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Comment by throwup238 | Hacker News Reader

> “There’s a tradition of scientists approaching senility to come up with grand, improbable theories,” the late physicist Freeman Dyson told Newsweek back in 2002. “Wolfram is unusual in that he’s doing this in his 40s.”

That is a brutal take down. Did Dyson and Wolfram have a math-beef going or something?

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I think it's more that Wolfram has stepped on enough toes that he earns takes like this.

He's an interesting character, and rare in that is his both obviously very intelligent, and yet not nearly as intelligent as he thinks he is.

I suspect he's the sort of person who can't stand the idea that he is not the smartest guy in the room - in perception or reality. He may well have constructed his career as an "outsider" to reduce the occurrences of this, perhaps not intentionally.

Totally, that whole writeup about his daily routine with that "portable" computer. He wasn't self aware enough to get outside his own nonesense.

What was wrong with that? Seemed pretty interesting as an alternative to working in doors.

For reference here is the piece:

https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2019/02/seeking-the-prod...

My view- put the work down and take a darn walk.

This is not the behavior of a man in balance, or someone who is truly "here".

That is a long articld, what exactly do you mean?

I mean, he certainly does not seem in balance, because he is very full of himself. But his working setup is interesting.

I mean his working setup is not interesting, and not even the basic standard.

For $500 on amazon one can get a decent sit stand desk (not the thing that sets on a desk, that's not nearly as ergonomic), a under desk treadmill or stair stepper, several monitors and a stand. It would be better than his setup.

To me, this blog post is a microcosm of his broader work.

It's a mild takedown in the set of all Wolfram slams.

See, for example: A Rare Blend of Monster Raving Egomania and Utter Batshit Insanity (2002) http://bactra.org/reviews/wolfram/

I met Wolfram some 20 years before that review when he was on a world tour promoting the earliest iterations of Mathematica, the first iteration post his symbolic differentation work.

This was the period when cellular automata, Mandelbrot sets, and symbolic math were pretty hot topics about math departments - computer assisted proofs on monster groups in symbolic algebra were recent, Cayley (the first iteration of Magma) was being written at Sydney University, etc.

Even then he had many of the traits that Cosma Shalizi described in the linked review above and was already dismissing various people for their 'poor ideas' and later claiming those ideas as his own.

He's a smart guy. He swam in waters filled with smart people, some smarter. He was never, IMHO, as smart as his own legend, as authored by himself.

shalizi is overwhelmingly charming. i have wanted to work with him for years, as much for the whimsy of his website as our overlap in research interests

Not to mention a fantastic writer. Already his PhD thesis was brilliant, and one of the few [1] I have ever read cover-to-cover. "Advanced data analysis from an elementary point of view" is one of my go-to recommendations for people (scientists) that have had some exposure to different concepts in data analysis (typically some regression and PCA), but want to acquire a more systematic understanding. His writing is charming as ever, his exposition exceptionally clean and straightforward, the math as simple as possible but not simpler, the advice practical. He manages to walk the very fine line in mathematical writing of being rigorous enough that the reader feels being taken seriously, while being engaging enough and maintaining a pace that allows one to actually finish the whole book without burning out.

[1] Four, to be exact, and that number includes my own.

I like Freeman Dyson, but it seems like he really didn't hold punches much. He seems very laid back and is to a degree, but if you watch a lot of interviews with him, you'll notice he throws around quite a lot of shade.

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