历史与人物medium.com
克劳德·香农：天才如何思考、工作与生活
Claude Shannon: How a Genius Thinks, Works, and Lives
2017 — 2021，它一次次回到首页
黑点是上首页（≥ 50 分）的那次投稿，空心点是没冲上去的投稿，点越大分数越高。
导读
这是一篇关于克劳德·香农的传记性文章，讲述这位信息论奠基人的思维方式、工作习惯与生活态度，并试图从中提炼关于学习和人生的经验。文中也提到他家中充满小装置的“玩具房”，以及他由好奇心驱动的性格。
为什么经久不衰：香农既是信息论的开创者，又保持着罕见的跨界好奇心和谦逊，他的思考与生活方式至今仍能给技术人带来启发。
HN 评论精选
补充了香农玩具房和游戏装置的一手资料链接。
认识香农本人的Arthur Lewbell写过一篇悼词，里面附有文章提到的他那间“小装置爱好者天堂”玩具房的照片。我还把他为玩游戏而制作的装置照片（现藏于MIT博物馆）整理到了BoardGameGeek的一个列表里。
JoeDaDude查看英文原文
Arthur Lewbell, who knew Shannon personally, wrote a eulogy for him [1] and included photos of his "gadgeteers paradise" toy room[2][3] which is mentioned in the article. I collected photos of the gadgets he built to play games (now in the MIT Museum) and put them on this list in boargamegeek[4]. [1] https://www2.bc.edu/arthur-lewbel/Shannon.html [2] https://www2.bc.edu/arthur-lewbel/toys1.jpg [3] https://www2.bc.edu/arthur-lewbel/toys2.jpg [4] https://boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/143233/claude-shannon-man-games-and-machines
批评“天才”叙事过度归因个人、忽视运气与谦逊。
作为一个心理学爱好者，我对我们迷恋“天才”感到恼火。领域内出名的人往往只是努力加基因的组合，但这些书似乎利用人们暗藏的希望：自己也是个被压抑的天才。我怀疑爱因斯坦或香农本人是否把自己看得比“充满热情”更多；想发掘内心天才所需的自我，反而与他们表现出的极大谦逊相悖。这些书还犯了事后研究单个人的错误，我们根本不知道运气占多大成分。
gboudrias查看英文原文
As a psychology enthusiast (and soon to be student), I'm quite annoyed with our fascination with "geniuses". It seems obvious that people who are very famous in their field became "very intelligent" because of a combination of hard work and genetics. But it's as if these books capitalize on the faint hope of being a repressed genius of some sort. I highly doubt Einstein or Shannon (as the article implies) ever saw themselves as more than passionate. And the ego required to want to find your inner genius goes contrary to the enormous humility they seemed to display. That aside, these books and articles all make the same mistake of studying a single person after the fact. It's similar to mimicking Steve Jobs: That's not how he became Steve Jobs. We literally cannot know how much luck was involved in his (or Einstein's) success. Might as well study the lives of lottery winners. So if not that, how can we maximize our potential and generally better ourselves intellectually? Simply by referring to the very vast fields of learning, motivation and general cognitive science. But "learn the science" doesn't have quite the same ring to it as "how to be Einstein", now does it?
引用香农自述，强调好奇心而非奖项金钱才是其动力。
香农回顾职业生涯时说：“我不认为我曾被获奖的念头驱动，虽然隔壁房间里有二十多个奖。我更多是被好奇心驱动，从不是对金钱的渴望。我只想知道事物如何组合，或者支配某种情况的法律/规则是什么，是否存在关于能做什么、不能做什么的定理。主要因为我想让自己知道。”这段话让我一直着迷：真正天才似乎被自己的神经构造迫使去追求学术，因为别的东西挠不到那个痒处。
Bakary查看英文原文
>Reflecting on the arc of his career, Shannon confessed, “I don’t think I was ever motivated by the notion of winning prizes, although I have a couple of dozen of them in the other room. I was more motivated by curiosity. Never by the desire for financial gain. I just wondered how things were put together. Or what laws or rules govern a situation, or if there are theorems about what one can’t or can do. Mainly because I wanted to know myself.” This is one insight about actual geniuses that shun the "classic" trappings of life that has always intrigued me. They are essentially coerced by their own neurology to aim for academic pursuits, because anything else cannot scratch that itch. Money and power are nice (and Johnny von Neumann loved his parties and loud music) but in the end it's just not that stimulating in comparison to hard abstract problems. Social relationships still have their draw as well, but you have to hit the knowledge-pipe regularly or face withdrawal. For people of that caliber, living in pre-modern societies must have been equivalent to torture. For the rest of us, it would have been like watching paint dry for our entire lives. Sounds like sour grapes, but in a way I am grateful not to have to deal with all of this. Looking at von Neumann's example again, the fear of death still caused him to lash out irrationally and in the end even he could not escape the human condition.
书评认为用“一万小时”框架宣传与香农实际不符，且宣传过于以作者为中心。
我去年读过这本书，觉得很有意思。但它毕竟是由不在他专业领域的人写的传记，讲的是人物而非技术。与《The Idea Factory》一起看，能形成一种T形的创新与创造力视角。不过书的呈现和宣传有两个大问题：1）帖子标题隐含地联系马尔科姆·格拉德威尔的“一万小时”理论，这与书中香农工作和思考的方式完全相悖；若想简洁地联系专长，提《Range：为什么通才在专业化世界中胜出》更合适。2）整体有种“我们发现了这个有趣的人”的调子，这对传记来说很奇怪，似乎把作者而非香农放在中心。
avs733查看英文原文
I read the book last year and found it really interesting. That being said, it is still a biography about a person by people not in his field of expertise. It's a narrative about the person not the technology. In concert with 'the idea factory' it is an interesting T shaped perspective on innovation and creativity. That being said I've noticed two big concerns with how the book has been presented and advertised... 1) I find the implicit connection in the post title to Malcolm Gladwells 10k hours theory of expertise to be incredibly antithetical to everything in the book itself about how Shannon worked and thought and created. If they wanted to be pithy and make a connection to Shannon and expertise, mentioning Range: Why generalists triumph in a specialized world seems much more appropriate. 2) All of it seems to be a little to 'we discovered this interesting person' which frankly is a weird way to position a biography. It is a PATH to people learning about someone, but usually the greatest interest in a biography is going to come from people who know abotu a person but want to know more. It is part of a broader, fairly egocentric approach to advertising the work that seems to really make it about the authors not Shannon, which just strikes me as odd for a biography of someone else.
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