| ▲ | lutusp 2 hours ago | |
Imagine Isaac Newton (and/or Gottfried Leibniz) saying, "Today we're announcing the availability of new mathematical tools -- contact our marketing specialists now!" The linked article isn't about mathematics, technology or human knowledge. It's about marketing. It can only exist in a kind of late-stage capitalism where enshittification is either present or imminent. And I have to say ... Stephen Wolfram's compulsion to name things after himself, then offer them for sale, reminds me of ... someone else. Someone even more shamelessly self-promoting. Newton didn't call his baby "Newton-tech", he called it Fluxions. Leibniz called his creation Calculus. It didn't occur to either of them to name their work after themselves. That would have been embarrassing and unseemly. But ... those were different times. Imagine Jonas Salk naming his creation Salk-tech, then offering it for sale, at a time when 50,000 people were stricken with Polio every year. What a missed opportunity! What a sucker! (Salk gave his vaccine away, refusing the very idea of a patent.) Right now it's hard to tell, but there's more to life than grabbing a brass ring. | ||
| ▲ | Joel_Mckay an hour ago | parent [-] | |
I like a lot of Stephen Wolfram's work, but we must also recognize the questionable assumptions he made in many of his commercial projects. There is a difference between cashing-in and selling-out... but often fame destroys peoples scientific working window by shifting focus to conventional mundane problems better left to an MBA. I live in a country where guaranteed health care is part of the constitution. It was a controversial idea at one time, but proved lucrative in reducing costs. Isaac Newton purchased the only known portrait of the man who accused him of plagiarism, and essentially erased the guy from history books. Newton also traded barbs with Robert Hooke of all people when he found time away from his alleged womanizing. Notably, this still happens in academia daily, as unproductive powerful people have lots of time to formalize and leverage grad student work with credible publishing platforms. The hapless and unscrupulous have always existed, where the successful simply leverage both of their predictable behavior. =3 "The Evolution of Cooperation" (Robert Axelrod) https://ee.stanford.edu/~hellman/Breakthrough/book/pdfs/axel... | ||