Objectively, it avoids jargon and florid prose (apart from some rather repetitive language). It means a child could read it, and perhaps that makes it boring to read.

Perhaps you found the actual experiments he did boring, or tedious. I think they're pretty cool, and I've now done my fair share of them, and taught other people how to do them. The axiom systems, graph automata, constraint satisfaction, causal graph stuff, and entropy stuff is all cool. And the notes are a goldmine reference.

Also, this is probably the least important of the 8 specific claims of Shalizi's that I rebut. But hey.

edit: because we seem to be using edits to converse. For 25 years, Wolfram has been the company brand, and people roughly know what it is -- how can we NOT prefix our products with the word Wolfram? Also, did you just call a marketing-type pre-announcement hyperbolic? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BETSuT2RNLs