Hacker News Reader

Comment by teh_g | Hacker News Reader

The phrase 'a new kind of science' is a huge red flag, but apart from this I don't think I can evaluate what I'm reading. Does the article make any sense? Does it at least hint at a useful direction? Or is this a case of someone holding a hammer (the language) and seeing everything as a nail (how the universe works)?

View on HN

It doesn't pass the smell test. I'll be very diplomatic and say this to our high school and undergrad readers: Mathematica is a lovely program, but working for this man on this project will not do good things for your scientific career.

Among the many many many red flags, Wolfram claims to have discovered that complexity can emerge from simple rules in the early 80's. This is a full decade after P. W. Anderson's seminal paper [More is Different](https://science.sciencemag.org/content/177/4047/393).

In fact, if you haven't RTFA yet, save your time and just read the original, rigorous, less self-aggrandizing paper: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/177/4047/393

> Among the many many many red flags, Wolfram claims to have discovered that complexity can emerge from simple rules in the early 80's

Total red flag. His obsession with this - though - does not seem ill placed. As far as smell tests go, I think this thread is worth pulling.

I am also put off by his self-obsession, but it is also true that I discovered how complexity can emerge from simple rules in the 90's. Like wolfram, I was not first, but I did discover it.

I can’t seem to access more than the cover page of that paper.

Do I need a journal membership?

Found a pdf linked from his Wikipedia page

http://robotics.cs.tamu.edu/dshell/cs689/papers/anderson72mo...

Though I must admit I don’t really understand it. I was expecting automata to be referenced somewhere.

I enjoyed A New Kind of Science, though I feel like it would have been a much shorter book if Wolfram included less self-aggrandizing.

It's the paper that established "emergent phenomena" as an interesting and viable field of inquiry. When you understand it, it changes the way you think about the world.

It's more fundamental than automata papers, so of course it doesn't address automata, but automata papers should reference it.

"A New Kind of Science proposed ideas that were not new, were not kind, and were not science. Discuss."

Reply on news.ycombinator.com