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Comment by johnwheeler | Hacker News Reader

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I’ll ask a question that I’ve asked a lot and never gotten a satisfactory answer:

At what point of accomplishment or perhaps via what factors in accomplishing something measurable and tangible, can someone recognize or state it in a way that doesn’t come off as arrogant/brag etc…?

Like if Michalangelo stood in the Sistine and been like “look how amazing what I did was” while people came though, I genuinely have no idea why anyone would have a problem with that. It is amazing, and him saying is valid because he (and almost no others) could demonstrate that he has the ability and skill to evaluate it. If you’re the top of your game, there’s nobody who is even good enough to check your work, if you’re in uncharted territory. Peer review and replication is what actually makes things last, but in the beginning of something breakthrough you have no peers.

This phenomena of “humble” exists to the extent that, in many cases, or in specific cultures simply acknowledging your own positive impact is often grounds for “losing face.”

This is challenging to me because in practice, the people who self-promote are rarely actually the ones with the talent, and talented people rarely self promote. I’d argue that the people making actual breakthroughs are so focused on the problem they have no energy or desire to self promote.

I have studied humans and our thinking for decades and I think it’s some embedded social thing that is vestigial - but has deep roots in some kind of social masking behavior for hiding capabilities in complex power games.

So pretending you’re humble - or I suppose behaving humbly - is an advantage because you’re withholding information about how the results were achieved, while also subtly acknowledging your power position.

Baffling as someone on the spectrum just trying to live authentically

In my experience, great accomplishment emerges from both a significant quantity of effort and vision, and a critical injection of serendipity where the universe conspires to feed the craftsman critical nudges that elevate the work beyond the original intent.

I also find that those that have accomplished "greatness" without having drowned in their own kool-aid will speak candidly about the ambiguities encountered, the stuff that "worked better than it had any right to", and the aspects where satisfaction continues to elude them.

Assuming that Michalangelo was such a person, while I doubt there would be much left he found unsatisfactory in his work on the ceiling (or he wouldn't have allowed himself to be finished), I would expect a wealth of stories of his tribulations, and a number of unexpected avenues that provided sanity restoring inspiration for an outcome that _was_ satisfactory.

Hmm … That doesn’t really answer the question

Nobody disagrees that a host of factors are at play with any major breakthroughs

However, much like Engels stated when discussing his relationship with Marx, Marx in his view was a genius that didn’t need Engels and could have done it all himself. So there really are individuals that we can point to that did the work and have demonstrated their individual inputs were far and beyond the deciding factor in success or not.

If anything the elucidation, of the “trials and tribulations” emphasize the difficulty and exceptional talent required to accomplish it

This is why you need to be successful enough to hire your brother to be your full time PR person/hype man.

RT: ‘Wow, look how amazing Andrew is…and how humble. He’s not even bragging about the amazing things he does’

The subject here and now is Wolfram and the irritation of many comes not from the work that Wolfram has achieved on his own but the utter lack of acknowledgement | recogonition of work done by others .. a substantial amount of work by others.

His New Kind of Science both grossly overstates the importance of cellular autonoma being Turing complete and utterly ignores a vast community of others who had similar ideas to Wolfram, many before Wolfram, and some whose work it has been said he lifted directly and claimed as his own.

Like if Michalangelo stood before the Mona Lisa and been like “look how amazing what I did was”.

See: (for example) A Rare Blend of Monster Raving Egomania and Utter Batshit Insanity http://bactra.org/reviews/wolfram/

>The subject here and now is Wolfram and the irritation of many comes not from the work that Wolfram has achieved on his own but the utter lack of acknowledgement | recogonition of work done by others .. a substantial amount of work by others.

He wrote many essays on history of mathematics and science that IMO not just give credit where credit is due, but help immortalize these achievements.

We would be also be better off if the people who do interesting things that he wrote about bragged about them - so we'd get more exposure to the interesting things.

Ignoring bragging is easy. Finding out what Ramanujan's thought process was when he was coming up with his brilliant mathematics, in the absence of his own detailed notes, is pretty damn hard.

[1] https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/category/historical-pers...

> Like if Michalangelo stood in the Sistine and been like “look how amazing what I did was” while people came though, I genuinely have no idea why anyone would have a problem with that.

Um… that’s a building supposed to be dedicated to the glory of God, not for any man to try to glorify himself. It would be in extremely poor taste to brag inside the building, indulging in the sin of pride.

Most people like this neglect to mention the army of people working beneath them that did most of the work for these achievements. Does anyone really believe he wrote and published 9 high quality books in 5 years?

I saw a fireside chat where a good interviewer did his best to get him to talk about his employees. He Wolfram made it quite clear that in his view, the employees were in constant need of help, as he attempted to make them understand all the important, wise things Wolfram knew. I have only seen a comparable approach to employees only once before, from Ray Dalio. He spent tens, if not hundreds of millions of dollars trying to build a system that would make all his employees think as he did. Every employee ranked in dozens of ways, where Ray was the best ranked in almost every single category.

I bet you can find the book about how that one turned out the minute he stopped being in charge of his company.

Still true after 40 years.

Maybe it’s more intentional than people realize. Everyone assumes it’s just a personality flaw but what if instead it’s a way to purge all collaborators who have ego issues themselves.

I find him incredibly fascinating and personally suspect he is so crazy intelligent than it won’t be until decades later that people realize to what degree. It doesn’t bother me at all how he talks, yet I can understand how it does for others.

What I do know for sure after skimming this post from him, just like others of his the past. Is I need setup a Mathematica/Wolfram/his tools trial and spend at least a few weeks reading deeply what he writes. It’s probably a gold mine for anyone who can actually do it. I’m sure part of what he is doing has some marketing component as it has generated this reaction from me.

> what if instead it’s a way to purge all collaborators who have ego issues themselves.

I suppose that's possible. To me, thought, the more likely explanation seems to be simple vanity. I remember sensing jealousy in his writing when ChatGPT came out. In this post he has found a new angle ("people kept asking me about it. And over and over again I ended up explaining things about it"). I still get the feeling that he is seething over the attention that OpenAI got, especially compared to Wolfram Alpha.

I think his tendency to elevate himself to the exclusion of others around him leads to a trend where his and his company's work exists in a silo that's somewhat disconnected from the rest of computing and science. The vanity might be trapping him in a local maximum.

This is the best description I’ve seen of how I view his work. It’s interesting but it’s hard to point to cases in the wild where his stuff is actually used. Never once in my career have any of his tools been brought up in more than a “oh that’s cool” context.

I do like the idea of wolfram alpha being packaged and usable by intelligent agents as a sort of mental tool plugin. That would be cool.

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