very vain, it was not. It was a real statement of how he lived his life. And yet it has something in it which reminds me that he wasted the last years of his life. He never finished the great work that has been very difficult to carry on since his death. And he did not, really, because he gave up asking himself how other people see things. He became more and more engaged in work for private firms, for industry, for government. They were enterprises which brought him to the centre of power, but which did not advance eithr his knowledge or his intimacy with people—who to this day have not yet got the message of what he was trying to do about the human mathematics of life and mind.
Johnny von Neumann was in love with the aristocracy of intellect. And that is a belief which can only destroy the civilsation that we know. If we are anything, we must be a democracy of the intellect. We must not perish by the distance between people and government, between people and power, by which Babylon and Egypt and Rome failed. And that distance can only be conflated, can only be closed, if knowledge sits in the homes and heads of people with no ambition to control others, and not up in the isolated seats of power.
Later on, he also said this: “We are nature’s unique experiment to make the rational intelligence prove itself sounder than reflex.”
It’s hard, after finishing that book, not to agree with the “Great Men” theory of progress.
Posted by FusionGyro at March 20, 2005 01:58 AM
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