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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
What makes you think it was Wolfram's talent per se and not that of some marketing exec ?
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.
he is proposing
And what Aaronson analyses is that book's statements form no proposal.
Also, SW hasn't gotten anywhere near a 'greatest discovery', so I'm not sure the comparison is valid.
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.
They say that love is blind, ego must just be plain blinding.
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.
