Solomon Golomb (1932–2016)

Wolfram can continue writing these articles but as long as they aren't accompanied by actual research, he is just another critic that somehow finds ways to point back to himself - which makes it even worse. At least even the self-actualized critics realize that unless they are seriously involved, they should have a bit of humble pie to avoid making their audience even more turned off.

I love Mathematica, I like the idea of cellular automata. But man, there are no excuses for what Wolfram does in every blog post. Shameless.

Not carefully enough. "Or the meds are working" was a nasty cheap shot and more than enough reason to flag your comment.

I've had to ask you repeatedly to stop posting uncivil comments to Hacker News. Perhaps your experience moderating huge forums has blinded you to the differences between those and this one, but please follow the rules here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

A Pied Piper of Hamelin in Modern Dress

For me there is nothing new about Wolfram's primary ideas. I have toyed with such notions for a quarter of a century, and so have a great many other people. Such ideas have power, but it is a very different question whether they have physical plausibility at the most fundamental level, and a necessity that goes beyond redundancy in offering more than do scores of other competing 'explanations' of the physical world, at the tiniest, intermediate, and largest scales.

A passage in Montaigne's Essays (book One, Chapter 50: "On Democritus and Heraclitus") is pertinent: "Things in themselves perhaps have their own weights, measures, and states; but inwardly, when they enter into us, the mind cuts them to its own conceptions."

I think the mind of Wolfram cuts them short! Moreover, I feel that, for the moment at least, the attractions of cellular automata - like a carnival that snags eye, ear, and leg through its tricks, bustle, and strangeness - are meretricious.

But my greatest objection to cellular automata lies in my belief that little of what is thought essential to them is, and what is is not peculiar to them. In short, they are merely little mirrors of a much greater idea, or a deeper and more comprehensive truth; one which, to begin with, is neither cellular nor automatic, and which is discrete (or 'binary') only as a process of transformation, when it is discrete at all.

As a neuroscientist, I have seen, over 30 years, not dissimilar errors - errors, for example, of misplaced emphasis, extrinsic formalization, and naively truncated research into physical detail and parallel mechanisms - plague abortive theories of the brain.

..................

I am anxious that this excessively clever fellow not be allowed to become, through an initial absence of penetrating criticism of his ideas, and his megalomanical and almost autistic obsessions, another Pied Piper of Hamelin, in an age which is already blurring the distinction between the real (and natural) and the artificial (and fanciful), to a degree that could soon become pathological.

Incidentally, in Browning's homonymous poem, which he wrote in 1824, the Pied Piper of Hamelin "is a musician who, according to an old German legend, came, in 1284, fantastically dressed, to Hamelin in Prussia, and offered for a sum of money to rid Hamelin of its rats. He charmed the rats by his piping into the river Weser, where they drowned." So at first the Piper was a heroic figure.

Later, however, "as the reward was withheld, he in revenge by his magic piping drew the one hundred and thirty children of the town to a cavern in a hill, which closed after them forever."

In real life, most heroes ARE piebald figures. At bottom, I find Wolfram's youthful but embarrassingly perseverative love affair with cellular automata deeply amusing:

Two decades ago, to caution the ardor of a friend of mine, Prof. Edward Fredkin - whose pioneering work upon, and advocacy of, cellular automata, in fact later led to Wolfram's own bewitchment - I constructed an instructive list of "250 Single Things People Have Tried To Reduce All of Nature To".

Some of the more conventional rival candidates have been matter, mass, energy, time, space, number or mathematics, points, lines, spirit, mind, ideas, God, machines, motion, vortices, nothing, and life (biology), apart from the 233 OTHER 'sole fundamental entities' I was able to recall on the spur of a moment - while confronting a Plenum of ulterior possibilities.

The monoideistic advocates of these '1-substance' metaphysics (or cosmologies) were often just as bright, confident, and fanatical as their latest fashionable successor, or avatar, S. Wolfram.

The latter's faith in his own uniqueness, at least, is anything BUT unique!

Source: https://www.amazon.com/gp/review/R1NCVD80I7LEX2

yes it was meant to be a comedy. The Professor Heinrich von Hexenhammer character is a kind of loving homage to Mad Scientists in general. and to the most famous (or at least the most eccentric) physicists and mathematicians. Feynman meets Erdos meets Einstein meets Wolfram etc. except a little more fun and creative for entertainment value. :-P

I respect Wolfram's talents and accomplishments (esp Mathematica), but every time I come across artifacts of his personality quirks again, like in this Golomb post above, it does make me remember all the stereotypical anti-patterns of the Mad Scientist.