Comment by tomxor | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tomxor | Hacker News Reader

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> Tilting his (extremely interesting) book “A New Kind of Science” and saying that it would take a place next to Chemistry and Physics as a discipline is one such example.

There are a couple transcribed lectures of his on amazon, one of them "Computation and the Future of the Human Condition", they are short and deep and I find them very interesting, I read them maybe a couple years ago... somehow within that little context I was so entranced by the underlying concepts and material which just clicked with me, that this aspect of Wolfram's personality completely escaped me... My partner tried to read them and immediately picked up on it, now identified - I find everything I read from him slightly tainted. I've yet to pluck up the courage to read NKS, i'm worried I will not be able to get through it.

It's a shame because I believe some of the work he has produced and ideas he has explored to be a truly fundamental and under-explored part of nature, hopefully enough of us will appreciate that without letting his personality get in the way.

NKS has a lot of very interesting bits of information, ideas and experiments. Some of it is truly novel. At least, I think some are truly novel, because there are also quite a few ideas that aren't novel, but he doesn't mention that fact or cite anyone. And he kind of speaks down about biology and other sciences, about things they are supposedly not researching, except they do.

It would have been a much nicer book if he had connected his ideas in universality, fundamental computing, math, physics and biology, to the rest of those fields. He mentions many of these connections/theories, but does not cite them or even attribute them to their respective fields of science.

Otherwise if you can read past all that, it's super interesting. It just leaves me with the inclination that, if I want to find out more about these new subjects, I'd be best of starting out looking for information not by Wolfram, if only just to get a good view/idea of the field right now, since Wolfram isn't citing anyone, but others probably are.

Are you including the extensive notes in the book when you claim that he doesn't mention any connections nor cite any existing research? I think he wrote the main book much like a textbook, i.e. a straightforward presentation of the ideas, and not like a typical academic publication. IIRC, the extensive notes do mention many connections and include a lot of citations.

The entire book is available online for free. Here's the first section of the notes:

- [Note (a) for An Outline of Basic Ideas: A New Kind of Science | Online by Stephen Wolfram [Page 859]](https://www.wolframscience.com/nks/notes-1-1--mathematics-in...)

... but, after looking at some more sections of the notes, I think now I remembered very much incorrectly – there are in fact very few citations or specific references. There are, in my opinion, very many connections noted tho.

Also from the notes:

- [Clarity and modesty – Note (e) for General Notes: A New Kind of Science | Online by Stephen Wolfram [Page 849]](https://www.wolframscience.com/nks/notes-0-1--clarity-and-mo...)

- [Citations and references – Note (d) for General Notes: A New Kind of Science | Online by Stephen Wolfram [Page 850]](https://www.wolframscience.com/nks/notes-0-1--citations-and-...)

He hints to as much in the book itself...

https://www.wolframscience.com/nks/notes-0-1--citations-and-...

In developing the ideas described in this book I have looked at many thousands of books, papers and websites—and have interacted with hundreds of people (see page xiii). But rather than trying to give a huge list of specific references, I have instead included in these notes historical information tracing key contributions. From the names of concepts and people that I mention, it is straightforward to do web or database searches that give a vastly more complete picture of available references than could possibly fit in a book of manageable size—or than could be created correctly without immense scholarship. Note that while most current works of science tend to refer mainly just to very recent material, this book often refers to material that is centuries or even millennia old—in some ways more in the tradition of fields like philosophy.

If you can overlook his immodesty, or choose to ignore it, I think you might enjoy reading NKS. It's very interesting, even if you don't agree that he deserves all of the accolades he claims he's owed.

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