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Stephen Wolfram seems to be the quintessential intellectual DIYer. He writes 20,000 words on a highly abstract and technical subject, and every single hyperlink

Stephen Wolfram seems to be the quintessential intellectual DIYer. He writes 20,000 words on a highly abstract and technical subject, and every single hyperlink in the article goes to either one of his own websites, or to Wikipedia. I respect his ability to integrate a huge body of scientific knowledge in a single brain and then articulate it in books like A New Kind of Science, but I have to wonder whether his approach is designed to maximize scientific progress, or to maximize his personal reputation. His eagerness to claim credit for ideas that could hardly be credited to a single person is a bit of a warning sign.

Certhas 5y ago
There is no science and no scientific progress in Stephen Wolframs work.
- xyzzy21 5y ago
  Not science as YOU NARROWLY understand the term.
- mensetmanusman 5y ago
  Define science. He is certainly doing experiments and is very public about it. Better than what is going on in academia with the reproducibility crisis and the fear of publishing ideas that don’t pan out.
  - Barrin92 5y ago
    there is no empirical aspect at all to Wolfram's work, so it cannot be said that he is conducting experiments in any meaningful sense. Wolfram's 'new science' of physics improves in no way at all over existing models when it comes to making predictions about the physical world.
    - mensetmanusman 5y ago
      This is true at the “”””cutting edge”””” of physics where most hypothesis that are taken “seriously” are not falsifiable. http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2017/11/how-popper-killed-particle-physics.html?m=1 http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2017/11/how-popper-killed-p...
      - Barrin92 5y ago
        I'm unsure if you're disagreeing or agreeing with me because I agree with the piece. And Sabine isn't saying that top physics isn't falsifiable, she's saying that it is, but that this is not enough. Which is true. Falsifiability is not sufficient, but it is still a necessary requirement. If your physical theory cannot even be tested against the world, it is not physics. If it can, that still might not make it relevant. Wolfram's theory though is worse in that it doesn't appear to be even testable, doesn't build on things we know describe the world well,
        mensetmanusman 5y ago
        I just view a lot of Wolfram’s work as actually sharing the messy details of thinking about crazy things :) I don’t think he is the next timecube guy, but I am more glad he is sharing than not.
  - Certhas 5y ago
    No it's not better than what is going on in academia. It's like the extreme version of all the problems of academia rolled into one: Hyperbolic storytelling, massive vague claims, not citing anyone but yourself, and nothing backed up by evidence matching the claims. I spent way too much time looking at the Physics Project when it came out, there is just nothing of substance there. And no, he is not doing experiments that back up his claims, he's just running some random simulations and waving his hands at the pictures that come out. One key aspect of the scientific method is to acknowledge that it's very easy to fool yourself into thinking you have understood something "up to ironing out some details". Every crackpot is convinced of this. And that's why science operates on the foundation of convincing others of the understanding we have reached. Not any random others, but other people that have invested the time to master what is already known, and are making a good faith effort to understand. I am not talking about peer review, I am talking about the long conversation that unfolds over many many publication, conference talks, heated seminar discussions, etc. Nothing Wolfram has done/contributed to in the last 30 years that has convinced anyone of note. Deep thinkers in all branches of science that he touches upon have unanimously found his output to be a vanity project of no scientific value. That is not to say that there are no interesting and valuable ideas in the texts he produces, it's simply that these ideas are already known, not his, and he does not acknowledge or tackle the problems that they have. In turn he has not made a good faith effort to engage with the work of others that is pertinent to his claims (usually because this would show that his claims are vastly exagerated and known to be problematic). He good at one thing: Selling himself as a genius outsider to people not willing or qualified to come to their own conclusions on his work. (I rather enjoyed this review of ANKS which goes into some detail for a number of the points I make here: http://www.bactra.org/reviews/wolfram/ http://www.bactra.org/reviews/wolfram/ I personally looked quite deeply into the "papers" produced at the time of his "Physics Project", by Gorard. Some of these are things I have studied very deeply in the past and feel qualified to judge. There simply is _nothing_ there.)
Frost1x 5y ago
>He writes 20,000 words on a highly abstract and technical subject, and every single hyperlink in the article goes to either one of his own websites, or to Wikipedia. Exerpt: "But then—basically starting in the early 1980s—there was a burst of progress based on a new idea (of which, yes, I seem to have ultimately been the primary initiator): the idea of using simple programs, rather than mathematical equations, as the basis for models of things in nature and elsewhere." He also draws out everything more than it needs to be in this long winded narrative and explicit self-congradulatory form that makes me usually wait until someone else reputable with a computer or computational science background reads it and summarizes to see if it's worth suffering through the time to read it myself. Not only is it questionable (Conway and many others come to mind, would have to check dates to see origins but honestly who cares), it's just off-putting.
- macksd 5y ago
  It sounds to me like he's claiming credit for ideas behind weather modeling used as much as 20 years earlier, and fractal curves that were being clearly talked about in the previous decade.
  - seg_lol 5y ago
    But not to the depth at which he has explored them.
- jjoonathan 5y ago
  In your example quote, he only managed to shoehorn in his cellular automata work. The reader is left hanging -- for an entire sentence! -- as to whether or not he was a child prodigy. Is that growth? Or is his game slipping?
ithinkso 5y ago
His posts are very hit or miss and the one linked in this thread is unfortunately a huge miss. He describes nondeterministic automata (and pretends he doesn't) and gives them way too much significance. Even the 'computational paradigm' he's saying it replaces is only a paradigm in Wolfram's mind The 'applications' section at the end is just ramblings at best and borderline crankpotty at worst. Which is weird since he is undeniably smart and educated, maybe an overflow?
plutonorm 5y ago
He has a massive ego for sure. But this idea of building up from the most general to the more specific appeals very much to me.
frazbin 5y ago
I was so excited by the headline... and then I was so bummed by the domain name that I now doubt myself for being excited by the headline. I clicked.. there's still no danger of confusing this guy with a scientist or an academic. If somebody is real smart, but also real self serving, it kinda cancels out their smartness. He's not the worst, but still.. it's like if a paperclip maximizing super AI was trying to convince you to let it out of its box. He's not gonna teach you anything.
gfodor 5y ago
It would be cool if there could be a dedicated forum to discussing the hypothesis “Stephen Wolfram has a large ego” so these threads could be about 10% of their usual size, and much higher signal.

Certhas 5y ago

There is no science and no scientific progress in Stephen Wolframs work.

xyzzy21 5y ago
Not science as YOU NARROWLY understand the term.
mensetmanusman 5y ago
Define science. He is certainly doing experiments and is very public about it. Better than what is going on in academia with the reproducibility crisis and the fear of publishing ideas that don’t pan out.
- Barrin92 5y ago
  there is no empirical aspect at all to Wolfram's work, so it cannot be said that he is conducting experiments in any meaningful sense. Wolfram's 'new science' of physics improves in no way at all over existing models when it comes to making predictions about the physical world.
  - mensetmanusman 5y ago
    This is true at the “”””cutting edge”””” of physics where most hypothesis that are taken “seriously” are not falsifiable. http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2017/11/how-popper-killed-particle-physics.html?m=1 http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2017/11/how-popper-killed-p...
    - Barrin92 5y ago
      I'm unsure if you're disagreeing or agreeing with me because I agree with the piece. And Sabine isn't saying that top physics isn't falsifiable, she's saying that it is, but that this is not enough. Which is true. Falsifiability is not sufficient, but it is still a necessary requirement. If your physical theory cannot even be tested against the world, it is not physics. If it can, that still might not make it relevant. Wolfram's theory though is worse in that it doesn't appear to be even testable, doesn't build on things we know describe the world well,
      - mensetmanusman 5y ago
        I just view a lot of Wolfram’s work as actually sharing the messy details of thinking about crazy things :) I don’t think he is the next timecube guy, but I am more glad he is sharing than not.
- Certhas 5y ago
  No it's not better than what is going on in academia. It's like the extreme version of all the problems of academia rolled into one: Hyperbolic storytelling, massive vague claims, not citing anyone but yourself, and nothing backed up by evidence matching the claims. I spent way too much time looking at the Physics Project when it came out, there is just nothing of substance there. And no, he is not doing experiments that back up his claims, he's just running some random simulations and waving his hands at the pictures that come out. One key aspect of the scientific method is to acknowledge that it's very easy to fool yourself into thinking you have understood something "up to ironing out some details". Every crackpot is convinced of this. And that's why science operates on the foundation of convincing others of the understanding we have reached. Not any random others, but other people that have invested the time to master what is already known, and are making a good faith effort to understand. I am not talking about peer review, I am talking about the long conversation that unfolds over many many publication, conference talks, heated seminar discussions, etc. Nothing Wolfram has done/contributed to in the last 30 years that has convinced anyone of note. Deep thinkers in all branches of science that he touches upon have unanimously found his output to be a vanity project of no scientific value. That is not to say that there are no interesting and valuable ideas in the texts he produces, it's simply that these ideas are already known, not his, and he does not acknowledge or tackle the problems that they have. In turn he has not made a good faith effort to engage with the work of others that is pertinent to his claims (usually because this would show that his claims are vastly exagerated and known to be problematic). He good at one thing: Selling himself as a genius outsider to people not willing or qualified to come to their own conclusions on his work. (I rather enjoyed this review of ANKS which goes into some detail for a number of the points I make here: http://www.bactra.org/reviews/wolfram/ http://www.bactra.org/reviews/wolfram/ I personally looked quite deeply into the "papers" produced at the time of his "Physics Project", by Gorard. Some of these are things I have studied very deeply in the past and feel qualified to judge. There simply is _nothing_ there.)

Frost1x 5y ago

>He writes 20,000 words on a highly abstract and technical subject, and every single hyperlink in the article goes to either one of his own websites, or to Wikipedia. Exerpt: "But then—basically starting in the early 1980s—there was a burst of progress based on a new idea (of which, yes, I seem to have ultimately been the primary initiator): the idea of using simple programs, rather than mathematical equations, as the basis for models of things in nature and elsewhere." He also draws out everything more than it needs to be in this long winded narrative and explicit self-congradulatory form that makes me usually wait until someone else reputable with a computer or computational science background reads it and summarizes to see if it's worth suffering through the time to read it myself. Not only is it questionable (Conway and many others come to mind, would have to check dates to see origins but honestly who cares), it's just off-putting.

macksd 5y ago
It sounds to me like he's claiming credit for ideas behind weather modeling used as much as 20 years earlier, and fractal curves that were being clearly talked about in the previous decade.
- seg_lol 5y ago
  But not to the depth at which he has explored them.
jjoonathan 5y ago
In your example quote, he only managed to shoehorn in his cellular automata work. The reader is left hanging -- for an entire sentence! -- as to whether or not he was a child prodigy. Is that growth? Or is his game slipping?

ithinkso 5y ago

His posts are very hit or miss and the one linked in this thread is unfortunately a huge miss. He describes nondeterministic automata (and pretends he doesn't) and gives them way too much significance. Even the 'computational paradigm' he's saying it replaces is only a paradigm in Wolfram's mind The 'applications' section at the end is just ramblings at best and borderline crankpotty at worst. Which is weird since he is undeniably smart and educated, maybe an overflow?

plutonorm 5y ago

He has a massive ego for sure. But this idea of building up from the most general to the more specific appeals very much to me.

frazbin 5y ago

I was so excited by the headline... and then I was so bummed by the domain name that I now doubt myself for being excited by the headline. I clicked.. there's still no danger of confusing this guy with a scientist or an academic. If somebody is real smart, but also real self serving, it kinda cancels out their smartness. He's not the worst, but still.. it's like if a paperclip maximizing super AI was trying to convince you to let it out of its box. He's not gonna teach you anything.

gfodor 5y ago

It would be cool if there could be a dedicated forum to discussing the hypothesis “Stephen Wolfram has a large ego” so these threads could be about 10% of their usual size, and much higher signal.