Stephen Wolfram's ideas are under-appreciated

Oof – that looks really bad!

I've noticed comments about similar things on Andrew Gelman's blog and now I think I need to actually make a significant update towards 'something is wrong with Stephen Wolfram', tho I'm still not sure what the underlying issue is.

Do you have any links about that case ("Wolfram Research Inc v. Cook") specifically? I'd think it's possible that there was some reasonable reason for the lawsuit, but overall, on priors, I'd guess it's just bad (if not terrible).

I now think it is plausible that Wolfram sued "over literary conventions":

• Wolfram Research v Cook - LessWrong [LW · GW]

I suspect that Wolfram just wanted to reveal the relevant proof himself, first, in his book NKS (A New Kind of Science), and that Matthew Cook probably was contractually obligated to allow Wolfram to do that.

Given that the two parties settled, and that Cook published his paper about his proof in Wolfram's own journal (Complex Systems), two years after NKS was published, seems to mostly confirm my suspicions.

Maybe I should read the first link too, but I just don't expect to be able to 'wade thru' the vitriol to get at any 'technical' criticism.

I've read the other paper before and, IIRC, it was great criticism, but not inescapably 'fatal'. I'll try to reread it at some point.

I think that's very uncharitable and not a standard that anyone would apply to, e.g. 'string theory' (in any of their forms) or loop quantum gravity.

His whole 'paradigm' is also pretty distinct, i.e. 'computational exploration'. I don't think I've ever read a plausible account of 'hypothesis/theory generation' for physics generally, especially for any of the work people are pursuing for various GUTs.

It seems perfectly reasonable to start with 'oh, look, something like General Relativity'.

Have you read NKS?

I'm not asking because you not having it read it would 'disqualify' your comment or anything. I'm just curious.

I can see some substance in what you wrote in this comment (and I recognize you as a generally very thoughtful commenter), but this still seems exaggerated and at least a little uncharitable.

Something that he did in NKS, and then further confirmed in his recent post about him writing the book, was just look at a bunch of examples. I thought that was an admirable instance of 'original seeing' [LW · GW], if nothing else.

(And maybe even Wolfram himself has trouble keeping up with all of the relevant academic literature.)

I can understand that a lot – or maybe even literally all – of that work had been previously been done. The notes in the book do cite an awful lot of people tho! But I'm still not sure that anyone else had previously compiled it into a single work, let alone one that was accessible to people without an account thru, e.g. a university, to access academic journals. That seems, to me, to be valuable, in and of itself.

It does seem like Wolfram may have (nearly) permanently and irrevocably burned all of the bridges between himself and academia, and that's very sad. And others have pointed out that he's, if not just an asshole, possibly clinically disordered.

But enough people have also expressed, in various forms, that basically everything Wolfram has published, in any form, is completely bullshit and can be reasonably ignored entirely. That's certainly making me think I shouldn't bother sharing anything connected to him here, but I'm still not entirely convinced that something like this video, that another commenter on this post shared, is just entirely a mistake and stupid (and worthy of vitriol):

• Eigenbros ep 117 - Jonathan Gorard (Wolfram Physics) - YouTube

The first video (Eigenbros episode 117) is great – Jonathan Gorard shares a lot of interesting details!

He does in fact seem like a much more 'standard degree' of grandiose :)

(Sorry for replying so much to your comment!)

More notes about the second video:

• They've used the Wolfram model (and some additional "mathematical technology" they developed) to compute an "entanglement entropy" that agrees ("exactly") with the calculations using "path integrals using standard causal set theoretic techniques" – the latter tho seems to be a quantum field theory mathematical formalism that stills being developed
• The particle physics is still "embryonic" – they have conjectures about particles being 'persistent tangles in graphs/networks', and some suggestive toy models, but no scattering amplitudes that can be calculated yet, and an estimate '5-6' mathematical milestones remain before they reach things like that
• One of the hosts asks about 'emergence' (which seems a little 'cringe' to my old ears; I liked the idea, but it's pretty simple on its own, and was heavily abused as a marketing buzzword) – Gorard's answer is wonderful tho;
• The other host mentioned that the computational focus of the theory seemed 'correct', and something that was overdue in physics education in his opinion – I don't think they've read NKS! They'd probably like it.
• The field/gauge theory connections are preliminary but promising; they matched some calculation for electromagnetism (for a "Dirac monopole") but haven't completed others.
• They're some interesting discussion of 'avoiding curve fitting' – "a good model is one where everything that can be emergent is emergent"
• There's some experimental investigations ongoing (or were as of October 2021) in "dimension perturbations" in the early universe and "dimension perturbations" and their effect on the propagation of light (for astrophysics); the hope for the latter is to be ably to compute/calculate predictions of the effects of "small scale dimension perturbations". [One aspect of the theory is that spacetime is expected to (or just could?) be of fractional dimension, instead of an exact integer 'topological dimension'.]

Overall, I'm not sure Wolfram's physics theory is under-appreciated. It seems like there's a good sized team making good progress and that, at worst, it's still a bunch of cool math/science/computering.

The second video is really interesting!

Jonathan Gorard, discussing the math, is very convincing. He said some very intriguing things about practical benefits with the theory for "quantum computation optimization", e.g. "circuit simplification for quantum computers" (for experiments or simulations).

His description of quantum computing, using the 'multiway systems', as 'a statistical ensemble of inputs, on which the multiway system then performs all possible computations, producing a statistic ensemble of outputs'.

In the first video, Gorard stated that the "worst case" outcome of the project, in his view, would be a bunch of really cool math/computation. I think they might be a good bit past that already. (The first two videos were recorded about five months apart.)

Another great quote from the second video: 'multiway systems give you something like a path integral approach to computation'. That's something. (I don't really know what, but it seems cool!)

(My math creds are a BA (and one graduate seminar class) and being generally interested. I've one some very amateurish 'original math' that was almost certainly independent re-discovery, to the extent I finished any of it. I make a living via classical computer programming.)

Before just what of the second video I've now watched, I didn't think quantum computing would ever 'really work'. (I don't think 'quantum supremacy' has been definitely demonstrated still?) A big part of that was due to intuitions I picked up from reading NKS. That is very interesting that NKS+ is what has now convinced me that it probably will be working and practical. I excuse myself as having been driven mad learning about the continuity of the real numbers! (I just didn't think our universe could be made of real numbers!)

So, the Wolfram Physics theory is: discrete ("quantized"), computational, multiway ('many worlds', "path integral", 'statistical'), and Jonathan Gorard seems like a legit mathematician/computer-scientist

I like the idea that the underlying 'quantized quantumness' of spacetime (everything) might be a discrete "statistical ensemble".

Thanks!

I'm going to add them to my 'read later' list now.

This sounds maybe exactly the same as Tegmark Level 4 Multiverse.

I agree!

I don't have much technical background, but they're both so abstract that I'm not sure anyone really does. The only obvious (perhaps superficial) difference is Wolfram's is a "computation universe" versus Tegmark's "mathematical universe".

(I would think that, ultimately, they're equivalent, but Wolfram has generally considered 'computation' to be more general than 'mathematics', and that matches my own (weak) intuitions. I suspect tho that it might be more of a difference in emphasis, if not just literally a difference only in the terminology used.)

I'm fairly sure he hadn't done that when last I read about it (a few years ago I think), but maybe they've made some progress on that since?

Wolfram's arrogance isn't on the level of literary convention, it's on the level of personality disorder.

I like Yudkowsky too (and a LOT), but I'm not blind to the (very good) reasons why so many other people think he's insufferably arrogant!

And Wolfram might be even more arrogant than EY!

I'm just personally indifferent to in either case, and it remains true that whether their ideas are true or useful is, ultimately, independent of their personalities.

I haven't looked at his book in a very long time because I'm not convinced it says anything interesting beyond studying Cellular Automata in depth.

I've read a good bit in ... the last decade or so? ... about the many many instances of 'co-discovery' and I find that it's generally good for (many) people to 'repeat' the same claims and theories. Often it's helpful, for me and I think many others, to better understand any particular thing because different explanations by different people aid that understanding in different ways; often very different ways. So, even if there was literally nothing novel in it, I still consider it interesting and valuable to me. And had it been broken up and published as dozens (or more) of academic papers, I probably wouldn't have been exposed to much of the info at all.

But the book is freely available on the web! You can try reading it from the beginning, or pick a random section. If you can separate the material from your feelings about his disordered personality, you might find it to be pretty good, even if it's not useful for yourself specifically.

Isn’t it also arrogance on the part of the professional physics community that working on his theories is considered “career suicide” just because he wrote it in an unconventional format? Not saying Wolfram is blameless here, just that it seems sort of silly for that to be such a sticking point.

I'm torn about this.

I absolutely sympathize with what you describe. It certainly seems like he was both capable of doing what you claim he should have done and that, had he done so, his work would have probably been 'better accepted'.

But, on the other hand, this just seems like a really terrible argument – that the only way to discover any new and important things is thru 'The Official Channels'. Physics isn't, AFAIK, the worst academic discipline, but it's not obvious to me that that 'academy' is providing more value to the world than it is 'rents' to its members.

I haven't seen him directly and explicitly complain about not "getting the recognition [he] deserve[s]". If anything, he seems too optimistic about the recognition he's supposedly already received!

I think it's fine if the work to integrate whatever it is he's discovered with all of the relevant academic disciplines is work that someone else does later. I don't think he's obligated to have done that work himself.

I myself greatly appreciate that he did not write a whole series of academic articles, written in an interminably dry and stuffy academic style, and published in journals that I couldn't reasonably afford to access. (I think most mathematics papers are now freely available, but I don't know that the same is true for physics papers. I'm not sure even that most computer science papers are freely available.)