Here's a critique I wrote a few months ago about Shalizi's review: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3973173 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3973173 You

Here's a critique I wrote a few months ago about Shalizi's review: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3973173 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3973173 You know, when I was a teenager I was very excited about Stephen's book. Then I found and read Shalizi's review, and reluctantly changed my mind. At the time I didn't have enough background knowledge or intellectual confidence to really see it for what it is, which is a kind of weird character assassination masquerading as a scientific critique (it is interesting to note that Shalizi's PhD advisor and Stephen go way back). Much later, after some pure math and a bit of industry, I actually met Wolfram, talked to him at length, did some science in the NKS style, and in fact I found the whole thing so stimulating (and the other people so cool) that I applied for a job at Wolfram Research, where is where I now work. In fact, at this exact moment, I'm acting as an instructor at the Wolfram science summer school, supervising students around the world ranging from gifted high-school to PhD. It's a lot of fun. NKS -- both the book and the methodology -- isn't perfect, and hasn't delivered on some of its promises. However, I think it does represent a really cool network of ideas and insights, if you take the trouble to understand them, especially in their historical context. Many of them familiar, of course, but Wolfram puts them in a new light and unifies various ideas. And I think in the next few decades it will really come into its own, when we get memristor arrays that need to be programmed, universal constructors that need simple rules to operate, algorithmic drugs that have to be both simple and effective, and so on. "Watch this space", etc.