Review of A New Kind of Science by Stephen Wolfram (2002) | Hacker News Reader

Review of A New Kind of Science by Stephen Wolfram (2002)

bactra.org

43 pointspmoriarty24 comments

And in 2012, the follow-up, "Ten Years of Monster Raving Egomania and Utter Batshit Insanity:"

The title should indicate that it is linking to a book review (of a now rather dated doorstop of a book). Although the linked article follows a standard journal book-review format, which makes it obvious on context what is going on, it is not obvious to someone following an HN link.

wow.

I mean, I knew Wolfram was nuts, despite Mathematica's success. But this... this is beyond nuts. It's not just crazy, it's also immoral (not citing people who do your research, suing everybody left and right, etc.).

I was really confused. The title and author in the header really looked like the title and author of that post with that formatting. Until I read the tiny link at the top. Just goes to show that minimalist HTML/CSS can be used for terrible layouts - just like an overuse of JS.

I was in the fist or second year of college and I asked for A New Kind of Science book as a gift. I believed the book, not knowing much about the history of the related fields NKS supposedly compelely revolutionized. That's how cult following starts, isn't it?

But then as years rolled by I realized that stuff is too far out of the ordinary, with the claims which are too lofty. Even as far as style goes, at first phrases like "I discovered this...", "I did that.." seems impressive, excuded confidence, but then, they started to sound grating and excessively arrogant. I just couldn't stand to read it anymore. The book collected dust for a few years, then I gave it away to someone.

Has Wolfram's "new kind of science" led to any predictions of natural phenomena in the 15 years or so since his book appeared? This is usually how we decide if a physical theory is interesting. Generating patterns that look like natural phenomena that we already know about doesn't count.

The review’s author claims that in the decade following it’s publication, neither the book nor Wolfram have made any contribution to the field.

Interesting analysis of a very brilliant but very flawed personality

Why do people always mention that someone is smart? It's a non-informative sentence. How many times do you hear that someone is dumb?

I'll take my community college educated mother over this "child prodigy" on the vast majority of subjects, so he must not be that great.

On the contrary, 99.99% of the population is really dumb. (I'd like to think I'm part of the other 0.01%, but the low prior probability of that situation suggests that I don't have enough evidence to justify that conclusion.) Wolfram is not part of that 99.99%. He's part of the 0.01%. But he's squandered his talent on self-indulgent and self-destructive projects instead of contributing to the intellectual and cultural advancement of humanity.

It turns out that human nature is such that being really smart doesn't give you a high probability of being right about things, especially when the truth is not favorable to you, just a slightly better one.

You missed my point. If he is smart and yet not right as you say, doesn't that make him dumb?

Arrogance makes smart people idiots.

In short, high amounts of intelligence, while comparatively rare, is not necessarily a trait you should optimize for.

I feel that your attempt at summarizing my comment falls far short of the mark in many ways; not only was that not the entire meaning of my comment, it is not only its main point, and in fact it is not even among the things my comment said. In fact, it is mysterious to me how you could read that into what I wrote, to the point that it tempts me to question your sanity.

Ow. That's pretty painful. Let me explain. You claim that 99.99% of the population is really dumb. You use Wolfram as an example of someone in the 0.01% who squandered their talent. This shows that being in 0.01% percent won't necessarily give you a strong advantage, and the advantages you get are easy to squander.

You than say:

>It turns out that human nature is such that being really smart doesn't give you a high probability of being right about things, especially when the truth is not favorable to you, just a slightly better one.

So if being smart won't help you much with being right about things, and there are other skills that can better help you be right about things (there are), than optimizing for intelligence isn't a reasonable goal, because there are other abilities you can optimize for which would give you a greater advantage.

What did I miss?

There are situations in which being smart is necessary but not sufficient to be right about something, and there are things other than being right about things that being smart enables you to do. Some of them, like cleverly rationalizing your errors, are counterproductive, but others, like coming up with good scientific hypotheses to test, are not.

But I wasn't really talking about your own intelligence at all. I was talking about how your judgment of someone's credibility should depend on their intelligence.

My apologies for hurting your feelings with my crappy comment.

Thanks for clarifying.

And no, you didn't really hurt my feelings that much :-). If my feelings were so easily hurt, I'd have stopped commenting years ago. As it stands, my comments aren't always smart (in retrospect, some of them are downright idiotic), but I do my best.

This website is quite fun. Here's another. http://bactra.org/notebooks/prigogine.html

(2005)

Not sure why we're still discussing this book. It's old, and it's been thoroughly debunked many times. One of few ~1000 page books from which I've learned nothing.

> This book was more valuable when it was a tree.

'nuff said.

Aren't we done flogging this guy yet?

The beatings will continue until Wolfram stops.

Just kidding. If we beat on this guy anymore, he'll die, and turn into a horse.

From title thought this was an article about Trump.

don't down vote me. I finally got to 100 :)

update: comment referred to original title, not current.

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