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He is not just "creating a research institute". He basically claims to have solved all of science. Case in point: Yesterday he streamed a "History of Science a

He is not just "creating a research institute". He basically claims to have solved all of science. Case in point: Yesterday he streamed a "History of Science and Technology Q&A" session. [1] Is it about the history of science and technology? No! It's a sales pitch for his new institute! As if he is the singularity that all of science and technology have culminated in. So obviously when talking about history of science and technology all you need to talk about is cellular automata and Stephen Wolfram's role in it. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mEMFxPWzVU8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mEMFxPWzVU8 Watch it, it's enlightening.

Pilottwave 5y ago
>Stephen Wolfram hosts a live and unscripted Ask Me Anything about the history of science and technology for all ages. I dont get why people wanna frame wolfram so badly as a negative arrogant actor. He is answering viewer questions, his subscriber audience is ofcourse asking certain wolfram physics related questions. Timestamps: 00:00 Start stream 1:49 SW begins talking and introduces Wolfram Institute 22:58 Do you have a sense of the skills that an incoming fellow to the Wolfram Institute will have? What would effective preparation for Institute-type work be? 29:23 What is the emerald functionality that was mentioned for biological/cellular computational explorations? 32:55 and what about around the world overseas and in other countries? 33:05 You get some wonderful things out of pursuing science just for the sake of it. There are pejorative terms for this, like 'fishing trips' and 'stamp collecting', but such pursuits led to PCR technology just because someone was curious about thermophile bacteria 44:53 activity overseas & in other countries in regards to outreach programs in cooperation with education systems...you were mentioning some campaigns you had going on 51:03 Will there be more active development on the computational capabilities of Wolfram Mathematica with the Wolfram Institute? 52:53 British physics is more Geometry guild vs American physics is more Group theory and particle physics Guild 54:08 What is your opinion about experimental mathematics and its relationship with classical "mainstream" mathematics? 1:17:05 I often hear that science needs philosophy to justify it. What are some historical examples of this? 1:32:27 i think in a lot of places in history the role of academic pursuit was that a philosopher's role, but academic pursuit has attained a large amount of "division of labor" 1:34:22 Philosophy and Mathematical logic are starting to overlap more. Tarskis Semantics relates Formal logic to topology just like math and computer langauges 1:36:22 Are there inherently philosophical ideas (i.e. cannot be turned into a scientific one like the question of motion)? Can we distinguish them outright without knowing future scientific development?
api 5y ago
Wolfram is well known for... lets just say... tooting his own horn. It can get comical. I saw a drinking game once. Take a drink every time he opens a sentence with a self-congratulation about discovering something. Take two drinks when he talks about being a child prodigy. Etc... He's human. Let him be human. Evaluate his work and the work of others that he promotes on its merit. Let the work be more important than whatever personality flaws he has. The worst allegation IRL I've heard about him is a tendency to give the impression that he discovered all of this stuff when he did not. He did do a good chunk of brilliant original work in the field but for example A New Kind of Science contains work by dozens of others. He did eventually revise the book to add a ton of citations that were not explicit in the original edition. In keeping with his writing style, he definitely exaggerates the impact and significance of some of this work. Nevertheless I think there are some incredible insights here. I wouldn't be surprised if this whole field (complexity / emergence / cellular automata / computational physics / informatics) does indeed end up solving a lot of serious issues in physics and other fields. I'm fond of the umbrella term "informatics" for all of it. There's some thinking around informatics as a branch of physics that studies information qua information.
- wildmanx 5y ago
  > The worst allegation IRL I've heard about him is a tendency to give the impression that he discovered all of this stuff when he did not. Yeah, but it's worse than that. It's not just that he uses his employees' work and acts as if it's his. He takes ideas from the physics field, rephrases them in the terminology of his "physics" and then acts as if he came up with this! Example: In a podcast from last year with Sean Correll, who is one of the people in the world who knows quantum mechanics best, Wolfram gave a short summary of his theories ("our models") and then goes on to describe "branchial space" and "rurial space". In a way as if that's a new discovery and he came up with it and "it turns out" and "I recently realized" and "we've discovered" (with "we" always meaning himself). You can really hear Correll hardly being able to hold it together. This brilliant idea has been around in physics for many decades, one of its flavour being the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics which Correll has given very good and accessible popular-science presentations about. It's just nonsense that Wolfram "discovered" this. He not just recycles it but more so in a way that's not helpful. This all is not just "human". It's disingenuous.

Pilottwave 5y ago

>Stephen Wolfram hosts a live and unscripted Ask Me Anything about the history of science and technology for all ages. I dont get why people wanna frame wolfram so badly as a negative arrogant actor. He is answering viewer questions, his subscriber audience is ofcourse asking certain wolfram physics related questions. Timestamps: 00:00 Start stream 1:49 SW begins talking and introduces Wolfram Institute 22:58 Do you have a sense of the skills that an incoming fellow to the Wolfram Institute will have? What would effective preparation for Institute-type work be? 29:23 What is the emerald functionality that was mentioned for biological/cellular computational explorations? 32:55 and what about around the world overseas and in other countries? 33:05 You get some wonderful things out of pursuing science just for the sake of it. There are pejorative terms for this, like 'fishing trips' and 'stamp collecting', but such pursuits led to PCR technology just because someone was curious about thermophile bacteria 44:53 activity overseas & in other countries in regards to outreach programs in cooperation with education systems...you were mentioning some campaigns you had going on 51:03 Will there be more active development on the computational capabilities of Wolfram Mathematica with the Wolfram Institute? 52:53 British physics is more Geometry guild vs American physics is more Group theory and particle physics Guild 54:08 What is your opinion about experimental mathematics and its relationship with classical "mainstream" mathematics? 1:17:05 I often hear that science needs philosophy to justify it. What are some historical examples of this? 1:32:27 i think in a lot of places in history the role of academic pursuit was that a philosopher's role, but academic pursuit has attained a large amount of "division of labor" 1:34:22 Philosophy and Mathematical logic are starting to overlap more. Tarskis Semantics relates Formal logic to topology just like math and computer langauges 1:36:22 Are there inherently philosophical ideas (i.e. cannot be turned into a scientific one like the question of motion)? Can we distinguish them outright without knowing future scientific development?

api 5y ago

Wolfram is well known for... lets just say... tooting his own horn. It can get comical. I saw a drinking game once. Take a drink every time he opens a sentence with a self-congratulation about discovering something. Take two drinks when he talks about being a child prodigy. Etc... He's human. Let him be human. Evaluate his work and the work of others that he promotes on its merit. Let the work be more important than whatever personality flaws he has. The worst allegation IRL I've heard about him is a tendency to give the impression that he discovered all of this stuff when he did not. He did do a good chunk of brilliant original work in the field but for example A New Kind of Science contains work by dozens of others. He did eventually revise the book to add a ton of citations that were not explicit in the original edition. In keeping with his writing style, he definitely exaggerates the impact and significance of some of this work. Nevertheless I think there are some incredible insights here. I wouldn't be surprised if this whole field (complexity / emergence / cellular automata / computational physics / informatics) does indeed end up solving a lot of serious issues in physics and other fields. I'm fond of the umbrella term "informatics" for all of it. There's some thinking around informatics as a branch of physics that studies information qua information.

wildmanx 5y ago
> The worst allegation IRL I've heard about him is a tendency to give the impression that he discovered all of this stuff when he did not. Yeah, but it's worse than that. It's not just that he uses his employees' work and acts as if it's his. He takes ideas from the physics field, rephrases them in the terminology of his "physics" and then acts as if he came up with this! Example: In a podcast from last year with Sean Correll, who is one of the people in the world who knows quantum mechanics best, Wolfram gave a short summary of his theories ("our models") and then goes on to describe "branchial space" and "rurial space". In a way as if that's a new discovery and he came up with it and "it turns out" and "I recently realized" and "we've discovered" (with "we" always meaning himself). You can really hear Correll hardly being able to hold it together. This brilliant idea has been around in physics for many decades, one of its flavour being the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics which Correll has given very good and accessible popular-science presentations about. It's just nonsense that Wolfram "discovered" this. He not just recycles it but more so in a way that's not helpful. This all is not just "human". It's disingenuous.