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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

#261

Post by pmayrgundter »

kemayo wrote: post #244
pmayrgundter wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haters gonna hate. I rolled my eyes when I saw this link posted with hundreds of comments, ofc not because of Wolfram but because it's been this reaction for 20 years. People demand mediocrity and are furious when they don't get it.* Projection is a real thing. What's cool about Wolfram is his priority is his work, not peoples' opinions of his work. I know he cares, and sometimes maybe it affects his stance, but he's…

> People demand mediocrity and are furious when they don't get it. Remember that people have different preferences. Those objecting to Wolfram tend to be those who appreciate a "quiet confidence" style, which lets your work stand for itself rather than needing you to function as its hype man. To such people, Wolfram's general presentation style reads as puffery-covering-mediocrity -- someone who truly had what he cla…

Basically agreed, but isn't that preference usually context dependent?

People like to let the work stand for itself.. that feels like it's from a cloistered environment where everyone is tenured and respected and get their fair time to present their work and get its due attention. Which is fine and dandy and I'm glad we have that.

There's also people who are not in that environment who sometimes have something important to say and will definitely be ignored if they follow the same rules.

To follow your analogy.. was what Trump had to say actually important? Maybe some of it, but mostly it was all hot air, misleading, demonstrably false and occasionally dangerous. As OP is pointing out, Wolfram is none of those things.

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

#262

Post by whimsicalism »

throwaway81523 wrote: post #129
dTal wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not really that interesting. Can you write it in a computer program? Then you can write it in a cellular automata, because many of them are Turing complete: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_110#The_proof_of_universa... https://conwaylife.com/wiki/Turing_machine And yes, this is a cheap trick. That's the point. "Porting" our current theories to some new, whacky substrate, peeking at the textbooks all the while,…

No I don't see how to implement QM as a computer program while preserving basic complexity invariants of Turing machines. That is the point of quantum computing: that the complexity classes for quantum computers are different than those for Turing machines. If you take the view that that the whole Universe is one gigantic entangled quantum state, the cellular automaton simulation would get pretty bogged down.

You are conflating multiple unrelated issues.

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

#263

Post by shoyer »

postingposts wrote: post #56
aj7 wrote: post #28

I’ve had more downvotes sharing my opinions about cellular automata on HN than on any other topic, so I won’t make any here. Rather, I’d like to point out that I personally have not seen a single theory, not a single piece of a theory, known to be productive in explaining experimental data, recast with underlying cellular automata theory. If I am simply showing my ignorance, please enlighten me. Meanwhile, the clock…

Hey, I do really weird math for unspecified reasons. https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/28da/6507acf40f892b95ee61a7... Cellular Automata are, in essence, a type of mathematical function called a “Chaos Map”, aside from the cool name it’s also a WYSIWYG name, a chaos map is a mapping of how a fractal expands or changes across space time. A great example very germane to this site is the Hacker Glider from Conway’s game o…

I work on weather prediction, both with traditional simulation methods and machine learning. I have not seen any examples of cellular automata used for useful predictions in this space.

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

#264

Post by qorrect »

EricE wrote: post #216
logicchains wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>But he’s on the side of science and reason, so he’s our ego-maniac. Humility and the ability to recognise and accept when we're wrong is one of the fundamental characteristics of science. People with big egos are the enemies of science.

"People with big egos are the enemies of science." lol - history doesn't agree with this AT ALL.

Written history is a re-creation of past events and big egos are entertaining.

Claude Shannon coined the word bit and fathered Information Theory. But very few know his name, despite his huge influence on our daily lives.

This is a long winded way of saying, written history is probably half right at best.

Ten years ago I watched a pay-per-view boxing match. At the end, the fighter said "I'm not the greatest but I'll fight the greatest".

2 minutes later the local news misquoted him as saying "I am the greatest".

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

#265

Post by ogogmad »

hobofan wrote: post #134
k8sToGo wrote: post #55

I used Wolfram Alpha a lot while I was in college and liked it a lot. So I am surprised to see the hatred toward this man in the comments. Can anyone enlighten me why he is delusional and why he has lost it?

> Can anyone enlighten me why he is delusional and why he has lost it? DISCLAIMER: Views not necessarily my own I think it would be hard to try to pinpoint a single point in time where "he lost it". Stephen Wolfram grew up as a mathematician/physicist wunderkind, so as it's often the case for people that produced highly praised work early in their life, it's hard to transition to a life with humbleness and where outp…

Wolfram Alpha isn't "revolutionary" perhaps, but it's surprisingly useful for some queries. There's the obvious use-case of solving mathematical problems. But you can also use it to (for instance) count the number of weeks from 3rd August 2022 to 7th January 2023. It often "just works" for these kinds of things.

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

#267

Post by whimsicalism »

m12k wrote: post #196
Spinnaker_ wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

I don't think it is accurate to use problems in the field of psychology to indict peer review in math or physics.

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

#268

Post by eternalban »

LudwigNagasena wrote: post #182
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…

There is a quote (written 20 years ago) about Wolfram that sums up why people feel that way towards him, > There’s a tradition of scientists approaching senility to come up with grand, improbable theories. Wolfram is unusual in that he’s doing this in his 40s.

A true prodigy then.

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

#269

Post by narrator »

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’…

I'd say that gradient descent and deep learning have made obsolete whatever cellular automata stuff Wolfram has come up with. Neural nets can approximate any function. Cellular automata has a much more limited range that only includes the generation of some interesting pictures and not much else of interest, IMHO.

To be charitable, if he had some way to mathematically slide between and combine networks of cellular automata, he might have something, but it would probably just end up reinventing deep learning and neural nets on a slightly different set of primitives.

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

#270

Post by gammarator »

motoboi wrote: post #232
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 (…

I suppose you are not familiar with his early career as a physicist, publishing in the field since he was 15 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Wolfram#Early_career

That doesn’t tell us much about the quality of the work under discussion.
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