This is the feeling I have every time I read Wolfram's writing. It seems deep when first approached, but is ultimately a superficial rewording of established knowledge.
It’s like when avionics use independent systems to make decisions. If all the systems agree, they’re probably right. The value is in independent parallel construction of the same result.
As someone who doesn’t know enough to really know if he’s right or wrong, it’s hard to fully believe the HN view that he’s a transparent Charleston (and easy to spot at that) considering his history.
It’s helpful to see a “positive” read of him and gives me more to think about so thank you!
Can you link/mention the podcast?
This sounds like the scepticism here is unfair.
You need to consider that if somebody establishes a reputation for using their reasonably well-known (and justifiably respected) position as an academic software developer to publicise dubious and grandiose scientific theories to gullible techies and pop-sci readers, rather than submitting them to be evaluated by experts through the normal scientific process, it seems pretty miniscule beer in comparison to have some pushback in threads like this.
Who else has ever achieved that level of success on the back of a programming language, let alone a Lisp? Our host here is the only one in the same ballpark and his success was more on the application side. Arc is no Wolfram language.
Think of this as a stretch exercise for HN.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
(We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34658960.)
When Wolfram writes a long screed about his own genius as an introduction to his work that's a claim to intellectual authority. Scientific work isn't supposed to be evaluated based on the authority of its author, because that's not a good guide to whether it is valid. As I understand it (I haven't personally checked) Wolfram doesn't submit any of his stuff to peer review either.
Your post has me thinking about 'independent scientists' more generally.
Some defy characterisation as their work is just outside normal categories. An example could be George Spencer-Brown with his Laws of Form, a book that appeared as a complete and dense argument. Spencer-Brown was a colourful character to say the least.
Others are sort of 'semi-detached' and do publish papers in mainstream academic journals and do collaborate. Julian Barbour would be my example here.
I would imagine that a fair amount of self-confidence is needed (along with resources) to work in this way.
There's a great deal of similar practice in other places too but the inverted cult of personality in Wolfram threads is sui generis, I think. I tried once to make the case that it's a mirror image of the the thing it's criticizing, but IIRC that didn't go over too well.
I suppose the cynically exaggerated version of this would be to say bad science is fine as long as it doesn't lead to crap threads. Note that I didn't say that.
However, it could be that common opinions about authors are not tropes but warranted. In the first decade of my exposure to Stephen Wolfram, I was in awe of his intelligence. Mathematica is a wonderful tool and its step-by-step explanations of proofs are fantastic. I thought his approach to computational systems was mind-blowing.
Then I leaned more. I saw that much of his work was built on the backs of giants. His cellular automota are simplified versions of what Conroy worked on. Don't get me wrong, Wolfram formalized 1D automata in his own works, but it wasn't revolutionary. He didn't "discover" these features; he built upon the works of others.
My biggest critique of Wolfram is that he will come up with SOME new interpretation of a physical or computation phenomenon and claim that it is THE ONE TRUE INTEPERATION of how the world works. He feels like hubris personified.
But to simplify it, I think he is a smart person who often posts self-congratulatory things and I don't thing it's wrong to call him out when his writings are full of fluff.
I'll tell you one thing though: anytime someone uses the phrase "call him out", that's a sign the needle is in the red, or at least twitching to get there.
The thing to realize is that even if you're 100% right, it doesn't make repetitive threads any less tedious. Avoiding tedium is more important than being right—at least on HN. No doubt other websites, with other mandates, have other priorities.