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Comment by jordigh | Hacker News Reader

It seems that whenever Wolfram makes these grandiose and dubious claims, there are always people cheering him on. The comments on his blog posts are always unending adulation. You sound just like those people.

I very much doubt that those of us who doubt just about all the marketing fluff that he exposes are just not understanding his genius. I have read parts of NKS, and I don't think it's all that fascinating other than "cellular automata produce pretty pictures, and there's no reason to try to understand why they do this." It's very cranky.

I think Stephen Wolfram is just a rare breed of socially successful crank. He scores high on the crackpot index, but not high enough to be completely discredited as a lunatic. His litigious nature and ability to wrangle the legal system in order to label everything "mine" is what keeps him in business.

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For those curious for more details about "He scores high on the crackpot index, but not high enough to be completely discredited as a lunatic. His litigious nature and ability to wrangle the legal system in order to label everything "mine" is what keeps him in business.", see this review of "A New Kind of Science", which begins:

> Attention conservation notice: Once, I was one of the authors of a paper on cellular automata. Lawyers for Wolfram Research Inc. threatened to sue me, my co-authors and our employer, because one of our citations referred to a certain mathematical proof, and they claimed the existence of this proof was a trade secret of Wolfram Research. I am sorry to say that our employer knuckled under, and so did we, and we replaced that version of the paper with another, without the offending citation. I think my judgments on Wolfram and his works are accurate, but they're not disinterested.

> With that out of the way: it is my considered, professional opinion that A New Kind of Science shows that Wolfram has become a crank in the classic mold, which is a shame, since he's a really bright man, and once upon a time did some good math, even if he has always been arrogant.

http://vserver1.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~crshalizi/reviews/wolfra...

How can they have legal standing for such a claim, unless one of the authors had privileged access to Wolfram Research knowledge to misappropriate a trade secret? Seems to me that the principle of trade secrets should have a clear defense for independent rediscovery, although law often fails to reflect common sense.

> How can they have legal standing for such a claim, unless one of the authors had privileged access to Wolfram Research knowledge to misappropriate a trade secret?

The absence of legal standing obviously is something that can be raised once a lawsuit is underway, but it doesn't prevent the threat of a lawsuit, and many organizations will knuckle under to the threat of a lawsuit from a wealthy opponent just to avoid the expense of consulting with lawyers if there isn't a big cost in avoiding the lawsuit.

How would you refer to a trade secret in a scientific publication? The citations list where, when, and by whom the reference was published; a trade secret isn't a trade secret after it's published, right?

And is the employer in question the Santa Fe Institute? I am not sure whether to be incredulous about or cynically believing that they would go along with that.

Ah. I should have finished the review:

"The real problem with this result, however, is that it is not Wolfram's. He didn't invent cyclic tag systems, and he didn't come up with the incredibly intricate construction needed to implement them in Rule 110. This was done rather by one Matthew Cook, while working in Wolfram's employ under a contract with some truly remarkable provisions about intellectual property. In short, Wolfram got to control not only when and how the result was made public, but to claim it for himself. In fact, his position was that the existence of the result was a trade secret. Cook, after a messy falling-out with Wolfram, made the result, and the proof, public at a 1998 conference on CAs. (I attended, and was lucky enough to read the paper where Cook goes through the construction, supplying the details missing from A New Kind of Science.) Wolfram, for his part, responded by suing or threatening to sue Cook (now a penniless graduate student in neuroscience), the conference organizers, the publishers of the proceedings, etc. (The threat of legal action from Wolfram that I mentioned at the beginning of this review arose because we cited Cook as the person responsible for this result.)"

I admire his (or his company's) high production values (I bet many would interpret my "slick" comment as a slur though!) but these certainly stand separate to his/their work's scientific merit which I'll sadly never be smart enough to judge ;-)

I suspect much of his/their success comes through his/their Jobsian eye for detail and ability in presentation and while this is at its best when applied to meritorious work, it's certainly a skill/asset in its own right too.

Don't confuse "smart" and "knowledgeable". If you choose to do so, you could become sufficiently knowledgeable about the field to judge for yourself with reasonable confidence Wolfram's and Wolfram's company's scientific contributions.

In my field, there are many people smarter than I am. Many of my significant contributions to others come from knowledge and experience.

Wolfram made a really useful tool. This is independent of how you may feel about NKS.

Try to take yourself back to 1988. Macs are newish. Desktop publishing is new. There's this neat new program called Mathematica. You can type in equations, solve them, and even graph them in 3D. You can laser-print the notebooks and they look better than textbooks.

Wolfram may be an egomaniacal self-promoter, but it's not all empty hype.

The thing is, he didn't even make most of Mathematica. He just managed to sue all of his collaborators at the time so that he could say he did.

It's hard to know how much he has created now, because he just keeps being deceptive about it.

I've never heard that story before. Can you flush that out with some more details? I'm genuinely curious to hear.

I've used MMA since 2.0 on NeXT and love it to bits. But I've met Stephen and he lives up to his reputation.

The details of the story are hard to find nowadays, probably because the lawyers told everyone to shut up about it. You can find some vague allusions to it here: " Wolfram quit Illinois, took the program private, and entered into complicated lawsuits with both his former employee and his co-authors (all since settled)." http://vserver1.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~crshalizi/reviews/wolfra...

Btw, which side of his reputation does he live up to? To being a visionary genius or to being a raving crank?

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