To be honest I haven’t understood much of this. Am I also the only one who’s very skeptical of AI? I see no correlation between what we call “biological thinking” and computation. Even though I don’t know much of the theory behind AI, to me it’s similar to saying that since we have lots of simple calculators, we can arrange them together in some specific way and emergent intelligence will arise. Sure yes I mean but y…
A World Run with Code
41–50 of 116 posts
Re: A World Run with Code
#42I find Stephen Wolfram to be a an interesting person. On one hand, he is undeniably exceptional and created an impressive computational system. On the other hand, the "Wolfram language" is really a pretty poor design as far as programming languages go, and would not even be noticed if it wasn't for the giant standard library that gets shipped with it, called Mathematica. I use the "Wolfram language" because I have to…
"25. 20 points for naming something after yourself. (E.g., talking about the "The Evans Field Equation" when your name happens to be Evans.)"
Re: A World Run with Code
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I find Stephen Wolfram to be a an interesting person. On one hand, he is undeniably exceptional and created an impressive computational system. On the other hand, the "Wolfram language" is really a pretty poor design as far as programming languages go, and would not even be noticed if it wasn't for the giant standard library that gets shipped with it, called Mathematica. I use the "Wolfram language" because I have…
I have worked with a small number of exceptionally talented individuals (I don't know where to draw the "genius" line, but they were up there), and I see negative aspects of their personalities echoed in Stephen Wolfram. It looks like ego to me. People lose their humility after being told that their better than everyone else for their whole lives. Being an expert at one thing doesn't make you an expert at everything.…
This is arguably the best distinction I've heard described between "mad" and "genius".
Re: A World Run with Code
#44>Right now, most of what the computers in the world do is to execute tasks we basically initiate. But increasingly our world is going to involve computers autonomously interacting with each other, according to computational contracts. Once something happens in the world—some computational fact is established—we’ll quickly see cascades of computational contracts executing. And there’ll be all sorts of complicated intr…
In the same vein, "Human intelligence" led to the 2008 crash. Human's aren't infallible either. My problem with this argument is that there is no logical basis for how exactly human intelligence is different. Computers aren't there yet in most domains, but there is no evidence to say they can't get there. How soon is anybody's guess right now. While AGI might be far off, I can certainly imagine computers running larg…
Humans don't think kittens are avocados with complete certainty because someone flicked a speck of green paint on the kitten.
Re: A World Run with Code
#45I find Stephen Wolfram to be a an interesting person. On one hand, he is undeniably exceptional and created an impressive computational system. On the other hand, the "Wolfram language" is really a pretty poor design as far as programming languages go, and would not even be noticed if it wasn't for the giant standard library that gets shipped with it, called Mathematica. I use the "Wolfram language" because I have to…
Funny, because I think the Wolfram language (also as a long-time user) is actually really well-designed and consistent, and has stood the test of time. Even ignoring the standard library, it has a really expressive syntax for pattern matching and functional programming, and I find that you can often do very complex things with very little code. For doing any kind of symbolic manipulation or lazy evaluation, it's pretty hard to beat.
On the other hand, I feel that his theory of cellular automata as some fundamental underpinning to mathematics is misguided.
Re: A World Run with Code
#46perhaps wolfram is parodying his main idea in his work output. from a basic origin he's creating monstrous bloat and complexity, as a type of demonstrative self-referential proof. there are people who write code until it works, and people who rewrite until it doesn't. room enough for both.
Excellent observation. Perhaps it’s a twist on Conway’s Law?
Re: A World Run with Code
#47[deleted]
Re: A World Run with Code
#48Wolfram might be a genius, but I personally find his writing and lectures extremely dull. The only thing he seems to write is how everything is "computational", and how we need to embrace his idea that computing is what the whole universe is about. For example in this blog post alone, we can find this following word count:
computer - 19x
computation* - 96x
computational - 63x
computational intelligence - 2x
computational contracts - 7x
computational universe - 7x
computational language - 18x
computational thinking - 2x
computational fact - 1x
computational acts - 1x
computational equivalence - 8x
computational irreducibility - 6x
computational system - 1x
computational process - 1x
computational work - 1x
computational essays - 2x
computational law - 1x
Re: A World Run with Code
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have worked with a small number of exceptionally talented individuals (I don't know where to draw the "genius" line, but they were up there), and I see negative aspects of their personalities echoed in Stephen Wolfram. It looks like ego to me. People lose their humility after being told that their better than everyone else for their whole lives. Being an expert at one thing doesn't make you an expert at everything.…
That last perspective is the most important one. I've known a few genius-ish people, and I recently had a jarring experience where one of them who's a bit older and retired, but definitely not mentally ill or demented, had gone off the cliff of believing in all kinds of crazy alien/government conspiracy theories and started working on some free-energy device, etc. At first I found it shocking that he was being so com…
Linus Pauling was a bona fide genius; he won a Nobel for his pioneering research in to chemical bonds, made important contributions to our understanding of crystalline structures and various proteins, helped explain the the molecular genetic cause of sickle cell anemia, etc, etc. He was a giant of science and will always be remembered as such.
But he also spent the last thirty years of his career refining and attempting to popularize a model for the structure of the nucleus (the "close-packed spheron model") that never seems to have gained much acceptance. He spent even longer advocating for megavitamin therapy, which is now generally regarded as quackery, and went to his grave pushing the idea that large doses of vitamin C can help cure cancer, despite numerous studies failing to support this.
I'm not saying that Wolfram is exactly like Pauling (although his fascination with his own work on cellular automata certainly seems to share some similarities to Pauling's fascination with the spheron cluster model). But I can't help but wonder if Pauling's reputation would be different if he had had a blog.
Re: A World Run with Code
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I find Stephen Wolfram to be a an interesting person. On one hand, he is undeniably exceptional and created an impressive computational system. On the other hand, the "Wolfram language" is really a pretty poor design as far as programming languages go, and would not even be noticed if it wasn't for the giant standard library that gets shipped with it, called Mathematica. I use the "Wolfram language" because I have…
I have worked with a small number of exceptionally talented individuals (I don't know where to draw the "genius" line, but they were up there), and I see negative aspects of their personalities echoed in Stephen Wolfram. It looks like ego to me. People lose their humility after being told that their better than everyone else for their whole lives. Being an expert at one thing doesn't make you an expert at everything.…
Classic: "A Rare Blend of Monster Raving Egomania and Utter Batshit Insanity" - http://bactra.org/reviews/wolfram/