Stephen Wolfram – 4-Hour Conversational Documentary on My Entire Arc of Life [video]

Scientific American I think did a balanced article about this character: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20231231040033&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.scientificamerican.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;physicists-criticize-stephen-wolframs-theory-of-everything&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20231231040033&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.scien...</a><p>My favorite quotes:<p>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.”<p>“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.”

So, story time. I once interviewed Stephen Wolfram for IEEE&#x27;s software engineering radio and I had a lot of fun doing it and he did to.<p>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 &#x2F; physics theories and on the idea of a programming language leading to better thinking and more break-throughs.<p>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&#x27;t sure that the notation wasn&#x27;t more valuable itself.<p>Notebooks, like Jupter, clearly came from his work and the other thing that hasn&#x27;t reached mainstream he seems to have invented is having data sort of embedded in the programming language, in standard libraries, where it&#x27;s easy to get the number of calories in the moon if it were made of cheese or whatever.

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&#x27;t listen to him.

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&#x27;s been more than 20 years already, and with a title like that, we&#x27;d expect a completely upturned physics, biology, and other disciplines based on it.

He&#x27;s like an actually smart version of Nicholas Nassim Taleb. Arrogant, egotistical and dismissive but at least he has real math chops.

I liked his interview with Lex Fridman.<p>He&#x27;s full of himself but has interesting things to say.<p>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.

Yeah that dude can talk. I try listening to him on Alex and he’s a windbag.

Here&#x27;s a question. Why isn&#x27;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?

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.<p>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.<p>He&#x27;s an interesting guy, even if he isn&#x27;t as interesting as he thinks he is.

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&#x27;t meet a more humble, interesting and interested conversationalist

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&#x2F;formalization(?) will basically invalidate 50% of the research made by Wolfram.<p>I&#x27;ll spare myself commenting on Wolfram, it&#x27;s enough to do Ctrl+F on &quot;arrogant&quot; in this topic. Frankly, I don&#x27;t even care. It&#x27;s just that New Kind of Science didn&#x27;t meaningfully advance anywhere beyond being &quot;an interesting concept&quot; for all of his natural life.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.lesswrong.com&#x2F;posts&#x2F;kAmgdEjq2eYQkB5PP&#x2F;douglas-hofstadter-changes-his-mind-on-deep-learning-and-ai" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.lesswrong.com&#x2F;posts&#x2F;kAmgdEjq2eYQkB5PP&#x2F;douglas-ho...</a>

Cmd+F &quot;aggrandize&quot;<p>Only 2 instances so far?!

Wolfram WAS the first set of MacArthur fellows. It counts for something..

Interview with Stephen Wolfram on his favorite subject.<p>EDIT 1: Maybe I&#x27;ll update this as I listen, maybe not we&#x27;ll see.<p>But so far:<p>- Doesn&#x27;t remember anything he used to talk about with his parents. Doesn&#x27;t remember any particularly interesting conversations. Doesn&#x27;t know anything about his parent&#x27;s political inclinations.<p>- He a brother younger by 10 years. Says he was an &quot;only child for about 10 years&quot;. For the rest of the conversation says his parent&#x27;s experience with children were data size 1.<p>EDIT 2: getting super tedious. I&#x27;d like to hear what his kids or his brother think of him.

Wolfram is insufferable in short form -- imagine listening to him talk for 4 hours!

&quot;It all started when I <i>invented</i> cellular automata, this thing that will revolutionise computing... at some point.&quot;

I love Stephen Wolfram so much that I may even consider him a role model.<p>I understand the need for the masses to have people ideas that are obviously practical.<p>Stephen Wolfram is more of an explore. And he is documenting phenomena that I don&#x27;t see any one else doing because everyone else is so teleological.<p>I think we need to give a break to researchers doing this original non teleological research.<p>I don&#x27;t understand why people find him &quot;insufferable&quot;?

I LOVE Stephen Wolfram.

TYSM

I respect the work that he&#x27;s done and the contributions he&#x27;s given to humanity but for once I would like to see something by Stephen Wolfram that didn&#x27;t involve at least 50% of the content being a form of self-aggrandizement.<p>I find that everything I try to consume from him contains his autobiography interspersed in the giant wall of text. This video is <i>exquisitely</i> cringeworthy.

I don&#x27;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&#x27;s arrogant, he doesn&#x27;t give credits to others. So what? Silly Ad hominem attack.<p>Not listening to him because of this is a mistake, Wolfram is a true genius and, even if &quot;his&quot; ideas aren&#x27;t fully his, you will probably not hear them with such clarity anywhere else. He is, at a <i>minimum</i>, an amazing explainer like few people I&#x27;ve ever seen.

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&#x27;t move it again for hours. That and his unmoving legs are strikingly reminiscent of a friend who had MS.

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.