Why I Don't Love Gödel, Escher, Bach • Hacker News Board

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

#101

Post by schnitzelstoat » Thu, Jul 05, 2018, 3:15 PM UTC

brudgers wrote: post #50

My first GEB, I traded for a complete works of Shakespeare. The second is sitting on a shelf alongside Fluid Analogies . Thinking about the GEB phenomenon today, boggles my mind. Sure it won a Pulitzer. But it was a best seller. That's how different the world was...non-fiction could be thick and highly technical and sell in volume to the general public...it didn't need to be a new journalistic summary or popular hist…

The Road to Reality by Roger Penrose was a bestseller just recently and I found that impossible to read even with a graduate degree in Physics.

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

#102

Post by lisper » Thu, Jul 05, 2018, 3:15 PM UTC

beaconstudios wrote: post #95

lisper wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what is the property of a program that makes it undecidable? That is itself an undecidable question! There are a lot of programs for which you can tell that they halt (programs with no loops, for example). Likewise there are a lot of programs for which you can tell that they do not halt (any program whose main body is a WHILE TRUE loop in a language that does not have exceptions, for example.) And then there are lo…

but that's exactly my point - there are clear-cut halting, clear-cut non-halting, and "we don't know yet" programs. My interest is in delineating the properties that separate the 3. The collatz conjecture is exactly the example I use when explaining the "we don't know yet" programs. If I could build a logic system that can positively prove halting, and one that can positively prove non-halting, then anything that rem…

> the properties that separate the 3

But that is exactly my point: what separates these three classes is the state of our current mathematical knowledge, and that obviously changes over time.

> Which is pretty self-evident

No, that is not at all self-evident. (If it were, someone would have proven it long before Turing, and he wouldn't be famous for it.) I don't know what you mean by a "bounding" problem, but we can prove a lot of things about programs with a structure similar to Collatz. For example, we can prove that a program that searches for a prime larger than its input will always halt for any input.

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

#103

Post by poe876 » Thu, Jul 05, 2018, 3:16 PM UTC

You don't love them because you hate them you dimwitted trash.

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

#104

Post by inputcoffee » Thu, Jul 05, 2018, 3:16 PM UTC

This was a pre-internet book though.

The internet has made explanations hyper competitive. At this point I can find dozens -- perhaps hundreds -- of explanations of Godel's theorem.

But in the pre-internet days I could go to the library, or have my friend Kent explain it to me. (He had to explain first that languages were either complete or true -- he called it sound if I recall. soundness was the property -- and then it was demonstrated that these formal languages were sound, therefore incomplete.)

Back then you couldn't just google Godel and say "oh, that reminds me of music returning to the tonic" or whatever and then google that.

I think because a lot of the ideas have sort of spread out into culture, and been re-explained over the years, the best explanation are not in those books anymore.

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

#105

Post by chillingeffect » Thu, Jul 05, 2018, 3:16 PM UTC

Procrastes wrote: post #59

Like another commenter, I was in my 20s. I had no background in Math or CS when I read GEB. I was just a self taught C programmer writing door games for BBS systems. I read it cover to cover and it inflated my mind like a segmented bouncy castle. I had whole rooms to play in that I had never even realized were in there. Parts of it were slow, but I just put that down to my ignorance and plowed on. I can honestly say…

Similar here. I accept that it's a cartoon-y version of Big Adult Concepts, but as a teenager, it taught me what meta means.

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

#106

Post by j2kun » Thu, Jul 05, 2018, 3:16 PM UTC

purplezooey wrote: post #90

giantsloth wrote: post #54

This is a perfect opportunity to whip out one of my favorite quotes by Simone de Beauvoir: “Proust observed with astonishment that a great doctor or a great professor often shows himself, outside of his specialty, to be lacking in sensitivity, intelligence, and humanity. The reason for this is that having abdicated his freedom, he has nothing else left but his techniques. In domains where his techniques are not appli…

Indeed, and to Peter Thiel

I also dislike Thiel, but this is gratuitously negative and irrelevant to the discussion.

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

#107

Post by superkuh » Thu, Jul 05, 2018, 3:18 PM UTC

Maybe he read it too old. I read it in high school and it absolutely blew my mind. It was a slog at parts, predicate calculus and symbolic manipulation like that was new to me, but I can say without qualification that it changed my thinking and life.

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

#108

Post by carapace » Thu, Jul 05, 2018, 3:18 PM UTC

Tomte wrote: post #71

GEB is a book – like TAOCP – that makes me feel inadequate. I "know" I "should" work through it. I "know" I "should" enjoy it. But I never follow through. This review gives me hope that maybe I'm not just a ludicrous failure, but that there are different ways to go. Obviously, I do believe that, and I don't believe I'm a total failure, but still, I can't deny the nagging voice in the back of my head sometimes.

Have you tried Smullyan?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Smullyan#Selected_publ...

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

#109

Post by burger_moon » Thu, Jul 05, 2018, 3:21 PM UTC

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…

This is interesting, I picked up GEB a while ago and never finished. Got to page 400 (I just checked because it's sitting next to me). I was fatigued from reading the same book for so long, it didn't get boring but it's not an easy read so I found I couldn't read it before bed otherwise I'd have to reread pages for it to sink in. That means I couldn't spend as much time reading it as I could other books which is part of why the fatigue set in I think.

I'm going to try this mit course, I think will help motivate me to get through the rest of the book finally.

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

#110

Post by Tomte » Thu, Jul 05, 2018, 3:23 PM UTC

carapace wrote: post #108

Tomte wrote: post #71

GEB is a book – like TAOCP – that makes me feel inadequate. I "know" I "should" work through it. I "know" I "should" enjoy it. But I never follow through. This review gives me hope that maybe I'm not just a ludicrous failure, but that there are different ways to go. Obviously, I do believe that, and I don't believe I'm a total failure, but still, I can't deny the nagging voice in the back of my head sometimes.

Have you tried Smullyan? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Smullyan#Selected_publ...

Only as a child, a German translation of one of his books with Knaves and Knights. Also Gardner.

It impressed me, but was too difficult for me back then.