From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Mon Jun 17 2002 - 08:18:54 MDT
On Sun, Jun 16, 2002 at 01:19:39PM -0400, Harvey Newstrom wrote:
> While some people seem amazed at Wolfram's new book promoting a new kind
> of science, some scientists don't see anything new in the book. They
> say that it is a collection of current ideas already being investigated
> by mainstream science. They claim that by remaining a recluse and
> working on his manifesto in solitude, Wolfram has been out of the loop
> of mainstream science. They say he has reinvented the wheel and is
> proposing theories that mainstream science has already proposed.
>
> (Has anybody looked at Wolfram's book yet?)
I'm still at the early chapters but my experience has so far been
1) very clear writing and explanation, with some innovative and
sometimes elegant graphical forms of notation, 2) lots of fun
examples of very simple rules producing complex patterns and 3)
nothing that feels truly new. I think Wolfram did himself a
disservice by being a recluse, he has reinvented a lot of stuff
that is going on in mainstream science. Even worse, many of his
results are in the form of examples of interesting behavior, but
very little proofs for statements of the form "If X, then Y" -
which are absolutely necessary for making predictions in science.
Meanwhile the mainstream people are working on stuff like this,
which will in the end become truly useful.
While academia is a kind of kindergarten and full of distractions,
the continual interaction with other researchers is a very
powerful intelligence amplifaction tool: you get criticisms, ideas
and data from a large number of parallel researchers. Even if you
are a genius the law of comparative advantage implies that you are
better off trading information with the others rather than work on
your own.
Wolfram may be important *culturally* by pronouncing a shift in
thinking that is already occuring in many subjects but still
remains very unknown outside the scientific community: that simple
"programs" can generate enormous complexity and that this affects
our world. But the risk is that this message gets overshadowed by
his person and the myth of genius.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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