when provided with some of the responses from other physicists regarding his work, Wolfram is singularly unenthused. “I’m disappointed by the naivete of the questions that you’re communicating,” he grumbles. “I deserve better.”
“There’s a tradition of scientists approaching senility to come up with grand, improbable theories,” the late physicist Freeman Dyson told Newsweek back in 2002. “Wolfram is unusual in that he’s doing this in his 40s.”
> “There’s a tradition of scientists approaching senility to come up with grand, improbable theories,” the late physicist Freeman Dyson told Newsweek back in 2002. “Wolfram is unusual in that he’s doing this in his 40s.”
That is a brutal take down. Did Dyson and Wolfram have a math-beef going or something?
I think it's more that Wolfram has stepped on enough toes that he earns takes like this.
He's an interesting character, and rare in that is his both obviously very intelligent, and yet not nearly as intelligent as he thinks he is.
I suspect he's the sort of person who can't stand the idea that he is not the smartest guy in the room - in perception or reality. He may well have constructed his career as an "outsider" to reduce the occurrences of this, perhaps not intentionally.
I met Wolfram some 20 years before that review when he was on a world tour promoting the earliest iterations of Mathematica, the first iteration post his symbolic differentation work.
This was the period when cellular automata, Mandelbrot sets, and symbolic math were pretty hot topics about math departments - computer assisted proofs on monster groups in symbolic algebra were recent, Cayley (the first iteration of Magma) was being written at Sydney University, etc.
Even then he had many of the traits that Cosma Shalizi described in the linked review above and was already dismissing various people for their 'poor ideas' and later claiming those ideas as his own.
He's a smart guy. He swam in waters filled with smart people, some smarter. He was never, IMHO, as smart as his own legend, as authored by himself.
shalizi is overwhelmingly charming. i have wanted to work with him for years, as much for the whimsy of his website as our overlap in research interests
Not to mention a fantastic writer. Already his PhD thesis was brilliant, and one of the few [1] I have ever read cover-to-cover. "Advanced data analysis from an elementary point of view" is one of my go-to recommendations for people (scientists) that have had some exposure to different concepts in data analysis (typically some regression and PCA), but want to acquire a more systematic understanding. His writing is charming as ever, his exposition exceptionally clean and straightforward, the math as simple as possible but not simpler, the advice practical. He manages to walk the very fine line in mathematical writing of being rigorous enough that the reader feels being taken seriously, while being engaging enough and maintaining a pace that allows one to actually finish the whole book without burning out.
[1] Four, to be exact, and that number includes my own.
I like Freeman Dyson, but it seems like he really didn't hold punches much. He seems very laid back and is to a degree, but if you watch a lot of interviews with him, you'll notice he throws around quite a lot of shade.
So, story time. I once interviewed Stephen Wolfram for IEEE's software engineering radio and I had a lot of fun doing it and he did to.
We ended up running way overtime because he was having fun showing me things with Mathematica. He is a fascinating person, I successfully kept him off talking about his math / physics theories and on the idea of a programming language leading to better thinking and more break-throughs.
I left the discussion pretty impressed by him and he did in the discussion have some vague worries that he maybe got so focused on the idea of a notation for science in Mathematica that he neglected the actual work that sent him on this path. But he wasn't sure that the notation wasn't more valuable itself.
Notebooks, like Jupter, clearly came from his work and the other thing that hasn't reached mainstream he seems to have invented is having data sort of embedded in the programming language, in standard libraries, where it's easy to get the number of calories in the moon if it were made of cheese or whatever.
> Notebooks, like Jupter, clearly came from his work
While I often hear this claim from Wolfram and his supporters, I have never seen any evidence that it was his innovation. MathCAD was the first software released with a notebook interface, and there was research using those ideas prior to the release of the first Mathematica notebook. Maybe his particular take was an improvement on the others, but the claim that it was entirely his idea seems to me to be 100% incorrect.
I've never understood what Knuth considered literate programming. I've seen some examples of his and find them incomprehensivle. I think the issue with Knuth's contribution is that he only seemed to concentrate on the specification of a markup language, marred by TeX baggage.
The key idea of notebooks today are their interactiveness, the dynamic between a markup state and view state, and their multi-paradigm and multi-language nature.
Yeah, if you want to search for ancestors, I think literate programming definitely qualifies. I've also heard references to Smalltalk and Lisp machines as ancestors, but not being familiar with either, I can't say.
Knuth introduced the technique of literate programming in 1984, MathCAD was first released in 1986, and my copy of Literate Programming (the book of the thing) was published in 1992.
Knuth's literate programming notably differs from notebooks in that it was designed to write explanations meant for humans, which meant that the author could present the code in chunks in the narrative sequence; the code did not have to be in execution order, unlike notebooks.
I'm not clear on this. Is it not just about having the function definitions in an arbitrary order just like all of us mortals do? Is there anything special about the code structure that Knuth proposes?
No, Knuth's cweb has the notion of chunks, which is just lines of code. It wires the chunk in dependency order. A chunk can have multiple functions, or no functions, or parts of functions; cweb doesn't care.
Part of the motivation might have been that he set up WEB for Pascal, which does enforce an order of declarations. Once he started working more with C, perhaps there was less reason; but he found that he enjoyed working in that manner. I haven't looked at anything released in that format for years, though.
Even at Wolfram Research, Theodore Gray is credited with inventing/developting THEIR initial interpretation of the notebook interface. His Wikipedia page [1] makes that clear.
> having data sort of embedded in the programming language, in standard libraries, where it's easy to get the number of calories in the moon if it were made of cheese or whatever.
I predict that within 100 years, computers will be twice as powerful, ten thousand times larger, and so expensive that only the five richest kings of Europe will own them. -- Professor John Frink
The units file itself is a worthy read just for the commentary.
Ha! That's marvelous. The rants on `mol`, `hertz` and `candela` are astonishing. Well worth the price.
// WARNING: Use of "Hz" will cause communication problems, errors, and make
// one party or another look insane in the eyes of the other.
//
// In other words, if you use the Hz in the way it's currently defined by the
// SI, as equivalent to 1 radian/s, you can point to the SI definitions and
// prove that you follow their definitions precisely. And your physics
// teacher will *still* fail you and your clients will think you're completely
// incompetent because 1 Hz = 2 pi radians/s. And it has for centuries.
// You are both simultaneously both right and both wrong.
// You cannot win.
// You are perfectly right. You are perfectly wrong. You look dumb and
// unreasonable. The person arguing the opposite looks dumb and unreasonable.
//
// Hz == YOU CANNOT WIN
//
// (Insert "IT'S A TRAP" image here.)
I'm surprised Stephen didn't claim he invented saving files. I used Macsyma before Wolfram and we had front ends that had worksheets. He definitely wasn't the first.
Agree with most everything, your description resonates (also a since 1988 mathematica person).
Theo Gray is who came up with the notebook, that iPython -> Jupyter were a multilanguage shout-out to, and they cite such. Other UIUC professors wrote significant parts of Mathematica originally, were paid for such.
Mathematica has no notation, and that's the worst thing about it.
Mathematics has M-Expressions, like S-Expressions, which are extremely powerfully and human-like for reasoning in multiple logical (not geometric) dimensions (using Lisp-style macro expansion)
It's been a long time since the discussion, but I think he was getting at the whorf hypothesis. If you could express certain ideas easily it would enable thinking about certain things more deeply and intelligently.
Not only that, but the intonation also changes people’s personalities. Notice how there are round calming words and sharper ones, like the ohm in mantras give an o sound and a word like stab has a sharper intonation.
If sapolsky believes the Sapir whorf hypothesis I do too.
He is bright. He has important things to say. Learning what he has to say takes way too much time. Until he gets a merciless editor, I won't listen to him.
I remember buying his A New Kind of Science book before it was available for free. It was interesting to read, and it was good enough to impress a college kid like me back then. But now, looking back, I wonder what fields of science has it advanced? It's been more than 20 years already, and with a title like that, we'd expect a completely upturned physics, biology, and other disciplines based on it.
After pondering it for a while, the problem is that CAs are too chaotic to use, and there is simply no way to overcome this, nor is there even particularly a reason to try.
Anything that is Turing Complete is going to exhibit at least some degree of what I call "Turing Chaos", which is the sort of chaos you have in trying to understand what a given Turing Complete system is going to do in light of the fact that a Turing Complete system is going to include some equivalent of "if (something) { run this program } else { run that program }", which means that there is inevitably going to be uncertainty amplification in any attempt to understand a program. By "uncertainty amplification" I mean exactly what anyone who has every tried to understand a code base has been through; you can tell that your uncertainty about what the "something" value is gets amplified into the question of which entire program is being run, and that can iterate for quite a while. It's very chaotic.
However, for all that, and despite the famous way in which changing a single bit of a program may completely change how it operates, in practice with real human programs changing a single random bit is statistically most likely to have no user-visible impact. We spend a lot of time constraining our system's chaos. We have to. We can't work with systems in which literally every bit change completely changes the program.
However, CAs tend to work that way. A single bit flip will spread out at the relevant "speed of light" and change everything.
As a result, while they may be some of the simplest Turing Complete things, they are humanly useless. They are not useful for modeling processes; you have to be too precise with the initial states, and the thing you are modeling has to be too precise in its usage of the CA rules. They are not useful for engineering, which is precisely why we don't use them.
Or, to put it in a nutshell, while A New Kind Of Science is full of pretty pictures and legitimately interesting ideas... it's also in essence, comprehensively wrong. Not a "not even wrong"; it rises to the level of "real" wrongness. But it's comprehensively, from top to bottom, wrong about practical utility or any future practical utility.
(You can sit down and try to strip this characteristic from a sufficiently well-designed CA, but getting the precise balance of just the right amount of chaos is going to be difficult, and getting it to be also somehow useful afterwards raising the bar even higher. In the meantime, I've got von Neumann machines right here for people who want to do real work and the lambda calculus for people who want to work directly in mathematical abstractions without going insane, so... why?)
> A New Kind Of Science is full of pretty pictures and legitimately interesting ideas... it's also in essence, comprehensively wrong. Not a "not even wrong"; it rises to the level of "real" wrongness. But it's comprehensively, from top to bottom, wrong about practical utility or any future practical utility.
Yeah, after 20 some years, that's has to be the answer. At its basic level I think it just exploited the idea that people, including me, like to see interesting or complicated patterns, especially arising out of simple iterative rules like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_30 or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_110.
Of course, I can see how snail pattern or other natural patterns might be generated by a similar process but it's nowhere near revolutionizing any science like the title was claiming.
But Wolfram being Wolfram doesn't give up. There is the https://www.wolframinstitute.org and there is some activity there. I periodically drop by to see what's happening.
> They are not useful for engineering, which is precisely why we don't use them.
Exactly, we'd think by now they'd be some AI super-chip or something tangible based on of the cellular automata thing discovered by Wolfram.
On the options desk that I was a quant on[1] the traders were extremely dismissive of Taleb's math chops since in his book "Taleb on Risk: Managing Vanilla and Exotic Options" he clearly doesn't understand delta hedging, which is a pretty fundamental concept, particularly if you're writing a book about managing options risk.
[1] Equity Exotics and Hybrids at Goldman in London circa 2005 or so.
Ok, the guy is not some Fields medalist, so it depends what you mean by math chops, but here are a few of his papers published in respectable journals that have non negligible math content:
He's full of himself but has interesting things to say.
WolframAlpha is a gem on its on right. Yeah we have Gemini, GPT, Mixtral but when it comes to actual compositional compute, Wolfram alpha gets you the right answer and shows you the math.
In the for hour conversation on topic, he asks "if you want to know the weights of various dinosaurs, you can ask Wolfram alpha and it will tell you". So I asked it "what's the weight of a stegaussaurus", and it gave me some number. The i asked it "what's the total weight of all the stegaussaurus that ever lived" and it gave me some nonsense about the average [don't remember] for the population of the US. It didn't even understand the question. Calling it compute is overestimating it by as much as Wolfram overestimates himself.
Here's a question. Why isn't Wolfram Research considered a sexy employer? They have cool research and technical problems and cool software. I looked a bit into it but I could only see them hiring in 3rd world countries, and only contractors. So are they a bad employer or what gives?
I had a friend who worked there. A very smart Ivy League-educated math PhD. He was very critical of the work culture at Wolfram Research. Apparently in his experience Stephen Wolfram treated people badly.
I’m a bit apprehensive since I don’t know SW personally, but what my friend described sounded like a borderline abusive behavior. Basically he treated people like they were stupid and shouted at them when they made mistakes.
I think it’s a shared trait among the ultra successful (think: bezos, jobs, musk, wolfram), that they unrelentingly pursue good ideas. In that relentless pursuit, people will inevitably have their (bad) ideas shot down.
Wolfram becomes audibly irritated at bad ideas, but mostly only when they should have been better, more complete, better explained (in their interest of time, for example) etc.
I think most of those who work with him know that he pursues truth, not what will make people feel good in that moment/meeting.
I’ve worked around people who are the opposite and try to morph reality so that whatever flimsy idea is suggested is somehow considered ‘correct’, and it results in long term frustration and inefficacy.
They also unrelentingly pursue bad ones. 3D fire phone interface, boring company + everything with Twitter, trying to fight cancer with a fruitarian diet ....
- They pay like shit (compared to "sexy employers")
- Headquartered in Champaign, Illinois (not a bad town, but not sexy)
- As "cool" as their software is, not a lot of people use it. Python is eating their lunch, ESPECIALLY outside of academia. Although, they're losing ground in academia as well
- Stephen Wolfram isn't a charismatic leader who is fun to work for. There's no shortage of stories of him short circuiting in meetings and treating employees disrespectfully.
- They're not doing quite as much cutting edge stuff (that matters, at least) these days. Their AI/ML suite isn't that interesting, numpy/scipy does a lot of numerical stuff better, Matlab does a lot of stuff (like digital signal processing, for example) better. And Python, being free and open source, is a better prototyping language for most stuff. Symbolic computing is probably the one place it is actually a leader in... but for so many applications in the real world (engineering, r&d, real-time algorithms, etc) symbolic computing simply isn't needed.
As you hint at, they can attract some talent because there are opportunities to work on some niche stuff that's hard to work on elsewhere. But that's a minority of roles at the company.
Thanks for the insight.
I used to be a mathematician and looked a bit into working as a numerical mathematician on numerical or optimization software. What I noticed is that salaries do tend to be significantly lower than FAANG. Maybe that's because it is a niche and there aren't lots of employers around doing that sort of work.
How does the market for numeric optimization software divided by the number of engineers required to create and maintain it compare to the market for "nearly any physical good, cloud computing, eyeballs-for-ads, watching videos, connecting with other humans, high quality computers and mobile devices, maps, email, and search" divided by the [larger] number of engineers required to create and maintain it?
Sales / potential gross profit per FAANG employee is high.
I believe the main reason is that the skillset in this domain has a small overlap with what is needed at FAANG. This is done mostly in academia and as such the salaries are in line with the salaries at universities.
True, but it's always funny when people compare midwestern salaries to FAANG companies, as if the cost of living is like 10x less in the midwest. I don't know the specifics of what wolfram pays, but my gut feeling has always been that it's likely pretty good. A lot of the other random math and tech adjacent companies in the area started by ex-wolfram employees and UIUC grads seem to be doing pretty well.
Yeah, I don't disagree. But again, the original metric was "sexy". But you're definitely better off getting a remote big-tech adjacent job than working at Wolfram Research, if you've got those chops.
I think they're very traditional – I don't think software or engineering is their edge, and I suspect they outsource a lot of that to cheaper locations – they seem themselves as being more research focused.
Their Glassdoor reviews used to be a bit dodgy too, nothing you wouldn't be able to guess after watching 10 minutes of any video of you-know-who though.
They are also just small, only a few hundred people if I remember correctly.
I sent them an email asking what .NET version their .NET link library used, asking if it was still .NET Framework or if it had moved to .NET Core or 5+. The question seemed incomprehensible to them. They barely understood what I was asking, and I never heard back from them.
Software is their product, but my guess is there's a separation between the product and research side which will be filled with Phds, and the "build" side which I expect is outsourced or offshored.
What I really mean is that I don't think they see themselves as an engineering company in the way FAANG do, or an "AI" company, but probably more like a maths/science department at a university.
I think people take issue with CEOs pretending to be experts in things where they aren't - Wolfram in physics, Musk in geopolitics and freedom of speech etc.
Wolfram literally is an expert in physics though. Most of the criticism, even in these comments seems to boil down to not liking the guy because he's smart or because his big ideas are incomprehensible if aren't familiar with the fields in which he is more knowledgeable than most people. It's ok to not like the guy, but let's not pretend it's for any real objective reason.
"Most of the criticism, even in these comments seems to boil down to not liking the guy because he's smart or because his big ideas are incomprehensible"
No, most of the criticism comes from the fact, that he has a super high ego, thinking he is always the smartest person in the room, making him treat others badly. See the comments from people working for him. And his big ideas - well, he claims he found the holy grail of physics, the theory of everything. And he wrote a bestseller for the masses. But actual physicists are not convinced because his model is simply worse at predicting data of experiments, than other models (which do not claim to be theories of everything). And he reacts poorly to this criticism.
So yes, he is smart and a interesting character. But maybe not one who solved the theory of everything. Because if he really would have - then the results would speak for itself. So I am not ruling out that his approach can one day lead towards it (not my area of expertize) - but apparently he is not there, but claims he is.
Somehow people who are most convinced of their genius are the least interesting to me. Contrast with Roger Penrose and you couldn't meet a more humble, interesting and interested conversationalist
> Somehow people who are most convinced of their genius are the least interesting to me.
I know some people who are great in their area of research, but are, to put it very midly, not the most humble persons (to give an example of one such person (a great research): "the people who could learn a whole lot from me are all tenured professors in my area of research"; just to be clear: his judgement is right :-) ).
In my experience, great researchers who are full of themselves nearly always had to work/fight very hard for where they are now, and are thus very bitter about worse researchers who have it easier.
Murray Gell-Mann said exactly this. He basically got tired of working with him because everything about his personality was to generate stories and mythologies about himself.
To me, this whole idea shows what a fool the average man is.
As if we all know so much about Richard Feynman compared to Murray Gell-Mann because of what a great scientist Richard Feynman was. When OBVIOUSLY, the reason is because of the degree Feynman self promoted himself compared to
other scientists.
Yeah, very obviously a highly intelligent man but it's immediately obvious that he was very carefully crafting how he wanted to be perceived by others in several of his self aggrandizing memoirs.
I wonder if New Kind of Science will end up like Godel, Escher, Bach ended up after release of GPT4[0]. It will be interesting to see what concept/formalization(?) will basically invalidate 50% of the research made by Wolfram.
I'll spare myself commenting on Wolfram, it's enough to do Ctrl+F on "arrogant" in this topic. Frankly, I don't even care. It's just that New Kind of Science didn't meaningfully advance anywhere beyond being "an interesting concept" for all of his natural life.
Interview with Stephen Wolfram on his favorite subject.
EDIT 1: Maybe I'll update this as I listen, maybe not we'll see.
But so far:
- Doesn't remember anything he used to talk about with his parents. Doesn't remember any particularly interesting conversations. Doesn't know anything about his parent's political inclinations.
- He a brother younger by 10 years. Says he was an "only child for about 10 years". For the rest of the conversation says his parent's experience with children were data size 1.
EDIT 2: getting super tedious. I'd like to hear what his kids or his brother think of him.
I didn't know Wolfram was even available in short form.
I bought NKS for fifty bucks twenty years ago because I thought I could form a group around it that would take turns summing up chapters for each other, but unfortunately, if humans who give a f** represent states and the number of f**s a human can give represent colors, we're talking about a 1,0 turing machine here.
I actually laughed out loud at "I didn't know Wolfram was even available in short form."
That said, I too have read a lot of his work (yes, even A New Kind of Science). I came away very impressed but lacking the right kind of framing to make the best of it (which is, I suspect, what most people who actually make the effort will feel).
For every genius who was right and ridiculed, and celebrated accordingly, there are many people who were wrong and ridiculed, and forgotten accordingly.
His work is definitely worthwhile. Wolfram Language by itself is actually very cool. I really wish he would open source it. I'm not going to use any math package that isn't open source for anything.
I think his physics work is pretty interesting as well.
I think the reason he aggrandizes, and this is only speculation, is because he is pushing the envelope in many fields simultaneously and wants to "credentialize" himself, and give people context on his background.
He might also be insecure self-absorbed. Which, while annoying, doesn't disqualify someone's ideas by itself. It just means you might need to watch for ego-based confabulations in their work.
It might also mean he's a pain to work with, if it is indeed an ego thing. But I don't know the guy... so it's all speculation.
> His work is definitely worthwhile. Wolfram Language by itself is actually very cool. I really wish he would open source it. I'm not going to use any math package that isn't open source for anything.
Here is the official statements of Wolfram Research on this topic:
> Why Wolfram Tech Isn’t Open Source—A Dozen Reasons
I don't have an answer for him. I don't mind paying money for software, I get his points, but at the same time, it's a non-starter for me.
When it comes to math. Especially a system as cool as Wolfram Language, I want to hack on the insides.
I don't publish things, or have time right now. But in 10 years, I estimate I'm going to be wanting to compile math software on radically different chips and ISAs.
Without an open source language, everything I build on top of the system will be incompatible with hardware specific instructions, unless they compiled it for that chip, often missing very specific optimizations (which could be improved even today). Or I would need to virtualize.
All this math code will the most important and hottest running code paths in my system, and won't even be able to compile to experimental ISAs or their extensions to take advantage.
I said to be logical you should only ridicule people for being wrong.
Ridiculing someone for being an ass hole is valid but illogical. There is merit to this distinction because sometimes the ass hole is right and everyone else is wrong.
The key here is dispassionate judgment and analysis. Can you handle that? If not that's totally normal and valid.
It's not (as far as I can tell). The closest thing I can quickly find in the transcript is the following:
Copied from transcript and lightly reformatted, but otherwise not corrected (girdle for Gödel, etc all left intact):
1:40:2x
in the fall of 1981 and I spent that time kind of studying The Works of people like bonan and girdle and bunch of stuff about neural Nets and I was that was all in kind of the can I understand foundationally how complexity shows up in the world and that caused me to um uh to
kind of um uh try and develop sort of the simplest model that might do something interesting and it
led me to these things called cellular autometer which are very simple uh systems where like tiny
programs where you just have a row of black and white cells and you just have a rule that says how to update those cells and um I started looking at those things in the fall of 1981 and
"It led me to" does not imply "led me to [discover/invent]" but rather "led me to [start studying]"
His own notes here directly state that they were considered long before he studied them:
No, of course not, it's just me parodying Stephen Wolfram every time he speaks/writes. He wrote a book called 'A New Kind of Science' claiming all this stuff in about 2002 which was widely criticised by scientists as overstating it's claims and much less important than he thinks it is, but he's been talking like that ever since pretty much.
He comes off as very arrogant. Also, on more than one occasion he's tried to pass off others work as his own. The best of example of this is when he said he invented the field of cellular automata.
(He does come across as arrogant, because he probably is, but his arrogance doesn't extend so far as to include this a claim that he invented something that he’s acknowledged were discussed before his birth.)
Attempting to goad a critical reviewer into engaging in some sort of comments-section "public debate" (assuming that somehow the public discussion would change the reviewer's mind) a _decade_ after the fact? That behavior is, in a word, insufferable.
EDIT: Also, "I know it was a challenge to review a book of its size..." comes off as insinuating that (1) the book is somehow "grand" and (2) maybe the reviewer didn't "get it".
I remember when it came out because a friend was excited about it. As I recall it’s a pretty large book.
Edit: just under 1200 pages on Amazon. I never got into it because I couldn’t figure out what the big revelation was supposed to be. It would take some serious dedication to go through such a large book for the sake of an unfavorable review.
I respect the work that he's done and the contributions he's given to humanity but for once I would like to see something by Stephen Wolfram that didn't involve at least 50% of the content being a form of self-aggrandizement.
I find that everything I try to consume from him contains his autobiography interspersed in the giant wall of text. This video is exquisitely cringeworthy.
blah blah (which I did in 1988) blah blah (which I completed in 1992).
He has no collaborators. He gives no credit to others. He just relentlessly names things after himself, takes singular credit for everything, and name-drops other famous scientists he bumped into.
I genuinely find the wolfram physics project interesting, but the behavior of wolfram himself sets off all my bullshit alarms.
I suspect that it will be someone else that will take these ideas over the finish line. He seems completely oblivious to the fact that his behavior makes it harder to take the ideas seriously.
My gateway to the ideas was Jonathan Gorard. Check out his videos if you are curious, they are much more accessible than Wolfram's own content.
But it takes a leader to assemble a village around a cause.
I do appreciate your take. The village deserves credit for the work they've done.
But, at the same time, for many folks I see "well actuallyed" for their achievements because of the village... I don't think the change would have manifested in the world if the village didn't have that person.
An example I see more frequently now is that a market for electric cars wasn't willed into existence by Elon. There are variations of this claim, from him not being the original founder to the huge number of employees involved with Tesla's accomplishments.
But, at the end of the day, I have zero reason to believe Mercedes Benz would be releasing an electric car if Elon had decided to take his market winnings and go sit on a beach.
I have no reason to characterize the wolfram language, and its ecosystem, as anything other than a magnum opus that was willed into existence by Wolfram.
I'm open to being wrong here. But I've not yet learned why I am.
If an evil villain crushes a man's spine and the man develops technology to get revenge that allows him to walk, does that make the act of crushing his spine not evil?
I think in your example the evil villain set out to crush a man's spine, not to develop an exoskeleton to help people walk? And they are introduced upfront as an evil villain.
Wouldn't this be a more appropriate analogy:
If a person decides to will an exoskeleton into existence to help people walk, and builds a techno-capital machine capable of supporting the team necessary make it happen, is the act of building the exoskeleton not evil?
His book "A new kind of science" is quite fascinating and has some interesting ideas about cellular automata. But I couldn't finish it because of how every few pages there is something about how great the author/his ideas are.
Famously, without a bibliography. Odd choice for a book claiming to be a substantial field-defining scientific work.
A few years later a list of "books that have been added to his permanent collection" appeared in lieu of a bibliography. It's pretty good but perhaps too comprehensive. https://www.wolframscience.com/reference/books/
This is the reasoning from the link above, which I post without comment.
> I always consider history important—both for giving credit and for letting one better understand the context of ideas.... I resolved that rather than just throwing in disembodied references, I would actually do the work of trying to unravel and explain the detailed histories of things.
> And the result was that of the nearly 300,000 words of notes at the back of the book, a significant fraction are about history. I did countless hours of (often fascinating) primary interviews and went through endless archives—and in the end was rather proud of the level of historical scholarship I managed to achieve. And when it came to traditional references I figured that rather than using yet more printed pages, I should just include in the notes appropriate names and keywords, from which anyone—even with the state of web search in 2002—could readily find whatever primary literature they wanted, at greater depth and more conveniently than from lists of journal page numbers.
I don't understand why Wolfram is getting the attention he is getting. His new theory of physics is not just riddled with problems, it also riddled with erroneous claims. He has also taken credit for ideas from von Newmann and Conway. We also have this issue of undecidable problems, he wants to violate up and down. He self-published his books, so that is one problem. Feynman warned us of Cargo cult science. Here it is in action.
He's arrogant, he doesn't give credits to others. So what? Silly Ad hominem attack.
Not listening to him because of this is a mistake, Wolfram is a true genius and, even if "his" ideas aren't fully his, you will probably not hear them with such clarity anywhere else. He is, at a minimum, an amazing explainer like few people I've ever seen.
It's not a mistake to value your time to be worth more than "listening to Stephen Wolfram"
I think all the ad hominem you see in here are from people who waste too many precious hours of their life listening to him. I know I am: I spent weeks as a young teen over NKS when it came out. Wasn't as revelatory as he kept insisting it was. Turned me off of cellular automata.
> EDIT: Generally when people are "true geniuses" their _peers_ identify them as such.
Counterexample: Kurt Heegener. OK, not a genius, but nevertheless a mathematician whose proof of a deep result (class number 1 problem [1]) was not accepted by his peers
Quote from [2]:
"In 1952, he published the Stark–Heegner theorem which he claimed was the solution to a classic number theory problem proposed by the great mathematician Gauss, the class number 1 problem. Heegner's work was not accepted for years, mainly due to his quoting of a portion of Heinrich Martin Weber's work that was known to be incorrect (though he never used this result in the proof)."
This is interesting, I wasn't aware. Thank you! What I was (maybe snarkily) trying to evoke was e.g. how the way Hans Bethe spoke about Richard Feynman contrasts with how Freeman Dyson speaks about Stephen Wolfram, or Cosma Shalizi's review of A New Kind of Science. It's obviously not universally true that everyone accepts or understands a scientist's work in their time, but it's not often that a scientific "genius" is widely regarded as a crackpot among their scientific contemporaries. Extraordinary claims, etc etc.
In my opinion, arrogance, selfishness, and ego from (perceived) "genius" people should not be tolerated even if they made/make substantial contributions in one field or another. Academia, in particular, is full of these types. The world would survive without their precious work and would be a much better place without the shitty experience they bring to everyone else. I was just watching Avi Loeb; good riddance, no matter what contributions he made to science, we could do without them and him.
> The world would survive without their precious work and would be a much better place without the shitty experience they bring to everyone else.
People have very different needs for harmony. Your statement likely implies that yours is rather high. My stance differs: great research is what advances mankind. Unpleasant great researchers will die some day, their research is there to stay.
(just to be clear: there is nothing good or bad with having a high or low need for harmony)
This is somewhat off-topic, but does Wolfram have a degenerative muscle illness? He puts his right hand down at around 30 minutes, and then doesn't move it again for hours. That and his unmoving legs are strikingly reminiscent of a friend who had MS.
He gestures with both his hands frequently throughout the entire video, not just before the 30 minute mark. I think this is just confirmation bias. And frankly, if he did have a degenerative muscle illness, that would be nobody’s business but his own.
I sometimes wonder if he even uses deodorant. He liked to work remote and bother people via an iPad Segway robot. If you had to chaperone him in an elevator there you would understand he likes to talk about himself.
My favorite quotes:
when provided with some of the responses from other physicists regarding his work, Wolfram is singularly unenthused. “I’m disappointed by the naivete of the questions that you’re communicating,” he grumbles. “I deserve better.”
“There’s a tradition of scientists approaching senility to come up with grand, improbable theories,” the late physicist Freeman Dyson told Newsweek back in 2002. “Wolfram is unusual in that he’s doing this in his 40s.”