361–370 of 376 posts
I think Law of Jante summarizes the 'zeitgeist' of HN comments towards this man: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Jante The goal should be always to understand and discuss ideas, despite egos. As hard that can be practically, anything else is unproductive and not worth persuing. His thoughts and theories are something to not ignore, but to follow with the same skepticism as any revolutionary claim should be. That…
>Law of Jante summarizes the 'zeitgeist' Why do you feel the need to dress up your comment to be something more than "you guys are just jealous."? Most of the comments criticizing Wolfram in this comment section discuss A New Kind of Science, cellular automata and hypergraphs but yours has no reference to any of the ideas discussed. Your post fluffs Wolfram to an absurd degree without ever actually providing any spec…
When I posted my comment, most comments I read then haven't tried to discuss any specific points nor his ideas, and my comment was for those. Most were discrediting the guy just based on his personality.
No matter how big this man's ego are, and I also think it is, he has proven himself a creator so far and to be passionate on those topics. For me, that's enough to not dismiss him as crazy or charlatan, especially so early.
My main point here is not aimed to defend or "fluff" Wolfram – I don't care about him personally. It is only about how our society does not have a healthy culture on receiving new ideas.
Let him and his team pursue his research – if this turns up to be something remarkable, time will show us – and humanity will benefit from it.
I posted "Law of Jante" as I see this happening over and over again. Different contexts, same "boohoo, this person think they're better than us".
>Complicated is not a virtue. That is not correct.
Complicated just means a complex 'something'. If the complexity of 'something' is accidental or not, that is another topic and is not even subject to moral judgment IMO.
Now, to develop complex software in a complex domain over several years, this is something hard and only someone sane can do that. So I'm just optimistic and open to see what his team will output from all this.
Have a great weekend!
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He is not just "creating a research institute". He basically claims to have solved all of science. Case in point: Yesterday he streamed a "History of Science and Technology Q&A" session. [1] Is it about the history of science and technology? No! It's a sales pitch for his new institute! As if he is the singularity that all of science and technology have culminated in. So obviously when talking about history of scienc…
Wolfram is well known for... lets just say... tooting his own horn. It can get comical. I saw a drinking game once. Take a drink every time he opens a sentence with a self-congratulation about discovering something. Take two drinks when he talks about being a child prodigy. Etc... He's human. Let him be human. Evaluate his work and the work of others that he promotes on its merit. Let the work be more important than…
Yeah, but it's worse than that. It's not just that he uses his employees' work and acts as if it's his. He takes ideas from the physics field, rephrases them in the terminology of his "physics" and then acts as if he came up with this!
Example: In a podcast from last year with Sean Correll, who is one of the people in the world who knows quantum mechanics best, Wolfram gave a short summary of his theories ("our models") and then goes on to describe "branchial space" and "rurial space". In a way as if that's a new discovery and he came up with it and "it turns out" and "I recently realized" and "we've discovered" (with "we" always meaning himself). You can really hear Correll hardly being able to hold it together. This brilliant idea has been around in physics for many decades, one of its flavour being the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics which Correll has given very good and accessible popular-science presentations about. It's just nonsense that Wolfram "discovered" this. He not just recycles it but more so in a way that's not helpful.
This all is not just "human". It's disingenuous.
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> 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?
And that's it. It's not very deep, and nobody outside his sphere of influence uses this term for that purpose.
The thing with Stephen Wolfram is that he invents all those terms, uses them as if they are standard terminology in the field (of physics or computer science) while freely mixing them with _actual_ standard terminology. That goes for "branchial graph", "rurial space", "principle of computational equivalence" and also "multicomputation". He is just diving deeper and deeper into his own buzzwordial space.
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> I think it's worth considering the users of Mathematica as near or overlapping. Mathematica predates any kind of statement of NKS by over a decade (and SMP nearly a decade before that). Moreover, I don't see any evidence Mathematica is becoming more "NKS-y" over time; it's a usual sort of moribund enterprise tooling, just for a highly selective enterprise. I don't see any real connection, other than some possible p…
I didn't know about SMP. Cool! Yeah, NKS clearly came after Mathematica, but I think there's a strong through-line there that goes back to his early work and connects directly to this meta-math stuff he's doing now. The core language is a pattern matching substitution system, and that's what he eventually distills into his 1d automata and then generalizes to meta-math. "at the core of Mathematica is the notion of sto…
I don't think GitHub will be able to tell you much about how physicists are working one way or another. Physicists in general, and also mathematicians and researching engineers who I suspect make up the bulk of most Mathematica users, don't use GitHub.
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A group of mathematicians operating under a pseudonym is basically the exact opposite of a single mathematician naming everything after himself.
Only until the pseudonym becomes famous and it's basically the same thing.
The name has some prestige, but it would be difficult for "Nicolas Bourbaki" to leverage "his" mathematical fame to accumulate wealth in a way that allows "him" to advocate a particularly fringe theory of, say, virology.
Wolfram, on the other hand, can leverage Mathematica to get rich, and use his riches to continue to push NKS, despite zero (or less) interest from physicists.
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Only until the pseudonym becomes famous and it's basically the same thing.
The difference is capitalism. The name has some prestige, but it would be difficult for "Nicolas Bourbaki" to leverage "his" mathematical fame to accumulate wealth in a way that allows "him" to advocate a particularly fringe theory of, say, virology. Wolfram, on the other hand, can leverage Mathematica to get rich, and use his riches to continue to push NKS, despite zero (or less) interest from physicists.
On the other hand, academic credit (not merit) will get you much further than money in many cases - and the lack of it (while not lacking merit) is a serious impediment on the progress of many scientific projects.
The difference? Socialism. Wolfram uses his own taxed income to further his goals, while meritless scientists use the broken system of academia and the income from taxes (that should've been used to further real science) to accomplish theirs.
> 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’…
This discussion between the CEO of NKN and Wolfram is pretty good. [0]
I am not saying it is the most important thing happening in "multicomputation" but I think there's a lot that this approach can lead to when we start talking about using clusters of computers, GPUs, TPUs, cell phones, edge devices, etc in a secure fashion. I think there's something to it, but I am also an idiot and could be very wrong.
[0] https://medium.com/nknetwork/stephen-wolfram-creator-of-nks-...
> 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’…
>An author who sets a piece up like that had better deliver the goods - big time. The author does not. That's been my impression of Stephen Wolfram and what he does in general. He has some accomplishments but his ego is comically large by comparison with those. Very hard to take him seriously.
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The difference is capitalism. The name has some prestige, but it would be difficult for "Nicolas Bourbaki" to leverage "his" mathematical fame to accumulate wealth in a way that allows "him" to advocate a particularly fringe theory of, say, virology. Wolfram, on the other hand, can leverage Mathematica to get rich, and use his riches to continue to push NKS, despite zero (or less) interest from physicists.
Nobody has to listen to Wolfram. Close his graphomaniac blog and forget about him. On the other hand, academic credit (not merit) will get you much further than money in many cases - and the lack of it (while not lacking merit) is a serious impediment on the progress of many scientific projects. The difference? Socialism. Wolfram uses his own taxed income to further his goals, while meritless scientists use the broke…