[glimshe]

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.

[Whitespace]

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.

[jcgrillo]

Populism, it works!

EDIT: Generally when people are "true geniuses" their _peers_ identify them as such. That's not the case here.

[aleph_minus_one]

> 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)."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Class_number_prob...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Kurt_Heegner&oldi...

[jcgrillo]

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.

[beryilma]

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.

[aleph_minus_one]

> 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)