I agree with a lot of the sentiments here about Wolfram's ego. Aside from all that, I found his blog post interesting. The below items I found the most intere

I agree with a lot of the sentiments here about Wolfram's ego. Aside from all that, I found his blog post interesting. The below items I found the most interesting (note: I haven't read NKS, and I'm aware of the criticisms, but his insistence on the significance of it is intriguing nonetheless): ----- > Was it worth spending more than $10 billion to find this out? I definitely think so. Now, what’s actually come out is perhaps not the most exciting thing that could have come out. But there’s absolutely no way one could have been sure of this outcome in advance. > Perhaps I’m too used to the modern technology industry where billions of dollars get spent on corporate activities and transactions all the time. But to me spending only $10 billion to get this far in investigating the basic theory of physics seems like quite a bargain. > I think it could be justified almost just for the self-esteem of our species: that despite all our specific issues, we’re continuing a path we’ve been on for hundreds of years, systematically making progress in understanding how our universe works. And somehow there’s something ennobling about seeing what’s effectively a worldwide collaboration of people working together in this direction. > That in fact there’s no reason all the richness we see in our universe couldn’t arise from some underlying rule—some underlying theory—that’s even quite simple. There are all sorts of things to say about what that rule might be like, and how one might find it. But what’s important here is that if the rule is indeed simple, then on fundamental grounds one shouldn’t in principle need to know too much information to nail down what it is. But what I suspect is that from the experimental results we have, we already know much more than enough to determine what the correct ultimate theory is—assuming that the theory is indeed simple.