7 ms·

As someone who is completely unrelated to the academic world, is Stephen Wolfram actually working on meaningful things? I remember reading an article where he w

As someone who is completely unrelated to the academic world, is Stephen Wolfram actually working on meaningful things? I remember reading an article where he was announcing his Physics Project which got a lot of backlash from the scientific community (at least I think that was the case). Nonetheless, every time I browse through Wolfram Alpha I am thoroughly impressed of what it can do with only Natural Language as an input.

meltyness 2y ago
They've got a YouTube with pretty robust updates. Iirc, during the lock downs, he'd do live coding and stuff.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
pvg 2y ago
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20wolfram%20derangement&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
- Tainnor 2y ago
  That's weird, why does Stephen Wolfram gets some sort of special treatment here that nobody else seems to get - including people that are subject to much more common and intense criticism (just the other day there were people bitching about Trudeau, for example - or let's take Elon Musk who is an asshat (IMHO, YMMV), is discussing that off-topic when it comes to how he manages Twitter?). The question "is Stephen Wolfram being taken seriously by the mathematics community?" seems relevant as a question to gauge whether one should spend time reading a very long article. edit: an even more relevant analogy - is Mochizuki's big ego irrelevant in a discussion about whether his proof of the abc conjecture, that nobody understands and which he refuses to explain properly, is correct?
  - pvg 2y ago
    Because it's highly repetitive and uninteresting, especially in the context of an article that is not about Wolfram. The mod exhortations are a consequence of the repetitiveness rather than some special carveout. Other things that get that repetitive get similar appeals.
    - Tainnor 2y ago
      90% of content on HN is repetitive. "Unit tests suck", "managers forcing return to the office are assholes", "Fauci lied about Covid", ... I've never seen a single of these things being called out. This is an article about a proof Stephen Wolfram claims to have discovered. Somebody further upthread already mentioned that this may not actually be true, or that the credit at least should be shared.
      - pvg 2y ago
        90% of everything is repetitive. The generic analogies method is not really that useful in discussing the specific thing you asked about. I've never seen a single of these things being called out. Happens all the time plus many repetitive things constantly get moderated away by users and moderators. The goal is a less boring messageboard, but it's aspirational rather than perfectly achievable. Edit: Ok, fine, let's do analogies. Imagine Elon Musk started writing long, interesting, researched articles about some topic, say, Chinese history. If every such article got flooded with discussions about who does and does not like Elon Musk and by how much, those would start getting modbleatings too. This is what happened except it wasn't Elon Musk but Stephen Wolfram and it wasn't Chinese History and it started about a decade ago (as you can see from the comment dates).
        Tainnor 2y ago
        Maybe the reason why people keep calling out Stephen Wolfram (and have been doing so for a decade) is because he has a history of making grandiose claims that do not always withstand closer scrutiny? I'm not claiming that Stephen Wolfram is an idiot or that nothing he writes is of value, but his ego clearly does influence his judgement so it makes no sense to me to claim that it is off-topic (in the way that, say, his love life or his opinion on abortion would be). Also this: > Happens all the time plus many repetitive things constantly get moderated away by users and moderators. The goal is a less boring messageboard, but it's aspirational rather than perfectly achievable. No sorry, I've been on HN during the pandemic and I was this close to quitting it forever. These things do not get called out in any consistent fashion for many topics. I'm pretty sure a message board for people interested in technology can handle a couple of "Wolfram sucks" comments a year better than literally hundreds of angry rants about a health advisor that doesn't even have any relevance to anyone who isn't from the US.
mr_mitm 2y ago
No. Even though Mathematica is arguably meaningful. It's very popular with some scientists, and in many aspects it's a respectable piece of software. A few years ago Sean Carroll was hosting him on his podcast. It was a bit surprising to me because Sean would never give a crackpot the time of the day, and Wolfram is borderline in crackpot territory IMHO, but not quite. He hasn't published anything meaningful in a scientific journal in a long time as far as I know.
- ericbarrett 2y ago
  I am neither a mathematician nor a scientist, so I’m unqualified to judge Wolfram’s current theories* of physics and computation. But my impression is that he remains quite rigorous in his work, even if the path he’s walking is far from the main. And of course he’s quite bombastic, which always seems to raise hackles. In fact, the article on which this discussion anchors is a great example of both. * Ref: https://www.wolframphysics.org/technical-introduction/ https://www.wolframphysics.org/technical-introduction/ The podcast with Sean Carroll that parent mentioned is also a surprisingly accessible lay introduction, definitely worth a listen.
- empath75 2y ago
  As far as I can tell, he's not a crackpot, and doesn't say anything that isn't _true_, he just wastes a lot of time going down dead ends, and relentlessly promotes himself. Like all the stuff about Rule 30 that he writes _endlessly_ about is both true and about 1/100th as interesting as he evidently thinks it is.
  - jnwatson 2y ago
    When I started reading the article, I wondered to myself, how long before he talks about cellular automata? He almost made it to the end but I guess he just can't help it.
jlouis 2y ago
Define "meaningful". A lot of mathematics is about exploration. You look at some system and try to figure out how it works. If you have a good idea (conjecture), you try proving or disproving it. The goal is to gain some understanding. Once in a while, it turns out that exploration hits the gold ore in the mine. You get something that applies to solving some problem we've had for years. As an example, algebra was considered meaningless for years. Then cryptography came along. There are other good examples. Reed-Solomon coding relies on a basis of finite fields. The problem is we don't really know when we'll strike gold in many cases. So people go exploring. It also involves humans, and they can disagree on a lot of things. Stephen seems to run into disagreements more often than the average researcher, at least historically.
- pepinator 2y ago
  Has he gained interesting understanding of anything?
j16sdiz 2y ago
He is trying to do alternative theory of science. It's like rewriting (and clarifying things here or there, putting in new analogies, etc.. not just translating) everything in Klingon, and creating new Klingon words while he is doing that. Sure this is "interesting" in academic sense. Good luck finding a journal accept paper written in Klingon.
the__alchemist 2y ago
His physics project is high risk, and probably wrong. But very worth it. He's working on things outside what the physics community is focused on. And there are incentives for them to keep working the same angles. IMO you need outsiders to spark progress in cases like this. I will continue reading his work and progress. I think, specifically, his vision is very different and radical from other things I've seen, which you'd think would lend itself to at least one currently-testable hypothesis, but I haven't seen one. It seems there may overfitting. He has a way for every major principle in physics to fit into his theory, but no new ones, or flaws in current ones; that's what worries me. I hope he continues working on it. (Unlikely he'll stop after this many decades) As a comparison, I'm more hopeful for this than String theory, and the latter has been found worthy of physicist's time, so I certainly think this is. Regarding the crackpot angle: I think that is not an appropriate label: If you look at the people that the label canonically applies to, you will find people who have no idea what they're talking about, who don't understanding the math and physics etc. That is not the case here; he knows it as well as anyone.
jebarker 2y ago
The backlash Wolfram always gets bugs me a little bit. He's certainly verbose and self-aggrandizing, but he's thinking deeply about interesting questions. There are endless blog posts from dilettantes speculating about LLMs without putting in any real leg work to test their beliefs. Wolfram's blog posts are always thought provoking and backed by some real effort to explore the topic in novel ways. As far as I can tell he's not upset by lack of recognition from the scientific community and he puts his ideas out there for criticism so it seems like he's making a valuable contribution. I don't think scientists should be pre-judged on the perceived importance of their work as that leads to group-think and a lack of exploration.

meltyness 2y ago

They've got a YouTube with pretty robust updates. Iirc, during the lock downs, he'd do live coding and stuff.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

pvg 2y ago

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20wolfram%20derangement&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Tainnor 2y ago
That's weird, why does Stephen Wolfram gets some sort of special treatment here that nobody else seems to get - including people that are subject to much more common and intense criticism (just the other day there were people bitching about Trudeau, for example - or let's take Elon Musk who is an asshat (IMHO, YMMV), is discussing that off-topic when it comes to how he manages Twitter?). The question "is Stephen Wolfram being taken seriously by the mathematics community?" seems relevant as a question to gauge whether one should spend time reading a very long article. edit: an even more relevant analogy - is Mochizuki's big ego irrelevant in a discussion about whether his proof of the abc conjecture, that nobody understands and which he refuses to explain properly, is correct?
- pvg 2y ago
  Because it's highly repetitive and uninteresting, especially in the context of an article that is not about Wolfram. The mod exhortations are a consequence of the repetitiveness rather than some special carveout. Other things that get that repetitive get similar appeals.
  - Tainnor 2y ago
    90% of content on HN is repetitive. "Unit tests suck", "managers forcing return to the office are assholes", "Fauci lied about Covid", ... I've never seen a single of these things being called out. This is an article about a proof Stephen Wolfram claims to have discovered. Somebody further upthread already mentioned that this may not actually be true, or that the credit at least should be shared.
    - pvg 2y ago
      90% of everything is repetitive. The generic analogies method is not really that useful in discussing the specific thing you asked about. I've never seen a single of these things being called out. Happens all the time plus many repetitive things constantly get moderated away by users and moderators. The goal is a less boring messageboard, but it's aspirational rather than perfectly achievable. Edit: Ok, fine, let's do analogies. Imagine Elon Musk started writing long, interesting, researched articles about some topic, say, Chinese history. If every such article got flooded with discussions about who does and does not like Elon Musk and by how much, those would start getting modbleatings too. This is what happened except it wasn't Elon Musk but Stephen Wolfram and it wasn't Chinese History and it started about a decade ago (as you can see from the comment dates).
      - Tainnor 2y ago
        Maybe the reason why people keep calling out Stephen Wolfram (and have been doing so for a decade) is because he has a history of making grandiose claims that do not always withstand closer scrutiny? I'm not claiming that Stephen Wolfram is an idiot or that nothing he writes is of value, but his ego clearly does influence his judgement so it makes no sense to me to claim that it is off-topic (in the way that, say, his love life or his opinion on abortion would be). Also this: > Happens all the time plus many repetitive things constantly get moderated away by users and moderators. The goal is a less boring messageboard, but it's aspirational rather than perfectly achievable. No sorry, I've been on HN during the pandemic and I was this close to quitting it forever. These things do not get called out in any consistent fashion for many topics. I'm pretty sure a message board for people interested in technology can handle a couple of "Wolfram sucks" comments a year better than literally hundreds of angry rants about a health advisor that doesn't even have any relevance to anyone who isn't from the US.

mr_mitm 2y ago

No. Even though Mathematica is arguably meaningful. It's very popular with some scientists, and in many aspects it's a respectable piece of software. A few years ago Sean Carroll was hosting him on his podcast. It was a bit surprising to me because Sean would never give a crackpot the time of the day, and Wolfram is borderline in crackpot territory IMHO, but not quite. He hasn't published anything meaningful in a scientific journal in a long time as far as I know.

ericbarrett 2y ago
I am neither a mathematician nor a scientist, so I’m unqualified to judge Wolfram’s current theories* of physics and computation. But my impression is that he remains quite rigorous in his work, even if the path he’s walking is far from the main. And of course he’s quite bombastic, which always seems to raise hackles. In fact, the article on which this discussion anchors is a great example of both. * Ref: https://www.wolframphysics.org/technical-introduction/ https://www.wolframphysics.org/technical-introduction/ The podcast with Sean Carroll that parent mentioned is also a surprisingly accessible lay introduction, definitely worth a listen.
empath75 2y ago
As far as I can tell, he's not a crackpot, and doesn't say anything that isn't _true_, he just wastes a lot of time going down dead ends, and relentlessly promotes himself. Like all the stuff about Rule 30 that he writes _endlessly_ about is both true and about 1/100th as interesting as he evidently thinks it is.
- jnwatson 2y ago
  When I started reading the article, I wondered to myself, how long before he talks about cellular automata? He almost made it to the end but I guess he just can't help it.

jlouis 2y ago

Define "meaningful". A lot of mathematics is about exploration. You look at some system and try to figure out how it works. If you have a good idea (conjecture), you try proving or disproving it. The goal is to gain some understanding. Once in a while, it turns out that exploration hits the gold ore in the mine. You get something that applies to solving some problem we've had for years. As an example, algebra was considered meaningless for years. Then cryptography came along. There are other good examples. Reed-Solomon coding relies on a basis of finite fields. The problem is we don't really know when we'll strike gold in many cases. So people go exploring. It also involves humans, and they can disagree on a lot of things. Stephen seems to run into disagreements more often than the average researcher, at least historically.

pepinator 2y ago
Has he gained interesting understanding of anything?

j16sdiz 2y ago

He is trying to do alternative theory of science. It's like rewriting (and clarifying things here or there, putting in new analogies, etc.. not just translating) everything in Klingon, and creating new Klingon words while he is doing that. Sure this is "interesting" in academic sense. Good luck finding a journal accept paper written in Klingon.

the__alchemist 2y ago

His physics project is high risk, and probably wrong. But very worth it. He's working on things outside what the physics community is focused on. And there are incentives for them to keep working the same angles. IMO you need outsiders to spark progress in cases like this. I will continue reading his work and progress. I think, specifically, his vision is very different and radical from other things I've seen, which you'd think would lend itself to at least one currently-testable hypothesis, but I haven't seen one. It seems there may overfitting. He has a way for every major principle in physics to fit into his theory, but no new ones, or flaws in current ones; that's what worries me. I hope he continues working on it. (Unlikely he'll stop after this many decades) As a comparison, I'm more hopeful for this than String theory, and the latter has been found worthy of physicist's time, so I certainly think this is. Regarding the crackpot angle: I think that is not an appropriate label: If you look at the people that the label canonically applies to, you will find people who have no idea what they're talking about, who don't understanding the math and physics etc. That is not the case here; he knows it as well as anyone.

jebarker 2y ago

The backlash Wolfram always gets bugs me a little bit. He's certainly verbose and self-aggrandizing, but he's thinking deeply about interesting questions. There are endless blog posts from dilettantes speculating about LLMs without putting in any real leg work to test their beliefs. Wolfram's blog posts are always thought provoking and backed by some real effort to explore the topic in novel ways. As far as I can tell he's not upset by lack of recognition from the scientific community and he puts his ideas out there for criticism so it seems like he's making a valuable contribution. I don't think scientists should be pre-judged on the perceived importance of their work as that leads to group-think and a lack of exploration.