
Review of A New Kind of Science by Stephen Wolfram (2002) - pmoriarty
http://bactra.org/reviews/wolfram/
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braythwayt
And in 2012, the follow-up, "Ten Years of Monster Raving Egomania and Utter
Batshit Insanity:"

[http://bactra.org/weblog/915.html](http://bactra.org/weblog/915.html)

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jknoepfler
The title should indicate that it is linking to a book review (of a now rather
dated doorstop of a book). Although the linked article follows a standard
journal book-review format, which makes it obvious on context what is going
on, it is not obvious to someone following an HN link.

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qwertyuiop924
_wow_.

I mean, I knew Wolfram was nuts, despite Mathematica's success. But this...
this is beyond nuts. It's not just crazy, it's also immoral (not citing people
who do your research, suing everybody left and right, etc.).

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m_mueller
I was really confused. The title and author in the header really looked like
the title and author of that post with that formatting. Until I read the tiny
link at the top. Just goes to show that minimalist HTML/CSS can be used for
terrible layouts - just like an overuse of JS.

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rdtsc
I was in the fist or second year of college and I asked for A New Kind of
Science book as a gift. I believed the book, not knowing much about the
history of the related fields NKS supposedly compelely revolutionized. That's
how cult following starts, isn't it?

But then as years rolled by I realized that stuff is too far out of the
ordinary, with the claims which are too lofty. Even as far as style goes, at
first phrases like "I discovered this...", "I did that.." seems impressive,
excuded confidence, but then, they started to sound grating and excessively
arrogant. I just couldn't stand to read it anymore. The book collected dust
for a few years, then I gave it away to someone.

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leephillips
Has Wolfram's "new kind of science" led to any predictions of natural
phenomena in the 15 years or so since his book appeared? This is usually how
we decide if a physical theory is interesting. Generating patterns that look
like natural phenomena that we already know about doesn't count.

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braythwayt
The review’s author claims that in the decade following it’s publication,
neither the book nor Wolfram have made any contribution to the field.

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intrasight
Interesting analysis of a very brilliant but very flawed personality

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untilHellbanned
Why do people always mention that someone is smart? It's a non-informative
sentence. How many times do you hear that someone is dumb?

I'll take my community college educated mother over this "child prodigy" on
the vast majority of subjects, so he must not be that great.

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kragen
On the contrary, 99.99% of the population is really dumb. (I'd like to think
I'm part of the other 0.01%, but the low prior probability of that situation
suggests that I don't have enough evidence to justify that conclusion.)
Wolfram is not part of that 99.99%. He's part of the 0.01%. But he's
squandered his talent on self-indulgent and self-destructive projects instead
of contributing to the intellectual and cultural advancement of humanity.

It turns out that human nature is such that being really smart doesn't give
you a high probability of being right about things, especially when the truth
is not favorable to you, just a slightly better one.

~~~
untilHellbanned
You missed my point. If he is smart and yet not right as you say, doesn't that
make him dumb?

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ScottBurson
Arrogance makes smart people idiots.

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bendbro
This website is quite fun. Here's another.
[http://bactra.org/notebooks/prigogine.html](http://bactra.org/notebooks/prigogine.html)

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r721
(2005)

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starchild3001
Not sure why we're still discussing this book. It's old, and it's been
thoroughly debunked many times. One of few ~1000 page books from which I've
learned nothing.

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starchild3001
> This book was more valuable when it was a tree.

'nuff said.

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hackinthebochs
Aren't we done flogging this guy yet?

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qwertyuiop924
The beatings will continue until Wolfram stops.

Just kidding. If we beat on this guy anymore, he'll die, and turn into a
horse.

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SubiculumCode
From title thought this was an article about Trump.

don't down vote me. I finally got to 100 :)

update: comment referred to original title, not current.

