The Wigner quote seems a bit misleading to me because you left out the second half to make a point it didn’t support (“JvN was smarter than Einstein, and yet...”). The full quote is
I have known a great many intelligent people in my life. I knew Max Planck, Max von Laue, and Werner Heisenberg. Paul Dirac was my brother-in-Iaw; Leo Szilard and Edward Teller have been among my closest friends; and Albert Einstein was a good friend, too. And I have known many of the brightest younger scientists. But none of them had a mind as quick and acute as Jancsi von Neumann. I have often remarked this in the presence of those men, and no one ever disputed me. [...]
But Einstein’s understanding was deeper than even Jancsi von Neumann’s. His mind was both more penetrating and more original than von Neumann’s. And that is a very remarkable statement. Einstein took an extraordinary pleasure in invention. Two of his greatest inventions are the Special and General Theories of Relativity; and for all of Jancsi’s brilliance, he never produced anything so original.
I also always interpreted Wigner’s “I have often remarked this in the presence of those men, and no one ever disputed me” as referring to Planck, von Laue, Heisenberg, Dirac, Szilard, Teller, and Einstein, but not von Neumann, so your “Von Neumannn was pronounced, by a peer, to be smarter than Albert Einstein to his face and got no objection” interpretation feels off to me (but I may be wrong of course).
But that’s just nitpicking. Perhaps more substantively, I felt sad reading this section
I also work with and lead many other brilliant people who also never will be intellectual pillars of humanity and constantly feel bad about themselves for not being more brilliant. I’ve been surprised how much of my time at big companies is spent pulling people out of the pit of inadequacy and self disgust…
I’ve done a little bit of this too, although my go-to advice is to read Scott’s Parable of the Talents, in particular this passage (long quote, emphasis mine):
Every so often an overly kind commenter here praises my intelligence and says they feel intellectually inadequate compared to me, that they wish they could be at my level. But at my level, I spend my time feeling intellectually inadequate compared to Scott Aaronson. Scott Aaronson describes feeling “in awe” of Terence Tao and frequently struggling to understand him. Terence Tao – well, I don’t know if he’s religious, but maybe he feels intellectually inadequate compared to God. And God feels intellectually inadequate compared to John von Neumann.
So there’s not much point in me feeling inadequate compared to my brother, because even if I was as good at music as my brother, I’d probably just feel inadequate for not being Mozart.
And asking “Well what if you just worked harder?” can elide small distinctions, but not bigger ones. If my only goal is short-term preservation of my self-esteem, I can imagine that if only things had gone a little differently I could have practiced more and ended up as talented as my brother. It’s a lot harder for me to imagine the course of events where I do something different and become Mozart. Only one in a billion people reach a Mozart level of achievement; why would it be me?
If I loved music for its own sake and wanted to be a talented musician so I could express the melodies dancing within my heart, then none of this matters. But insofar as I want to be good at music because I feel bad that other people are better than me at music, that’s a road without an end.
This is also how I feel of when some people on this blog complain they feel dumb for not being as smart as some of the other commenters on this blog.
I happen to have all of your IQ scores in a spreadsheet right here (remember that survey you took?). Not a single person is below the population average. The first percentile for IQ here – the one such that 1% of respondents are lower and 99% of respondents are higher – is – corresponds to the 85th percentile of the general population. So even if you’re in the first percentile here, you’re still pretty high up in the broader scheme of things.
At that point we’re back on the road without end. I am pretty sure we can raise your IQ as much as you want and you will still feel like pond scum. If we raise it twenty points, you’ll try reading Quantum Computing since Democritus and feel like pond scum. If we raise it forty, you’ll just go to Terence Tao’s blog and feel like pond scum there. Maybe if you were literally the highest-IQ person in the entire world you would feel good about yourself, but any system where only one person in the world is allowed to feel good about themselves at a time is a bad system.
People say we should stop talking about ability differences so that stupid people don’t feel bad. I say that there’s more than enough room for everybody to feel bad, smart and stupid alike, and not talking about it won’t help. What will help is fundamentally uncoupling perception of intelligence from perception of self-worth.
I just reread Scott’s review of John von Neumann’s bio The Man From The Future by Ananyo Bhattacharya, and it made me realise something else that felt off to me about the OP, which was that the OP’s insecurity seems to be primarily social status-related(?), whereas John’s seemed to be primarily existential. (This probably influenced his extreme views, like advocating for nuking Russia ASAP.) Some quotes:
[von Neumann] attributed his generation’s success to “a coincidence of some cultural factors” that produced “a feeling of extreme insecurity in the individuals, and the necessity to produce the unusual or face extinction. In other words, [the Jews’] recognition that the tolerant climate of Hungary might change overnight propelled some to preternatural efforts to succeed.
(FWIW Scott doesn’t buy this as a differentiating factor, but that’s not what I’m pointing at)
Throughout all this excellence, Bhattacharya keeps coming back to the theme of precariousness. Max von Neumann didn’t teach his kids five languages just because he wanted them to be sophisticated. He was preparing for them to have to flee Hungary in a hurry. This proved prescient; when John was fifteen, Communists took over Hungary, targeting rich families like the von Neumanns. A few months later, counterrevolutionaries defeated the Communists—then massacred thousands of Jews, who they suspected of collaborating. The von Neumanns survived by fleeing the country at opportune times, and maybe by being too rich to be credibly suspected of communist sympathies. But John’s “feeling of extreme insecurity…and…necessity to produce the unusual or face extinction” certainly wasn’t without basis. This was, perhaps, an education of a different sort.
Scott’s review also touches on the thing about advocating for nuking Russia ASAP, quoting his daughter Marina on his hatred of totalitarianism:
Throughout much of his career, he led a double life: as an intellectual leader in the ivory tower of pure mathematics and as a man of action, in constant demand as an advisor, consultant and decision-maker to what is sometimes called the military-industrial complex of the United States. My own belief is that these two aspects of his double life, his wide-ranging activities as well as his strictly intellectual pursuits, were motivated by two profound convictions. The first was the overriding responsibility that each of us has to make full use of whatever intellectual capabilities we were endowed with. He had the scientist’s passion for learning and discovery for its own sake and the genius’s ego-driven concern for the significance and durability of his own contributions. The second was the critical importance of an environment of political freedom for the pursuit of the first, and for the welfare of mankind in general.
I’m convinced, in fact, that all his involvements with the halls of power were driven by his sense of the fragility of that freedom. By the beginning of the 1930s, if not even earlier, he became convinced that the lights of civilization would be snuffed out all over Europe by the spread of totalitarianism from the right: Nazism and Fascism. So he made an unequivocal commitment to his home in the new world and to fight to preserve and reestablish freedom from that new beachhead.
In the 1940s and 1950s, he was equally convinced that the threat to civilization now came from totalitarianism on the left, that is, Soviet Communism, and his commitment was just as unequivocal to fighting it with whatever weapons lay at hand, scientific and economic as well as military. It was a matter of utter indifference to him, I believe, whether the threat came from the right or from the left. What motivated both his intense involvement in the issues of the day and his uncompromisingly hardline attitude was his belief in the overriding importance of political freedom, his strong sense of its continuing fragility, and his conviction that it was in the United States, and the passionate defense of the United States, that its best hope lay.
“Von Neumannn was pronounced, by a peer, to be smarter than Albert Einstein to his face and got no objection” interpretation feels off to me
I see that it’s a bit ambiguous, but I read “to his face” as most likely referring to Einstein’s face, which is consistent with your interpretation of Wigner.
The Wigner quote seems a bit misleading to me because you left out the second half to make a point it didn’t support (“JvN was smarter than Einstein, and yet...”). The full quote is
I also always interpreted Wigner’s “I have often remarked this in the presence of those men, and no one ever disputed me” as referring to Planck, von Laue, Heisenberg, Dirac, Szilard, Teller, and Einstein, but not von Neumann, so your “Von Neumannn was pronounced, by a peer, to be smarter than Albert Einstein to his face and got no objection” interpretation feels off to me (but I may be wrong of course).
But that’s just nitpicking. Perhaps more substantively, I felt sad reading this section
I’ve done a little bit of this too, although my go-to advice is to read Scott’s Parable of the Talents, in particular this passage (long quote, emphasis mine):
I just reread Scott’s review of John von Neumann’s bio The Man From The Future by Ananyo Bhattacharya, and it made me realise something else that felt off to me about the OP, which was that the OP’s insecurity seems to be primarily social status-related(?), whereas John’s seemed to be primarily existential. (This probably influenced his extreme views, like advocating for nuking Russia ASAP.) Some quotes:
(FWIW Scott doesn’t buy this as a differentiating factor, but that’s not what I’m pointing at)
Scott’s review also touches on the thing about advocating for nuking Russia ASAP, quoting his daughter Marina on his hatred of totalitarianism:
I see that it’s a bit ambiguous, but I read “to his face” as most likely referring to Einstein’s face, which is consistent with your interpretation of Wigner.