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

writings.stephenwolfram.com

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

#191

Post by goldenkey »

saberience wrote: post #154
OOvsuOO wrote: post #112

Wolfram software is awesome! It beats any other software and it's why they charge for it. It's worth it. Education about computers, science and math made easier to manipulate. Fact based results. If you google something you get jumbled results. Wolfram either you get it right with some facts back at your query. Or you get nil. You can be confident that it's a fact staring at you. You can cross reference and check it…

This reads like a comment generated by Wolfram's version of GPT3 trained only on his own writing.

Ram is Wolf. Wolf is Life. Life is Wolf Ram. - Michael GPT-3 Scott

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

#192

Post by mistrial9 »

xtiansimon wrote: post #172
d--b wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh come on! We call him delusional cause he has lost all humility. He is utterly convinced that he discovered the underlying mechanism of literally everything from physics to eceonomics. Delusion of grandeur is a well-known psychological condition, and no matter what you think of the science, it's hard to argue that Wolfram doesn't have it. Why can't he just say: "hey I've got this idea, it's crazy, but you know what…

How does his ego effect anyone who doesn’t work for him? I read most of the announcement and he’s promising research papers and lecture/teaching materials. That’s good, no? Wolfram’s over the top next level ego, to be sure. But he’s on the side of science and reason, so he’s our ego-maniac.

I have interacted with Dr Wolf-ram, and I dont like being spoken down to, or given direct orders by a stranger. Plenty of criticism here today, very well-deserved by my limited and direct experience.

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

#193

Post by abetusk »

DantesKite wrote: post #73

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 agree that Wolfram gets a lot of unnecessary hate by people online and the scientific community and that Wolfram has a lot of interesting things to say but I also see why the community at large bashes on him so regularly. Wolfram is arrogant, self centered and self congratulatory. I often find that I have to really work to find the content in what Wolfram says after wading through what sounds like marketing. I'm often wondering why Wolfram just doesn't talk about the research or ideas he's trying to push instead of trying to tell me why I need to know it's really important.

To me, Wolfram treats science and discovery as a kind of business opportunity while pretending it's for the greater good. Open source, peer review, transparency, etc. all give way to his "strong man" personality.

Not to fall afoul of Wittgenstein's ruler, I think Wolfram got right the principle of Turing Machine Equivalence. The idea that Turing machine completeness is the norm, rather than the exception, is something that I think people at large don't really understand or accept (and which I think is correct and profound). I will point out that there's work to be done here in trying to prove TME for other 1D cellular automata, not just rule 110, to further cement this point in these toy systems.

A fundamental thing that I think Wolfram got wrong is that something fundamentally new needs to supplant scientific discovery and mathematics. Often times discrete systems turn into continuous systems, and vice versa, so throwing out everything and starting over seems counterproductive. I'm in favor of bringing computational tools, both symbolic and numerical, in helping discovery but this is already happening. I also don't understand how this can be done if scientific discovery and tooling isn't democratized in the way that open source focuses on.

I think framing Wolfram solely in terms of his marketing for Mathematica and his ANKoS book is overly reductive but I also think it perverts his research, the way he presents his research and explains a lot of why people can come away with that feeling that he's a con artist.

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

#195

Post by Traster »

I've read through this very carefully and it's very difficult for me to understand what exactly he thinks is a breakthrough. Generally when we're talking about breakthroughs in physics in theoretical physics we're often talking about a new idea that links previous ideas, or an emergent property from a theory that we can then test. I've read a bit about it, and it seems to boil down to "Model things as a graph and simple set of rules about how that graph changes over time steps", and doing this if you plug in the right stuff you get something you recognise from somewhere else in physics. Which seems both unsurprising, and not a break through? It's like an ML problem, you don't get credit for predicting things that have already happened. Does anyone know where this approach is pushing forward the totality of physics?

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

#196

Post by m12k »

Spinnaker_ wrote: post #186
underdeserver wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sure sounds promising. Lots of things do. This is why we have peer review and standard publishing practices.

This idea never sat right with me. Only one of Einsteins paper's went through the now standard practice, and he was upset that it did. Peer review is useful, but let's not pretend it's the only way forward for a theory of everything. It's a very, very modern practice. We did a lot of great physics before it existed. Nearly everything wolfram does is available to anyone who is interested (including code!).

And just to add on top of this - there is to the best of my knowledge little if any research that shows that the current practice of publication and peer review is actually effective at weeding out bad science. The current replication crisis in psychology and other fields would suggest that it's actually quite bad at it. For a community that is supposed to be based on the ideal of experimentation and falsifiability, scientists are surprisingly willing to just accept at face value, that the current process is sound, without actually scrutinizing this hypothesis.

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

#197

Post by leephillips »

DantesKite wrote: post #73

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…

“new model for understanding reality...the meta-rules that undergird not just our Universe, but all possible Universes...”

Is there any evidence whatsoever that he’s accomplished these things? He’s been at this for decades. Is there any prediction of any natural phenomenon? Did he predict a new elementary particle? Can he predict the flow of water through a pipe? Is there a quantitative connection with anything in the physical world, aside from pretty pictures generated by a computer?

In other words, is this any kind of science?

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

#198

Post by sjg007 »

tokai wrote: post #120

It's interesting with the sycophant outrage over criticism of Wolfram. With arguments ala "criticise his work not his person". But if you actually follow his work (scientific work, not his business) it is clear that there is a lot to critique, but not in a useful sense. Scholarly reviews of A New Kind of Science were universally negative. The usefulness of what he proposes is doubtful and it is unoriginal. He is unab…

Neural networks were basically negatively critiqued for decades. I think there is something to cellular automata and there's definitely a relationship between CAs and DNNs that is unexplored.

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

#199

Post by JumpCrisscross »

abetusk wrote: post #193
DantesKite wrote: post #73

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 agree that Wolfram gets a lot of unnecessary hate by people online and the scientific community and that Wolfram has a lot of interesting things to say but I also see why the community at large bashes on him so regularly. Wolfram is arrogant, self centered and self congratulatory. I often find that I have to really work to find the content in what Wolfram says after wading through what sounds like marketing. I'm of…

> Wolfram is arrogant, self centered and self congratulatory

Not making a comparison in terms of contributions to science. But the same could be said about Newton and a host of other great (mostly) men of history.

One of the most useful emotional filters I've learned to drop is the predisposition against zealous enthusiasm. Automatically dismissing it is as reductive as immediately submitting to it.

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

#200

Post by nyadesu »

WithinReason wrote: post #137
poulpy123 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can be passionate and arrogant.

He didn't seem arrogant to me from the Lex podcasts. He seems to have no problem admitting when he doesn't know something or when he was wrong. Maybe his overuse of the "I" pronoun gives the wrong impression?

My opinion about him changed for good after watching some of those podcasts, it could be he has a very special writing style
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