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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

#291

Post by Chris2048 »

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…

It's not very useful to post some top-level like this addressed to "some low-quality comments". Can you point out the post to which you are referring?

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

#292

Post by Adraghast »

xhkkffbf wrote: post #254
crispyambulance wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wolfram deserves accolades for Mathematica. It's a magnificent achievement and he's kept his company alive and thriving and people use Wolfram (the company) tools everyday to do productive stuff. BUT... Wolfram (the man) is very much an outsider when it comes to physics. This started 20 years ago when he published a "A New Kind of Science". It was a lengthy but ultimately not useful exploration of cellular automata (…

It may or may not be correct, but to get hung up on the ego and the name on the paper is a big mistake. Read the ideas. Maybe they're too weird to understand. But don't condemn them because where they came from. Find the flaws and do it scientifically.

There are only so many hours in a day. If we spend all of them thoroughly debunking known quacks nothing else will ever get done.

Stephen Wolfram hasn’t yet achieved full quack status where it’s best to dismiss him out of hand, but he has been moving in that direction for some time.

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

#294

Post by ganzuul »

Chris2048 wrote: post #288
ganzuul wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Modular ethical argument. There is nothing of substance but attention to the character judgement in the message.

Is a judgement of character not "of substance"? Where is the substance in an erroneous accusation of ad-hominem?

The most direct path to prove my point would be to start calling you names.

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

#296

Post by AnimalMuppet »

m12k wrote: post #149
throwaway81523 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> show where it’s wrong Do you know the expression "not even wrong"?

They're trying to come up with a new way of modelling the foundations of physics. In order to be "even wrong", they need to make falsifiable predictions. As far as I can tell, they're not at (or claiming to be at) that level of maturity of the model, they seem to be slowly working toward feature parity with existing models. Whether they ever achieve that remains to be seen. Whether they manage to coalesce all this in…

"Not even wrong, but still making all these grand claims about revolutionizing everything" is a bit worse than just "not even wrong", though.

I mean, take quantum loop gravity. It might revolutionize, not everything, but quite a bit. Last I checked, it was as the same stage - not mature enough to make actual predictions. But it was touting itself as "there might be something here, and if there is, it could be really important", not as "we hold the secrets to everything".

I guess what I'm looking for is "under promise, over deliver". When you over promise your scientific theory, it stops looking like science and starts looking like marketing. That's... you know what a code smell is? That's a science smell. The more it looks like marketing, the more skeptical I am of it as science.

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

#297

Post by TheMagicHorsey »

I'm not smart enough to judge work of such momentous significance.

Is this for real, or is this guy a wealthy quack? It just seems like I would have heard more about it if it was real.

Or are we living through a Galileo moment where a genius is laboring outside the established institutions and is closer to the truth than the establishment?

My neo-cortex is just not capable enough to judge these things, but I hope smarter people here can chime in.

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

#298

Post by copperx »

daneelsan wrote: post #274
Barrera wrote: post #213

> Something remarkable has happened these past two years. For 45 years I’ve devoted myself to building a taller and taller tower of science and technology—which along the way has delivered many outputs of which I’m quite proud. But starting in 2020 with the unexpected breakthroughs of our Wolfram Physics Project we’ve jumped to a whole new level. And suddenly—yes, building on our multi-decade tower—it seems as if we’…

> it's nothing more than noodling cellular automata in ways that have had no effect whatsoever on chemistry, physics, or biology. I mean, you could at least read a bit about what his Multicomputation stuff is really studying. CA are not being noodled there.

For those of us that are not going to read Wolfram's papers, what is multicomputation?

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

#299

Post by posix_me_less »

mrjangles wrote: post #151

I don't understand all these comments saying "Sure Wolfram may be arrogant, but he has achieved amazing things". "lets look at his work and ideas not him as a person". ... What does this even mean? Steven Wolfram has never achieved a single thing in science or mathematics. Absolutely no one has ever said otherwise, except for Steven Wolfram himself. I used to think he was a failed scientist who, at least, was good wi…

Feynman wrote something in the sense Wolfram did invent an interesting way to implement quantum chromodynamics on a computer, so he did something contributory to science.

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

#300

Post by michael_j_ward »

dannykwells wrote: post #277

I came across this today: https://www.stephenwolfram.com/publications/academic/all/ "Note: Since 1987, Stephen Wolfram’s intellectual efforts have not primarily been reported in academic articles." To be clear - no serious scientist believes that a scholarly output which is composed predominantly of non-peer reviewed publications is a serious or valid output. Essentially, Wolfram is a glorified blogger who runs a tec…

Ideas being subjected to peer review != the institutionalized "Peer Review Process(TM)"
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