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Why I Don't Love Gödel, Escher, Bach

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Re: Why I Don't Love Gödel, Escher, Bach

#21

Post by stuntkite »

zerr wrote: post #14
stuntkite wrote: post #6

I'd owned this book for many years and had a similar experience to OP. But one day someone gave me `I am a Strange Loop`, which I started reading and enjoyed way more. After getting in a little bit Hofstadter makes some apologies for GEB saying it was the sum of work of a very young person. I think he was 24? I think it's pretty incredible considering his age. The things that lead him to thinking critically about con…

Can you be more specific - exactly from what page should one start reading GEB?

It's been about 2 years I think since I did that. Skip the Socratic dialogs basically. I think the course I linked is the same one I went through. He covers it in the first video.

Also once you get through the other parts, the Socratic discussions are easy to come back to. You just don't end up in nowhere taxed with his presentation before you really find the book.

Re: Why I Don't Love Gödel, Escher, Bach

#22

Post by stuntkite »

code_duck wrote: post #15
stuntkite wrote: post #6

I'd owned this book for many years and had a similar experience to OP. But one day someone gave me `I am a Strange Loop`, which I started reading and enjoyed way more. After getting in a little bit Hofstadter makes some apologies for GEB saying it was the sum of work of a very young person. I think he was 24? I think it's pretty incredible considering his age. The things that lead him to thinking critically about con…

I read this book when I was a kid and frequently back then, I was not concerned with reading books from beginning to end. I’d start in the beginning, skip to the middle if it got boring, skip to the end if I wanted to kill a cliffhanger, then go back and read everything in between, or eventually restart from the beginning. So this is how I read GEB. I think I never would have gotten through it from start-to-finish.

It took me too long to figure out that coming into a dense tome can be a dance. You can move around to get an idea, pick out what interests, take a dive, then really do a contextual exploration.

Found this after many years of sort of doing something similar without knowing it was a thing. It honestly felt like cheating sometimes for some reason?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Read_a_Book

Re: Why I Don't Love Gödel, Escher, Bach

#24

Post by beaconstudios »

jatsign wrote: post #20

Does anyone have a better metaphor, or a link to someplace with a better explanation, of the Incompleteness Theorem?

I'm not familiar with directly, but if you're more familiar with comp-sci: based on my understanding of Curry-Howard correspondence, I would think it's the logic equivalent of the halting problem. I could be way off-base though, I'd appreciate a mathematician chiming in on whether my intuition is accurate here.

Re: Why I Don't Love Gödel, Escher, Bach

#25

Post by tombert »

I admit that I found the book a bit pretentious and irritating the first time I read it, but someone encouraged me to read it again, and I was unemployed at the time, and I really enjoyed it the second time. I don't know if I just didn't understand it very well the first time, or if I had just become a bit more interested in theoretical math and philosophy, making me pay better attention.

I admit that the tortoise and Achilles analogies get kind of weird, and sometimes feel a bit contrived, but I actually found them instrumental to the overarching theme of the book: self-reference.

The theme was a bit more clear in "I am a Strange Loop", but I still really enjoyed GEB, if for no other reason than it made me finally understand the concepts of "axioms" and "theorems" and whatnot.

Re: Why I Don't Love Gödel, Escher, Bach

#26

Post by jhbadger »

A couple of comments: 1) The author complains that the Socratic dialogs are contrived and largely consist of one character explaining something and the other saying "I see" and so on. Well, that's true, but that's kind of how the format works. You could make a similar complaint about Plato's _Republic_. 2) I think the author totally misses that the reference to not hearing the silverware during 4'33" in a cafe is a joke. Of course it wouldn't work that way.

Re: Why I Don't Love Gödel, Escher, Bach

#27

Post by [deleted] »

stuntkite wrote: post #22
code_duck wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read this book when I was a kid and frequently back then, I was not concerned with reading books from beginning to end. I’d start in the beginning, skip to the middle if it got boring, skip to the end if I wanted to kill a cliffhanger, then go back and read everything in between, or eventually restart from the beginning. So this is how I read GEB. I think I never would have gotten through it from start-to-finish.

It took me too long to figure out that coming into a dense tome can be a dance. You can move around to get an idea, pick out what interests, take a dive, then really do a contextual exploration. Found this after many years of sort of doing something similar without knowing it was a thing. It honestly felt like cheating sometimes for some reason? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Read_a_Book

[deleted]

Re: Why I Don't Love Gödel, Escher, Bach

#28

Post by lolc »

muro wrote: post #5

tl;dr. Excellent first few chapters (which deserve the high praise and possibly are the cause of all the hype), gets less and less interesting. At some point, I dreaded returning to it and gave up.

Did you sum up your experience reading the book? Or did you try to sum up the critique we're discussing here? If it's the latter you failed.

Re: Why I Don't Love Gödel, Escher, Bach

#29

Post by audunw »

I read and finished GEB first, and then read 'I am a Strange Loop'.

I think the trick to reading GEB is to not take it so seriously. You can skim sections, you can skip parts, you don't have to understand everything, not everything has to make sense. I think the author here misses that when he complains such about the quality of the metaphors. They're not meant to help understand, as much as being there to give a vague idea about what's coming in a fun way.

If you still don't enjoy GEB, then it's not for you, and that's OK too.

I found 'I am a Strange Loop' a more dry and less enjoyable read than GEB, but it was certainly a lot clearer, and better written in many ways. I would probably recommend it before GEB for most people.

Re: Why I Don't Love Gödel, Escher, Bach

#30

Post by jason_s »

…well, it would have been, but for some reason I kept struggling to get through it. I thought highly of it, but my secret shame was that my admiration for the book was based mostly on the first two hundred or so pages. It took slogging effort to get myself through the rest, effort sporadically applied over the course of years. I did eventually make my way through the whole thing, but even now, I can’t necessarily be sure I’ve read and absorbed every page, even though I’ve certainly looked at each one. By the end, my impression of the book was much more reserved: it does have some genuine high points and I can understand how it came to have its classic reputation, but I also felt it had a number of problems I’ve rarely seen discussed. For me personally, it ended up falling short of its reputation as a sparkling, effervescent text that drew together art, mathematics, and culture, and given how little I’ve seen this discussed, I wanted to write down why I feel this way.

That's not the point. So what if you don't get everything? Are you supposed to get everything in Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming on the first read?

The record-playing example is a wonderful metaphor for Godel's theorem, not a terrible one.

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