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aaaal66 karma

What are your thoughts on Elon Musk?

aaaal52 karma

Is there something that you think is true, that almost nobody agrees with you on?

aaaal6 karma

He answered a similar question in his last AMA, but I'm curious if he can add to your Hofstadter comment.

https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/tmutz/stephen_wolfram_nks_10th_anniversary/c4nzaw3

aaaal6 karma

In your last AMA, you mentioned you were interested in "automated discovery", but grappled with the issue of generating "nonsense" formulas (where units don't match, etc. etc.) that actually work. https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/tmutz/stephen_wolfram_nks_10th_anniversary/c4nzy4u

Have you thought about publishing them just for humour, similar to the spurious correlations project? http://tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations Do you think if crowds could vote on them, perhaps some interesting formulas that actually work can bubble to the top?

Thank you for taking the time to do AMAs!

aaaal3 karma

Have you or your brother come across effective methods of increasing the popularity of using computational models outside of science, the classroom, or other areas in which they usually are used? I hope using computational models can become a cultural norm in debates, journalism, law, or other arenas of public discourse. Public discourse is almost always composed of groups of people writing for and against a proposition. Often, the groups are "basically just hurling around unsourced soundbites, leaving readers little to go on besides emotional appeal. What if both sides were expected to offer computational models, and the reader could critically explore their predicted scenarios?" (If people are interested in this, I recommend Bret Viktor's posts about explorable explanations here: http://worrydream.com/#!/ExplorableExplanations) Or what if every news pundit on TV had to display a score of the accuracy of every public prediction they made in the past, similar to a baseball player's batting average? I think public discourse would generally improve significantly, but I don't know how one would establish those higher standards. (If people are interested in this, see Brier Score (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brier_score) and google Philip Tetlock forecasting.