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wow. this article is horribly biased. i went to a lecture wolfram gave at my university when he was touring for NKS. he would answer a question from a CS pro
by jpendry 18y ago
wow. this article is horribly biased.
i went to a lecture wolfram gave at my university when he was touring for NKS. he would answer a question from a CS professor until he went over the CS professor's head, then a biologist until he went over his head, then a physicist until he went over her head. flippantly passing off that level of genius by calling him "the lovable George Costanza of the mathematics community" says something. i understand wolfram has a huge ego, but that does not belittle his accomplishments.
just because your work "ruffled some feathers in the scientific community" currently, does not mean that it won't be considered ground breaking in 100 years. to be clear, i'm referring to how scientists become attached to their life's work and thus biased, as opposed to anything specific to wolfram or NKS and cellular automata.
finally, Alpha will be judged when it comes out. if it's worthwhile great, if not fine, but there's not much point in trying to persuade people of something before it is out.
- Angostura 18y agoDid he actually go over their heads? Or did he just become too hard to follow?
- jpendry 18y agofair enough, i didn't word that well. what i was trying to convey was simply that he was holding conversations with computer scientists, biologists, and physicists each in their respective languages, which to me is pretty impressive.
- andreyf 18y agoI used to feel exactly this way about Wolfram until I actually talked to some of my professors about him... they pointed out that this framing is unique to student's experience - where some of our peers really do know more than others. But most professors have been passionately studying their fields full-time for longer than you've been alive (some, probably longer than the two of us, combined)... at that point, not being able to communicate is a matter of misusing or misunderstanding jargon, not of "knowing more" than someone else or "going over their head". As brilliant as he is, it seems Wolfram is rather guilty of disregarding a lot of the work already done in the fields he works in - coming up with his own jargon for parallel (published) ideas, and hyping up his unreleased work instead of publishing and just letting it speak for itself (like alpha). Research is more about advancing the understanding of science in the community than it is about doing something brilliant on your own (because as brilliant as it is, if one can't communicate it, it'll die with the individual), and so Wolfram deserves quite a lot more criticism than he gets.