Great history of science reporting, I enjoyed reading it.
Errata: The article says "The higher the probability, the higher the entropy and the lower the information content." It should say "the lower the entropy", of course, as the definition of information is the same as the definition of entropy (they are correlated, not anti-correlated): white noise has the lowest probability (it's impossible to predict), the highest entropy and therefore the highest information content, according to Shannon's original Theory of Communication.
Oh wow. I read early Wiener account of McCulloch&Pitts work and even have one of their papers in my copy of 1956 Dartmouth workshop proceedings. It always puzzled me how Wiener and the whole cybernetics thing sort of just faded away. Had no idea that one woman single-handedly killed it.
Jerry Lettwin, one of Conway and Siegelman’s informants, suggests that Margaret’s accusation was a lie. Nevertheless, Wiener reacted strongly and immediately, cutting all ties with McCulloch and his group. His actions were, as the authors argue, the death knell for cybernetics as a unified field of study. McCulloch and his team were devastated by Wiener’s rejection, and they turned away from further exploration and elaboration of his ideas.
Wiener's wife did influence the fallout between him and McCulloch but this hardly killed cybernetics, and is perhaps best interpreted as an MIT turf war.
This is one of my favourite pieces of science feature reporting. I lack the background in computer science to better appreciate the technical angles of the story, but for the present, the article made a strong impression because of the underdog story:
"The library was familiar ground, where he had taught himself Greek, Latin, logic, and mathematics—better than home, where his father insisted he drop out of school and go to work. Outside, the world was messy. Inside, it all made sense.
"Not wanting to risk another run-in that night, Pitts stayed hidden until the library closed for the evening. Alone, he wandered through the stacks of books until he came across Principia Mathematica, a three-volume tome written by Bertrand Russell and Alfred Whitehead between 1910 and 1913, which attempted to reduce all of mathematics to pure logic. Pitts sat down and began to read. For three days he remained in the library until he had read each volume cover to cover—nearly 2,000 pages in all—and had identified several mistakes. Deciding that Bertrand Russell himself needed to know about these, the boy drafted a letter to Russell detailing the errors. Not only did Russell write back, he was so impressed that he invited Pitts to study with him as a graduate student at Cambridge University in England. Pitts couldn’t oblige him, though—he was only 12 years old. But three years later, when he heard that Russell would be visiting the University of Chicago, the 15-year-old ran away from home and headed for Illinois. He never saw his family again."
~~
It also made an impact because of its description of the nature of a deep friendship and mentorship: "Pitts had found in McCulloch everything he had needed—acceptance, friendship, his intellectual other half, the father he never had. Although he had only lived in Hinsdale for a short time, the runaway would refer to McCulloch’s house as home for the rest of his life. For his part, McCulloch was just as enamored. In Pitts he had found a kindred spirit, his “bootlegged collaborator,” and a mind with the technical prowess to bring McCulloch’s half-formed notions to life. As he put it in a letter of reference about Pitts, “Would I had him with me always.”"
[...] "Some years earlier, in a letter to McCulloch, Pitts wrote “About once a week now I become violently homesick to talk all evening and all night to you.” Despite his success, Pitts had become homesick—and home meant McCulloch. He was coming to believe that if he could work with McCulloch again, he would be happier, more productive, and more likely to break new ground. McCulloch, too, seemed to be floundering without his bootlegged collaborator."
~~
The tragic end also left an impression, where the article explores the consequence of creating an identity based on relationships with other people (arguably codependency): "Now, alienated from Wiener, Pitts’ despair turned lethal. He began drinking heavily and pulled away from his friends. When he was offered his Ph.D., he refused to sign the paperwork. He set fire to his dissertation along with all of his notes and his papers. Years of work—important work that everyone in the community was eagerly awaiting— he burnt it all, priceless information reduced to entropy and ash. Wiesner offered Lettvin increased support for the lab if he could recover any bits of the dissertation. But it was all gone."
[...] "Pitts remained employed by MIT, but this was little more than a technicality; he hardly spoke to anyone and would frequently disappear. “We’d go hunting for him night after night,” Lettvin said. “Watching him destroy himself was a dreadful experience.”"
~~
The loss of the friendship was compounded by Pitts's attempt to substantiate an ambitious goal related to much of the work in his life, but perceiving failure along the way (the results were disproven): "The results shook Pitts’ worldview to its core. Instead of the brain computing information digital neuron by digital neuron using the exacting implement of mathematical logic, messy, analog processes in the eye were doing at least part of the interpretive work. “It was apparent to him after we had done the frog’s eye that even if logic played a part, it didn’t play the important or central part that one would have expected,” Lettvin said. “It disappointed him. He would never admit it, but it seemed to add to his despair at the loss of Wiener’s friendship.”"
~~
Analysis: On the one hand, it's an amazing story of defying one's likely station in life, through self-study and earning the support of a mentor who takes a chance on you.
But on the other, it's also a tragedy of deeply relying on others, and how a breach in that relationship can cause a negative spiral of thoughts and emotions.
I wonder how Walter Pitts's life would have turned out if he had a wider support network or at least friends, preferably outside of his field of work and in academia (it's possible he may well have, but I didn't read about it in the article). Then, perhaps, the loss of his friendship with Wiener wouldn't have made such an impact, and the negative result also wouldn't have had such a profoundly negative impact, either.
I also wonder why the loss of his friendship with Wiener had such an impact, when he still had the near-lifelong friendship of McCulloch. It's impossible to really know, but perhaps he saw Pitts more as a close friend, and McCulloch more as a family member and mentor.
Yeah, I was struck by the article when I first read it too. I suspect the author warrants a closer look; great writing.
I've always been intrigued by mathematicians, which is probably the best label for Pitts. That world can be as virtual as it gets. Based on his fascination for Principia Mathematica, I have the sense that Pitts may have needed the world to fit into a neat representation that he felt he could navigate. Perhaps when he found it didn't, he lost 'faith' and became untethered from it.
Someone like pitts may have needed a story to give himself some kind of existential validity in the world, and to give the world meaning (see also Neitsche). People in this position are prone to attaching themselves to grandiose ideas. Still, it sounds like he would have been fine, had it not been for what happened with Weiner.
Just add more axioms as the universe expands. That's arguably a valid interpretation of Godel, who put the nail in the coffin of the positivists who had goals around Principia Mathematica.
I think the point about his wife might have also been a factor.
"There was just one person who wasn’t happy about the reunion: Wiener’s wife. "
"And so she invented a story. She sat Wiener down and informed him that when their daughter, Barbara, had stayed at McCulloch’s house in Chicago, several of “his boys” had seduced her. Wiener immediately sent an angry telegram to Wiesner: “Please inform [Pitts and Lettvin] that all connection between me and your projects is permanently abolished. They are your problem. Wiener.” He never spoke to Pitts again. And he never told him why.3"
What a wedge to be driven between the sum of the parts. I've started to think pregnancy is such a drain on the female body that the change in behaviour in women afterwards seem like minor psychotic episodes which the medical profession ignore and pass off as "normalised" behaviour. In a round about way, she legally killed him because her actions are not recognised as murder by the legal profession.
Edit: One other point on his theorem, with quantifying the chemical effects in the body & brain, you are never going to be able to mathematically model a chemical entity with logic. We are complex realtime chemical reactions, we are not able to quantify the activity of every cell exactly, only generalise which introduces a margin of error in being able to predict a biological entities next move.
> I've started to think pregnancy is such a drain on the female body that the change in behaviour in women afterwards seem like minor psychotic episodes which the medical profession ignore and pass off as "normalised" behaviour.
I don’t know that there’s a nice way to say this, but this is such a misogynistic take. I don’t see anything in the story that involved pregnancy or hormones. Whenever you read about something bad that was done by a man do you comment about how testosterone turns men into psychopaths?
That is your opinion and you can count yourself lucky you have not been exposed to the evil in some women which could alter your point of view. But consider this, if someone holds a misogynistic view, what caused this opinion to form?
On the point of testosterone turning men into psycho's, I'll agree it can make men more emotionless or robotic, but that doesnt make them an a-hole going around causing crimes, which is the connotation the word psychopath generates in the general psyche of a population.
The thing with the deceitful jealous shrew of a wife breaking up a productive (and dare I say, brotherly-loving?) company of men by lying about a sexual assault (a psychic cudgel that is still available to every woman) which in turn lead to the emotional downfall of one of the men into alcoholism, was so disappointing, and frankly, evil. I googled her and it also turns out she was an ardent Nazi supporter... Shocker.
Do you have a source for this? My searches land primarily on the University of North Carolina professor. I do see that she was a German immigrant but I'm not finding many details beyond that.
> The catastrophe emerged from Wiener's German-born wife, Margaret, and their almost gothically weird relationship. Though Wiener was Jewish, Margaret became an outspoken Nazi supporter during World War II. (She kept a copy of "Mein Kampf" on a dresser at home.) She was even more hostile to her daughters, and accused the elder of inspiring "unnatural" sexual feelings in her father. As Wiener's reputation grew and he crisscrossed the globe on lecture circuits, Margaret attempted to trigger his depressions with undercutting remarks. At the peak of Wiener's fame, she told an audacious lie that destroyed his relationship with his closest scientific collaborators. One of Wiener's daughters had interned for a spring with the colleagues; Margaret told Wiener that their daughter had had sex with several of them. Wiener chose to believe the falsehood. He immediately cut off all contact with his collaborators, never explained the accusation and never spoke to them again. And that, the authors contend, is the real reason cybernetics died. Wiener's colleagues were shattered, and without his participation, their explorations of his ideas quickly atrophied. One of Wiener's former protégés, the young mathematical genius Walter Pitts, was so scarred that ultimately he drank himself to death. By the time of Wiener's death in 1964, there were few proselytizers left; Soviet scientists were interested, but this only served to give cybernetics a "red" tinge.
Just a dream of a spouse, that one. :: eye roll ::
Two years ago I might have asked how it was possible that a Nazi supporter could literally be married to a Jew and hold the same beliefs.
After seeing people dying of COVID with their family accusing the doctors of killing them while blaming it on a nonexistent illness, I no longer wonder, now I'm just sad for humanity
Make it mandatory to teach critical thinking and basic science literacy in high school ASAP
A man who tried to redeem the world with logic (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26637134 - March 2021 (66 comments)
A Man Who Tried to Redeem the World with Logic - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13190601 - Dec 2016 (16 comments)
The Man Who Tried to Redeem the World with Logic - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9003735 - Feb 2015 (23 comments)