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We’ve got a science opportunity overload: Launching the Wolfram Institute

writings.stephenwolfram.com

91–100 of 376 posts

Re: We’ve got a science opportunity overload: Launching the Wolfram Institute

#91

Lots of comments about his "arrogance" but i just see someone passionate, judge for yourself! He has three long interviews on Lex Fridmans youtube channel! I greatly enjoyed watching those those. 1:[Stephen Wolfram: Cellular Automata, Computation, and Physics]( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ez773teNFYA ) 2:[Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe]( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-t1_…

You can be passionate and arrogant.

Re: We’ve got a science opportunity overload: Launching the Wolfram Institute

#94

Man these are some low-quality comments. You’d think Wolfram was torturing gerbils or something. I don’t mind criticisms of my favorite thinkers. I enjoy watching someone being taken to task in the battle of ideas so to speak, but apparently something about Wolfram just rubs people the wrong way, because they seem to lose the ability to make cogent arguments after reading him. As a simple example of what a healthy di…

There was once a book, "100 Authors Against Einstein"[0]. Expect opposition against everything you do. Those who are against are just typically more vocal than those who don't know yet. Those who support Wolfram typically are busy doing research and don't care about commenting, they have better things to do than answer every naysayer 1v1. I'm in the "we'll see" camp, but I don't like naysayers.

[0] https://archive.org/details/HundertAutorenGegenEinstein

Re: We’ve got a science opportunity overload: Launching the Wolfram Institute

#95

Man these are some low-quality comments. You’d think Wolfram was torturing gerbils or something. I don’t mind criticisms of my favorite thinkers. I enjoy watching someone being taken to task in the battle of ideas so to speak, but apparently something about Wolfram just rubs people the wrong way, because they seem to lose the ability to make cogent arguments after reading him. As a simple example of what a healthy di…

I'm also surprised by the extreme negativity. This work is something that nerds like me should be interested in! It's basically a generalisation of physics: So far physics was assuming a mathematical foundation for the universe. It makes perfect sense to ask if it can be generalised and look for a procedural foundation. It's shocking to me that only Wolfram's company is pursuing such a logical alternative. And in my opinion his multiway graph approach is an elegant generalisation of what a procedural foundation could be like by trying to maximally reduce the assumptions made in the basic rule set (it's not a cellular automaton, even though everyone seems to be assuming it is)

Re: We’ve got a science opportunity overload: Launching the Wolfram Institute

#96
post #79
post #13

Let us concede that in the last 20 years, the number of mentions of "I" in his writing has decreased, and there are more mentions of "We". As much as a cellular automata, and computation in general, fan as I am, and after having read a fair amount of his work... I am still not convinced that Wolfram is not just a rich crack pot.

As rich eccentrics go, I much prefer the ones trying to advance science (like Wolfram) or medicine (like Gates) to the ones just building more superyachts and lobbying corrupt politicians. I don't really understand the animosity toward Stephen Wolfram on HN - has he done something evil or been super rude to someone? Maybe he has a big ego, but I think that's probably true of a lot of - if not most - of the rich and/o…

The issue is he makes a bunch of apparently empty claims about his hypergraph stuff being related to physics. The pictures are pretty and the hypergraph stuff is perhaps interesting in its own right, but with all the hand waving about QM and GR, I looked pretty hard a couple of years ago and couldn't find any explanation of the most familiar QM phenomena like the double slit experiment. It's almost like free association. I'd like to see this new theory solve one problem, and by that I don't mean an open research problem. I mean pick any homework problem from an introductory QM course and apply this stuff to it. As Feynman used to say, you have to get the numbers out. As far as I can tell, that hasn't happened.

Re: We’ve got a science opportunity overload: Launching the Wolfram Institute

#97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pure math isn’t computational? o_O (Constructivist mathematics is a thing, and it is pretty easy to formulate physics in a constructivist framework. Many serious quantum theoreticians do.)

My current layman pseudo-insight into this: Why in mathematics do we want to approximate non-linear functions by linear functions? Why do we not have sufficient theory to understand complex non-linear phenomena? Perhaps a different paradigm is required.

- we don't.

- because if we had those tools we would not call them "compkex nonlinear phenomena".

- maybe, but what makes you think this one is the one?

Re: We’ve got a science opportunity overload: Launching the Wolfram Institute

#98
post #79
post #13

Let us concede that in the last 20 years, the number of mentions of "I" in his writing has decreased, and there are more mentions of "We". As much as a cellular automata, and computation in general, fan as I am, and after having read a fair amount of his work... I am still not convinced that Wolfram is not just a rich crack pot.

As rich eccentrics go, I much prefer the ones trying to advance science (like Wolfram) or medicine (like Gates) to the ones just building more superyachts and lobbying corrupt politicians. I don't really understand the animosity toward Stephen Wolfram on HN - has he done something evil or been super rude to someone? Maybe he has a big ego, but I think that's probably true of a lot of - if not most - of the rich and/o…

> I don't really understand the animosity toward Stephen Wolfram on HN - has he done something evil or been super rude to someone?

He's super rude to pretty much the entire scientific community, by essentially pretending to have invented cellular automata and ignoring everyone else's contributions - even to the point of suppressing them by wielding the legal axe of copyright law:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30941559

Re: We’ve got a science opportunity overload: Launching the Wolfram Institute

#99
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As rich eccentrics go, I much prefer the ones trying to advance science (like Wolfram) or medicine (like Gates) to the ones just building more superyachts and lobbying corrupt politicians. I don't really understand the animosity toward Stephen Wolfram on HN - has he done something evil or been super rude to someone? Maybe he has a big ego, but I think that's probably true of a lot of - if not most - of the rich and/o…

The issue is he makes a bunch of apparently empty claims about his hypergraph stuff being related to physics. The pictures are pretty and the hypergraph stuff is perhaps interesting in its own right, but with all the hand waving about QM and GR, I looked pretty hard a couple of years ago and couldn't find any explanation of the most familiar QM phenomena like the double slit experiment. It's almost like free associat…

Even that would prove nothing. Wolfram himself makes a pretty big deal about how cellular automata, being Turing-complete, can model anything. I can give you any number of cellular automata that model our current understanding of quantum physics right now, no problem. It only becomes interesting if it can make different, better predictions than our existing theories.
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