I'm noticing a lot of people taking "you should read more about this, here are some book recommendations" as insulting their intelligence.

This is relevant because most USians lack a political education.

  • ProfessorAdonisCnut [he/him]
    ·
    1 year ago

    Einstein was a committed socialist, Johnny Von Neumann spent half his life as the Mycroft Homes of the Mutually Assured Destruction-Industrial Complex because of his anti-communist ideology. So far as raw intelligence is a concept which even exists, it doesn't remotely align with neatly political views.

    • IzyaKatzmann [he/him]
      ·
      1 year ago

      A shame about Neumann. I greatly admire his work (Computer and the brain is worth a read!) and think he could've had interesting contributions to socialist and communist ideas. Particularly creating analogies between dialectical materialism and computer architecture.

      • usernamesaredifficul [he/him]
        ·
        1 year ago

        Particularly creating analogies between dialectical materialism and computer architecture

        I don't see how they are connected

        • IzyaKatzmann [he/him]
          ·
          1 year ago

          Oh sorry for the lack of clarity. Ok to give a proof by induction: dialectical materialism is a metaphysical philosophical position which aims to describe the material world and what is related to it through contradictions. If computer architecture is material, if Neumann is material, and the work put in towards computer architecture is material; if the aforementioned all involve contradictions and resolving contradictions, then it falls under the purview of dialectical materialism.

          Dialectical materialism would fall apart if it could not explain everything (the efficacy or success is unimportant) by way of contradictions.

          I hope that was an ok answer. Giving a different kind of explanation would require much more time and effort, it also might not be successful (you may be right). It's something I have thought about in depth, and of course that doesn't mean it's right. I do have arguments, it would take a while to work them out in a concise way and one amenable as a reply on a discussion board.

          • usernamesaredifficul [he/him]
            ·
            1 year ago

            yeah but computer architecture at the abstract level is the design of a tool and that is the level which I think dialectical materialism touches the subject