[marssaxman]

Not sure how you get to "I think I am very smart" from "this guy thinks he is very smart, and his writing invariably highlights that belief to the detriment of whatever he's actually trying to communicate"...

For all I know, maybe he actually is the world-class genius he believes himself to be, but it's difficult to tell underneath all the blatant self-promotion.

[dredmorbius]

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41406645>

[bitwize]

The thing is, Wolfram is that smart, having gotten his Ph.D. at 20 or something. He's just never been humbled, had a leash put on him so he could be aimed and focused on productive work (outside of maybe Mathematica). Probably because a lot of university professors in the 80s were like "wow, that kid is smart" and indulged his ego. (One major exception: Richard Feynman! https://www.cantorsparadise.com/richard-feynmans-advice-to-a...)

After Quake was released and the principals of Id Software broke up, John Romero pretty much spent the next few years making an ass of himself during the development of Daikatana. When asked about the delayed and beleaguered development process on Slashdot, John Carmack kind of paid him a backhanded comment saying something like "A properly disciplined Romero is a credit to any team." And that's more or less what Wolfram is: properly disciplined, he would be an asset to any cutting-edge physics research team, but as he his he'd rather go down these rabbit holes than suffer to work with people of more ordinary intellect. And it's his, and the world's, loss really.