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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

#181

Post by svat »

pvg wrote: post #169
pnathan wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> plenty of very good arguments can be made you're better off not-reading at least one of them. I'm extremely confused as to why this would be the case for TAOCP. While I wouldn't recommend TAOCP for "just reading", I don't know why it wouldn't be recommended for study. Knuth provides a very interesting approach for algorithms analysis, deep in substance.

Let's say, like many people, you enjoy the occasional article from The Onion . You can very easily continue enjoying them without reading Animal Farm , Gulliver's Travels or the collected works of Aristophanes. TAOCP, to me, is in a similar category - it's worth remembering Knuth essentially carved the field of study out himself. If you need a reference or textbook, there are by now better places to start. If you are…

I completely disagree that TAOCP is a "reference work" or that invariably there are "by now better places to start". If you care to learn about any of the topics in TAOCP, to the level of detail it contains, it is usually one of the best places to read. Knuth has taken the entire mass of published literature on the topic, passed it through his "interestingness" filter, and boiled it down to usually the best writing on the topic.

For example, suppose you want to learn about Binary Decision Diagrams. I have before me TAOCP Volume 4A, which has 57 pages of text, 22 pages of exercises, 58 pages of answers, and a wealth of references. (Section 7.1.4, you can see the draft Fascicle 1B online: http://www.cs.utsa.edu/~wagner/knuth/) There are simply no other books or papers where you can learn so much about BDDs and ZDDs this well or easily. The writing is crisp and clear, and is really intended to teach, not to be a reference to look up.

Of course, a lot of people have simply no need to learn about zero-suppressed binary decision diagrams, so they can just simply not read TAOCP. But that's a different claim from saying that it's a reference work or not a good read on its topics.

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

#182

Post by microtherion »

I still like GEB, which I first read as a teenager. But later, when I read Hofstadter's "Le Ton beau de Marot", I was struck by similar thoughts about Hofstadter's non-mathematical ideas as this review hinted at:

His tastes in music, poetry, etc, are very conservative and rather conventional, he doesn't seem to make any effort to engage seriously with any modern work, and he tries to pass this off as edgy sophistication.

After the 50th repetition of "they were playing this awful Rock Music and my brilliant friend X remarked on how awful it was", it gets a bit old.

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

#183

Post by kranner »

core-questions wrote: post #163
kranner wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it such a great thing to be born that we are doing something good for certain pigs by causing them to come into existence?

Is it such a great thing to be born that we are doing something good for our children by causing them to come into existence? I mean, c'mon. The only way for there to be something good, or great, from a first-person experience, is for there to be a first person to actually do the experiencing. Caveat, of course, bringing something into an existence that is only suffering is probably not so great. This is why we need…

My intuition is that suffering dominates our lives. This is especially true for animals. So I don’t believe we are doing pigs any favours by giving them life.

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

#184

Post by jvagner »

stuntkite wrote: post #47
ZanyProgrammer wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IAASL also has one of the best (and easiest to understand) descriptions of non human sentience-when he talks about why he’s a vegetarian.

I am not a vegan, but his consciousness cone is something I seem to bring up frequently with people. Usually by the end of the conversation I don't quite know why I'm not vegan aside from habit. Last time I brought it up I was eating sushi and talking about how I had decided to quit eating cephalopods because they might be smarter than humans... But then ate pork belly and just didn't really know what I stood for any…

perhaps https://www.lighter.world can help...

i live with my own temptations in this realm, so i'm not coming from a "i've done it" POV, but from a "this is where i lean when i'm pretty sure i need to give it a real go" one.

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

#185

Post by j2kun »

Grue3 wrote: post #141
j2kun wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "the proof" As if there can only be one. (And it seems OP is describing the theorem, not a proof)

It's just plain wrong to say that there are more facts in a theory than proofs of facts. Both of these sets are countably infinite. Godel's theorem proves that provable facts are a strict subset of all facts.

While I agree with you, in the context of a "hand wavey" explanation, "more" is not rigorously defined and so saying "plain wrong" is silly. A strict subset relationship is a reasonable interpretation of "more" in the context of an informal discussion.

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

#186

Post by pvg »

svat wrote: post #181
pvg wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's say, like many people, you enjoy the occasional article from The Onion . You can very easily continue enjoying them without reading Animal Farm , Gulliver's Travels or the collected works of Aristophanes. TAOCP, to me, is in a similar category - it's worth remembering Knuth essentially carved the field of study out himself. If you need a reference or textbook, there are by now better places to start. If you are…

I completely disagree that TAOCP is a "reference work" or that invariably there are "by now better places to start". If you care to learn about any of the topics in TAOCP, to the level of detail it contains, it is usually one of the best places to read. Knuth has taken the entire mass of published literature on the topic, passed it through his "interestingness" filter, and boiled it down to usually the best writing o…

not a good read on its topics.

That is a different claim and also one I didn't make.

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

#187

Post by [deleted] »

schnitzelstoat wrote: post #101
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.

[deleted]

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

#188

Post by dredmorbius »

giantsloth wrote: post #140
jkabrg wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does "fulfill himself as a flight" mean? Is the lesson that since professors are "less free" than everyone else, they criticize everyone else out of bitterness? Or is it that since they're so specialized and able to make a living only in their specialty, they don't need to practise good judgement outside their discipline? Is it that they live in an ivory tower and don't know the difference between theory and pra…

What does "fulfills himself as a flight."? We need to define flight here: "a brilliant, imaginative, or unrestrained exercise or display" [1]. So he fulfills himself as a a brilliant, imaginative, or unrestrained exercise or display. He toots his own horn, to promote oneself; to boast or brag; to tout oneself [2]. What does the quote mean? They (some doctors and professors in this quote) have abdicated their freedom…

Your Beauvoir quote and clarifications jibe with a statement by David Krakauer: intelligence is search.

In which case, why specific people are more intelligent than others, and whether that intelligencee is highly general (rare) or more specific (common, almost painfully or absurdly so at times), and why, is a fascinating question.

Beauvoir and Proust suggest that the mechanism is technique rather than a more general capacity, and hence focused on specific capabilities. That is, a method effective at crossing some specific divides, but not providing a deeper vision or reach, or higher vantage, generally. That last visualising a conceptual landscape as having peaks, valleys, and barriers (walls or chasms) to be crosssed.

Technique providing bridging capacity, but not view-from-a-peak.

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

#189

Post by Crespyl »

alkonaut wrote: post #8

Has anyone read it and not found the dialogue bits meandering and superfluous? I found the other chapters acceptable but the useless dialogue left me feeling the whole book was pretentious and babbling.

The dialogues were the only parts I could make sense of the first few times I read the book (at a young age). I greatly enjoyed them and found them both amusing and eye-opening; even more so when I could finally start making sense of the prose that accompanied them.

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

#190

Post by sudouser »

KevanM wrote: post #172
dmd wrote: post #153

There's a discussion in GEB about mystery/detective novels, and how the physical fact of seeing that you're near the end of the book leaks information about the state of the plot to you. He muses - what if you inserted some number of blank pages at the end, so you weren't sure where the end was? But no, that's too easy - you might flip through and see them. What about Lorem Ipsum text? Well, that's better, but still…

Chuck Palahniuk wanted one of his novels to direct the reader to a page number when the chapter ended so you wouldn't be able to tell when the book was going to end, seems like a sensible solution.

cortazar’s hopscotch is written that way
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