I used Wolfram Alpha a lot while I was in college and liked it a lot. So I am surprised to see the hatred toward this man in the comments. Can anyone enlighten me why he is delusional and why he has lost it?
> Can anyone enlighten me why he is delusional and why he has lost it?
DISCLAIMER: Views not necessarily my own
I think it would be hard to try to pinpoint a single point in time where "he lost it". Stephen Wolfram grew up as a mathematician/physicist wunderkind, so as it's often the case for people that produced highly praised work early in their life, it's hard to transition to a life with humbleness and where output is received with anything else than praise.
In the past he has made a number of outlandish claims that didn't bear fruit (predictably so), to an extent that one would think that only a delusional person could make them.
E.g. he did a lot of work on cellular automata, and wrote a book titled "A new kind of science", in which he predicted that cellular automata would revolutionize all kinds of natural sciences (hint: that didn't happen). He later made similar claims for Wolfram Alpha revolutionizing search engines, and the Wolfram language revolutionizing programming.
Wolfram Alpha isn't "revolutionary" perhaps, but it's surprisingly useful for some queries. There's the obvious use-case of solving mathematical problems. But you can also use it to (for instance) count the number of weeks from 3rd August 2022 to 7th January 2023. It often "just works" for these kinds of things.
There are two Stephen Wolframs: the one who makes useful software (Mathematica, Wolfram Alpha), and the one who fancies himself an academic. His success in the former lets him avoid humility in the latter, and this conflict is where the problems come in.
Wolfram is by any measure a successful academic. One general issue though is that particle physics basically hit a dead end. The future was in simulation (hence Mathematica) and then the idea that the universe is computational and if it is how could it be and how might it work.
This multi computational idea seems to draw from the double slit experiment where observation collapses the wave function and the multi-probability path history based on the observer.
This is saying that computations can be modeled similarly. And this type of model handles non-determinism in general and "threads of time" apparently. Interesting. Ambitious but very interesting.
> However I think a lot of that narcissism is confidence [...]
Funny, I see it as the entire opposite: very extreme insecurity, the need to constantly remind us that, yes, truly, he was there, he pioneered this, it _is_ amazing and awesome and will revolutionize everything, believe me, and it's only second to this other thing, which we must remind you, I invented.
A confident person would strip away the fluff and just get on with the message?
i can't, but i don't care about him. apparently he's pissed some people off. naturally, when his name comes up, it gets noticed by those people. especially when he's starting his own institute... named after himself.
