[Whitespace]

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.

[zhynn]

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.

[pmdr]

> He just relentlessly names things after himself

Well "Wolfram" does sound like a pretty good name to name things after.

[BonoboIO]

He even got a metal named after him ;-) Tungsten is called „Wolfram“ in German.

[amszmidt]

The metal has literally nothing to do with Stephen Wolfram…

[lukan]

It was a joke (there was a smiley). Wolfram the element was named in the 16. century.

[gjvc]

Wolfram is scared that Gorard is going to upstage him.

[graphe]

The stallman of physics.

[CuriouslyC]

At least Stallman is charming in his uncouth, nerdy way.

[lukan]

That is .. debatable. Or rather subjective.

[r3trohack3r]

I don't know.

It takes a village to build something.

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.

[CuriouslyC]

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?

[r3trohack3r]

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?

[CuriouslyC]

I think ignoring the villain portion of the analogy given the behavior of capitalist "magnates" is being overly generous.

[submain]

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.

[NelsonMinar]

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/

In 2012 he wrote about why he didn't have references or bibliography. It's a New Kind of Publishing, too. https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2012/05/living-a-paradig...

[abdullahkhalids]

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.

[ska]

This book is perhaps most valuable as an example of why you need an editor.

[noahmotion]

Unfortunately, it needed a new kind of editor, one which has yet to be discovered, even after all these years.

[keiferski]

It reminds me of Nietzsche's autobiography Ecce Homo, which was at least somewhat self-aware of its pomposity, titling chapters as:

1 – Why I Am So Wise

2 - Why I Am So Clever

3 – Why I Write Such Excellent Books, Part 1

4 – Why I Write Such Excellent Books, Part 2

5 - Why I Write Such Excellent Books, Part 3

6 - Why I Am a Fatality

[verticalscaler]

You just can't handle the Kanye of Mathematics.