3 ms·

I used Wolfram Alpha a lot while I was in college and liked it a lot. So I am surprised to see the hatred toward this man in the comments. Can anyone enlighten

I used Wolfram Alpha a lot while I was in college and liked it a lot. So I am surprised to see the hatred toward this man in the comments. Can anyone enlighten me why he is delusional and why he has lost it?

mitko 5y ago
Probably he comes off as big ego, which we are hardwired to resist. However I think a lot of that narcissism is confidence justified by his successes and track record, he’s created a lot of value for the world.
- afc 5y ago
  > However I think a lot of that narcissism is confidence [...] Funny, I see it as the entire opposite: very extreme insecurity, the need to constantly remind us that, yes, truly, he was there, he pioneered this, it _is_ amazing and awesome and will revolutionize everything, believe me, and it's only second to this other thing, which we must remind you, I invented. A confident person would strip away the fluff and just get on with the message?
- chrisseaton 5y ago
  > However I think a lot of that narcissism is confidence Narcissism more often comes from hidden or repressed insecurity - the opposite of confidence.
  - mitko 5y ago
    Why not a mixture of both? We all have insecurities- I’m sure even Mr Wolfram. But success also leads to confidence. An entrepreneur has to pitch his brand and “wolfram” is his strongest brand. Would love if someone massively successful explains what that feels like
pasquinelli 5y ago
i can't, but i don't care about him. apparently he's pissed some people off. naturally, when his name comes up, it gets noticed by those people. especially when he's starting his own institute... named after himself.
hobofan 5y ago
> Can anyone enlighten me why he is delusional and why he has lost it? DISCLAIMER: Views not necessarily my own I think it would be hard to try to pinpoint a single point in time where "he lost it". Stephen Wolfram grew up as a mathematician/physicist wunderkind, so as it's often the case for people that produced highly praised work early in their life, it's hard to transition to a life with humbleness and where output is received with anything else than praise. In the past he has made a number of outlandish claims that didn't bear fruit (predictably so), to an extent that one would think that only a delusional person could make them. E.g. he did a lot of work on cellular automata, and wrote a book titled "A new kind of science", in which he predicted that cellular automata would revolutionize all kinds of natural sciences (hint: that didn't happen). He later made similar claims for Wolfram Alpha revolutionizing search engines, and the Wolfram language revolutionizing programming.
- ogogmad 5y ago
  Wolfram Alpha isn't "revolutionary" perhaps, but it's surprisingly useful for some queries. There's the obvious use-case of solving mathematical problems. But you can also use it to (for instance) count the number of weeks from 3rd August 2022 to 7th January 2023. It often "just works" for these kinds of things.
  - copperx 5y ago
    It's funny; 99% of my interactions with Wolfram Alpha are about dates.
TazeTSchnitzel 5y ago
There are two Stephen Wolframs: the one who makes useful software (Mathematica, Wolfram Alpha), and the one who fancies himself an academic. His success in the former lets him avoid humility in the latter, and this conflict is where the problems come in.
- sjg007 5y ago
  Wolfram is by any measure a successful academic. One general issue though is that particle physics basically hit a dead end. The future was in simulation (hence Mathematica) and then the idea that the universe is computational and if it is how could it be and how might it work. This multi computational idea seems to draw from the double slit experiment where observation collapses the wave function and the multi-probability path history based on the observer. This is saying that computations can be modeled similarly. And this type of model handles non-determinism in general and "threads of time" apparently. Interesting. Ambitious but very interesting.

mitko 5y ago

Probably he comes off as big ego, which we are hardwired to resist. However I think a lot of that narcissism is confidence justified by his successes and track record, he’s created a lot of value for the world.

afc 5y ago
> However I think a lot of that narcissism is confidence [...] Funny, I see it as the entire opposite: very extreme insecurity, the need to constantly remind us that, yes, truly, he was there, he pioneered this, it _is_ amazing and awesome and will revolutionize everything, believe me, and it's only second to this other thing, which we must remind you, I invented. A confident person would strip away the fluff and just get on with the message?
chrisseaton 5y ago
> However I think a lot of that narcissism is confidence Narcissism more often comes from hidden or repressed insecurity - the opposite of confidence.
- mitko 5y ago
  Why not a mixture of both? We all have insecurities- I’m sure even Mr Wolfram. But success also leads to confidence. An entrepreneur has to pitch his brand and “wolfram” is his strongest brand. Would love if someone massively successful explains what that feels like

pasquinelli 5y ago

i can't, but i don't care about him. apparently he's pissed some people off. naturally, when his name comes up, it gets noticed by those people. especially when he's starting his own institute... named after himself.

hobofan 5y ago

> Can anyone enlighten me why he is delusional and why he has lost it? DISCLAIMER: Views not necessarily my own I think it would be hard to try to pinpoint a single point in time where "he lost it". Stephen Wolfram grew up as a mathematician/physicist wunderkind, so as it's often the case for people that produced highly praised work early in their life, it's hard to transition to a life with humbleness and where output is received with anything else than praise. In the past he has made a number of outlandish claims that didn't bear fruit (predictably so), to an extent that one would think that only a delusional person could make them. E.g. he did a lot of work on cellular automata, and wrote a book titled "A new kind of science", in which he predicted that cellular automata would revolutionize all kinds of natural sciences (hint: that didn't happen). He later made similar claims for Wolfram Alpha revolutionizing search engines, and the Wolfram language revolutionizing programming.

ogogmad 5y ago
Wolfram Alpha isn't "revolutionary" perhaps, but it's surprisingly useful for some queries. There's the obvious use-case of solving mathematical problems. But you can also use it to (for instance) count the number of weeks from 3rd August 2022 to 7th January 2023. It often "just works" for these kinds of things.
- copperx 5y ago
  It's funny; 99% of my interactions with Wolfram Alpha are about dates.

TazeTSchnitzel 5y ago

There are two Stephen Wolframs: the one who makes useful software (Mathematica, Wolfram Alpha), and the one who fancies himself an academic. His success in the former lets him avoid humility in the latter, and this conflict is where the problems come in.

sjg007 5y ago
Wolfram is by any measure a successful academic. One general issue though is that particle physics basically hit a dead end. The future was in simulation (hence Mathematica) and then the idea that the universe is computational and if it is how could it be and how might it work. This multi computational idea seems to draw from the double slit experiment where observation collapses the wave function and the multi-probability path history based on the observer. This is saying that computations can be modeled similarly. And this type of model handles non-determinism in general and "threads of time" apparently. Interesting. Ambitious but very interesting.