Scott Alexander's Reply to "John von Neumann Shot Lightning from His Arse"

MacRae is saying that, although his memory for words and mathematical symbols was amazing, it was not "photographic" in the sense of applying to faces.

I think this also gets at a more general objection I have to this section. MacRae is telling all of these amazing stories about the crazy things JvN can do, and you're quote-mining all of them for a few words you can take out of context to suggest that he wasn't really all that great. Not only would someone who went back to the source find you are citing the few words in a misleading way, but they would find them placed in the middle of countless anecdotes about how great JvN indeed was, which you pretend don't exist because you can't fit them into your debunking project.

(continued in reply because full comment is too long)

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Scott Alexander

Nov 12, 2025Edited

SOURCE OF MARTIANS: I tried to respond to arguments like yours here in my posts on von Neumann, including https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-man-from-the-future . I don't think they're very plausible.

MacRae concludes - and you sort of also conclude, but then back away from at the last moment - the obvious explanation, which is that Jews were succeeding all over Europe, and Budapest had more Jews than anywhere else (cf. Berlin 3% Jewish vs. Budapest 23%), plus a better selection filter for the richest and smartest Jews. I think this matches very well with what you call "pop hereditarianism", as does the fact that von Neumann's father was also a genius, his mother came from a family of geniuses, that his brother and daughter (while not quite geniuses) were both accomplished in their fields, etc.

You mention that there were two non-Jewish Nobel Prize winners in the Budapest of the age, but neither of those are considered among the Martians. Two non-Jewish Nobel Prize winners is well within the base rate for European cities of the time - for example, Madrid during the same period also contained two current-or-future Nobel Prize in Medicine winners. Nobody is surprised that Budapest included two Nobel Prize winners - they're surprised about the Martians!

I know you have a special interest in aristocratic tutoring, but you don't provide any evidence that aristocratic tutoring was any better in Budapest than anywhere else that there were aristocrats. You claim that Budapest "may have been one of the few places and times in all of history where you could hire a bevy of top-notch professional private tutors and governesses without being obscenely wealthy", but this isn't true - you could do the same in any college town in America today (I can't remember if I got this example from you - if so, thank you).

The "superb high schools in Budapest" are only judged superb retroactively because they produced so many geniuses. I have looked pretty hard for what teaching techniques they did differently or better from anywhere else, and I can't find them - except maybe the Hungarian math competitions, which are great but have failed to produce Martians post-1950 despite still going on. I've already discussed why I think your attempts to disprove that von Neumann was smart long before high school are tenuous, but it doesn't matter - there's equally good evidence for many of the other Martians (for example, TMWLON claims that age four Erdos could calculate in his head the number of seconds people had lived, given their age). Also, I think Nicholas says JvN's high school teachers complained he didn't do the assignments anyway.

No piece can ever be entirely without errors, but I think the overly aggressive style of this essay - the insistence that you've debunked everyone else, that they only read Wikipedia but you are a virtuous fact checker, that everyone who disagrees with you is "pop hereditarians" (are you a "pop nurturist"? why not?) places a higher burden on you to get things right.

I think a more honest version of this piece would have said that some of these stories come from stories told by JvN's Princeton friends, and others from stories told by JvN himself, and all of these could have been tall tales or grown in the telling; if you don't think this level of intelligence is possible, then you have to believe this. But I don't think your framing - that you have absolutely debunked this and that everyone except you is a credulous fool - matches the strength of your evidence.

I stand by most of the claims I made in https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-man-from-the-future , which I think were appropriately caveated, and encourage anyone who remains uncertain to read MacRae's biography and see which of us treated it more faithfully.

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Erik Hoel

Nov 13, 2025Edited

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There are lots of people who talk and write about John von Neumann. So no, this piece isn't aimed specifically at you (unless you identify as a pop-hereditarian, but if so, that’s sort of your choice).

However, a note. You use pretty strong language here. You seem to think that the point of the piece is to perfectly balance compliment of Johnny with criticism. That's the point of a full biography, not here. And Johnny’s been complimented more than enough! I also clearly praise him many times, very explicitly.

Driven by that perceived injustice, you accuse me of presenting points in “in a misleading, bordering on dishonest, way” and of overhyping the debunking. However, everything you list ends up being either (a) contradicted by further sources, or (b) a minor quibble. Only one even gets close to mattering at all, and there's other supportive evidence on my side for it.

I don’t think I’m overhyping the main thrust either. For instance, it does impact what you've written yourself. Here's how you originally set up the main motivation for your take on Johnny and The Martians that you’ve expanded on over the years: