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I have a small bit to add to the story of Pitts in the form of an article my grandfather, an ecologist, wrote with him in the Journal of Mammalogy: Dog Locates Winter Nests of Mammals[0]. The article reads as a charming account of scientists tramping around in the woods with a dog looking for mice. When I talked to my father about this article, however, I learned that this was an attempt by my grandfather to help Pitts and keep him psychologically grounded. I guess the woods made him feel a little bit better.

[0] https://archive.org/details/sim_journal-of-mammalogy_1952-05...

That makes me really sad to read. Analytical observation papering over a deep emotional hole. Reminds me of Euler.
This is a wonderful, well written story about people at the center of our profession in the early days. People more versed in CS history might be more familiar with the story than I was.

In a way it explores a problem, or an understanding of the world which is still very much alive and well, but fraught with the same problems that Pitts experienced: The notions that we as humans can understand (and therefore command) reality at its core, using logic and mathematics.

I don't have an issue with exploring the power of logic and mathematics to the fullest, but I'm now convinced that for our own mental wellbeing it would be beneficial to understand that everything has its limits: we can never understand and command everything.

Reality will always surprise us, because reality is always larger.

To understand, yes. Who said anything about "to command"? And "therefore", even?

Science is the quest for knowledge. That's all. It's greed and arrogance that try to boss everyone around and end up destroying the world.

in brief, reality is a mystery with unbounded depths.
Related:

A man who tried to redeem the world with logic (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30275687 - Feb 2022 (19 comments)

A man who tried to redeem the world with logic (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26637134 - March 2021 (66 comments)

Walter Pitts pioneered neural networks. Then he lit his entire PhD on fire - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15987076 - Dec 2017 (8 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)

When people say that academic politics are meaner and nastier than legislative politics, this is the kind of thing they're talking about. Just practically, if Pitts had known how to maintain a formal separation between his personal friendships and his professional relationships he might have been able to avoid all the problems with Wiener (who doesn't really come across in a very good light, blaming it all on his wife is a bit of a dodge of responsibility).

Pitts comes across as a brilliant person who was perhaps emotionally unstable and over-involved with his work - in that, he seems to have fallen into depression in part because his view of how the world worked was sabotaged by the results of his experiments, so he set his dissertaion on fire and fell into alcoholism... (I can't imagine what Pitts would have thought of the rise of chaos theory in physical systems, aka 'sensitive dependence on initial conditions' which was largely discovered with the aid of computers, although Poincare sort of foresaw it).

A rather tragic tale, but not one that is at all uncommon in the academic world.

I can't imagine what Pitts would have thought of the rise of chaos theory in physical systems, aka 'sensitive dependence on initial conditions' which was largely discovered with the aid of computers, although Poincare sort of foresaw it

He must have been aware of it - control theory involves feedback loops, and numerical robustness is what it's all about. Anti-aircraft rocketry was developed at that point, and Wiener was a central figure, he even called the field "cybernetics".

The very beginning kind of explains everything in my presumptive reading, his father was abusive and Pitts dove into books and via this obsession gave himself a college prep education by the age of fifteen and ran away from his family forever at age 15. Academic achievement wise, it's what many parents wants for their child, but the possible concentration on the one thing and the relationship history left him under leveled to deal with the rest of living.
Regarding this claim that Wiener's wife was conservative, and slandered Pitts (or his associates), there are some interesting answers on https://hsm.stackexchange.com/questions/184/ to the question of why Wiener broke off ties, including one that suggests that both Wiener and his wife were actually ardent socialists, and one that there were other difficulties working together that lead up to the break.

It's stated as if fact in this article that it was slander, I don't know how reliable the source is. It's not too interesting to me, and it's sad all the same that Pitts drunk himself to death. It's always sad seeing academic or otherwise principled people broken by politics and social troubles, regardless of the full story, I'm fully sympathetic to it.

If someone has more info on the actual sources here it would probably be of value for posterity.

"Dark Hero of the Information Age" is the book that I found, and it looks pretty legit to me. Multiple sources all say roundabout the same thing of Margaret, even their daughter.

She accused her daughter of trying to seduce her husband after getting her ears pierced, ffs.

It's only one answer and it doesn't give sources for its claim, so I'm not sure the claim about the Wieners being Trostkyists or socialists should be taken at their word.

That said, according to his Wikipedia article, Norbert Wiener was a pacifist and didn't shy away from crediting Soviet researchers and sharing his work with them as with any other part of the international scientific community. Considering he was active during the McCarthy era, anything more tangible than that could have likely been career-ending so I would take those claims with a grain of salt.

Given that these claims allegedly stem from Lettvin, who again according to his Wikipedia article strongly believed in individual rights but opposed the AAA&S withdrawing an award from someone for vocally supporting literal fascism (the article mentions Kropotkin as an early influence but the emphasis on "individual rights" reads more right-libertarian than socialist), and given the historical context (McCarthyism), I would read any such claim as an accusation and attempt at defamation rather than trivia.

It's worth mentioning that the political spectrum is fuzzy and many-facetted and individuals can hold contradictory beliefs with regard to the ideologies they profess, especially when condensed to a one-dimensional gradient. It's entirely possible that Wiener's wife (or he himself) was conservative and yet an "ardent socialist". Pacifism is widely regarded as a leftist position (if only because it was often seen treasonous and "communism" was the label for the enemy). The Soviet Union (which seems relevant if the Wieners were interested in Trostky's ideas) was culturally conservative in many ways: while it was decades ahead in gender equality, queerness was seen as bourgeois perversion and "bohemian" lifestyles were largely seen as counter-revolutionary.

This story is told in part in Models of the Mind by Grace Lindsay (excellent read on neurobiology and it's echo in computer science: ML).

Really interesting to read about.

Perhaps it's of use to others, The possibilities for healing were not as diverse then as they are now. Besides the clinical dbt or cbt, there are many coaches and bodyworkers with diverse offerings on how to transform trauma. Somatic practices like Hakomi, breathwork like holotropic. Many many options, all of which can have a contribution to healing.
The paper "What the Frog’s Eye Tells the Frog’s Brain" by Pitt and his collaborators demonstrated that vision in frogs does not work the way many of us assumed vision works where the eyes simply transmit raw data to the brain. Has this ever been demonstrated in other species or humans?
The ariticle title could have named Walter Pitts instead of giving it an air of mystery by not mentioning it.
I always mention this when there are articles about logical approaches to psychology that mention Freud: Freud was the first person to attempt to create an entirely physical theory of the psyche, and he attempted to understand psychological operations as a product of neurological reactions[0]. To be fair, not many in the early 20th century would know of this work, since it wasn't published until some years after Freud's death. But Psychoanalysis was developed out of the fact of his failure: that human relations, and human psychology, were "messy," they were unable to be accessed through traditional empirical means, and so there was a need to develop a new method of evaluating therapeutic subjects which, by dint of its subject, grew to be quasi-mystical (if you want the deep Freudian mysticism, read "Beyond the Pleasure Principle."[1])

But these myths, acknowledged as much by Freud, were in principle used not to describe reality, but to give a framework for teaching analysis: for instructing others how to go about the therapeutic approach. No myth, no logic, no grammar is universal to the psyche; and yet humans live in interrelations, there is at some level a groundwork for both social and psychological life, a particular set of relations: Lacan, who came after Freud, heavily employed the use of pure math and logic in order to describe this set of relations, but these formulas were never meant to capture the "whole" thing, because one could never: they were only meant to give a framework for analysis, a framework for analyzing operations of human beings in their social world.

Freud may not have been perfect or spoke the absolute truth: but there was never an absolute truth to speak about, and the success of HBO's myriad (and explicitly Freudian) Dramas I think demonstrates the validity of the method: just like Oedipus Rex was able to stimulate horror in its ancient audience, Freud was able to capture what it was about that play that triggered the reaction, and we can now easily recreate it over and over and over again. Honestly though, it is getting a little tiring to see psychological dramas rehashing the same co-ordinates over and over. I completely endorse moving away from his work to create something new, a reinterpretation if you will (just like with Lacan), but the outright dismissal is inappropriate and misguided, in my book.

[0]http://users.clas.ufl.edu/burt/freud%20fleiss%20letters/2007...

[1]https://www.libraryofsocialscience.com/assets/pdf/freud_beyo...

> No myth, no logic, no grammar is universal to the psyche;

Logic is universal; it holds true for all regardless of language and environment. "AND" doesn't have different meanings by changing language or social environment. Children use "AND" easily, fluently and universally. What is that but "universal to the psyche"?

I don't think your claim is empirically demonstrable and therefore not useful to an empirical science.
Inventor of Logban ?
(2015)
Very enjoyable and well-written story until:

> After all, it had been Wiener who discovered a precise mathematical definition of information: The higher the probability, the higher the entropy and the lower the information content.

This seems jarring wrong and a little digging reveals that in 1948 Weiner wrote:

> the notion of information attaches itself very naturally to a classical notion in statistical mechanics: that of entropy [...] just as the amount of information in a system is a measure of its degree of organization, so the entropy of a system is a measure of its degree of disorganization; and the one is simply the negative of the other.

The broad idea is there (and perhaps Weiner deserves credit for the observation), but it is the same year that Shannon published A Mathematical Theory of Communication, and two years later Weiner is quoted with the more precise description:

> Just as entropy is a measure of disorganization, the information carried by a set of messages is a measure of organization. In fact, it is possible to interpret the information carried by a message as essentially the negative of its entropy, and the negative logarithm of its probability.

The later quote using Shannon's definition. I've not seen information theory being credited to Weiner before and that makes me curious - what is the story here? Parallel invention is commonplace in scientific history, yet Weiner and Shannon are listed as collaborators in other sources.