The issue is not that it's wrong, it's that it's extremely repetitive and we want fresh discussion on HN, preferably about the specific content of an article.
A lot to admire in this post about passion and long-term thinking but this is too egregious.
> Back in 1979, for example, I’d invented the idea of transformations for symbolic expressions as a foundation for computational language.
I hope at 65 to have the energy to work this hard, but I also hope at 65 I'm surrounded by people who will kindly correct me when I take credit for ideas that aren't mine, and that I will listen to them.
Say what you want of Stephen Wolfram, but he's an interesting person doing interesting things - and managing to finish a lot of them.
A bite-sized idea I liked from the long article: "the very act of exposition was a critical part of organizing and developing my ideas".
I've arrived to the same conclusion for myself (and this article, hopefully, will be the last straw for me to start writing in an organized manner).
My only moderately-successful writing so far has been my ADHD wiki[0], which, in the spirit of Stephen Wolfram, I will shamelessly promote here and now (I've gotten some marvelous feedback from HN in the past, and I believe it to be a useful resource to many).
FWIW Stephen not merely boasting about productivity; a fair bit of the article is dedicated to talking about techniques and tools that he believes help him with that.
While his article on Computational Essays[1] is mostly a Mathematica ad, Mathematica is a great system (which have influenced things like Jupyter notebooks a lot), and the idea of literal programming and interactive data/code/writing is a solid one.
We have yet to have a solid collection of resources like that even for teaching mathematics (where it's natural to play with code to experiment with ideas).
Another bit I liked: and yes, one seems to be able to see the essence of machine learning in systems vastly simpler than neural nets. Sure, we all know about that cellular automata are the Woflram's thing, so it's not surprising to see them pop up in his article about minimal learning computational models[2], but I feel an article like that has been way overdue.
We've been playing with neural nets long enough without having a solid idea what's really going on, and it's limiting to use them as legos of sorts. Why these blocks in particular? What else is out there?
The ChatGPT explainer that he mentioned[1] is still my go-to article for learning about it; I think I'll add another one of his to the list.
Finally, the bit one why history is important - and finding out his archive of writing on history of math and science[4] is great. I believe that history is the most underappreciate science itself, and learning science without its history leaves you without either context or deep understanding of it.
(Personally, I add etymology to history: I find resources like "Earliest Known Uses of Some Mathmatical Terms"[5] invaluable).
And, of course, it's great to see that he's diving into linking mathematics, computation, physics, biology. Great discoveries often lie on the interfaces of various fields.
As Vladimir Arnold wrote in his famous essay[6], divorcing mathematics from physics has been a phenomenal crime. I'm guilty of it too. I recently made a post on reddit[7] with a GIF showing the osculating circles and the evolute of an ellipse. It's pretty, but what is really hiding behind it is the shape of the gear tooth which nearly all gears have.
I learned (and taught!) the mathematics behind it without having any understanding how gears are designed and why they work. And people who make gears make them without understanding the math behind the equations. This came up at work (I'm working on implicit CAD modeling), and from a discussion a better understanding (...and a better product) emerged. There is no reason for narrow specialization that creates barriers in fields that aren't just related, but are necessary for each other - so I believe that the mere fact of Wolfram doing this work is important.
Maybe he'll find out something groundbreaking in those directions. Maybe not. But I can guarantee that he and people around him will stumble into fascinating things along the way that they wouldn't encounter otherwise.
Lord Kelvin thought that what makes atoms different is how they're tied into different knots. That turned out to not describe the reality of atoms at all - but gave rise to knot theory[8], which has since gained a fundamental ground in mathematics, particularly - topology (you can construct any 4-manifold by removing a tubular neighborhood of a knot in 3-sphere and gluing it back with some twists - see Dehn Surgery[9]). So, while Kelvin did not find what he was looking for there, the direction his effort has jump-started may, in fact, fundamentally describe our reality - as we have yet to learn what kind of manifold structure our universe has. And knot
Anyway. All in all, good, thought-provoking article (this comment, which contains some thought at least, is a testament to that); I'd recommend looking beyond the title and looking into the things Wolfram mentions. There's a ton of interesting tangents there.
Just wanted to say, your ADHD wiki is part of what made me get a diagnosis in year 7 of a 4 year PhD, the meds of which then allowed me to finish it successfully.
I've since used it to show 6 fellow high functioning AuDHD people, 2 of which were getting into the depression and anxiety spirals that can come with the Systems failing.
Just in my corner of the world, you saved the dreams of at 3 people with your wiki, I would call it slightly more than moderately successful. Thank you so much.
This should be [3]. Thanks for your detailed post, I stopped paying attention to Wolfram years ago but there are still gems to be found in his work under the piles of boasting.
> So, while Kelvin did not find what he was looking for there, the direction his effort has jump-started may, in fact, fundamentally describe our reality - as we have yet to learn what kind of manifold structure our universe has. And knot
Often I realized I really couldn’t have done [the languishing projects] without the tools and ideas (and infrastructure) I now have.
I find this idea of building your own infrastructure to accomplish goals super interesting, especially because already-made software never quite does exactly what you want. Wolfram actually wrote more about that here: https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2019/02/seeking-the-prod...
I imagine that anyone who is serious about anything will end up building/designing some of their own tools. Maybe a custom pedal (or pedal board) for a guitarist, a custom printer for a 3D-printing diehard, or simply designing the tools needed to perform experiments as a scientist. With software, it's a lot easier, especially over long periods of time. I still use a backup script I wrote 20 years ago, for example.
Edit: not to say that the backup script is somehow special, but rather that it being software means that it can last a lifetime with minimal upkeep, unlike the tools made by toolmakers of old.
Building your own tools to do things is excellent and a potential trap. My brief tangent into language implementation is now a decade deep and I don't clearly remember what I was trying to build in the first place. YMMV.
From the URL I thought it was one of those posts about graphs of activity (“quantified self”) that I’ve seen before from him, but I’m glad I took a look.
Seeing him taking a walk along the coast with shorts, goofy hat, tablet on hand, made me feel sympathy for him. Most of the things he describes doing at home and traveling are things I’ve either done or would have done if I had the means.
Stephen Wolfram has some Q&A streams on youtube where he answers questions off-the-cuff about the history of science. It's remarkable how much he can immediately recall and how easily he makes connections between seemingly unrelated scientific developments. He is a true polymath and his productivity is next level.
Stephen Wolfram is one of my heroes. But not for the usual thing of being really good at science and technology.
He is my hero because he has won capitalism and entrepreneurship. He is incredibly wealthy for all the stuff that a normal person needs, does what he really enjoys and has no shareholders to worry about.
The only other company I know of that is similar is Valve. Both at the cutting edge, doing very interesting things and just leading a meaningful, stressless life.
I am modeling my companies heavily on Wolfram and Valve. May other companies take some notes from them too.
So the first thing is the meta learning. Looking at companies like Valve and Wolfram, they provide a template of another way of running companies which seem to consistently produce the best kind of software and incredible wealth for all those involved. The two things you look for when running a software company.
Next, Stephen livestreams his day to day as a CEO. This is so significant. I know the HN trope which dang warned about earlier, but I actually love it. Imagine if you could get detailed logs about how Steve Jobs lived his life. Not from books others write about him and make up fake stuff to make it sell more, but straight from the horse's mouth as they say. That is what his meticulous logs and streams of his life provides.
Gabe Newell of course does much less of this, but he still has some incredible videos which go so in depth in how he runs the business and what he thinks about.
Look, we are nerds. To learn business, we go online and try to piece together information. For example, I know for a fact a bunch of YC companies (both in this batch and earlier) have fallen for scammers like Alex Hormozi because he has a massive Youtube presence and just spews nonsense which sounds like it should make sense.
So in that world, to learn as close to first hand from people who actually run some of the biggest and most interesting business on the planet is just incredible.
I find it absolutely fascinating that from the ages of 60 to 65, this guy produced nine books, 499 hours of podcasts, and 14 software product releases.
For one thing it's quite interesting just to measure your productivity that way. I'm going through life generally just concerning myself with earning my daily bread. In my entire lifetime I've produced zero books, zero hours of podcasts, and a variety of software releases for other people. I think I'd be more proud of myself if I had a fraction of his track record.
It's also amazing that he's doing this at an age when most people are just getting ready for retirement, and seems to have increased his output over the previous 5 year period.
Goals I suppose. And it takes a bit of pressure off of me to think that you can still be this prolific later in life. The five year time horizon is pretty interesting, you can accomplish some pretty dramatic things in five years, and even in middle age you have several more of these 5 year windows remaining.
Mmm. Nine books in five years plus doing tons of other stuff? I don’t know anything about the specifics of this situation but have seen enough of the publishing industry and of the influencer/executive/thought-leader side of it that I can assure you the normal way someone in those positions writes nine books in five years is by writing zero books. “Producing” is the right term indeed… maybe. Usually they outsource that to one company or another as well (or start a company for it and have someone else run the company, too—I’ve seen this, lol). They provide an outline and final say on each chapter.
It's always so sad to see updates from Stephen. The folks who were at the AI lab in the early days describe him as someone so motivated and arrogant that he was certain that one day he'd earn a Nobel. Now all of these years later he's basically wasted his career with delusions of grandure. Sometimes over a beer we wonder what happened. Did he crack because he realized he maybe wasn't the God he thought he was and then created some fantasy land for himself?
My hypothesis and the reason I write this is that he fell prey to what often happens to truly exceptional folks when they get to exceptional places (I've seen it first hand many times).
You show up and discover that there are people who are nominally better than you in every possible way. It takes time to understand that raw talent can eventually be beaten by hard work. And that there are so many problems in the world that ok, so someone is astronomically better than me in every way, fine, I can still change the world by what metrics matter to me if I work hard. And the people who are astronomically better, they often can't handle serious long term failure and overcome it with grit, that's a hard lesson to learn.
There's a very different notion of grit that you have when you're at the top of the pile than at the bottom. And if you've never experienced the latter it can hit you hard.
I'm not writing this to be mean to Stephen. He's a tragic case. But we rarely talk about the effect such places can have on people even though it happens a lot.
Readit News
The issue is not that it's wrong, it's that it's extremely repetitive and we want fresh discussion on HN, preferably about the specific content of an article.
> Back in 1979, for example, I’d invented the idea of transformations for symbolic expressions as a foundation for computational language.
I hope at 65 to have the energy to work this hard, but I also hope at 65 I'm surrounded by people who will kindly correct me when I take credit for ideas that aren't mine, and that I will listen to them.
Right, so math then. You invented math.
A bite-sized idea I liked from the long article: "the very act of exposition was a critical part of organizing and developing my ideas".
I've arrived to the same conclusion for myself (and this article, hopefully, will be the last straw for me to start writing in an organized manner).
My only moderately-successful writing so far has been my ADHD wiki[0], which, in the spirit of Stephen Wolfram, I will shamelessly promote here and now (I've gotten some marvelous feedback from HN in the past, and I believe it to be a useful resource to many).
FWIW Stephen not merely boasting about productivity; a fair bit of the article is dedicated to talking about techniques and tools that he believes help him with that.
While his article on Computational Essays[1] is mostly a Mathematica ad, Mathematica is a great system (which have influenced things like Jupyter notebooks a lot), and the idea of literal programming and interactive data/code/writing is a solid one.
We have yet to have a solid collection of resources like that even for teaching mathematics (where it's natural to play with code to experiment with ideas).
Another bit I liked: and yes, one seems to be able to see the essence of machine learning in systems vastly simpler than neural nets. Sure, we all know about that cellular automata are the Woflram's thing, so it's not surprising to see them pop up in his article about minimal learning computational models[2], but I feel an article like that has been way overdue.
We've been playing with neural nets long enough without having a solid idea what's really going on, and it's limiting to use them as legos of sorts. Why these blocks in particular? What else is out there?
The ChatGPT explainer that he mentioned[1] is still my go-to article for learning about it; I think I'll add another one of his to the list.
Finally, the bit one why history is important - and finding out his archive of writing on history of math and science[4] is great. I believe that history is the most underappreciate science itself, and learning science without its history leaves you without either context or deep understanding of it.
(Personally, I add etymology to history: I find resources like "Earliest Known Uses of Some Mathmatical Terms"[5] invaluable).
And, of course, it's great to see that he's diving into linking mathematics, computation, physics, biology. Great discoveries often lie on the interfaces of various fields.
As Vladimir Arnold wrote in his famous essay[6], divorcing mathematics from physics has been a phenomenal crime. I'm guilty of it too. I recently made a post on reddit[7] with a GIF showing the osculating circles and the evolute of an ellipse. It's pretty, but what is really hiding behind it is the shape of the gear tooth which nearly all gears have.
I learned (and taught!) the mathematics behind it without having any understanding how gears are designed and why they work. And people who make gears make them without understanding the math behind the equations. This came up at work (I'm working on implicit CAD modeling), and from a discussion a better understanding (...and a better product) emerged. There is no reason for narrow specialization that creates barriers in fields that aren't just related, but are necessary for each other - so I believe that the mere fact of Wolfram doing this work is important.
Maybe he'll find out something groundbreaking in those directions. Maybe not. But I can guarantee that he and people around him will stumble into fascinating things along the way that they wouldn't encounter otherwise.
Lord Kelvin thought that what makes atoms different is how they're tied into different knots. That turned out to not describe the reality of atoms at all - but gave rise to knot theory[8], which has since gained a fundamental ground in mathematics, particularly - topology (you can construct any 4-manifold by removing a tubular neighborhood of a knot in 3-sphere and gluing it back with some twists - see Dehn Surgery[9]). So, while Kelvin did not find what he was looking for there, the direction his effort has jump-started may, in fact, fundamentally describe our reality - as we have yet to learn what kind of manifold structure our universe has. And knot
Anyway. All in all, good, thought-provoking article (this comment, which contains some thought at least, is a testament to that); I'd recommend looking beyond the title and looking into the things Wolfram mentions. There's a ton of interesting tangents there.
[0] https://romankogan.net/adhd
[1] https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2017/11/what-is-a-comput...
[2] https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2024/08/whats-really-goi...
[3] https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/02/what-is-chatgpt-...
[4] https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/category/historical-pers...
[5] https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Miller/mathword/m/
[6] https://www.math.fsu.edu/~wxm/Arnold.htm
[7] https://old.reddit.com/r/math/comments/1f1yblk/evolute_of_an...
[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_knot_theory
[9] https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/Dehn+surgery
I've since used it to show 6 fellow high functioning AuDHD people, 2 of which were getting into the depression and anxiety spirals that can come with the Systems failing.
Just in my corner of the world, you saved the dreams of at 3 people with your wiki, I would call it slightly more than moderately successful. Thank you so much.
Deleted Comment
I find this idea of building your own infrastructure to accomplish goals super interesting, especially because already-made software never quite does exactly what you want. Wolfram actually wrote more about that here: https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2019/02/seeking-the-prod...
Edit: not to say that the backup script is somehow special, but rather that it being software means that it can last a lifetime with minimal upkeep, unlike the tools made by toolmakers of old.
Seeing him taking a walk along the coast with shorts, goofy hat, tablet on hand, made me feel sympathy for him. Most of the things he describes doing at home and traveling are things I’ve either done or would have done if I had the means.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(British_TV_series...
He is my hero because he has won capitalism and entrepreneurship. He is incredibly wealthy for all the stuff that a normal person needs, does what he really enjoys and has no shareholders to worry about.
The only other company I know of that is similar is Valve. Both at the cutting edge, doing very interesting things and just leading a meaningful, stressless life.
I am modeling my companies heavily on Wolfram and Valve. May other companies take some notes from them too.
Next, Stephen livestreams his day to day as a CEO. This is so significant. I know the HN trope which dang warned about earlier, but I actually love it. Imagine if you could get detailed logs about how Steve Jobs lived his life. Not from books others write about him and make up fake stuff to make it sell more, but straight from the horse's mouth as they say. That is what his meticulous logs and streams of his life provides.
Gabe Newell of course does much less of this, but he still has some incredible videos which go so in depth in how he runs the business and what he thinks about.
Look, we are nerds. To learn business, we go online and try to piece together information. For example, I know for a fact a bunch of YC companies (both in this batch and earlier) have fallen for scammers like Alex Hormozi because he has a massive Youtube presence and just spews nonsense which sounds like it should make sense.
So in that world, to learn as close to first hand from people who actually run some of the biggest and most interesting business on the planet is just incredible.
---
Live CEOing https://livestreams.stephenwolfram.com/category/live-ceoing/
Gabe Newell: On Productivity, Economics, Political Institutions, and the Future of Corporations https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Td_PGkfIdIQ
I wonder if his complexity ideas from A New kind of science could be applied to software, do you know some applications on that?
For one thing it's quite interesting just to measure your productivity that way. I'm going through life generally just concerning myself with earning my daily bread. In my entire lifetime I've produced zero books, zero hours of podcasts, and a variety of software releases for other people. I think I'd be more proud of myself if I had a fraction of his track record.
It's also amazing that he's doing this at an age when most people are just getting ready for retirement, and seems to have increased his output over the previous 5 year period.
Goals I suppose. And it takes a bit of pressure off of me to think that you can still be this prolific later in life. The five year time horizon is pretty interesting, you can accomplish some pretty dramatic things in five years, and even in middle age you have several more of these 5 year windows remaining.
Mmm. Nine books in five years plus doing tons of other stuff? I don’t know anything about the specifics of this situation but have seen enough of the publishing industry and of the influencer/executive/thought-leader side of it that I can assure you the normal way someone in those positions writes nine books in five years is by writing zero books. “Producing” is the right term indeed… maybe. Usually they outsource that to one company or another as well (or start a company for it and have someone else run the company, too—I’ve seen this, lol). They provide an outline and final say on each chapter.
My hypothesis and the reason I write this is that he fell prey to what often happens to truly exceptional folks when they get to exceptional places (I've seen it first hand many times).
You show up and discover that there are people who are nominally better than you in every possible way. It takes time to understand that raw talent can eventually be beaten by hard work. And that there are so many problems in the world that ok, so someone is astronomically better than me in every way, fine, I can still change the world by what metrics matter to me if I work hard. And the people who are astronomically better, they often can't handle serious long term failure and overcome it with grit, that's a hard lesson to learn.
There's a very different notion of grit that you have when you're at the top of the pile than at the bottom. And if you've never experienced the latter it can hit you hard.
I'm not writing this to be mean to Stephen. He's a tragic case. But we rarely talk about the effect such places can have on people even though it happens a lot.