| > megalomaniacs tend to be frauds Eeeh. Scott Aaronson review [0] and Cosma Shali's review [1] of NKS kinds of points to this direction, so he may well be a fraud. The plagiarism case regarding rule 110 (and attempts to hide this through NDA and lawsuits [2]) doesn't do him any favors, either. Indeed maybe the biggest problem of Wolfram isn't the megalomany per se, but the total unwillingness to give credit to others and cite their damn papers. Wolfram simply isn't in the business of sharing his bibliography, which is problematic for a scientist. However, the newer Wolfram Physics [3] [4] looks so damn promising that I'm willing to entertain possible quackery. I mean it surely has many ideas regarding how a digital universe would look like; he may be all wrong in the details but his ideas look important contributions to me. I sometimes think what's like to be at the frontier of science; today we take relativity (for example) for granted but there was a time when it was up in the air. When I read Wolfram's stuff stuff I just think this could very well be true, and while there's absolutely no evidence for it the conjectures all make sense. [0] https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0206089 [1] http://bactra.org/reviews/wolfram/ [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13961947 [3] https://www.wolframphysics.org/ [4] https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2020/04/finally-we-may-h... |
> However, the newer Wolfram Physics [3] [4] looks so damn promising that I'm willing to entertain possible quackery.
I don't know him, and clearly you know quite a bit. Still, that tradeoff is exactly where we've made our mistakes - the temptation of that payoff.