Scott Aaronson tears NKS apart [pdf]

by pookleblinky • 17 years ago

42 37 17 years ago

1gor3• 17 years ago

Wolfram's talent for self-promotion has been nicely demonstrated by the publicity campaign ahead of his WolframAlpha launch. Multiple pre-announcements, screenshots, peek-reviews, demos have been appearing on NH for weeks already.

Which may not be a bad thing, except it all comes at a price of credibility. Why does one need to create all that fuzz? Isn't it because the revolutionary product/idea cannot win followers and reputation solely on its merits?

Same applies to his book. With a bit of modesty its impact could have been so much greater. Especially since its subject is indeed fascinating.

pj• 17 years ago

WA would have been much better off if they had slowly released it, gathered feedback and built up knowledge repositories.

Why can't you get http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=how+many+college+gradua....

But you can get it for each university with http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=harvard+graduates

Seems like it'd be a simple aggregate...

Little things like this would be flushed out with a bit of testing over time. The hardest part for WA is going to be figuring out how people want to talk to it, and that will take time.

slackenerny9• 17 years ago

Especially since its [ANKS] subject is indeed fascinating.

It is not.

Or at best in a sense that Pythagorean Harmony is.

Subject has been explored to death long before ANKS. In sixties by every garden variety computer scientist, and in eighties by physicists, giving no insight for either science. Even as an art, his book was few years too late to "generative art" market.

Tichy6• 17 years ago

I find it fascinating.

mikedouglas2• 17 years ago

Since when has Hacker News, with its highly entrepreneurial core, ever so viciously attacked publicity? I haven't read NKS, so maybe I don't understand the depths of this man's capital offense, but I see nothing in your list that any smart business won't do. Maybe it isn't revolutionary (whatever that means), but it's a damn cool project that's going to be useful to a lot of people, and isn't that all we care about?

Isn't it because the revolutionary product/idea cannot win followers and reputation solely on its merits?

If the odds are worse without promotion, what rational human wouldn't use it?

wheels3• 17 years ago

Since when has Hacker News, with its highly entrepreneurial core, ever so viciously attacked publicity?

I believe the last time was Cuil.

Being able to work the hype machine is great, but if you generate more hype than you can deliver on it hurts your image. Since A New Kind of Science was similarly underwhelming, not to mention even more pretentiously hyped, many are cynical.

1gor3• 17 years ago

Since when has Hacker News, with its highly entrepreneurial core, ever so viciously attacked publicity?

Since when polluting valuable community information resource with paid commercial fluff became acceptable?

Aggressive promotion poisons the well for everybody. People come to HN for the honest information and opinion exchange with the like-minded, not to be bombarded with PR.

And by the way, I remember time when NH core were not get-rick-quick wannabes but engineers and, well, hackers. Which does not exclude being entrepreneurial. It just means being not easy for some 'smart business' to manipulate.

If the odds are worse without promotion, what rational human wouldn't use it?

The one that is familiar with game theory. Defection does work in the trusting, cooperative environment. First time. After that the community switches to 'tit-for-tat' strategy and bans the aggressor into oblivion. Or core of the community decamps to greener pastures leaving 'smart businesses' and their shills to their task of filling communal cesspit with more crap.

huhtenberg• 17 years ago

> Wolfram's talent for self-promotion has been nicely demonstrated by the publicity campaign ahead of his WolframAlpha launch.

What makes you think it was Wolfram's talent per se and not that of some marketing exec ?

wheels3• 17 years ago

Kurzweil's write-up on it is also good:

http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0464.html?printable=1

DanielBMarkham• 17 years ago

I'm more impressed with the book than the review.

It's a good review, no doubt, but I think Aaronson, while catching Wolfram using a bit of hyperbole on occasions, misses the essence of what NKS is.

It's not simply a review of existing CS theory.

The Feynman quote was quite illuminating. Wolfram does take the discrete conversation to the next step. He doesn't answer the questions, mainly because what he is proposing is, well, a New Kind of Science. Which means that there are going to be hundreds or thousands of questions.

What might be missing the most is a methodology for exploration. But I think overall Wolfram is just a bit ahead of his time. Those things will be worked out.

slackenerny9• 17 years ago

Because it was no review but an analysis. Review is when renowed reviewer gives his opinion which is backed by his authority. When your'e a poor grad student, like Aaronson in 2002, then you better withold emotional opinons and give facts.

he is proposing

And what Aaronson analyses is that book's statements form no proposal.

yummyfajitas• 17 years ago

He isn't remotely proposing a new kind of science. All he is proposing is to do regular science, but use cellular automata as a framework for new theories (rather than PDEs).

rw• 17 years ago

Thanks for the alley-oop? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=612002

Sephr• 17 years ago

Until I read the PDF, I assumed this would be about Nobody Knows Shoes. It's better to abbreviate A New Kind of Science as ANKOS to avoid confusion.

ninguem2• 17 years ago

I prefer WANKOS (Wolfram's ANKOS...)

asciilifeform2• 17 years ago

I prefer this review:

http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/reviews/wolfram/

tophat02• 17 years ago

Wolfram is remarkably short-sighted. You'd think that such a smart guy would have realized that spending 1100+ pages blowing is own horn would tend to turn off the very people he hoped to convince.

They say that love is blind, ego must just be plain blinding.

asciilifeform2• 17 years ago

> You'd think that such a smart guy would have realized...

This is the best theory I've seen yet to explain his behavior:

http://groups.google.com/group/sci.math/msg/37f51351f5340e58...

It makes a lot of sense, in light of the man's biography.

See this:

http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/reviews/wolfram/

for an informed critic's perspective on the details.

danbmil99• 17 years ago

Wolfram is a brilliant, egotistical, narcissistic credit hog. The history of science is littered with them. Some of the greatest discoveries of mankind are credited to the wrong people.

gustavo_duarte• 17 years ago

Can you give examples? I'm genuinely interested. Rosalind Franklin and DNA is about the only 'greatest discovery' I know of where I think credit wasn't given where it was due.

Also, SW hasn't gotten anywhere near a 'greatest discovery', so I'm not sure the comparison is valid.

mnemonicsloth• 17 years ago

Everyone likes to talk about the immortality that comes with proving an important mathematical result, but it's rarely that easy:

The first publication on the Mobius strip was written by a guy named Listing, who did the same work as Mobius at the same time. I have to warn you that googling "Listing Strip" is slightly NSFW.

Kalman was only the popularizer of the Kalman Filter.

Grassman, who invented vector spaces and developed a lot of linear algebra, only got credit posthumously.

Some people, like Fourier, only inspired the theory named for them. Modern theory is so much more general than classical theory that entire careers can be built by translating an old mathematical idea to a new domain.

Sometimes, a new idea gets labeled as an extension to an existing idea if it so much as resembles an old idea. For example, the Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equation was Bellman's work. This is dangerous if you're after immortality -- there are very few ideas in math that aren't even slightly hinted at in the works of: Euler, Gauss, Jacobi, Hamilton, Lagrange, Laplace, etc.

Sometimes, though, the new guys can usurp the old. When set theory being laid down as the core idea in all of mathematics, the mathematicians who reformulated ideas in rigorous set-theoretic language often got the new names. That's why we now have the Haar Measure instead of the Hurwitz Invariant Integral.

Scott Aaronson tears NKS apart [pdf]

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