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Comment by NelsonMinar | Hacker News Reader

Oh Wolfram, never change. Even in a very charming and personal obituary about someone he obviously admires, Wolfram's ego shines through. As does his bizarre claim to ownership of all of complexity theory. No one cares that Gell-Mann left you out of the index of his book, Stephen.

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Please don't take yet another HN thread into yet another repetition of this. It's not that it's wrong. It's that that lemon was squeezed dry years ago, the rind is hard as rock, and the spectacle of HN users gnawing on it is unseemly. It's also off topic. As is usually the case with his writing, there are genuinely interesting things to react to here.

If Wolfram's tic is a thing, the strange way the internet crystallizes on it is also a thing. In fact, it's a mirror image of the thing. Let's resist recreating that here.

https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

> Wolfram's self tic is a thing, but the strange way that internet reactions crystallize on it is also a thing. In fact, it's a mirror image of the same thing.

This is the Wolfram effect: when one person's unusually conspicuous status-seeking behaviour in turn triggers the status preoccupations of a large number of people who usually aren't so bad about it themselves.

> It's that that lemon was squeezed dry years ago, and now the rind is hard as rock, and the spectacle of HN users competing to gnaw on it is unseemly.

Why can’t the other online communities I’m a part of be run by moderators who have a way with words like you do?

100x this. I've met Stephen and was like this in person.

Even the essay (ostensibly an obituary for a physics luminary!) is full of humblebrags as he notes his personal contributions and wunderkind status growing up. Strange, because if anyone should be confident in their own skin, a famous billionaire physicist should fit the bill...

It's amusing how Wolfram don't get why his friends politely shy off from discussing his theories with him and don't seem to understand. Gell-Mann's reaction to A New Kind of Science is telling.

Wolfram can squeeze just few interesting and original things in his book but he handwaves it as something magnificent and revolutionary. The most striking feature of the book is the extremely high quality of printing, layout and illustrations. He created monument for himself.

Indeed! And you Stephen, are also very bad at reading people :)

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