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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]

#31

Post by zhynn »

Whitespace wrote: post #6

I respect the work that he's done and the contributions he's given to humanity but for once I would like to see something by Stephen Wolfram that didn't involve at least 50% of the content being a form of self-aggrandizement. I find that everything I try to consume from him contains his autobiography interspersed in the giant wall of text. This video is exquisitely cringeworthy.

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 someone else that will take these ideas over the finish line. He seems completely oblivious to the fact that his behavior makes it harder to take the ideas seriously.

My gateway to the ideas was Jonathan Gorard. Check out his videos if you are curious, they are much more accessible than Wolfram's own content.

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

#32

Post by dachworker »

Here's a question. Why isn't Wolfram Research considered a sexy employer? They have cool research and technical problems and cool software. I looked a bit into it but I could only see them hiring in 3rd world countries, and only contractors. So are they a bad employer or what gives?

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

#33

Post by adamgordonbell »

lupire wrote: post #27
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…

Notation, or semantics? Mathematica has no notation, and that's the worst thing about it. Mathematics has M-Expressions, like S-Expressions, which are extremely powerfully and human-like for reasoning in multiple logical (not geometric) dimensions (using Lisp-style macro expansion)

It's been a long time since the discussion, but I think he was getting at the whorf hypothesis. If you could express certain ideas easily it would enable thinking about certain things more deeply and intelligently.

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

#37

Post by FPGAhacker »

jcgrillo wrote: post #17
max_ wrote: post #12

I love Stephen Wolfram so much that I may even consider him a role model. I understand the need for the masses to have people ideas that are obviously practical. Stephen Wolfram is more of an explore. And he is documenting phenomena that I don't see any one else doing because everyone else is so teleological. I think we need to give a break to researchers doing this original non teleological research. I don't underst…

Here's one example: http://bactra.org/weblog/915.html

Is there something wrong there? I’m sorry if I’m being dense.

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

#38

Post by ThisIsMyAltAcct »

physicsguy wrote: post #18

"It all started when I invented cellular automata, this thing that will revolutionise computing... at some point."

Is this an actual quote from the video? I'm not going to scrub through 4 hours of footage to find out, sorry.

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

#39

Post by danpalmer »

dachworker wrote: post #32

Here's a question. Why isn't Wolfram Research considered a sexy employer? They have cool research and technical problems and cool software. I looked a bit into it but I could only see them hiring in 3rd world countries, and only contractors. So are they a bad employer or what gives?

I think they're very traditional – I don't think software or engineering is their edge, and I suspect they outsource a lot of that to cheaper locations – they seem themselves as being more research focused.

Their Glassdoor reviews used to be a bit dodgy too, nothing you wouldn't be able to guess after watching 10 minutes of any video of you-know-who though.

They are also just small, only a few hundred people if I remember correctly.

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