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Stephen Wolfram – 4-Hour Conversational Documentary on My Entire Arc of Life [video]

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Re: Stephen Wolfram – 4-Hour Conversational Documentary on My Entire Arc of Life [video]

#131

Post by jcgrillo »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #115
jcgrillo wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Populism, it works! EDIT: Generally when people are "true geniuses" their _peers_ identify them as such. That's not the case here.

> EDIT: Generally when people are "true geniuses" their _peers_ identify them as such. Counterexample: Kurt Heegener. OK, not a genius, but nevertheless a mathematician whose proof of a deep result (class number 1 problem [1]) was not accepted by his peers Quote from [2]: "In 1952, he published the Stark–Heegner theorem which he claimed was the solution to a classic number theory problem proposed by the great mathema…

This is interesting, I wasn't aware. Thank you! What I was (maybe snarkily) trying to evoke was e.g. how the way Hans Bethe spoke about Richard Feynman contrasts with how Freeman Dyson speaks about Stephen Wolfram, or Cosma Shalizi's review of A New Kind of Science. It's obviously not universally true that everyone accepts or understands a scientist's work in their time, but it's not often that a scientific "genius" is widely regarded as a crackpot among their scientific contemporaries. Extraordinary claims, etc etc.

Re: Stephen Wolfram – 4-Hour Conversational Documentary on My Entire Arc of Life [video]

#132

Post by rdtsc »

jerf wrote: post #76
rdtsc wrote: post #46

I remember buying his A New Kind of Science book before it was available for free. It was interesting to read, and it was good enough to impress a college kid like me back then. But now, looking back, I wonder what fields of science has it advanced? It's been more than 20 years already, and with a title like that, we'd expect a completely upturned physics, biology, and other disciplines based on it.

After pondering it for a while, the problem is that CAs are too chaotic to use, and there is simply no way to overcome this, nor is there even particularly a reason to try. Anything that is Turing Complete is going to exhibit at least some degree of what I call "Turing Chaos", which is the sort of chaos you have in trying to understand what a given Turing Complete system is going to do in light of the fact that a Tur…

> A New Kind Of Science is full of pretty pictures and legitimately interesting ideas... it's also in essence, comprehensively wrong. Not a "not even wrong"; it rises to the level of "real" wrongness. But it's comprehensively, from top to bottom, wrong about practical utility or any future practical utility.

Yeah, after 20 some years, that's has to be the answer. At its basic level I think it just exploited the idea that people, including me, like to see interesting or complicated patterns, especially arising out of simple iterative rules like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_30 or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_110.

Of course, I can see how snail pattern or other natural patterns might be generated by a similar process but it's nowhere near revolutionizing any science like the title was claiming.

But Wolfram being Wolfram doesn't give up. There is the https://www.wolframinstitute.org and there is some activity there. I periodically drop by to see what's happening.

> They are not useful for engineering, which is precisely why we don't use them.

Exactly, we'd think by now they'd be some AI super-chip or something tangible based on of the cellular automata thing discovered by Wolfram.

Re: Stephen Wolfram – 4-Hour Conversational Documentary on My Entire Arc of Life [video]

#133

Post by perrygeo »

martinky24 wrote: post #127
perrygeo wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mathematica has half-billion+ in annual revenue and has been a mainstay of engineering work for decades. So ... this world?

Alright, I'm gonna need a source cited on that one lmao. Absolutely no way.

Well it's an employee-owned company. Your data is as good as mine. You assert that Wolfram's work is worth less than $1billion. You're quite emphatic about that fact. Let's just do some back-of-the-napkin math to assess if your premise has any validity.

Mathematica has been around for over 40 years. It has 1600+ employees. Tell me, how could a private company make payroll for 1600 top earners without hundreds of millions in revenue? They had no outside funding that we know of.

Obviously this company has made $1 billion dollars in its lifetime. Many times over I'd guess.

Re: Stephen Wolfram – 4-Hour Conversational Documentary on My Entire Arc of Life [video]

#134

Post by nojvek »

I liked his interview with Lex Fridman.

He's full of himself but has interesting things to say.

WolframAlpha is a gem on its on right. Yeah we have Gemini, GPT, Mixtral but when it comes to actual compositional compute, Wolfram alpha gets you the right answer and shows you the math.

Re: Stephen Wolfram – 4-Hour Conversational Documentary on My Entire Arc of Life [video]

#135

Post by rendall »

schiffern wrote: post #60
adamgordonbell wrote: post #23

So, story time. I once interviewed Stephen Wolfram for IEEE's software engineering radio and I had a lot of fun doing it and he did to. We ended up running way overtime because he was having fun showing me things with Mathematica. He is a fascinating person, I successfully kept him off talking about his math / physics theories and on the idea of a programming language leading to better thinking and more break-through…

> having data sort of embedded in the programming language, in standard libraries, where it's easy to get the number of calories in the moon if it were made of cheese or whatever. If you like this sort of thing check out Frink. https://frinklang.org/ I predict that within 100 years, computers will be twice as powerful, ten thousand times larger, and so expensive that only the five richest kings of Europe will own the…

Ha! That's marvelous. The rants on `mol`, `hertz` and `candela` are astonishing. Well worth the price.

  // WARNING:  Use of "Hz" will cause communication problems, errors, and make
  // one party or another look insane in the eyes of the other.
  //
  // In other words, if you use the Hz in the way it's currently defined by the 
  // SI, as equivalent to 1 radian/s, you can point to the SI definitions and
  // prove that you follow their definitions precisely.  And your physics 
  // teacher will *still* fail you and your clients will think you're completely
  // incompetent because 1 Hz = 2 pi radians/s.  And it has for centuries.
  // You are both simultaneously both right and both wrong.  
  // You cannot win.
  // You are perfectly right.  You are perfectly wrong.  You look dumb and
  // unreasonable.  The person arguing the opposite looks dumb and unreasonable.
  //
  // Hz == YOU CANNOT WIN
  //
  // (Insert "IT'S A TRAP" image here.)

Re: Stephen Wolfram – 4-Hour Conversational Documentary on My Entire Arc of Life [video]

#136

Post by lukan »

Suppafly wrote: post #116
The_Colonel wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think people take issue with CEOs pretending to be experts in things where they aren't - Wolfram in physics, Musk in geopolitics and freedom of speech etc.

Wolfram literally is an expert in physics though. Most of the criticism, even in these comments seems to boil down to not liking the guy because he's smart or because his big ideas are incomprehensible if aren't familiar with the fields in which he is more knowledgeable than most people. It's ok to not like the guy, but let's not pretend it's for any real objective reason.

"Most of the criticism, even in these comments seems to boil down to not liking the guy because he's smart or because his big ideas are incomprehensible"

No, most of the criticism comes from the fact, that he has a super high ego, thinking he is always the smartest person in the room, making him treat others badly. See the comments from people working for him. And his big ideas - well, he claims he found the holy grail of physics, the theory of everything. And he wrote a bestseller for the masses. But actual physicists are not convinced because his model is simply worse at predicting data of experiments, than other models (which do not claim to be theories of everything). And he reacts poorly to this criticism.

So yes, he is smart and a interesting character. But maybe not one who solved the theory of everything. Because if he really would have - then the results would speak for itself. So I am not ruling out that his approach can one day lead towards it (not my area of expertize) - but apparently he is not there, but claims he is.

Re: Stephen Wolfram – 4-Hour Conversational Documentary on My Entire Arc of Life [video]

#138

Post by BonoboIO »

pmdr wrote: post #92
zhynn wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

blah blah (which I did in 1988) blah blah (which I completed in 1992). He has no collaborators. He gives no credit to others. He just relentlessly names things after himself, takes singular credit for everything, and name-drops other famous scientists he bumped into. I genuinely find the wolfram physics project interesting, but the behavior of wolfram himself sets off all my bullshit alarms. I suspect that it will be…

> He just relentlessly names things after himself Well "Wolfram" does sound like a pretty good name to name things after.

He even got a metal named after him ;-) Tungsten is called „Wolfram“ in German.

Re: Stephen Wolfram – 4-Hour Conversational Documentary on My Entire Arc of Life [video]

#139

Post by justin66 »

adamgordonbell wrote: post #70
bachmeier wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Notebooks, like Jupter, clearly came from his work While I often hear this claim from Wolfram and his supporters, I have never seen any evidence that it was his innovation. MathCAD was the first software released with a notebook interface, and there was research using those ideas prior to the release of the first Mathematica notebook. Maybe his particular take was an improvement on the others, but the claim that it…

Ah, I did not know that. My bad. Maybe he was more of a popularizer of the approach then?

I'd guess MathCAD was quite a bit more popular than Mathematica in the nineties, given Mathematica was something like ten times as expensive.

Re: Stephen Wolfram – 4-Hour Conversational Documentary on My Entire Arc of Life [video]

#140

Post by defrost »

throwup238 wrote: post #65
xaellison wrote: post #50

Scientific American I think did a balanced article about this character: https://web.archive.org/web/20231231040033/https://www.scien... My favorite quotes: when provided with some of the responses from other physicists regarding his work, Wolfram is singularly unenthused. “I’m disappointed by the naivete of the questions that you’re communicating,” he grumbles. “I deserve better.” “There’s a tradition of scientists…

> “There’s a tradition of scientists approaching senility to come up with grand, improbable theories,” the late physicist Freeman Dyson told Newsweek back in 2002. “Wolfram is unusual in that he’s doing this in his 40s.” That is a brutal take down. Did Dyson and Wolfram have a math-beef going or something?

It's a mild takedown in the set of all Wolfram slams.

See, for example: A Rare Blend of Monster Raving Egomania and Utter Batshit Insanity (2002) http://bactra.org/reviews/wolfram/

I met Wolfram some 20 years before that review when he was on a world tour promoting the earliest iterations of Mathematica, the first iteration post his symbolic differentation work.

This was the period when cellular automata, Mandelbrot sets, and symbolic math were pretty hot topics about math departments - computer assisted proofs on monster groups in symbolic algebra were recent, Cayley (the first iteration of Magma) was being written at Sydney University, etc.

Even then he had many of the traits that Cosma Shalizi described in the linked review above and was already dismissing various people for their 'poor ideas' and later claiming those ideas as his own.

He's a smart guy. He swam in waters filled with smart people, some smarter. He was never, IMHO, as smart as his own legend, as authored by himself.

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