I'm not at all a rationalist or a defender, but big yud has an epistemology that takes the form of the rationalist sacred text mentioned in the article (the sequences). A lot of it is well thought out, and probably can't be discarded as just coming from science fiction and video games. Yud has a great 4 hour talk with Stephen Wolfram where he holds his own.
I'm interested in this perspective, I haven't come across much criticism of Wolfram but I haven't really looked for it much either. Is it because of his theory of everything ruliad stuff?
I really enjoy his blog posts and his work on automata seems to be well respected. I've felt he presents a solid epistemology.
He’s pretty widely regarded as a kook by real scientists. He did some good math and physics back in the day and then some good work on cellular automata, and assumed that meant he was smarter than everybody else and that all of science was in fact a subset of his special focus, which it’s pretty trivially not.
Furthermore he has a very long history of grossly misrepresenting his accomplishments, whether by claiming authorship of his employees’ accomplishments or denying he was ever exposed to work that he built upon.
For example, I believe it’s been proven now that he had substantial exposure to MACSYMA before he started to lead his employees in the development of Mathematica—but that didn’t stop him from claiming it was entirely original and even threatening others with patent and other IP infringement claims for trying to do things that were similar.
(Which is the other problem with him: He doesn’t just take credit for the work he pays others to do, he’s an “IP protection” maximalist.)
