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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.
EDIT: Generally when people are "true geniuses" their _peers_ identify them as such. That's not the case here.
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…
Well "Wolfram" does sound like a pretty good name to name things after.
Wolfram is insufferable in short form -- imagine listening to him talk for 4 hours!
Eh he might be right. I would listen to his ideas dispassionately. Many geniuses who were right were ridiculed.
It's his way of making everything about himself and his plagiarism that put people off. He's Feynman without the charm.
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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.
Famously, without a bibliography. Odd choice for a book claiming to be a substantial field-defining scientific work. A few years later a list of "books that have been added to his permanent collection" appeared in lieu of a bibliography. It's pretty good but perhaps too comprehensive. https://www.wolframscience.com/reference/books/ In 2012 he wrote about why he didn't have references or bibliography. It's a New Kind…
> I always consider history important—both for giving credit and for letting one better understand the context of ideas.... I resolved that rather than just throwing in disembodied references, I would actually do the work of trying to unravel and explain the detailed histories of things.
> And the result was that of the nearly 300,000 words of notes at the back of the book, a significant fraction are about history. I did countless hours of (often fascinating) primary interviews and went through endless archives—and in the end was rather proud of the level of historical scholarship I managed to achieve. And when it came to traditional references I figured that rather than using yet more printed pages, I should just include in the notes appropriate names and keywords, from which anyone—even with the state of web search in 2002—could readily find whatever primary literature they wanted, at greater depth and more conveniently than from lists of journal page numbers.
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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?
Wouldn't this be a more appropriate analogy:
If a person decides to will an exoskeleton into existence to help people walk, and builds a techno-capital machine capable of supporting the team necessary make it happen, is the act of building the exoskeleton not evil?
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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?
I think in your example the evil villain set out to crush a man's spine, not to develop an exoskeleton to help people walk? And they are introduced upfront as an evil villain. Wouldn't this be a more appropriate analogy: If a person decides to will an exoskeleton into existence to help people walk, and builds a techno-capital machine capable of supporting the team necessary make it happen, is the act of building the…
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.
1 – Why I Am So Wise
2 - Why I Am So Clever
3 – Why I Write Such Excellent Books, Part 1
4 – Why I Write Such Excellent Books, Part 2
5 - Why I Write Such Excellent Books, Part 3
6 - Why I Am a Fatality
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> 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?
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> 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.