Stephen Wolfram's History of Not Playing Well with Others | Hacker News Reader

Stephen Wolfram's History of Not Playing Well with Others

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30 pointsjorgenveisdal10 comments

The interview, discussion, involving Eric Weinstein and Wolfram was insightful in regards to how Wolfram dismisses and treats others.

"Stephen Wolfram & Eric Weinstein: The Nature of Mathematical Reality" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OI0AZ4Y4Ip4

I think Stephen was pretty patient here. Weinstein went off on a tangent and moved away from the conversation into the politics of it. Wolfram was more focused on the science. Now the problem is that nobody else is studying the same thing in the same way... Wolfram is the only one doing the Science. So Wolfram's issue is that nobody is running CAs to study the same phenomena so the discussions are kinda of mute.

If like to turn it around and ask for examples of wildly people who DO okay well with others.

Andrew Ng in the field of machine learning - builds on top of and within the current scientific culture - credits others - humble despite huge contributions

Fittingly, the article is all about Feynman’s comments on Wolfram. Feynman was himself insufferable in many ways, but also quite capable of playing well with others, being one of the archetypal examples of good teaching

Paul Erdős

https://medium.com/cantors-paradise/the-mathematical-nomad-p...

Over the years, Erdős accrued as much fame for his personality as he did for his mathematics. Described by his biographer Paul Hoffman as “probably the most eccentric mathematician in the world”, famously Erdős developed his only language to accompany his unique nomadic lifestyle, referring to himself as a PGOM, LD, AD, LD, CD, a “poor great old man, living dead, archaeological discovery, legally dead, counts dead”. Famously, possessions meant little Erdős, who carried most of his belongings in “two half-full suitcases” as he travelled from institution to institution, living with friends and colleagues.

Von Neumann generally had a reputation for being jovial and humorous and good company, and he was without a doubt one of the brightest people of the last century. Edward Teller remarked: "von Neumann would carry on a conversation with my 3-year-old son, and the two of them would talk as equals, and I sometimes wondered if he used the same principle when he talked to the rest of us"

Wolfram is underrated I think. He's got a small army working on CA and the implications. He's also been working on CA for a long time! I believe that CA are interesting and underrated. Just as we underestimated neural networks and I think CA have fallen into a similar categorization. CAs are an array of cells (that are finite state machines) whose neighbors determine it's output. Sounds similar to a deep neural network to me!

To expand on this, you have say the elementary subparticles that interact and at some point form an electrons, protons and neutrons. Those particles then follow another set of rules (or maybe the same set) in some way to produce atoms.. and so and and so forth.

Obligatory: https://outline.com/RfpK9k

> "You won't enjoy administrating people because you won't succeed in it. You don't understand "ordinary people". To you they are "stupid fools"--so you will not tolerate them or treat their foibles with tolerance or patience--but will drive yourself wild (or they will drive you wild) trying to deal with them in an effective way.Find a way to do you own research with as little contact with non-technical people as possible"

Feynman's gift really was understanding things and then being able to communication the concept to people in a succinct and understandable way. This is a rare example of peer-to-peer advice where he understood his own foible.

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