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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]

#81

Post by duped »

bachmeier wrote: post #67
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…

> 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…

I get that it's not exactly what we consider notebooks now, but Knuth was writing about literate programming several years before MathCAD.

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

#82

Post by CuriouslyC »

graphe wrote: post #69
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…

The stallman of physics.

At least Stallman is charming in his uncouth, nerdy way.

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

#83

Post by ska »

submain wrote: post #58
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.

His book "A new kind of science" is quite fascinating and has some interesting ideas about cellular automata. But I couldn't finish it because of how every few pages there is something about how great the author/his ideas are.

This book is perhaps most valuable as an example of why you need an editor.

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

#84

Post by CuriouslyC »

r3trohack3r wrote: post #74
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.

I don't know. It takes a village to build something. But it takes a leader to assemble a village around a cause. I do appreciate your take. The village deserves credit for the work they've done. But, at the same time, for many folks I see "well actuallyed" for their achievements because of the village... I don't think the change would have manifested in the world if the village didn't have that person. An example I s…

If an evil villain crushes a man's spine and the man develops technology to get revenge that allows him to walk, does that make the act of crushing his spine not evil?

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

#85

Post by bbsz »

I wonder if New Kind of Science will end up like Godel, Escher, Bach ended up after release of GPT4[0]. It will be interesting to see what concept/formalization(?) will basically invalidate 50% of the research made by Wolfram.

I'll spare myself commenting on Wolfram, it's enough to do Ctrl+F on "arrogant" in this topic. Frankly, I don't even care. It's just that New Kind of Science didn't meaningfully advance anywhere beyond being "an interesting concept" for all of his natural life.

[0] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kAmgdEjq2eYQkB5PP/douglas-ho...

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

#86

Post by glimshe »

He's arrogant, he doesn't give credits to others. So what? Silly Ad hominem attack.

Not listening to him because of this is a mistake, Wolfram is a true genius and, even if "his" ideas aren't fully his, you will probably not hear them with such clarity anywhere else. He is, at a minimum, an amazing explainer like few people I've ever seen.

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

#87

Post by [deleted] »

r3trohack3r wrote: post #74
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.

I don't know. It takes a village to build something. But it takes a leader to assemble a village around a cause. I do appreciate your take. The village deserves credit for the work they've done. But, at the same time, for many folks I see "well actuallyed" for their achievements because of the village... I don't think the change would have manifested in the world if the village didn't have that person. An example I s…

[deleted]

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

#88

Post by martinky24 »

nomilk wrote: post #78
namirez wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m a bit apprehensive since I don’t know SW personally, but what my friend described sounded like a borderline abusive behavior. Basically he treated people like they were stupid and shouted at them when they made mistakes.

I think it’s a shared trait among the ultra successful (think: bezos, jobs, musk, wolfram), that they unrelentingly pursue good ideas. In that relentless pursuit, people will inevitably have their (bad) ideas shot down. Wolfram becomes audibly irritated at bad ideas, but mostly only when they should have been better, more complete, better explained (in their interest of time, for example) etc. I think most of those w…

> bezos, jobs, musk, wolfram

One of those things is not like the other lol

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

#90

Post by nomilk »

martinky24 wrote: post #88
nomilk wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it’s a shared trait among the ultra successful (think: bezos, jobs, musk, wolfram), that they unrelentingly pursue good ideas. In that relentless pursuit, people will inevitably have their (bad) ideas shot down. Wolfram becomes audibly irritated at bad ideas, but mostly only when they should have been better, more complete, better explained (in their interest of time, for example) etc. I think most of those w…

> bezos, jobs, musk, wolfram One of those things is not like the other lol

Jobs, because he didn’t do it himself?

The commonality is they all brought $1b+ ideas to market; they didn’t just have good ideas, but did the hard work necessary to execute on them.

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