Wolfram’s arrogance isn’t on the level of literary convention, it’s on the level of personality disorder.
I like Yudkowsky too (and a LOT), but I’m not blind to the (very good) reasons why so many other people think he’s insufferably arrogant!
And Wolfram might be even more arrogant than EY!
I’m just personally indifferent to in either case, and it remains true that whether their ideas are true or useful is, ultimately, independent of their personalities.
I haven’t looked at his book in a very long time because I’m not convinced it says anything interesting beyond studying Cellular Automata in depth.
I’ve read a good bit in … the last decade or so? … about the many many instances of ‘co-discovery’ and I find that it’s generally good for (many) people to ‘repeat’ the same claims and theories. Often it’s helpful, for me and I think many others, to better understand any particular thing because different explanations by different people aid that understanding in different ways; often very different ways. So, even if there was literally nothing novel in it, I still consider it interesting and valuable to me. And had it been broken up and published as dozens (or more) of academic papers, I probably wouldn’t have been exposed to much of the info at all.
But the book is freely available on the web! You can try reading it from the beginning, or pick a random section. If you can separate the material from your feelings about his disordered personality, you might find it to be pretty good, even if it’s not useful for yourself specifically.
I’m quite happy to separate content from presentation, I just remember there not being a lot of content beyond cellular automata and vague grand claims, last time I looked.
Some of the “vague grand claims” I still find useful/insightful:
There are (roughly) four classes of ‘complexity’: ‘static’, ‘simple repetition and nesting’, ‘randomness’, and ‘history’
‘Universal computation is common and cheap’ – this seems more and more confirmed via, e.g. various ‘Turing completeness’ results
Computation is (in some important sense(s)) ‘more general’ than mathematics (particularly the parts of it that mathematicians study) – on the other hand, I’d guess ‘computation’ and ‘math’ are ‘technically’ equivalent; on the gripping hand, one of my favorite Scott Aaronson papers/essays makes me think there might be a bit more to this
A lot of natural systems really can be modeled as ‘simple programs’, and much more easily/‘naturally’ than as simple mathematical systems
I like Yudkowsky too (and a LOT), but I’m not blind to the (very good) reasons why so many other people think he’s insufferably arrogant!
And Wolfram might be even more arrogant than EY!
I’m just personally indifferent to in either case, and it remains true that whether their ideas are true or useful is, ultimately, independent of their personalities.
I’ve read a good bit in … the last decade or so? … about the many many instances of ‘co-discovery’ and I find that it’s generally good for (many) people to ‘repeat’ the same claims and theories. Often it’s helpful, for me and I think many others, to better understand any particular thing because different explanations by different people aid that understanding in different ways; often very different ways. So, even if there was literally nothing novel in it, I still consider it interesting and valuable to me. And had it been broken up and published as dozens (or more) of academic papers, I probably wouldn’t have been exposed to much of the info at all.
But the book is freely available on the web! You can try reading it from the beginning, or pick a random section. If you can separate the material from your feelings about his disordered personality, you might find it to be pretty good, even if it’s not useful for yourself specifically.
I’m quite happy to separate content from presentation, I just remember there not being a lot of content beyond cellular automata and vague grand claims, last time I looked.
Fair enough!
Some of the “vague grand claims” I still find useful/insightful:
There are (roughly) four classes of ‘complexity’: ‘static’, ‘simple repetition and nesting’, ‘randomness’, and ‘history’
‘Universal computation is common and cheap’ – this seems more and more confirmed via, e.g. various ‘Turing completeness’ results
Computation is (in some important sense(s)) ‘more general’ than mathematics (particularly the parts of it that mathematicians study) – on the other hand, I’d guess ‘computation’ and ‘math’ are ‘technically’ equivalent; on the gripping hand, one of my favorite Scott Aaronson papers/essays makes me think there might be a bit more to this
A lot of natural systems really can be modeled as ‘simple programs’, and much more easily/‘naturally’ than as simple mathematical systems