The Stupidity of "Einstein vs. Von Neumann"

I have on occasion run into arguments in online fora in which people argue over whether Edward von Neumann was not in fact a "greater" scientist than Albert Einstein.

The discussion struck me as exceedingly inane--more so than a discussion of whether Superman or Batman would win in a fight. Most obviously there is the fact that the two scientists differ greatly in field, work, achievement. Einstein was a theoretical physicist who, principally on the basis of youthful work outside the physics establishment, authored a number of papers which conventional wisdom holds to be important contributions to the theoretical foundations of contemporary physics. By contrast Neumann was a mathematician who, working with a very long list of collaborators, coauthored a great many papers in a range of fields--computing, nuclear physics, etc.--that were individually not of the same kind of fundamental importance to basic science, but in the aggregate seemingly staggering in the number and diversity of their contributions.

However, even were the work not so obviously different as to leave comparisons of this nature with little meaning, there is the fundamental matter of the reality of scientific work as a collective, cumulative, collaborative process in which individual contributions are much, much trickier to assess than most realize, even with that highly specialized study which is a prerequisite for saying anything meaningful about them at all--and harder all the time in the era Brian Keating describes in Losing the Nobel, apparently to no more effect on the conventional wisdom about science than any of those who have tried to explain the matter before, because the message is so incomprehensible to persons of conventional mind. The ethic that prevails in society at large is a snarling individualism with the far from innocent agenda of justifying the prevailing extremes of inequality in wealth and power, which is an outlook greatly at odds with the hard realities of scientific work (which sociologist Robert Merton flatly described as having for its ethos "communism"), and how scientific progress happens--all as the former refuses any concession to the latter. Thus rather than adapting the individualistic understanding to the complex reality, it forces the complex facts to the individualistic understanding--everything conveniently, tidily, attributable to a single personality, a single name. The result is that like primitives unable to understand the natural world around them they make of scientific progress a myth in which demigod-like "geniuses" possessed of apparently transcendent abilities create everything in a seemingly magical fashion, and pseudo-educated persons waste their time arguing over which was the greater demigod.