The MANIAC by Benjamín Labatut — A Reader’s Dialogue
Benjamín Labatut’s writing style seamlessly combines biographical research with fictionalized psychological study. There is a uniqueness, both to his writing style, but also his continual fascination with mathematicians, physicists, and scientists more generally, which creates this very interlocking, subjective study within a field known for its professed objectivity.
In his previous book, When We Cease to Understand the World (translated by Adrian Nathan West), the writing is incredibly tight, as it grapples with conflicting ideas of rationality, despair, spirituality, and the unknowable. The narrative finds its force in the conflict, which perfectly complements Labatut’s writing style (subjective in an ‘objective’ field). The MANIAC (written directly in English this time), has many of those same conflicting ideas, but here, it feels less tight and, at times, forced together.
The MANIAC has three parts to it. The first part is about Paul Ehrenfest and his eventual death. This section is the most similar to When We Cease to Understand the World, and honestly, feels a bit of an offshoot from his previous book. There is that same theme about how the irrationality of the world can lead to despair, whether that be politically, through the rise of fascism, or mathematically, through quantum physics. Labatut plays with the idea that the discovery of disorder in the world of mathematics, leads to mental breakdowns in scientists because of our overreliance on the certainty of rationality. Labatut treats those mental breakdowns as a divine punishment, akin to opening Pandora’s box.
“For the Greeks, [Nelly Posthumus Meyjes] explained, the discovery of the irrational was a heinous crime, an act of unforgivable impiety, and the divulgence of that knowledge, an offence punishable by death. (13)”
“To acknowledge even the possibility of the irrational, to recognize disharmony, would place the fabric of existence at risk, since not just our reality, but every single aspect of the universe — whether physical, mental, or ethereal — depended on the unseen threads that bind all things. This taboo was not merely a concern for the ancients, Nelly explained, but lies at the heart of western philosophy and science: Kant had written that science demands that we be able to think of nature as a totality. (14)”
The first part of the book is primarily about moments of existential crisis. It is very beautifully written, and very on point for his writing style. It personalizes the people of a field which, honestly, I find a bit intimidating, and makes the abstract ideas easier to understand.
The second part is all about John von Neumann, and at this point, the multiple competing themes feel a bit messy. Although there are connections to the first part’s theme of irrationality and despair (specifically with regards to Georg Cantor), the section reads primarily as hero worship of Neumann. Despite brushing up against irrationality multiple times, even unto the fear of death, Neumann never loses his capacity for invention. Even in the final moments, when Neumann loses the ability to speak and do basic arithmetic, the book quickly returns to his final accomplishments, as if to say that Neumann, despite his mortality, is the personification of machine-like thought. It reads a bit like a celebration, but to be fair, given Neumann’s accomplishments, it’s very hard to write about his life without it seeming celebratory. Unfortunately, this undermines the first part of the book. The human spirit overcame the irrational, though by becoming more machine like.
This books also suggests that so much of the modern world has been shaped by the unique thought processes of John von Neumann, and that the way his mind worked, continues to shape what our society values and how it sees itself. There is some criticism of Neumann here, which I thought were some of the highlights of the second part (and this is my favourite passage, which I find incredibly insightful for how it is applied to the entire book).
“His thesis was an early demonstration of the style that he applied to all of his later work: he would pounce on a subject, strip it down to its bare axioms, and turn whatever he was analyzing into a problem of pure logic. This otherworldly capacity to see into the heart of things, or — if viewed from its opposing angle — this characteristic shortsightedness, which allowed him to think in nothing but fundamentals, was not merely the key to his particular genius but also the explanation for is almost childlike moral blindness. (83)”
This is probably most evident on his ideas of game theory or the development of nuclear weapons. For Neumann, it wasn’t simply knowledge for knowledge’s sake, but the reduction policy decisions to it’s fundamentals. For Neumann, of course you bomb both the Japanese and the Soviets, because that’s how you dominate in a world of pure logic. There is little to no concern about innocent lives lost and he seems to never have developed a code of ethics, at least in the book, which in turn, means that policy decisions were influenced by his particular outlook.
The second part ends on the idea of technology as governing force for society. A method of administration linked to technological progress as a motivating idea; an ideology which runs under all other ideologies.
“However, it seems that the ever-accelerating progress of technology gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity, a tipping point in the history of the race beyond which human affairs as we know them cannot continue. Progress will become incomprehensibly rapid and complicated. Technological power as such is always an ambivalent achievement, and science is neutral all through, providing only means of control applicable to any purpose, and indifferent to all. It is not the particularly perverse destructiveness of one specific invention that creates danger. The danger is intrinsic. For progress there is no cure. (250–251)”
Finally, in the third and final section, Labatut focuses on AlphaGo and the domination of AI in games such as Shogi, Chess, and most importantly, Go. Although Lee Sedol says, regarding his match with AlphaGo, “What surprised me most the most was that AlphaGo showed us that moves humans may have thought creative were actually conventional. I think this will bring a new paradigm to Go. I’m thankful for all this, I feel like I’ve found the reason why I play Go. (344)”, Lee Sedol also describes being broken by the match and at that moment, deciding to retire years later. The section both celebrates AI, while also acknowledging its effect on the human experience. This also link to an idea earlier regarding Eugene Wigner talking about Neumann.
“The marriage he was suggesting between advanced technology and our most archaic mechanisms of transcendence could only result in horror and chaos, a world that would evolve past a point where anyone could even begin to understand it, no matter how rich, smart, or powerful they were. Having had so few of his own to contend with, Jansci had never been one to accept limitations of any kind, and while he could not see the danger in his own thinking, I had firsthand experience of what it was like, as a ‘normal person,’ to cohabitate with someone completely exceptional. (225)”
It is a bit of a shame that Neumann couldn’t be humbled in this book, that, in a way, The MANIAC didn’t even try to capture his subjective perspective thereby making him more machine like (in section 2), and that Labatut only indirectly touches upon so many themes. I kept wondering whether Labatut is more optimistic or pessimistic about the impact that AI will have on human society. The book ends on the following lines, which honestly, filled me with a bit of fear for the future of AI.
“At first, it made completely random moves, but in next to no time it had evolved into an unbeatable force. It has now become the strongest entity the world has ever known at Go, chess, and shogi.
Its name is AlphgaZero. (354)”
A final thing to note, I was really struck by this passage in the third section.
“AlphaGo did not hesitate and it never thought twice. It was immune to weariness. It knew no self-doubt. It cared not for style or beauty, and it did not waste time with any of the elaborate mind games that all professional players bait each other with. It simply did not care about what others thought or felt; all it cared about was winning. To AlphaGo, it made no difference if it won by only a single point. That explained the ‘lazy’ moves it would play now and again, moves that seemed subpar and uninspiring to everyone, till a South Korean commentator pointed out that they were based on pure calculation: each one of those lazy stones made a tiny, almost imperceptible gain toward the final goal, and their true value would only be realized when they all came together in the endgame. (326–327)”
It reminded me a lot of playing chess with a computer. I just don’t enjoy those games at all. It is fun to play with human minds, and computers feel anti-game to me. They focus on winning at the cost of enjoyment, for both players. It’s hard to describe what makes a move uninspiring, but this passage captures that feeling I always had but have been unable to articulate. I now know why I don’t like playing games with computers. There is something indescribable needed besides the win or loss. Whether this will be safeguarded in the future remains to be seen.
Citations
Labatut, Benjamín. The MANIAC. Strange Light, 2023.
