Wolfram and Asperger's?

[bartosz]

"A New Kind of Science" (NKS) is written in such monotone drone that it makes me wonder if maybe Wolfram suffers from Asperger's syndrome. With the kind of science he's developing, it would be an asset-- and I'm not saying it facetiously. One of his excellent points is that despite all claims of objectivity, scientists selectively go after "interesting" targets, which introduces a systematic bias. Wolfram wonders why, despite Goedel's theorem, mathematicians still work with axiomatic systems, and keep proving theorem after theorem. Why don't they see any of the undecidable theorems in their day-to-day practice? Especially that Wolfram postulates that undecidable problems are much more common than one would expect. The trick might be that the undecidable problems are not "interesting" enough, so they rarely come under the mathematical spotlight. The "interesting" problems are those that are intuitive--they describe properties of things we can easily imagine. They also tend to follow from the axioms that we find intuitive. A lot of other stuff also follows from these axioms--non-intuitive stuff--among it a lot of undecidable problems. Our intuition just doesn't lead us to them.

Wolfram's is a shotgun approach. He did a systematic study of a simple set of systems, without looking for the sexy interesting stuff. A very unemotional approach, which in this case makes a lot of sense.

Besides having narrow and intense interests, language peculiarities, Wolfram also lacks social skills--he considers himself a genius above all the rest. That's a losing strategy if you want to have friends and followers.

If you know Steven Wolfram personally, correct me if I'm wrong.