Stephen Wolfram – 4-Hour Conversational Documentary on My Entire Arc of Life [video]
youtube.comScientific American I think did a balanced article about this character: https://web.archive.org/web/20231231040033/https://www.scien...
My favorite quotes:
when provided with some of the responses from other physicists regarding his work, Wolfram is singularly unenthused. “I’m disappointed by the naivete of the questions that you’re communicating,” he grumbles. “I deserve better.”
“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.”
> “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?
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.
So, story time. I once interviewed Stephen Wolfram for IEEE's software engineering radio and I had a lot of fun doing it and he did to.
We ended up running way overtime because he was having fun showing me things with Mathematica. He is a fascinating person, I successfully kept him off talking about his math / physics theories and on the idea of a programming language leading to better thinking and more break-throughs.
I left the discussion pretty impressed by him and he did in the discussion have some vague worries that he maybe got so focused on the idea of a notation for science in Mathematica that he neglected the actual work that sent him on this path. But he wasn't sure that the notation wasn't more valuable itself.
Notebooks, like Jupter, clearly came from his work and the other thing that hasn't reached mainstream he seems to have invented is having data sort of embedded in the programming language, in standard libraries, where it's easy to get the number of calories in the moon if it were made of cheese or whatever.
> Notebooks, like Jupter, clearly came from his work
While I often hear this claim from Wolfram and his supporters, I have never seen any evidence that it was his innovation. MathCAD was the first software released with a notebook interface, and there was research using those ideas prior to the release of the first Mathematica notebook. Maybe his particular take was an improvement on the others, but the claim that it was entirely his idea seems to me to be 100% incorrect.
I get that it's not exactly what we consider notebooks now, but Knuth was writing about literate programming several years before MathCAD.
I've never understood what Knuth considered literate programming. I've seen some examples of his and find them incomprehensivle. I think the issue with Knuth's contribution is that he only seemed to concentrate on the specification of a markup language, marred by TeX baggage.
The key idea of notebooks today are their interactiveness, the dynamic between a markup state and view state, and their multi-paradigm and multi-language nature.
Yeah, if you want to search for ancestors, I think literate programming definitely qualifies. I've also heard references to Smalltalk and Lisp machines as ancestors, but not being familiar with either, I can't say.
Knuth introduced the technique of literate programming in 1984, MathCAD was first released in 1986, and my copy of Literate Programming (the book of the thing) was published in 1992.
Knuth's literate programming notably differs from notebooks in that it was designed to write explanations meant for humans, which meant that the author could present the code in chunks in the narrative sequence; the code did not have to be in execution order, unlike notebooks.
>the code did not have to be in execution order
I'm not clear on this. Is it not just about having the function definitions in an arbitrary order just like all of us mortals do? Is there anything special about the code structure that Knuth proposes?
No, Knuth's cweb has the notion of chunks, which is just lines of code. It wires the chunk in dependency order. A chunk can have multiple functions, or no functions, or parts of functions; cweb doesn't care.
Part of the motivation might have been that he set up WEB for Pascal, which does enforce an order of declarations. Once he started working more with C, perhaps there was less reason; but he found that he enjoyed working in that manner. I haven't looked at anything released in that format for years, though.
Ah, I did not know that. My bad. Maybe he was more of a popularizer of the approach then?
Even at Wolfram Research, Theodore Gray is credited with inventing/developting THEIR initial interpretation of the notebook interface. His Wikipedia page [1] makes that clear.
I'd guess MathCAD was quite a bit more popular than Mathematica in the nineties, given Mathematica was something like ten times as expensive.
I certainly won't blame anyone for saying that, given that it's repeated so often that it's turning into common knowledge.
If you like this sort of thing check out Frink. https://frinklang.org/> having data sort of embedded in the programming language, in standard libraries, where it's easy to get the number of calories in the moon if it were made of cheese or whatever.I predict that within 100 years, computers will be twice as powerful, ten thousand times larger, and so expensive that only the five richest kings of Europe will own them. -- Professor John Frink
The units file itself is a worthy read just for the commentary.
Ha! That's marvelous. The rants on `mol`, `hertz` and `candela` are astonishing. Well worth the price.
// WARNING: Use of "Hz" will cause communication problems, errors, and make // one party or another look insane in the eyes of the other. // // In other words, if you use the Hz in the way it's currently defined by the // SI, as equivalent to 1 radian/s, you can point to the SI definitions and // prove that you follow their definitions precisely. And your physics // teacher will *still* fail you and your clients will think you're completely // incompetent because 1 Hz = 2 pi radians/s. And it has for centuries. // You are both simultaneously both right and both wrong. // You cannot win. // You are perfectly right. You are perfectly wrong. You look dumb and // unreasonable. The person arguing the opposite looks dumb and unreasonable. // // Hz == YOU CANNOT WIN // // (Insert "IT'S A TRAP" image here.)Is there any notion of integrating Frink as a library in other languages?
I'm surprised Stephen didn't claim he invented saving files. I used Macsyma before Wolfram and we had front ends that had worksheets. He definitely wasn't the first.
Agree with most everything, your description resonates (also a since 1988 mathematica person).
Theo Gray is who came up with the notebook, that iPython -> Jupyter were a multilanguage shout-out to, and they cite such. Other UIUC professors wrote significant parts of Mathematica originally, were paid for such.
Notation, or semantics?
Mathematica has no notation, and that's the worst thing about it.
Mathematics has M-Expressions, like S-Expressions, which are extremely powerfully and human-like for reasoning in multiple logical (not geometric) dimensions (using Lisp-style macro expansion)
It's been a long time since the discussion, but I think he was getting at the whorf hypothesis. If you could express certain ideas easily it would enable thinking about certain things more deeply and intelligently.
Not only that, but the intonation also changes people’s personalities. Notice how there are round calming words and sharper ones, like the ohm in mantras give an o sound and a word like stab has a sharper intonation.
If sapolsky believes the Sapir whorf hypothesis I do too.
He is bright. He has important things to say. Learning what he has to say takes way too much time. Until he gets a merciless editor, I won't listen to him.
He records every aspect of his life -- even design meetings. You can watch it all here: https://livestreams.stephenwolfram.com/
Wow, that's crazy. Imagine you have to be a very chilled character to be happy to be micromanaged by your boss (for example https://www.youtube.com/live/rtkioIv7x_Q?feature=shared&t=14...) and then have the meeting immediately put up on Youtube.
I remember buying his A New Kind of Science book before it was available for free. It was interesting to read, and it was good enough to impress a college kid like me back then. But now, looking back, I wonder what fields of science has it advanced? It's been more than 20 years already, and with a title like that, we'd expect a completely upturned physics, biology, and other disciplines based on it.
After pondering it for a while, the problem is that CAs are too chaotic to use, and there is simply no way to overcome this, nor is there even particularly a reason to try.
Anything that is Turing Complete is going to exhibit at least some degree of what I call "Turing Chaos", which is the sort of chaos you have in trying to understand what a given Turing Complete system is going to do in light of the fact that a Turing Complete system is going to include some equivalent of "if (something) { run this program } else { run that program }", which means that there is inevitably going to be uncertainty amplification in any attempt to understand a program. By "uncertainty amplification" I mean exactly what anyone who has every tried to understand a code base has been through; you can tell that your uncertainty about what the "something" value is gets amplified into the question of which entire program is being run, and that can iterate for quite a while. It's very chaotic.
However, for all that, and despite the famous way in which changing a single bit of a program may completely change how it operates, in practice with real human programs changing a single random bit is statistically most likely to have no user-visible impact. We spend a lot of time constraining our system's chaos. We have to. We can't work with systems in which literally every bit change completely changes the program.
However, CAs tend to work that way. A single bit flip will spread out at the relevant "speed of light" and change everything.
As a result, while they may be some of the simplest Turing Complete things, they are humanly useless. They are not useful for modeling processes; you have to be too precise with the initial states, and the thing you are modeling has to be too precise in its usage of the CA rules. They are not useful for engineering, which is precisely why we don't use them.
Or, to put it in a nutshell, while A New Kind Of Science is full of pretty pictures and legitimately interesting ideas... it's also in essence, comprehensively wrong. Not a "not even wrong"; it rises to the level of "real" wrongness. But it's comprehensively, from top to bottom, wrong about practical utility or any future practical utility.
(You can sit down and try to strip this characteristic from a sufficiently well-designed CA, but getting the precise balance of just the right amount of chaos is going to be difficult, and getting it to be also somehow useful afterwards raising the bar even higher. In the meantime, I've got von Neumann machines right here for people who want to do real work and the lambda calculus for people who want to work directly in mathematical abstractions without going insane, so... why?)
> A New Kind Of Science is full of pretty pictures and legitimately interesting ideas... it's also in essence, comprehensively wrong. Not a "not even wrong"; it rises to the level of "real" wrongness. But it's comprehensively, from top to bottom, wrong about practical utility or any future practical utility.
Yeah, after 20 some years, that's has to be the answer. At its basic level I think it just exploited the idea that people, including me, like to see interesting or complicated patterns, especially arising out of simple iterative rules like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_30 or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_110.
Of course, I can see how snail pattern or other natural patterns might be generated by a similar process but it's nowhere near revolutionizing any science like the title was claiming.
But Wolfram being Wolfram doesn't give up. There is the https://www.wolframinstitute.org and there is some activity there. I periodically drop by to see what's happening.
> They are not useful for engineering, which is precisely why we don't use them.
Exactly, we'd think by now they'd be some AI super-chip or something tangible based on of the cellular automata thing discovered by Wolfram.
He's like an actually smart version of Nicholas Nassim Taleb. Arrogant, egotistical and dismissive but at least he has real math chops.
Taleb has math chops, what are you talking about?
He's also quite a bit less self-aggrandizing.
Otoh, they do seem to like reach other, which in my book does cast some doubt on taleb's ability to judge people...
What math chops does taleb have? The same ones as any options trader, as far as I can tell.
On the options desk that I was a quant on[1] the traders were extremely dismissive of Taleb's math chops since in his book "Taleb on Risk: Managing Vanilla and Exotic Options" he clearly doesn't understand delta hedging, which is a pretty fundamental concept, particularly if you're writing a book about managing options risk.
[1] Equity Exotics and Hybrids at Goldman in London circa 2005 or so.
Ok, the guy is not some Fields medalist, so it depends what you mean by math chops, but here are a few of his papers published in respectable journals that have non negligible math content:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03784... (free at https://arxiv.org/pdf/1707.01370.pdf)
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03784...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03784... (free at https://arxiv.org/pdf/1405.1791.pdf)
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03784... (free at https://arxiv.org/pdf/1505.04722.pdf)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-020-0921-x
There are plenty more btw, these were the ones that I could find in more prestigious journals.
if you follow him on Twitter you'll see that he also does quite a bit of recreational maths too.
I liked his interview with Lex Fridman.
He's full of himself but has interesting things to say.
WolframAlpha is a gem on its on right. Yeah we have Gemini, GPT, Mixtral but when it comes to actual compositional compute, Wolfram alpha gets you the right answer and shows you the math.
I'm not super up to speed on everything he's said, but he didn't seem full of himself in that podcast. He sounded quite .. normal?
I was never impressed by Wolfram alpha.
In the for hour conversation on topic, he asks "if you want to know the weights of various dinosaurs, you can ask Wolfram alpha and it will tell you". So I asked it "what's the weight of a stegaussaurus", and it gave me some number. The i asked it "what's the total weight of all the stegaussaurus that ever lived" and it gave me some nonsense about the average [don't remember] for the population of the US. It didn't even understand the question. Calling it compute is overestimating it by as much as Wolfram overestimates himself.
Yeah that dude can talk. I try listening to him on Alex and he’s a windbag.
Here's a question. Why isn't Wolfram Research considered a sexy employer? They have cool research and technical problems and cool software. I looked a bit into it but I could only see them hiring in 3rd world countries, and only contractors. So are they a bad employer or what gives?
I had a friend who worked there. A very smart Ivy League-educated math PhD. He was very critical of the work culture at Wolfram Research. Apparently in his experience Stephen Wolfram treated people badly.
> Apparently in his experience Stephen Wolfram treated people badly.
Are you able/allowed to provide more details?
I’m a bit apprehensive since I don’t know SW personally, but what my friend described sounded like a borderline abusive behavior. Basically he treated people like they were stupid and shouted at them when they made mistakes.
I think it’s a shared trait among the ultra successful (think: bezos, jobs, musk, wolfram), that they unrelentingly pursue good ideas. In that relentless pursuit, people will inevitably have their (bad) ideas shot down.
Wolfram becomes audibly irritated at bad ideas, but mostly only when they should have been better, more complete, better explained (in their interest of time, for example) etc.
I think most of those who work with him know that he pursues truth, not what will make people feel good in that moment/meeting.
I’ve worked around people who are the opposite and try to morph reality so that whatever flimsy idea is suggested is somehow considered ‘correct’, and it results in long term frustration and inefficacy.
> that they unrelentingly pursue good ideas.
They also unrelentingly pursue bad ones. 3D fire phone interface, boring company + everything with Twitter, trying to fight cancer with a fruitarian diet ....
> bezos, jobs, musk, wolfram
One of those things is not like the other lol
Jobs, because he didn’t do it himself?
The commonality is they all brought $1b+ ideas to market; they didn’t just have good ideas, but did the hard work necessary to execute on them.
In what world is anything Wolfram has created a $1b+ idea?
Mathematica has half-billion+ in annual revenue and has been a mainstay of engineering work for decades. So ... this world?
Alright, I'm gonna need a source cited on that one lmao. Absolutely no way.
Well it's an employee-owned company. Your data is as good as mine. You assert that Wolfram's work is worth less than $1billion. You're quite emphatic about that fact. Let's just do some back-of-the-napkin math to assess if your premise has any validity.
Mathematica has been around for over 40 years. It has 1600+ employees. Tell me, how could a private company make payroll for 1600 top earners without hundreds of millions in revenue? They had no outside funding that we know of.
Obviously this company has made $1 billion dollars in its lifetime. Many times over I'd guess.
Existence doesn't guarantee profitability - they may have investors with a lot of patience and deep pockets. After 40 years, they should indeed turn a nice profit, but I'm not sure if it brings in billions. Many people see their product as educational software.
Look up what revenue is, it isn't the same as profits.
It does not have 1600+ employees. It's in the couple hundreds. Again, source, I worked there.
Didn't Apple contract with them for parts of Siri, using Wolfram Alpha?
- They pay like shit (compared to "sexy employers")
- Headquartered in Champaign, Illinois (not a bad town, but not sexy)
- As "cool" as their software is, not a lot of people use it. Python is eating their lunch, ESPECIALLY outside of academia. Although, they're losing ground in academia as well
- Stephen Wolfram isn't a charismatic leader who is fun to work for. There's no shortage of stories of him short circuiting in meetings and treating employees disrespectfully.
- They're not doing quite as much cutting edge stuff (that matters, at least) these days. Their AI/ML suite isn't that interesting, numpy/scipy does a lot of numerical stuff better, Matlab does a lot of stuff (like digital signal processing, for example) better. And Python, being free and open source, is a better prototyping language for most stuff. Symbolic computing is probably the one place it is actually a leader in... but for so many applications in the real world (engineering, r&d, real-time algorithms, etc) symbolic computing simply isn't needed.
As you hint at, they can attract some talent because there are opportunities to work on some niche stuff that's hard to work on elsewhere. But that's a minority of roles at the company.
Source: Used to work there.
I think Mathematica is cool, but it is my understanding that Maple is actually superior to Mathematica in symbolic calculations.
Thanks for the insight. I used to be a mathematician and looked a bit into working as a numerical mathematician on numerical or optimization software. What I noticed is that salaries do tend to be significantly lower than FAANG. Maybe that's because it is a niche and there aren't lots of employers around doing that sort of work.
How does the market for numeric optimization software divided by the number of engineers required to create and maintain it compare to the market for "nearly any physical good, cloud computing, eyeballs-for-ads, watching videos, connecting with other humans, high quality computers and mobile devices, maps, email, and search" divided by the [larger] number of engineers required to create and maintain it?
Sales / potential gross profit per FAANG employee is high.
I believe the main reason is that the skillset in this domain has a small overlap with what is needed at FAANG. This is done mostly in academia and as such the salaries are in line with the salaries at universities.
I know some mathematician working for big chemical company which has a huge internal Fortran Software stack for numerical optimization.
>- They pay like shit (compared to "sexy employers")
How do they pay compared to other midwestern employers?
Relatively reasonably, for Champaign cost of living. But "local midwestern employer salary" isn't sexy.
>But "local midwestern employer salary" isn't sexy.
True, but it's always funny when people compare midwestern salaries to FAANG companies, as if the cost of living is like 10x less in the midwest. I don't know the specifics of what wolfram pays, but my gut feeling has always been that it's likely pretty good. A lot of the other random math and tech adjacent companies in the area started by ex-wolfram employees and UIUC grads seem to be doing pretty well.
Yeah, I don't disagree. But again, the original metric was "sexy". But you're definitely better off getting a remote big-tech adjacent job than working at Wolfram Research, if you've got those chops.
Here's one example why, an ugly incident involving Matthew Cook's work proving a theorem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Cook#Work_with_Stephen...
I think they're very traditional – I don't think software or engineering is their edge, and I suspect they outsource a lot of that to cheaper locations – they seem themselves as being more research focused.
Their Glassdoor reviews used to be a bit dodgy too, nothing you wouldn't be able to guess after watching 10 minutes of any video of you-know-who though.
They are also just small, only a few hundred people if I remember correctly.
Wait, isn't software their product? Or are you distinguishing between their infrastructural and their math/science libraries?
I sent them an email asking what .NET version their .NET link library used, asking if it was still .NET Framework or if it had moved to .NET Core or 5+. The question seemed incomprehensible to them. They barely understood what I was asking, and I never heard back from them.
Software is their product, but my guess is there's a separation between the product and research side which will be filled with Phds, and the "build" side which I expect is outsourced or offshored.
What I really mean is that I don't think they see themselves as an engineering company in the way FAANG do, or an "AI" company, but probably more like a maths/science department at a university.
I looked into it a while back and the synopsis was that you needed to move there and that they paid poorly.
And this is why I thought Sheldon Cooper (of The Big Bang Theory) was supposed to be a parody of Stephen Wolfram, specifically.
I do not care that Stephen Wolfram is full of himself.
Every tech CEO is full of themselves too, but because Stephen is an awkward looking nerdy guy who is less business oriented people dislike him for it.
He's an interesting guy, even if he isn't as interesting as he thinks he is.
I think people take issue with CEOs pretending to be experts in things where they aren't - Wolfram in physics, Musk in geopolitics and freedom of speech etc.
Wolfram literally is an expert in physics though. Most of the criticism, even in these comments seems to boil down to not liking the guy because he's smart or because his big ideas are incomprehensible if aren't familiar with the fields in which he is more knowledgeable than most people. It's ok to not like the guy, but let's not pretend it's for any real objective reason.
"Most of the criticism, even in these comments seems to boil down to not liking the guy because he's smart or because his big ideas are incomprehensible"
No, most of the criticism comes from the fact, that he has a super high ego, thinking he is always the smartest person in the room, making him treat others badly. See the comments from people working for him. And his big ideas - well, he claims he found the holy grail of physics, the theory of everything. And he wrote a bestseller for the masses. But actual physicists are not convinced because his model is simply worse at predicting data of experiments, than other models (which do not claim to be theories of everything). And he reacts poorly to this criticism.
So yes, he is smart and a interesting character. But maybe not one who solved the theory of everything. Because if he really would have - then the results would speak for itself. So I am not ruling out that his approach can one day lead towards it (not my area of expertize) - but apparently he is not there, but claims he is.
> I think people take issue with CEOs pretending to be experts in things where they aren't - Wolfram in physics
Stephen Wolfram has a PhD in particle physics (source: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Stephen_Wolfram&o...).
That emphatically does not make him an expert in physics today. A PhD means he was an expert is some narrow niche of physics four decades ago.
People like to talk while Wolfram walks the walk, while he talks
Somehow people who are most convinced of their genius are the least interesting to me. Contrast with Roger Penrose and you couldn't meet a more humble, interesting and interested conversationalist
idk which is more cringeworth, Wolfram's computational reality https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/physicists-critic...
or Penrose's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orchestrated_objective_reducti...
> Somehow people who are most convinced of their genius are the least interesting to me.
I know some people who are great in their area of research, but are, to put it very midly, not the most humble persons (to give an example of one such person (a great research): "the people who could learn a whole lot from me are all tenured professors in my area of research"; just to be clear: his judgement is right :-) ).
In my experience, great researchers who are full of themselves nearly always had to work/fight very hard for where they are now, and are thus very bitter about worse researchers who have it easier.
Don Knuth and Preet Bharara too. I had an advisor in undergrad in plasma physics named Roscoe White who was also quite humble and brilliant.
Feynman never needed to tell you how smart he was, it just flowed out naturally as he talked about things in his beautiful clear way.
Disagree on Feynman. He seemed extraordinarily invested in showing off and self-mythologizing.
Murray Gell-Mann said exactly this. He basically got tired of working with him because everything about his personality was to generate stories and mythologies about himself.
To me, this whole idea shows what a fool the average man is.
As if we all know so much about Richard Feynman compared to Murray Gell-Mann because of what a great scientist Richard Feynman was. When OBVIOUSLY, the reason is because of the degree Feynman self promoted himself compared to other scientists.
Yeah, very obviously a highly intelligent man but it's immediately obvious that he was very carefully crafting how he wanted to be perceived by others in several of his self aggrandizing memoirs.
Jesus Christ what an awful example. If there's one thing that feynman did whenever he met anyone, was made it clear to them that he's smarter.
I wonder if New Kind of Science will end up like Godel, Escher, Bach ended up after release of GPT4[0]. It will be interesting to see what concept/formalization(?) will basically invalidate 50% of the research made by Wolfram.
I'll spare myself commenting on Wolfram, it's enough to do Ctrl+F on "arrogant" in this topic. Frankly, I don't even care. It's just that New Kind of Science didn't meaningfully advance anywhere beyond being "an interesting concept" for all of his natural life.
[0] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kAmgdEjq2eYQkB5PP/douglas-ho...
Cmd+F "aggrandize"
Only 2 instances so far?!
And only 1 "arrogant"! (so far)
Wolfram WAS the first set of MacArthur fellows. It counts for something..
Interview with Stephen Wolfram on his favorite subject.
EDIT 1: Maybe I'll update this as I listen, maybe not we'll see.
But so far:
- Doesn't remember anything he used to talk about with his parents. Doesn't remember any particularly interesting conversations. Doesn't know anything about his parent's political inclinations.
- He a brother younger by 10 years. Says he was an "only child for about 10 years". For the rest of the conversation says his parent's experience with children were data size 1.
EDIT 2: getting super tedious. I'd like to hear what his kids or his brother think of him.
When your comment was just the first sentence, it made me laugh out loud after the perfect short delay to comprehend it.
Yeah, some times less is more.
Wolfram is insufferable in short form -- imagine listening to him talk for 4 hours!
I didn't know Wolfram was even available in short form.
I bought NKS for fifty bucks twenty years ago because I thought I could form a group around it that would take turns summing up chapters for each other, but unfortunately, if humans who give a f** represent states and the number of f**s a human can give represent colors, we're talking about a 1,0 turing machine here.
I actually laughed out loud at "I didn't know Wolfram was even available in short form."
That said, I too have read a lot of his work (yes, even A New Kind of Science). I came away very impressed but lacking the right kind of framing to make the best of it (which is, I suspect, what most people who actually make the effort will feel).
I’m holding out for the 8-hour Stephen Wolfram Eric Weinstein Dueling Life Arcs documentary.
Larry Ellison enters the chat
I usually defend him from the inevitable HN accusations of hubris. But four hours is a nope from me. Would be interested in a written summary though.
Has Wolfram ever done a short form interview?
Eh he might be right. I would listen to his ideas dispassionately. Many geniuses who were right were ridiculed.
For every genius who was right and ridiculed, and celebrated accordingly, there are many people who were wrong and ridiculed, and forgotten accordingly.
His work is definitely worthwhile. Wolfram Language by itself is actually very cool. I really wish he would open source it. I'm not going to use any math package that isn't open source for anything.
I think his physics work is pretty interesting as well.
I think the reason he aggrandizes, and this is only speculation, is because he is pushing the envelope in many fields simultaneously and wants to "credentialize" himself, and give people context on his background.
He might also be insecure self-absorbed. Which, while annoying, doesn't disqualify someone's ideas by itself. It just means you might need to watch for ego-based confabulations in their work.
It might also mean he's a pain to work with, if it is indeed an ego thing. But I don't know the guy... so it's all speculation.
> His work is definitely worthwhile. Wolfram Language by itself is actually very cool. I really wish he would open source it. I'm not going to use any math package that isn't open source for anything.
Here is the official statements of Wolfram Research on this topic:
> Why Wolfram Tech Isn’t Open Source—A Dozen Reasons
> https://blog.wolfram.com/2019/04/02/why-wolfram-tech-isnt-op...
See also
> Episode 1: Thoughts on Wolfram & Open Source
> https://soundcloud.com/wolframresearch/wolfram-on-open-sourc...
If you nevertheless insist on having an open source implementation of the Wolfram language, have a look at the answers at
> https://mathematica.stackexchange.com/questions/4454/is-ther...
I don't have an answer for him. I don't mind paying money for software, I get his points, but at the same time, it's a non-starter for me.
When it comes to math. Especially a system as cool as Wolfram Language, I want to hack on the insides.
I don't publish things, or have time right now. But in 10 years, I estimate I'm going to be wanting to compile math software on radically different chips and ISAs.
Without an open source language, everything I build on top of the system will be incompatible with hardware specific instructions, unless they compiled it for that chip, often missing very specific optimizations (which could be improved even today). Or I would need to virtualize.
All this math code will the most important and hottest running code paths in my system, and won't even be able to compile to experimental ISAs or their extensions to take advantage.
Those that were forgotten may be right too.
I would still listen dispassionately. He's smarter than most people on this thread, that's for sure.
Being logical is ridiculing someone for being wrong, not for being full of himself. Many geniuses were ass holes.
I assure you -- There's nothing wrong with ridiculing someone for being an asshole. How you interact with other people matters, like it or not.
I never said there was nothing wrong with it.
I said to be logical you should only ridicule people for being wrong.
Ridiculing someone for being an ass hole is valid but illogical. There is merit to this distinction because sometimes the ass hole is right and everyone else is wrong.
The key here is dispassionate judgment and analysis. Can you handle that? If not that's totally normal and valid.
Worlfram's ideas aren't wrong, aside from technical disputes. Anyone can learn a heck of a lot from Wolfram.
It's his way of making everything about himself and his plagiarism that put people off. He's Feynman without the charm.
He is no Feynman. Feynman warned us about people like him and this kind of alternative science. No one is saying anything.
"It all started when I invented cellular automata, this thing that will revolutionise computing... at some point."
Is this an actual quote from the video? I'm not going to scrub through 4 hours of footage to find out, sorry.
It's not (as far as I can tell). The closest thing I can quickly find in the transcript is the following:
Copied from transcript and lightly reformatted, but otherwise not corrected (girdle for Gödel, etc all left intact):
1:40:2x
in the fall of 1981 and I spent that time kind of studying The Works of people like bonan and girdle and bunch of stuff about neural Nets and I was that was all in kind of the can I understand foundationally how complexity shows up in the world and that caused me to um uh to kind of um uh try and develop sort of the simplest model that might do something interesting and it led me to these things called cellular autometer which are very simple uh systems where like tiny programs where you just have a row of black and white cells and you just have a rule that says how to update those cells and um I started looking at those things in the fall of 1981 and
"It led me to" does not imply "led me to [discover/invent]" but rather "led me to [start studying]"
His own notes here directly state that they were considered long before he studied them:
No, of course not, it's just me parodying Stephen Wolfram every time he speaks/writes. He wrote a book called 'A New Kind of Science' claiming all this stuff in about 2002 which was widely criticised by scientists as overstating it's claims and much less important than he thinks it is, but he's been talking like that ever since pretty much.
I love Stephen Wolfram so much that I may even consider him a role model.
I understand the need for the masses to have people ideas that are obviously practical.
Stephen Wolfram is more of an explore. And he is documenting phenomena that I don't see any one else doing because everyone else is so teleological.
I think we need to give a break to researchers doing this original non teleological research.
I don't understand why people find him "insufferable"?
He comes off as very arrogant. Also, on more than one occasion he's tried to pass off others work as his own. The best of example of this is when he said he invented the field of cellular automata.
I don't think that's what he said (nor what he meant nor implied by the things that he actually did say).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39456628
(He does come across as arrogant, because he probably is, but his arrogance doesn't extend so far as to include this a claim that he invented something that he’s acknowledged were discussed before his birth.)
> The best of example of this is when he said he invented the field of cellular automata.
Source?
Did he really say that? My quick search didn’t turn anything up.
He posted a 4hr video on talking about his life. He always comes off with hubris and self-importance… that’s a big turn off.
People write large Biographies & memoirs about their life.
What should it be hubris to talk about your life for 4 hours?
But people don't often turn every opportunity they have into an a large autobiography and memoir of their life.
Here's one example: http://bactra.org/weblog/915.html
Is there something wrong there? I’m sorry if I’m being dense.
Attempting to goad a critical reviewer into engaging in some sort of comments-section "public debate" (assuming that somehow the public discussion would change the reviewer's mind) a _decade_ after the fact? That behavior is, in a word, insufferable.
EDIT: Also, "I know it was a challenge to review a book of its size..." comes off as insinuating that (1) the book is somehow "grand" and (2) maybe the reviewer didn't "get it".
I remember when it came out because a friend was excited about it. As I recall it’s a pretty large book.
Edit: just under 1200 pages on Amazon. I never got into it because I couldn’t figure out what the big revelation was supposed to be. It would take some serious dedication to go through such a large book for the sake of an unfavorable review.
I take wolfram’s words at face value.
I don’t find him insufferable but I also haven’t paid much attention to him.
From what I gather of other people’s comments, they are often bothered by his apparently pervasive discussion of himself and his life.
I’ve never met the man, but the few interviews I’ve see or read about him I thought were pretty interesting.
I LOVE Stephen Wolfram.
Him too.
Maybe it's Stephen lurking.
TYSM
I respect the work that he's done and the contributions he's given to humanity but for once I would like to see something by Stephen Wolfram that didn't involve at least 50% of the content being a form of self-aggrandizement.
I find that everything I try to consume from him contains his autobiography interspersed in the giant wall of text. This video is exquisitely cringeworthy.
blah blah (which I did in 1988) blah blah (which I completed in 1992).
He has no collaborators. He gives no credit to others. He just relentlessly names things after himself, takes singular credit for everything, and name-drops other famous scientists he bumped into.
I genuinely find the wolfram physics project interesting, but the behavior of wolfram himself sets off all my bullshit alarms.
I suspect that it will be someone else that will take these ideas over the finish line. He seems completely oblivious to the fact that his behavior makes it harder to take the ideas seriously.
My gateway to the ideas was Jonathan Gorard. Check out his videos if you are curious, they are much more accessible than Wolfram's own content.
> He just relentlessly names things after himself
Well "Wolfram" does sound like a pretty good name to name things after.
He even got a metal named after him ;-) Tungsten is called „Wolfram“ in German.
The metal has literally nothing to do with Stephen Wolfram…
It was a joke (there was a smiley). Wolfram the element was named in the 16. century.
Wolfram is scared that Gorard is going to upstage him.
The stallman of physics.
At least Stallman is charming in his uncouth, nerdy way.
That is .. debatable. Or rather subjective.
I don't know.
It takes a village to build something.
But it takes a leader to assemble a village around a cause.
I do appreciate your take. The village deserves credit for the work they've done.
But, at the same time, for many folks I see "well actuallyed" for their achievements because of the village... I don't think the change would have manifested in the world if the village didn't have that person.
An example I see more frequently now is that a market for electric cars wasn't willed into existence by Elon. There are variations of this claim, from him not being the original founder to the huge number of employees involved with Tesla's accomplishments.
But, at the end of the day, I have zero reason to believe Mercedes Benz would be releasing an electric car if Elon had decided to take his market winnings and go sit on a beach.
I have no reason to characterize the wolfram language, and its ecosystem, as anything other than a magnum opus that was willed into existence by Wolfram.
I'm open to being wrong here. But I've not yet learned why I am.
If an evil villain crushes a man's spine and the man develops technology to get revenge that allows him to walk, does that make the act of crushing his spine not evil?
I think in your example the evil villain set out to crush a man's spine, not to develop an exoskeleton to help people walk? And they are introduced upfront as an evil villain.
Wouldn't this be a more appropriate analogy:
If a person decides to will an exoskeleton into existence to help people walk, and builds a techno-capital machine capable of supporting the team necessary make it happen, is the act of building the exoskeleton not evil?
I think ignoring the villain portion of the analogy given the behavior of capitalist "magnates" is being overly generous.
His book "A new kind of science" is quite fascinating and has some interesting ideas about cellular automata. But I couldn't finish it because of how every few pages there is something about how great the author/his ideas are.
Famously, without a bibliography. Odd choice for a book claiming to be a substantial field-defining scientific work.
A few years later a list of "books that have been added to his permanent collection" appeared in lieu of a bibliography. It's pretty good but perhaps too comprehensive. https://www.wolframscience.com/reference/books/
In 2012 he wrote about why he didn't have references or bibliography. It's a New Kind of Publishing, too. https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2012/05/living-a-paradig...
This is the reasoning from the link above, which I post without comment.
> I always consider history important—both for giving credit and for letting one better understand the context of ideas.... I resolved that rather than just throwing in disembodied references, I would actually do the work of trying to unravel and explain the detailed histories of things.
> And the result was that of the nearly 300,000 words of notes at the back of the book, a significant fraction are about history. I did countless hours of (often fascinating) primary interviews and went through endless archives—and in the end was rather proud of the level of historical scholarship I managed to achieve. And when it came to traditional references I figured that rather than using yet more printed pages, I should just include in the notes appropriate names and keywords, from which anyone—even with the state of web search in 2002—could readily find whatever primary literature they wanted, at greater depth and more conveniently than from lists of journal page numbers.
This book is perhaps most valuable as an example of why you need an editor.
Unfortunately, it needed a new kind of editor, one which has yet to be discovered, even after all these years.
It reminds me of Nietzsche's autobiography Ecce Homo, which was at least somewhat self-aware of its pomposity, titling chapters as:
1 – Why I Am So Wise
2 - Why I Am So Clever
3 – Why I Write Such Excellent Books, Part 1
4 – Why I Write Such Excellent Books, Part 2
5 - Why I Write Such Excellent Books, Part 3
6 - Why I Am a Fatality
You just can't handle the Kanye of Mathematics.
I don't understand why Wolfram is getting the attention he is getting. His new theory of physics is not just riddled with problems, it also riddled with erroneous claims. He has also taken credit for ideas from von Newmann and Conway. We also have this issue of undecidable problems, he wants to violate up and down. He self-published his books, so that is one problem. Feynman warned us of Cargo cult science. Here it is in action.
He's arrogant, he doesn't give credits to others. So what? Silly Ad hominem attack.
Not listening to him because of this is a mistake, Wolfram is a true genius and, even if "his" ideas aren't fully his, you will probably not hear them with such clarity anywhere else. He is, at a minimum, an amazing explainer like few people I've ever seen.
It's not a mistake to value your time to be worth more than "listening to Stephen Wolfram"
I think all the ad hominem you see in here are from people who waste too many precious hours of their life listening to him. I know I am: I spent weeks as a young teen over NKS when it came out. Wasn't as revelatory as he kept insisting it was. Turned me off of cellular automata.
Populism, it works!
EDIT: Generally when people are "true geniuses" their _peers_ identify them as such. That's not the case here.
> EDIT: Generally when people are "true geniuses" their _peers_ identify them as such.
Counterexample: Kurt Heegener. OK, not a genius, but nevertheless a mathematician whose proof of a deep result (class number 1 problem [1]) was not accepted by his peers
Quote from [2]:
"In 1952, he published the Stark–Heegner theorem which he claimed was the solution to a classic number theory problem proposed by the great mathematician Gauss, the class number 1 problem. Heegner's work was not accepted for years, mainly due to his quoting of a portion of Heinrich Martin Weber's work that was known to be incorrect (though he never used this result in the proof)."
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Class_number_prob...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Kurt_Heegner&oldi...
This is interesting, I wasn't aware. Thank you! What I was (maybe snarkily) trying to evoke was e.g. how the way Hans Bethe spoke about Richard Feynman contrasts with how Freeman Dyson speaks about Stephen Wolfram, or Cosma Shalizi's review of A New Kind of Science. It's obviously not universally true that everyone accepts or understands a scientist's work in their time, but it's not often that a scientific "genius" is widely regarded as a crackpot among their scientific contemporaries. Extraordinary claims, etc etc.
In my opinion, arrogance, selfishness, and ego from (perceived) "genius" people should not be tolerated even if they made/make substantial contributions in one field or another. Academia, in particular, is full of these types. The world would survive without their precious work and would be a much better place without the shitty experience they bring to everyone else. I was just watching Avi Loeb; good riddance, no matter what contributions he made to science, we could do without them and him.
> The world would survive without their precious work and would be a much better place without the shitty experience they bring to everyone else.
People have very different needs for harmony. Your statement likely implies that yours is rather high. My stance differs: great research is what advances mankind. Unpleasant great researchers will die some day, their research is there to stay.
(just to be clear: there is nothing good or bad with having a high or low need for harmony)
This is somewhat off-topic, but does Wolfram have a degenerative muscle illness? He puts his right hand down at around 30 minutes, and then doesn't move it again for hours. That and his unmoving legs are strikingly reminiscent of a friend who had MS.
He gestures with both his hands frequently throughout the entire video, not just before the 30 minute mark. I think this is just confirmation bias. And frankly, if he did have a degenerative muscle illness, that would be nobody’s business but his own.
That's fair, and you're entirely correct that its nobody's business but his own.
I sometimes wonder if he even uses deodorant. He liked to work remote and bother people via an iPad Segway robot. If you had to chaperone him in an elevator there you would understand he likes to talk about himself.