{"id":1727,"date":"2009-05-06T22:57:44","date_gmt":"2009-05-06T09:57:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mhjb.co.nz\/blog\/?p=1727"},"modified":"2009-05-06T23:06:04","modified_gmt":"2009-05-06T10:06:04","slug":"science-is-hard","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/mhjb.co.nz\/blog\/archives\/1727","title":{"rendered":"Science is hard"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>From <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cscs.umich.edu\/~crshalizi\/reviews\/wolfram\/\">a review by Cosma Shalizi of the aforementioned Wolfram&#8217;s <em>A New Kind of Science<\/em><\/a> <\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Let me try to sum up. On the one hand, we have a large number of true but commonplace ideas, especially about how simple rules can lead to complex outcomes, and about the virtues of toy models. On the other hand, we have a large mass of dubious speculations (many of them also unoriginal). We have, finally, a single new result of mathematical importance, which is not actually the author&#8217;s. Everything is presented as the inspired fruit of a lonely genius, delivering startling insights in isolation from a blinkered and philistine scientific community. We have been this way before. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I&#8217;m a bad egg for starting to read reviews before finishing the book. Perhaps Wolfy will be vindicated when <a href=\"http:\/\/blog.wolfram.com\/2009\/03\/05\/wolframalpha-is-coming\/\">Alpha<\/a> goes live&#8230; perhaps.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>From a review by Cosma Shalizi of the aforementioned Wolfram&#8217;s A New Kind of Science Let me try to sum up. On the one hand, we have a large number of true but commonplace ideas, especially about how simple rules can lead to complex outcomes, and about the virtues of toy models. On the other [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,1,3,2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1727","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-general","category-link","category-quote"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/mhjb.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1727","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/mhjb.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/mhjb.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mhjb.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mhjb.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1727"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/mhjb.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1727\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1732,"href":"http:\/\/mhjb.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1727\/revisions\/1732"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/mhjb.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1727"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mhjb.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1727"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mhjb.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1727"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}