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Comment by DantesKite | Hacker News Reader

Man these are some low-quality comments. You’d think Wolfram was torturing gerbils or something.

I don’t mind criticisms of my favorite thinkers. I enjoy watching someone being taken to task in the battle of ideas so to speak, but apparently something about Wolfram just rubs people the wrong way, because they seem to lose the ability to make cogent arguments after reading him. As a simple example of what a healthy discussion could look like: Wolfram didn’t believe black holes were real for the longest time, or at least, had some skepticism about that. One could’ve had a reasonable debate, pointing out where he may have erred (up until he changed his mind). Like a proper scientist does.

But vilifying him for wanting to create a research institute is absurd. I have never seen such petty anger at the idea of doing more scientific research.

He’s done a fantastic job creating a new model for understanding reality, some of which suggest interesting physical structures underlying our Universe. He’s changed my understanding of evolution completely with his insights on computational irreducibility and complexity.

And he’s laying the groundwork for understanding the meta-rules that undergird not just our Universe, but all possible Universes. It’s fantastic stuff.

The great Richard Feynman himself frequently collaborated with Wolfram and talked about Rule 30, the foundational insight that spurred Wolfram to create a New Kind of Science. Calling him delusional or a fraud is Wittengtein’s Ruler in action: It says far more about you than it does about him.

I always click on a Wolfram thread, and occasionally you do get interesting insights and even informed disagreements, but this is just disgraceful to be honest.

There’s true evil in the world. Truly despicable sins. Calibrate your outrage towards that.

If you disagree with Wolfram, read his work, steelman it, and show where it’s wrong in a way worthy of scientific skepticism and empiricism.

Otherwise you’re worse than what you think he is.

View on HN

My problem with Wolfram is that every time I hear him talk or read him, I end up spending 15-20 minutes and come out the other end confused.

I studied physics in my undergrad, I have a graduate degree in math, I've shipped large features on planet-scale systems. I'm no genius, certainly nowhere close to Dr. Wolfram, but I don't think I'm far from your average HN reader in reading comprehension ability.

I've read 35 paragraphs in a post about founding a research institute and I don't know what was said there that couldn't have been conveyed in two or three paragraphs instead.

It is my default opinion that people who use lot word when few word do trick do so to cover up the fact that they have very little content of actual value. That might not be the case with Wolfram, who has quite a track record, but to me the burden of proof is still on him.

Try reading his one year update instead[1]

"But now this deflection is not in physical space but in branchial space. The fundamental underlying mathematical structure is the same in both cases. But the interpretation in terms of traditional physics is different. And in what to me is a singularly beautiful result of our models it turns out that what gives the Einstein equations in physical space gives the Feynman path integral in branchial space. Or in other words, quantum mechanics is the same as general relativity, except in branchial space rather than physical space."

Most of this stuff is mind-bending to me the same way statistical quantum mechanics, information theory or higher-dimensional physics are. But I always come away from reading about it with a feeling of "there could be something here, and I'm glad someone is exploring it further"

https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2021/04/the-wolfram-phys...

It sure sounds promising. Lots of things do. This is why we have peer review and standard publishing practices.

This idea never sat right with me. Only one of Einsteins paper's went through the now standard practice, and he was upset that it did.

Peer review is useful, but let's not pretend it's the only way forward for a theory of everything. It's a very, very modern practice. We did a lot of great physics before it existed.

Nearly everything wolfram does is available to anyone who is interested (including code!).

And just to add on top of this - there is to the best of my knowledge little if any research that shows that the current practice of publication and peer review is actually effective at weeding out bad science. The current replication crisis in psychology and other fields would suggest that it's actually quite bad at it. For a community that is supposed to be based on the ideal of experimentation and falsifiability, scientists are surprisingly willing to just accept at face value, that the current process is sound, without actually scrutinizing this hypothesis.

> The current replication crisis in psychology and other fields would suggest that it's actually quite bad at it.

Not saying that you're necessarily wrong but be careful not to compare apples to oranges: There is a huge difference between fields like math & physics on the one hand and fields like psychology on the other.

Definitely, but both use peer review.

But peer review works completely differently in math & physics than in psychology. In math and (theoretical) physics, practically all results (claims) can in principle be reproduced (tested) by other people. Sure reviewers are usually short on time and won't verify every single detail but at the same time – being experts in their fields – they tend to be extremely good at distinguishing the "easy" arguments from more intricate ones and can usually come up with rough arguments as to why (or why not) a given new result makes sense in light of existing results & literature.

I don't think it is accurate to use problems in the field of psychology to indict peer review in math or physics.

The reviewer was Tolman (or Robertson I think Tolman), and it was arguably one of his most important ones.

It's not about peer review, it's about making predictions. Theories that make predictions that come out true are good ("correct"). Peer review is a poor substitute.

Peer review is just a heuristic people use to spend time more efficiently: You know that if a paper is peer reviewed, it's more likely to be worthwhile spending time actively engaging with it than if it weren't.

But that's only statistical - if you want to quickly screen thousands of research papers and the only signal you have is peer review and maybe citation graph - and doesn't apply to specific papers or the research program of a specific person.

Thank you for posting this - I read the article too and was left feeling somewhat "dumb" and confused by all the scientific and market speak babble thrown in there. I was doubting my own intelligence for a bit there ... :)

He writes in a very marketing-informed way.

He clearly point to (his) previous work, clearly and repeatedly remembers the reader how amazing is the things he is trying to do, and shameless link (both in text and via hiperlinks) to his own enterprises and current initiatives.

I suppose this is some kind of mental template he uses when writing (think about someone writing a paper: the forma and hidden rules, the necessary and obligatory parts).

Of course I cannot vouch for his science but heck! the man is spending his own money, not trying to sell you anything (other than Mathematica) and has an impressive track record since he was a kid! Let’s give him some space to do his things.

> He writes in a very marketing-informed way.

I'm going to borrow this phrase. I always struggle with dismissing BS without being abrasive.

Wolfram deserves accolades for Mathematica. It's a magnificent achievement and he's kept his company alive and thriving and people use Wolfram (the company) tools everyday to do productive stuff.

BUT... Wolfram (the man) is very much an outsider when it comes to physics. This started 20 years ago when he published a "A New Kind of Science". It was a lengthy but ultimately not useful exploration of cellular automata (some of the fractal-like graphics were pretty cool at the time, but that's about it). Even that was perfectly fine, a rich guy with a vanity hobby doing some weird but interesting stuff, so what?

But lately he's really doubled down on the "theory of everything" stuff with his "hypergraph" idea. To be honest, it IS a bit cringe-worthy. To call this pursuit "The Fundamental Theory of Physics"... geezus, that takes a level of ego that makes one's mouth drop.

But you know what, it's still fine. It's not like he is applying for grants and competing with other worthwhile science for funding. His "staff" for this endeavor are his paid employees. AFAIK, he has no collaborators in academia (and no, multi-hour Twitch streams where he firehoses PHD level math jargon to the general public DON'T COUNT as collaboration).

Now he wants to launch an institute? Still fine by me as long as the funding it comes out of Wolfram's pocket and doesn't detract from more worthwhile non-vanity research.

I suppose you are not familiar with his early career as a physicist, publishing in the field since he was 15 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Wolfram#Early_career

That doesn’t tell us much about the quality of the work under discussion.

No. But I'm replying to the OP argument that his physics career began with the book.

No, I was trying to say that the book was when he first demonstrated that he was very much an outsider. Even by then he had been out of academia for a long time, busy building his company and making his fortune.

That was 40+ years ago.

It may or may not be correct, but to get hung up on the ego and the name on the paper is a big mistake. Read the ideas. Maybe they're too weird to understand. But don't condemn them because where they came from. Find the flaws and do it scientifically.

There are only so many hours in a day. If we spend all of them thoroughly debunking known quacks nothing else will ever get done.

Stephen Wolfram hasn’t yet achieved full quack status where it’s best to dismiss him out of hand, but he has been moving in that direction for some time.

It's an interesting idea but it's still very nascent and speculative.

In these last couple of years, Wolfram has been talking about a "universe building kit". He posits that universes (including our own universe) and it's time evolution can be described by relatively simple "hypergraph" that modifies itself and that fully describes physical laws including the concepts that would unify general relativity and quantum mechanics. His thinking is that we just have to somehow "find" that hypergraph and we'll know everything all the way back to "t=0".

Not surprisingly, the physics community doesn't seem interested in dropping whatever they're doing and pursuing this. But like I said, it's OK. The only gripe I would have is if he started trying to getting funding from sources which other scientific researchers use now. The concern is that he would just roll out his obscurantist papers and talks and convince people with the purse-strings to fork over money for this idea that COULD HAVE GONE towards more legitimate pursuits. As it is now, high-energy physics already gets what many consider to be "too much" funding and it's been rather fruitful. This hypergraph stuff... meh.

Would you say Wolfram provides low epistemic legibility[] ?

[] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30802349

I really appreciated the concept of "epistemic legibility" as a virtue. Arguments are most valuable when they are clear and concise. It makes them easier to refute if wrong and easier to extend/apply if correct.

As far as I know, the phrase was coined here: https://acesounderglass.com/2022/02/07/epistemic-legibility/

> Richard Feynman himself frequently collaborated with Wolfram

By way of a historical note relevant to the current topic, there was a funny exchange between Wolfram and Feynman recorded in the collection of Feynman's letters edited by his daughter. Wolfram started a letter with "Dear Feynman", I imagine because English public school boys don't use first names that much, and floated the idea of starting a scientific institute. Feynman replied in a letter starting "Dear Wolfram" that Wolfram was unlikely to succeed in any leadership capacity because he regards normal people as "stupid fools", and therefore should stick to academic work. Feynman's daughter added the editorial comment that Feynman was disproved by Wolfram's subsequent entrepreneurial success.

The letters can be found here:

https://www.cantorsparadise.com/richard-feynmans-advice-to-a...

Also worth reading Feyman's recommendation letter at the bottom

What the letter from Feynman to Wolfram^ actually said was:

> You say you want to create your own environment - but you will not be doing that: you will create (perhaps!) an environment that you might like to work in - but you will not be working in this environment - you will be administrating it - and the administration environment is not what you seek - is it? 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.

I've never worked for SW but judging by e.g. the employee comments for WR on Glassdoor^, this seems pretty on-the-nose to me.

^ https://www.cantorsparadise.com/richard-feynmans-advice-to-a...

^ https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Wolfram-Research-Reviews-E...

I've talked with Wolfram a couple of times about New Kind of Science, in 5-10 minute chunks, at various points in its evolution, spanning 20 years. I listened as he did the same with others.

With a couple of exceptions, none of these people were over 0.1 on Wolfram scale when it comes to physics or even math, but I never got the impression that he thought that any of us were stupid fools.

If anything, he seemed overeager to help us understand and even seemed interested in what we thought.

And no, he doesn't have the social skills to fake this. (He also didn't have any incentive to do so in that context.)

He may be more dismissive of folks who are above 0.7 Wolfram. (He wasn't dismissive of the 0.5 Wolfram I know, even though that person was somewhat dismissive of him.)

I'm also surprised by the extreme negativity. This work is something that nerds like me should be interested in! It's basically a generalisation of physics: So far physics was assuming a mathematical foundation for the universe. It makes perfect sense to ask if it can be generalised and look for a procedural foundation. It's shocking to me that only Wolfram's company is pursuing such a logical alternative. And in my opinion his multiway graph approach is an elegant generalisation of what a procedural foundation could be like by trying to maximally reduce the assumptions made in the basic rule set (it's not a cellular automaton, even though everyone seems to be assuming it is)

I agree that Wolfram gets a lot of unnecessary hate by people online and the scientific community and that Wolfram has a lot of interesting things to say but I also see why the community at large bashes on him so regularly. Wolfram is arrogant, self centered and self congratulatory. I often find that I have to really work to find the content in what Wolfram says after wading through what sounds like marketing. I'm often wondering why Wolfram just doesn't talk about the research or ideas he's trying to push instead of trying to tell me why I need to know it's really important.

To me, Wolfram treats science and discovery as a kind of business opportunity while pretending it's for the greater good. Open source, peer review, transparency, etc. all give way to his "strong man" personality.

Not to fall afoul of Wittgenstein's ruler, I think Wolfram got right the principle of Turing Machine Equivalence. The idea that Turing machine completeness is the norm, rather than the exception, is something that I think people at large don't really understand or accept (and which I think is correct and profound). I will point out that there's work to be done here in trying to prove TME for other 1D cellular automata, not just rule 110, to further cement this point in these toy systems.

A fundamental thing that I think Wolfram got wrong is that something fundamentally new needs to supplant scientific discovery and mathematics. Often times discrete systems turn into continuous systems, and vice versa, so throwing out everything and starting over seems counterproductive. I'm in favor of bringing computational tools, both symbolic and numerical, in helping discovery but this is already happening. I also don't understand how this can be done if scientific discovery and tooling isn't democratized in the way that open source focuses on.

I think framing Wolfram solely in terms of his marketing for Mathematica and his ANKoS book is overly reductive but I also think it perverts his research, the way he presents his research and explains a lot of why people can come away with that feeling that he's a con artist.

> Wolfram is arrogant, self centered and self congratulatory

Not making a comparison in terms of contributions to science. But the same could be said about Newton and a host of other great (mostly) men of history.

One of the most useful emotional filters I've learned to drop is the predisposition against zealous enthusiasm. Automatically dismissing it is as reductive as immediately submitting to it.

That's absolutely fair. We forgive and/or forget that arrogance when the contribution is significant.

I will push back a bit and say that the arrogance of current and past scientists and engineers mostly comes across in dealing with them personally and, for the most part, they try to put their egos to the side to better communicate their ideas. Wolfram puts his ego front and center in his more recent scientific communications (the CA collected papers didn't have this problem, as far as I can remember). It's been a while since I looked at ANKoS but, as I remember, the scientific ideas are intertwined with his editorializing. The editorializing gets in the way of understanding what actual fundamental scientific ideas he's trying to push forward.

> they try to put their egos to the side to better communicate their ideas

Could this be a function of the eras' SNRs? When the principal mode of public and scientific discourse was curated print media and letters, one needed only so much pomp to decide you could deduce something grand about the world, and then upon having deduced it, convince your peers that you had in fact done so. In our modern era, to attract people and funding and attention, something more extreme may be needed. (Very, very loose hypothesis. It's probably just a personality thing.)

He is not just "creating a research institute". He basically claims to have solved all of science.

Case in point: Yesterday he streamed a "History of Science and Technology Q&A" session. [1] Is it about the history of science and technology? No! It's a sales pitch for his new institute! As if he is the singularity that all of science and technology have culminated in. So obviously when talking about history of science and technology all you need to talk about is cellular automata and Stephen Wolfram's role in it.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mEMFxPWzVU8

Watch it, it's enlightening.

>Stephen Wolfram hosts a live and unscripted Ask Me Anything about the history of science and technology for all ages.

I dont get why people wanna frame wolfram so badly as a negative arrogant actor.

He is answering viewer questions, his subscriber audience is ofcourse asking certain wolfram physics related questions. Timestamps: 00:00 Start stream 1:49 SW begins talking and introduces Wolfram Institute 22:58 Do you have a sense of the skills that an incoming fellow to the Wolfram Institute will have? What would effective preparation for Institute-type work be? 29:23 What is the emerald functionality that was mentioned for biological/cellular computational explorations? 32:55 and what about around the world overseas and in other countries? 33:05 You get some wonderful things out of pursuing science just for the sake of it. There are pejorative terms for this, like 'fishing trips' and 'stamp collecting', but such pursuits led to PCR technology just because someone was curious about thermophile bacteria 44:53 activity overseas & in other countries in regards to outreach programs in cooperation with education systems...you were mentioning some campaigns you had going on 51:03 Will there be more active development on the computational capabilities of Wolfram Mathematica with the Wolfram Institute? 52:53 British physics is more Geometry guild vs American physics is more Group theory and particle physics Guild 54:08 What is your opinion about experimental mathematics and its relationship with classical "mainstream" mathematics? 1:17:05 I often hear that science needs philosophy to justify it. What are some historical examples of this? 1:32:27 i think in a lot of places in history the role of academic pursuit was that a philosopher's role, but academic pursuit has attained a large amount of "division of labor" 1:34:22 Philosophy and Mathematical logic are starting to overlap more. Tarskis Semantics relates Formal logic to topology just like math and computer langauges 1:36:22 Are there inherently philosophical ideas (i.e. cannot be turned into a scientific one like the question of motion)? Can we distinguish them outright without knowing future scientific development?

Wolfram is well known for... lets just say... tooting his own horn. It can get comical. I saw a drinking game once. Take a drink every time he opens a sentence with a self-congratulation about discovering something. Take two drinks when he talks about being a child prodigy. Etc...

He's human. Let him be human. Evaluate his work and the work of others that he promotes on its merit. Let the work be more important than whatever personality flaws he has.

The worst allegation IRL I've heard about him is a tendency to give the impression that he discovered all of this stuff when he did not. He did do a good chunk of brilliant original work in the field but for example A New Kind of Science contains work by dozens of others. He did eventually revise the book to add a ton of citations that were not explicit in the original edition.

In keeping with his writing style, he definitely exaggerates the impact and significance of some of this work. Nevertheless I think there are some incredible insights here. I wouldn't be surprised if this whole field (complexity / emergence / cellular automata / computational physics / informatics) does indeed end up solving a lot of serious issues in physics and other fields.

I'm fond of the umbrella term "informatics" for all of it. There's some thinking around informatics as a branch of physics that studies information qua information.

> The worst allegation IRL I've heard about him is a tendency to give the impression that he discovered all of this stuff when he did not.

Yeah, but it's worse than that. It's not just that he uses his employees' work and acts as if it's his. He takes ideas from the physics field, rephrases them in the terminology of his "physics" and then acts as if he came up with this!

Example: In a podcast from last year with Sean Correll, who is one of the people in the world who knows quantum mechanics best, Wolfram gave a short summary of his theories ("our models") and then goes on to describe "branchial space" and "rurial space". In a way as if that's a new discovery and he came up with it and "it turns out" and "I recently realized" and "we've discovered" (with "we" always meaning himself). You can really hear Correll hardly being able to hold it together. This brilliant idea has been around in physics for many decades, one of its flavour being the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics which Correll has given very good and accessible popular-science presentations about. It's just nonsense that Wolfram "discovered" this. He not just recycles it but more so in a way that's not helpful.

This all is not just "human". It's disingenuous.

> He’s done a fantastic job creating a new model for understanding reality, some of which suggest interesting physical structures underlying our Universe. He’s changed my understanding of evolution completely with his insights on computational irreducibility and complexity.

> And he’s laying the groundwork for understanding the meta-rules that undergird not just our Universe, but all possible Universes. It’s fantastic stuff.

What are you basing this on? This is the key point: so far, he has only vaguely gestured to such a model, built a whole mathematical tower around it, and is now claiming that this is directly applicable in vastly different domains. If this were a random forum poster saying it, it would smell to high heavens of someone who has no idea what they're speaking about noticing vague similarities between domains and hand waving a mathematical framework that would explain those similarities into being. This being Stephen Wolfram, he definitely knows something about those domains, but I still think it's almost impossible for his claims to be right.

At the very best, he has come up with a powerful mathematical abstraction, perhaps akin to Category Theory: something which can be used to model and relate extremely different phenomena, and allow insights from one domain to be used in another; but which typically doesn't in itself create much knowledge directly. Edit: to be clear, this would be an extraordinary achievement in itself. But it wouldn't "revolutionize science".

Otherwise, when you claim your model can be used equally well in the foundations of physics, economics, pure mathematics, evolutionary biology, computer science and chemistry - it's entirely on you to first prove this absolutely extraordinary claim. Making it with a gentle wave of the hand towards the future and then asking for money to get there raises all possible red flags.

Oh come on!

We call him delusional cause he has lost all humility. He is utterly convinced that he discovered the underlying mechanism of literally everything from physics to eceonomics. Delusion of grandeur is a well-known psychological condition, and no matter what you think of the science, it's hard to argue that Wolfram doesn't have it.

Why can't he just say: "hey I've got this idea, it's crazy, but you know what? I am going to pursue it and see where it leads, anyone wants to join?" Noone would be annoyed by that.

Whether being delusional affects the way you work, I would tend to think so, but you can think otherwise...

How does his ego effect anyone who doesn’t work for him? I read most of the announcement and he’s promising research papers and lecture/teaching materials. That’s good, no?

Wolfram’s over the top next level ego, to be sure. But he’s on the side of science and reason, so he’s our ego-maniac.

>But he’s on the side of science and reason, so he’s our ego-maniac.

Humility and the ability to recognise and accept when we're wrong is one of the fundamental characteristics of science. People with big egos are the enemies of science.

Humility before the truth is vital but not necessarily humility as expressed in one's public statements.

Indeed psychoticism was identified by the psychologist Hans Eysenck as one of the traits of genius, including scientific genius. Psychoticism is a package which includes associative thinking, creativity, disagreeableness, lack of empathy, antisocial nature, introversion, coldness, aggression, high self-esteem.

The problem is that most people are afraid of giving offence, of being ostracised by their colleagues and so on, and so they self-censor their original thoughts and never create anything fundamentally new and important.

So it's unsurprising that most of the great scientists in history had very difficult personalities (Faraday may have been an exception). I think the optimal approach is to study and benefit from the work of geniuses but have as little to do with them personally as possible. Leave them alone to their work.

Of course the fact that someone has a difficult personality does not mean he is a great thinker. However science has a mechanism for dealing with that via the publication system, where ideas that are wrong are eventually criticised and ultimately forgotten.

"People with big egos are the enemies of science." lol - history doesn't agree with this AT ALL.

Written history is a re-creation of past events and big egos are entertaining.

Claude Shannon coined the word bit and fathered Information Theory. But very few know his name, despite his huge influence on our daily lives.

This is a long winded way of saying, written history is probably half right at best.

Ten years ago I watched a pay-per-view boxing match. At the end, the fighter said "I'm not the greatest but I'll fight the greatest".

2 minutes later the local news misquoted him as saying "I am the greatest".

You're describing generally positive traits, not specific to science. Science was pushed forward by many kinds of people, many of them obnoxious, arrogant, racists, etc. You can't disqualify Wolfram as scientist by pointing to his bad personality characteristics.

I have interacted with Dr Wolf-ram, and I dont like being spoken down to, or given direct orders by a stranger. Plenty of criticism here today, very well-deserved by my limited and direct experience.

Do you have more substance to your argument than an ad hominem? This is trite.

Pointing out character flaws is not an ad hominem in itself. Stop calling everything an ad hominem, folks.

Modular ethical argument. There is nothing of substance but attention to the character judgement in the message.

Is a judgement of character not "of substance"? Where is the substance in an erroneous accusation of ad-hominem?

The most direct path to prove my point would be to start calling you names.

only if you consider that a judgement of character (or at least, one equivalent to the OP).

Can you fully expand on the things you say rather than leaving them cryptic? I'm having to guess what point you are making.

No I cannot fully expand on what I say. I can not predict the full extent of how you will interpret my words. You need good faith to be more valuable that a programmable object. This is why you assume the best about a person and if you overestimate then you carry the discussion forward.

This is why unquestioning criticism, judgement, is of no substance.

Your conclusion does not follow from your premise.

The web/media representation of Stephen Wolfram somehow seems (I never had a chance to know him personally so I have no idea if he even creates such an impression, let alone actually does) like he has a "huge ego". Whenever someone produces such an impression (which can often be an unfortunate coincidence, I wouldn't expect popular ideas about people to be reliably related to their actual characters), "egos" of all the other people ignite in trying to demonstrate they are "more huge". All the reason and meaningful discussion is lost at this point, no matter how clever and educated the people involved are and what they actually achieved/contributed.

By the way I wish more people would create research institutes so there would be more free competition and less bureaucracy in research. There are many talented people who could do some useful/interesting research but ~80% of them probably won't manage with all the obstacles on the path to actual research (including the obstacles which effectively filter subjects and other parameters of research to what's trending in Nature).

I've met him twice, personally.

He was very kind, humble and approachable.

So very much smarter than I'll ever be, yet I never once got the feeling he was looking down on me.

Thank you for sharing this. I always imagined him this way but a confirmation by who met him personally produces a nice feeling. By the way an idea just hit me: Stephen Wolfram probably has a great understanding of how does popular image of a person evolves and lives loosely dependent on their real selves: to me it feels like it's a lot like the cellular automata he described in "A New Kind of Science". We can hardly produce a reliable and concise quantification of popular sentiment surrounding a person but if we could the mechanics would probably be similar.

I honestly think it is that his academic accomplishments in youth combined with the work he has done since is just triggering to people who have their identity wrapped up in being the smart kid. Since he names his companies after himself, knocking him for being "egotistical" is an easy attack to feel better about oneself for not having a PhD from Caltech at 20 with Feynman advising.

I have listened to hours of him on Lex Fridman and he doesn't come off as egotistical or arrogant in the least.

Isn't naming your business after yourself a common, centuries-old convention?

IMO all of the comments about Wolfram as a topic are low quality, including this one.

The topic of the post is the "Wolfram Institute". I'm happy to see more investment in R&D, period. Good on Wolfram.

I will probably never seek out a job at the Wolfram Institute because I believe the title is true -- there is an abundance of scientific opportunity. Working on Wolfram's agenda would not be the best use of my time, in part because the Wolfram Institute likely won't have the resources or interest to exploit the scientific opportunities about which I'm most excited.

This is less a reflection on Wolfram than on the state of the world. Theoretical Physics of the sort Wolfram was imbued in his early career had its moment half a century ago, but has not produced fruit in a long time. I doubt that will change -- in part because even if all the stated problems were solved... so what? Similarly, computation systems seem to have hit a fevered pitch in the 2010s and are now approaching a plateau.

There are exciting opportunities in the life sciences, in robotics, and in AI. But the Wolfram Institute would be a bad place to work on those things, and in particular likely does not have the funding or expertise to do ground-breaking work in the life sciences.

I'm sure there are many who disagree with me, and I hope they find the Wolfram Institute to be a happy and productive place to do meaningful work.

> computation systems seem to have hit a fevered pitch in the 2010s

What do you mean?

Computer algebra systems and so on in particular. The sort of stuff Wolfram made is fortune on.

I also think "pure software" entering adulthood. The peak might last decades to come, but it's definitely not 1990 or 2010 anymore. CS still has lots of exciting things in the fire, but most of them involve more than "pure software". If that makes sense.

There was once a book, "100 Authors Against Einstein"[0]. Expect opposition against everything you do. Those who are against are just typically more vocal than those who don't know yet. Those who support Wolfram typically are busy doing research and don't care about commenting, they have better things to do than answer every naysayer 1v1. I'm in the "we'll see" camp, but I don't like naysayers.

[0] https://archive.org/details/HundertAutorenGegenEinstein

> Those who support Wolfram typically are busy doing research and don't care about commenting

Who is doing NKS-based research these days?

That's a reasonable question.. I think it's worth considering the users of Mathematica as near or overlapping. It might be possible to go through GitHub and find the number of Mathematica projects and then categorize them to get an approximation.

Also, this is very tenuous, but I see a lot of similarity between Wolfram's automata (not this new work) and Lattice Boltzmann methods. Both have been around since the 70s/80s and it makes me wonder a little about primacy but a lot about where he's gotten to with all this. Very intriguing

> I think it's worth considering the users of Mathematica as near or overlapping.

Mathematica predates any kind of statement of NKS by over a decade (and SMP nearly a decade before that). Moreover, I don't see any evidence Mathematica is becoming more "NKS-y" over time; it's a usual sort of moribund enterprise tooling, just for a highly selective enterprise. I don't see any real connection, other than some possible post-hoc handwaving.

Coming from the other side, Mathematica's relevance to modern physics seems at a 10-20 year nadir. (E.g. from what I can tell it missed the boat entirely on the data-crunching nature of many modern experiments, and its proprietary nature makes it difficult to integrate into increasingly-complex pipelines.) So if NKS - a theory of physics - is being researched, it's either having little success or it's not related to Mathematica use.

I didn't know about SMP. Cool!

Yeah, NKS clearly came after Mathematica, but I think there's a strong through-line there that goes back to his early work and connects directly to this meta-math stuff he's doing now.

The core language is a pattern matching substitution system, and that's what he eventually distills into his 1d automata and then generalizes to meta-math.

"at the core of Mathematica is the notion of storing collections of rules in which each rule specifies how to transform all pieces of data that are similar enough to match a single Mathematica pattern. And the success of Mathematica provides considerable evidence for the power of this kind of approach." https://www.wolframscience.com/nks/p627--human-thinking/

It's been a while since I read NKS but I recall him saying he started playing with automata earlier and getting some of the ideas for NKS then, but then did Wolfram Research/Mathematica for some time while he was noodling. I think that's kinda supported by his timeline:

  https://www.wolframscience.com/nks/notes-1-4--timeline/

Indeed there is not much for Mathematica physics on GitHub:

  7,833 repos using Mathematica [1]
  363 repos of that containing "physics" [2]

I expect that's a pretty heavy undercount as they've not pursued open-source. That's disappointing to me and I agree they missed out on a lot; I think those two are strongly connected. But also he kept his business afloat and did crazy (good) science on the side.

Did find this though. Looks neat!

https://github.com/FeynCalc/feyncalc maintained by: https://github.com/vsht

[1] https://github.com/search?q=language%3AMathematica&type=Repo... [2] https://github.com/search?q=language%3AMathematica+physics&t...

I think you'll get a more accurate view of things reading contemporary sources than his post-hoc justifications of why Mathematica was really NKS all along. If anything, Mathematica also missed the boat on proof assistants, which it should have totally nailed - so if anything, any NKS ideology embodied in Mathematica held it back here as the field verged to being grounded in type theory. (But more likely - ordinary large codebase too difficult to adapt.)

I don't think GitHub will be able to tell you much about how physicists are working one way or another. Physicists in general, and also mathematicians and researching engineers who I suspect make up the bulk of most Mathematica users, don't use GitHub.

I try to read everything Wolfram has written and generally finds his writings quite enjoyable.

After reading lots of hsi writings, I noticed one thing which I don't like. It seems like he always tries to belittle other giants (albeit in indirect ways) and project himself as an ultimate intellectual. Even in one of his writing about Feynman, he tried to show that even Feynman sometimed couldn't match his genius. Nevertheless, I still do enjoy his writings.

Maybe he simply can't escape his impostor syndrome. It's not always nefarious.

“new model for understanding reality...the meta-rules that undergird not just our Universe, but all possible Universes...”

Is there any evidence whatsoever that he’s accomplished these things? He’s been at this for decades. Is there any prediction of any natural phenomenon? Did he predict a new elementary particle? Can he predict the flow of water through a pipe? Is there a quantitative connection with anything in the physical world, aside from pretty pictures generated by a computer?

In other words, is this any kind of science?

You could say the same things about string theory. One could envision an alternate timeline where cellular automata is the darling of academia, and Dr. Steven Ramwolf is the lone iconoclast raving about D-branes.

People do say the exact same thing about string theory. They challenge it to show that it’s science. There may be some experiments in the not too distant future; we’ll see what happens. At least string theory makes some predictions and is relativistically correct.

> makes some predictions and is relativistically correct.

Many of which are obviously wrong. We do not observe 11-dimensional world.

String theory has been around since the late 1960s. To date, has it made a single prediction which was later experimentally found to true? (i.e. aside from "predicting" the existence of particles which were already known to physics)

(Edit: given the large umbrella it encompasses, I suppose you could consider things like AdS/CFT correspondence, where a direct "domain transform" with quantum field theory is proven, to be a useful tool that in some instances furthered QFT. But such results are scant given the enormous amount of brainpower allocated to string theory as a whole.)

No. That’s why I said that people “challenge it to show that it’s science.” Why are you bringing up string theory as if I’m defending it?

I'm just suggesting that Wolfram's "theory" belongs in the same category as string theory. On some level it is probably a useful tool to understand something about science, say, beyond Deepak Chopra-esque woo-woo ("We are all energy, we are all vibrations", etc.) But it's not currently obvious that there's a there there.

I think it’s worse in the sense that I alluded to when I mentioned “relativistically correct.”

> is this any kind of science?

It's the "new kind of science". /s

Yeah, I don't get it. He's a guy who runs a business to support his hobby, both pretty harmless. Bonus points for creating and sharing enjoyable and useful things and ideas. I'll debate his ideas, but I'm not gonna tell him what to do with his life.

There is a quote (written 20 years ago) about Wolfram that sums up why people feel that way towards him,

> There’s a tradition of scientists approaching senility to come up with grand, improbable theories. Wolfram is unusual in that he’s doing this in his 40s.

A true prodigy then.

Well this blog article is crackpot science. It doesn't matter that Wolfram created Mathematica or that he was a good scientist before. There are many examples of good scientists, even Nobel prizes, that became crackpot scientists.

Science simply doesn't work like that.

It's attempting to come up with a new way to model observable physical phenomena. If that's not science, then neither are Feynman diagrams, complex numbers or even calculus.

Whether it will prove useful like the above models still remains to be seen, but calling it "not science" seems ahistoric. Let's see if they can evolve the theory to the point where it can make novel predictions. If it never makes one, then the model is not useful. If it makes one but is proven wrong, then at least it will be wrong (rather than "not even wrong"). If it makes one and is proven right, then we will have made a big leap forward in our understanding of the universe.

I'm ok with either of these outcomes, but I don't get why anyone would want this thought experiment stopped before one of them is reached.

When you work in a research institute, you get used of receiving messages of people thinking they have a new theoritical model explaining physics. But that's not how science works. When you're a scientist you work on a specific topic of a specific branch of a specific science. Then you publish your work in one of the mainstream revue of your field. Then if your work is interesting, other scientists use your article to gain more comprehension and as a base of their own work. Rarely but sometimes your work is so fundamental that it can be used in other fields.

But you simply don't just say that you're revolutioning physics, biology, economy and the rest. A truly revolutionary work is deemed revolutionary not by yourself but by the other scientists and the impact on the field.

And Wolfram is not some kind of ermite lost in the middle of Siberia. He knows how that work and he has the credentials and the money to publish where he wants.

Note also that nobody is doing anything to stop him to do what he wants.

Universities and science academies are full of guys loudly announcing their revolutions. Wolfram uses his own money for it - I respect that.

Wolfram is saying that the new multicomputational paradigm that, he is heavily intellectually invested in and paying for the R&D himself, MIGHT revolutionize physics biology economy and the rest. This blog post is about scaling up the efforts, by founding an institute, to see if this new paradigm can actually deliver.

So weird for the hackernews audience to hate on this mans idea's so much. Its worth a shot no?

Elon Musk is often hailed a hero for paradigm shifting to reusable rockets and wanting to use this to colonize mars. But try and do a paradigm shift in physics, out of pocket, and the haters come out in droves.

I say let the man have a go at it. We might learn something!

> Calling him delusional or a fraud is Wittengtein’s Ruler in action: It says far more about you than it does about him.

Do you think it's impossible for him to be a skilled mathematician and delusional?

Do you think smart, successful business owners are incapable of committing fraud?

The interminable negative reactions to anything Wolfram does are boring, but the counter-impulse to "he's done good math, so this can't be a fraud" is outright dangerous.

> But vilifying him for wanting to create a research institute is absurd.

I think many noted plagiarists trying to open a research institute would get a similar response.

You might like to make a top-level comment about this. I think some of the people who see excessive negativity in attitudes towards Wolfram don't know about the plagiarism.

If nothing else has by now, I don't think a new top-level comment will inform them.

Part of it is that his writing is unclear. Not the technical parts, but generally. It's long and full of clauses and often a few sentence fragments shoved together with dashes. It's just taxing to read his prose.

Combined with some bravado and deep technical jargon, the reader is forgivably resentful of the entire experience.

Innovation largely comes from contrarians. If HN is polarized on a topic, to me that just signals it's probably worth MORE attention, not less.

From that perspective, overwhelming negative comments are a useful data point.

It’s possible that Wolfram has some latent narcissism, and this is what people don’t enjoy. Perhaps they are even jealous. I don’t make that speculation based on any “petty” aspects of his personality or communication, but rather the sweeping and self sufficient way he develops his theories. If he’s doing valuable science, I for one would like to cheer him on.

I'd cut Stephen Wolfram some slack if he published his work in a peer reviewed journal - like a proper scientist does.

The problem is nobody understands even very basic physics. The public has to rely entirely on personality and comments from people who seem to be respected, but the actual physics itself is a complete black box.

We can't read his work, we are years of study away from that point.

All people are going to do is shut up(My preferred option), immediately dismiss it because some other physicist did, or heap praise on it because it's "Far out and groovy and must be good if those dirty no good mainstream people hate it".

And people often aren't that good at shutting their mouths....

> He’s changed my understanding of evolution completely with his insights on computational irreducibility and complexity.

Quote you please elaborate on that? Or perhaps quote a piece of work that refers to your statement? Thank you :)

Well put. He might be right, he's more likely wrong (and that's not a judgement on the quality of the ideas). But bottom line is we will never get anywhere without thinkers like him.

Exactly. Why can’t we focus on the ideas and not the person?

(Unless the person is relevant to the idea but in most cases this is not true).

Everyone is so eager to pile on. It lowers the quality of the discussion.

It's not very useful to post some top-level like this addressed to "some low-quality comments". Can you point out the post to which you are referring?

Holy moly, thank you thank you thank you for putting into words how I've been feeling about these perennial negging on Wolfram.

Dude and company has done some amazing things.

> show where it’s wrong

Do you know the expression "not even wrong"?

They're trying to come up with a new way of modelling the foundations of physics. In order to be "even wrong", they need to make falsifiable predictions. As far as I can tell, they're not at (or claiming to be at) that level of maturity of the model, they seem to be slowly working toward feature parity with existing models. Whether they ever achieve that remains to be seen. Whether they manage to coalesce all this into a single coherent theory remains to be seen. Whether they manage to make novel, falsifiable predictions or not remains to be seen. And if they do, whether these predictions will be falsified or not also remains to be seen.

Long story short, I don't see why being "not even wrong" at this phase is some great sin.

It's an old reference, see e.g. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2005/sep/19/ideas.g2

"Not even wrong, but still making all these grand claims about revolutionizing everything" is a bit worse than just "not even wrong", though.

I mean, take quantum loop gravity. It might revolutionize, not everything, but quite a bit. Last I checked, it was as the same stage - not mature enough to make actual predictions. But it was touting itself as "there might be something here, and if there is, it could be really important", not as "we hold the secrets to everything".

I guess what I'm looking for is "under promise, over deliver". When you over promise your scientific theory, it stops looking like science and starts looking like marketing. That's... you know what a code smell is? That's a science smell. The more it looks like marketing, the more skeptical I am of it as science.

If you want to talk about Wolfram's physics, please do.

    There’s true evil in the world. Truly despicable sins. Calibrate your outrage towards that.

Holy whataboutism, Batman.

Funny how "focus on true evil in the world" doesn't apply to stanning rich weirdos on HN...

Very well put. You can replace Wolfram with Elon Musk and the same comment applies beautifully

Haters gonna hate.

I rolled my eyes when I saw this link posted with hundreds of comments, ofc not because of Wolfram but because it's been this reaction for 20 years. People demand mediocrity and are furious when they don't get it.* Projection is a real thing.

What's cool about Wolfram is his priority is his work, not peoples' opinions of his work. I know he cares, and sometimes maybe it affects his stance, but he's not letting it stop him from exploring. He's a hero.

*Mediocrity in the outgroup. When ingroup it carries prestige for you by association

> People demand mediocrity and are furious when they don't get it.

Remember that people have different preferences.

Those objecting to Wolfram tend to be those who appreciate a "quiet confidence" style, which lets your work stand for itself rather than needing you to function as its hype man. To such people, Wolfram's general presentation style reads as puffery-covering-mediocrity -- someone who truly had what he claims wouldn't need to spend so much time talking themself up. (Note that the major point made across much of the criticism of his new science here is, approximately, "I'll believe it when I see it".)

Of course, opinions vary. There are others who think that someone who's great should promote themselves as much as their work deserves, and to them Wolfram is perfectly reasonable.

If you want an example of this divide outside of the science field, look at Trump. Depending on your own preferences, and for similar presentational reasons as Wolfram, he either reads as a tough and competent man or as wildly insecure.

Basically agreed, but isn't that preference usually context dependent?

People like to let the work stand for itself.. that feels like it's from a cloistered environment where everyone is tenured and respected and get their fair time to present their work and get its due attention. Which is fine and dandy and I'm glad we have that.

There's also people who are not in that environment who sometimes have something important to say and will definitely be ignored if they follow the same rules.

To follow your analogy.. was what Trump had to say actually important? Maybe some of it, but mostly it was all hot air, misleading, demonstrably false and occasionally dangerous. As OP is pointing out, Wolfram is none of those things.

I think it's somewhat context-dependent, but people do have a general preference that applies across situations.

Particularly if it's a topic where you don't have the expertise needed to evaluate what someone says, falling back on presentational heuristics is pretty common. For Wolfram, I'm not a dual-PhD in math and physics, so I think I'm not qualified to really understand his claims. Thus thinking "this person's communication style makes me think of people who're exaggerating their achievements" colors my view of his likely correctness -- not enough to come out and say he's wrong myself (since I don't know), but rather to make me sit back and wait for someone who sounds more trustworthy to validate it.

I do admit it's a difficult situation, because if you do sincerely believe that you've come up with something that'll revolutionize all of science, it's difficult to say that in a humble way. (I feel I could do better at that than Wolfram, though, particularly if we take this article as representative of his style. :D)

To continue the Trump analogy... a lot of the people who believed what he was saying didn't have any deep knowledge of, say, immigration policy; they just heard someone who was giving (to them) "I am a confident and capable person" signals who was saying something was important, and they trusted that in part because of this bias.

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