{"id":2234,"date":"2015-02-18T12:21:41","date_gmt":"2015-02-18T17:21:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/?p=2234"},"modified":"2017-01-12T18:15:08","modified_gmt":"2017-01-12T23:15:08","slug":"the-man-who-tried-to-redeem-the-world-with-logic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/?p=2234","title":{"rendered":"&#8220;The Man Who Tried to Redeem the World with Logic&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>No, I&#8217;m not\u00a0talking about me!<\/p>\n<p>Check out an <a href=\"http:\/\/m.nautil.us\/issue\/21\/information\/the-man-who-tried-to-redeem-the-world-with-logic\">amazing <em>Nautilus<\/em> article of that title<\/a> by Amanda Gefter, a\u00a0fine\u00a0science writer of my acquaintance. \u00a0The article tells the story of Walter Pitts, who <span style=\"color: #ff0000;\"><strong>[spoiler alert]<\/strong><\/span>\u00a0grew up on the mean streets of Prohibition-era Detroit, discovered Russell and Whitehead&#8217;s <em>Principia Mathematica<\/em> in the library at age 12 while hiding from\u00a0bullies, corresponded with Russell about errors he&#8217;d found in the <em>Principia<\/em>, then ran away from home at age 15, co-invented neural networks with Warren McCulloch in 1943, became the prot\u00e9g\u00e9 of Norbert Wiener at MIT, was disowned by Wiener because Wiener&#8217;s wife concocted a lie that Pitts and others who she hated had seduced Wiener&#8217;s daughter, and then became depressed and drank himself to death. \u00a0Interested yet? \u00a0It&#8217;s not often that I encounter a piece of nerd history that&#8217;s important and riveting <em>and<\/em> that had been totally\u00a0unknown to me; this is one of the\u00a0times.<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #ff0000;\"><strong>Update (Feb. 19):<\/strong><\/span> Also in <em>Nautilus<\/em>, you can check out a fun <a href=\"http:\/\/nautil.us\/issue\/21\/information\/ingenious-scott-aaronson\">interview with me<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #ff0000;\"><strong>Update (Feb. 24):<\/strong><\/span>\u00a0In loosely-related news, check out a riveting\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/chronicle.com\/article\/The-Believers\/190147\/\">profile of Geoffrey Hinton<\/a> (and more generally, of deep learning, a.k.a. re-branded neural networks) in the <em>Chronicle of Higher Education<\/em>. \u00a0I had the pleasure of meeting Hinton when he visited MIT a few months ago;\u00a0he struck me as an extraordinary person. \u00a0Hat tip to commenter Chris W.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>No, I&#8217;m not\u00a0talking about me! Check out an amazing Nautilus article of that title by Amanda Gefter, a\u00a0fine\u00a0science writer of my acquaintance. \u00a0The article tells the story of Walter Pitts, who [spoiler alert]\u00a0grew up on the mean streets of Prohibition-era Detroit, discovered Russell and Whitehead&#8217;s Principia Mathematica in the library at age 12 while hiding [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2234","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nerd-interest"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2234","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2234"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2234\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2240,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2234\/revisions\/2240"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2234"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2234"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2234"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}