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Another good opportunity to re-post this critique of "A New Kind of Science" by Cosma Shalizi. It's not kind. http://vserver1.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~crshalizi/rev

• bsaul 13y ago
  Just read your comment after posting mine. I guess yours answers mine in a way :))))
• taliesinb 13y ago
  An entertaining read, but as an enthusiast of NKS-style science (and ohmygod bias! someone at Wolfram Research) I don't think the review is all that intellectually substantive: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3974503 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3974503
  • jacobolus 13y ago
    “I happen to think that most of it is written in simple, straightforward, unpretentious language” Hahahaha. That’s the funniest thing I’ve read someone write about Wolfram. The comparison to Darwin is also pretty amusing. Darwin’s book is amazing because it spends most of its effort showing us evidence, so we can draw our own conclusions guided by an overwhelming pile of careful data and research, plus a bit of sharp analysis. By contrast, Wolfram’s book spends most of its effort telling us how important it (and he) is, on unremarkable and tediously repetitive evidence/analysis. edit: note the Oxford American Dictionary’s definition of pretentious: “attempting to impress by affecting greater importance, talent, culture, etc., than is actually possessed”. For example count the number of things named “Wolfram” in this most recent blog post, or count the hyperbolic adjectives and adverbs: “amazing”, “whole different level”, “profoundly important”, “incredibly useful”, “breathtaking”, “exciting”, “spectacular”, “sophisticated”, “universally accessible”, “new kind of language”, “cover[ing] all forms of computation”, “by far the largest ever”, “immense”, “spectacularly productive”, “remarkable”, “immense”, “completely general and uniform”, “immense”, can’t-do-it-justice, “immediately meaningful”, “absolutely practical, and spectacular”, “amazing”, “never imagined before”, “incredibly fertile”, “disorienting”, uniquely converging, “universal”, incredibly powerful, “instant”, “absurdly”, “seamless”, “dauntingly long”, “widely accessible”, “wonderful”, “exciting”, “with full semantic fidelity”, “instantly programmable”, “a kind of global brain”, “convenient”, “efficient”, “a new level of computation”, “our most important technology project yet”, “incredibly exciting”. If you took out all the adjectives, and all the instances of “Wolfram”, there’d be pretty much nothing left. ;) [NKS is thankfully not quite this bad on a sentence-by-sentence level. But then it has 1000 pages to repeatedly tell us how revolutionary and brilliant it is.]
    • taliesinb 13y ago
      Objectively, it avoids jargon and florid prose (apart from some rather repetitive language). It means a child could read it, and perhaps that makes it boring to read. Perhaps you found the actual experiments he did boring, or tedious. I think they're pretty cool, and I've now done my fair share of them, and taught other people how to do them. The axiom systems, graph automata, constraint satisfaction, causal graph stuff, and entropy stuff is all cool. And the notes are a goldmine reference. Also, this is probably the least important of the 8 specific claims of Shalizi's that I rebut. But hey. edit: because we seem to be using edits to converse. For 25 years, Wolfram has been the company brand, and people roughly know what it is -- how can we NOT prefix our products with the word Wolfram? Also, did you just call a marketing-type pre-announcement hyperbolic? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BETSuT2RNLs http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BETSuT2RNLs