Hacker News Reader

Comment by gfodor | Hacker News Reader

Made it about 3 sentences in before closing the tab in disgust as Wolfram's ego interjects when asked about Turing, and he claims that Turing got distracted and so failed to create concrete computation, so that task was "left to me." Ugh.

View on HN

The combination of Wolfram's awkwardness and intelligence/accomplishments results in what seems like hubris, but I think he is just trying to state things plainly.

In this instance the "left to me" phrase simply means this is what he is now working on, not that he is the only one to fix dumb ol' Turing's mistakes. And he mentioned exactly how Turing "got distracted" in the next question: Turing jumped from project to project. This was something Wolfram described as a sometimes enviable trait. He's not disparaging the guy.

Maybe I'm misreading it, but it seems like he's clearly saying he alone is the only one who has ever implemented any kind of computation. I don't see how else to interpret "left to me". Why not "left to later mathematicians,", "left to later generations", or even "left to my team"?

Wolfram has never come across as egotistical to me.

Every single time I read the comments in a post about Wolfram, there is always some nitpicking going on, on words and phrases that don't mean anything special, being blow out of proportion.

I don't know where all this resentment is coming from for this man, but I guess some people just see what they believe, as opposed to believing what they see... Or I've just missed something completely.

He's an unusual combination of incredibly intelligent (among a handful in the world), but also incredibly boastful and supercilious. Unlike in basketball, where the biggest trash talkers are often the top players, among intellectuals, the biggest boasters are usually complete phonies. Wolfram is the exception -- he is indisputably the "real deal" while also sparing no opportunity to rub everyone's face in it.

His work is brilliant and insightful -- just treat it as work on its own merits and try not to think too much about the sanctimonious tone behind it.

Reading articles by Wolfram is like stepping into a alternative universe where the entire contemporary scientific community does not exist. Science and engineering are simply the progression of ideas and projects conceived by Stephen Wolfram. Hell, he has an entire company staffed with likely hundreds of engineers that have worked on his projects for decades, and yet talks about Mathematica as if he wrote every single line of code himself. I make an effort when I see him talk or write to find any references to this team of people who work tirelessly on his projects, and I usually fail to find even a single one.

If you handed his writing to a 3rd grader, they'd probably infer that actual research ground to a halt after the scientific revolution until, praise the Lord, A New Kind of Science was published. This seminal work broke all barriers and unified every single field of science through an elegant framework that had escaped mankind for hundreds of years. And, how was this great breakthrough possible, you ask? Well, it was only possible due to the amazing effort behind that other great work, Mathematica. And now, thanks to the breakthroughs of A New Kind of Science, the world is finally able to see the pinnacle of human achievement and computation: Wolfram|Alpha.

When he writes about historical progress of science and engineering, Wolfram peppers his points with citations to A New Kind of Science over and over again while not linking to, say, any other publication, ever. It's beyond egotistical, it's bizarre.

> Wolfram has never come across as egotistical to me.

That's interesting because the man himself believes he comes across as egotistical:

"That’s somewhat egotistical because I can say, ‘this would not have happened without me.’"

You've never met the guy then.

Here's another good one: "The actual data that we have inside of Wolfram Alpha is now roughly comparable to the textual content of the internet"

This can be true if by "textual content", you're not looking at things like the raw html (and obviously not images/videos/etc), and looking at only content - and comparing that to some gigs of random data and images and whatnot. Probably not that hard for that to be true, but it is of course an unfair comparison.

Your loss. It's a very interesting article.

Me too! Why did I even click the link? I just assume the rest of the article went something along the lines of: "Also, Newton was a moron. Gravity would have been apparent to me without the apple.", etc, etc.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com