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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

#171

Post by svat »

optimuspaul wrote: post #155
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…

Wait what? Are you suggesting that at some point in the book the text is just padding to throw you off? I haven't read it yet, but if that is what you are suggesting then I actually want to read it now. (if not then my interest is still don't feel any pull to it at all)

Yes that's perfectly plausible :-) A lot of the book similarly makes you wonder about the book itself, what tricks are being played. That's one of the enjoyable things about it. (See my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17464621)

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

#172

Post by KevanM »

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.

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

#173

Post by jweather »

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…

I appreciate being able to turn off the percentage progress indicator in the Kindle app for exactly this reason when reading fiction.

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

#174

Post by chriswarbo »

beaconstudios wrote: post #114
lisper wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

it's self-evident _at this point in time_, given you could feed such a machine the collatz conjecture as an algorithm and we just don't know if any arbitrary input will halt. I'm not claiming it is self-evident in perpetuity. By bounding problem I guess I mean the mathematical equivalent of knowing it can halt. I'm not a mathematician as I previously stated so I don't know the terminology. I don't think the space I'm…

> My interest is in creating a static analyser based on the set of axioms or deductions that can be derived from that space.

From the sound of it, I think this might be a little backwards: axioms and deductions give rise to a space of possible proofs, and those can be used for things like static analysis. One example of going the other way is "reverse mathematics", where we try to find a set of axioms that give rise to some statement. I'm not sure if that could be applied to a (perhaps informal) "space" of theorems rather than some particular theorem.

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

#175

Post by javajosh »

nwah1 wrote: post #123
javajosh wrote: post #9

I actually tend to agree with this review - the record-player analogy for incompleteness is particularly bad. But what you have here is a young man high on his intellectual gifts playing in beautiful abstract worlds, imperfectly, sometimes pointlessly. It's that intellectual playfulness that makes this book special, since books are usually either intellectual or playful but rarely both. Not to change the subject, but…

Can you give an example of fiction in which there is "something there"?

Yes, I can. Actually Herbert himself did have a good (taboo) thought in Dune with his Golden Path idea, that to save humanity it must endure a tyrant for thousands of years. Asimov's Foundation series had a lot to say about the natural ebb and flow of civilization on a long time scale, a very Buddhist view. He also had a lot to say about the nature of general AI, and the relationship to such beings with humans, in his Robot novels (I'm most familiar with the Daniel R Olivaw novels, e.g. Caves of Steel). Of course, when it comes to society, politics, and technology, Neal Stephenson, in both Snowcrash and The Diamond Age, has a lot of great philosophical ideas. Like a good author he shows, and doesn't tell us about his ideas. The character Raven in Snowcrash, for example, expresses the now pretty common understanding that individuals, armed with technology, can challenge states (e.g. bin Laden). There are lots and lots of other authors and ideas.

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

#176

Post by pnathan »

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 see what you mean.

I'll be frank, I think that Knuth's analyses have surprisingly fresh and useful approaches, particularly compared with the other algorithms texts I've read. The usual texts are better at compressed results and a "Straight path" through, but as ways of thinking, I find Knuth more useful to study.

I wouldn't recommend TAOCP to anyone not interested in algorithms, mind.

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

#177

Post by Crespyl »

audunw wrote: post #29

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 vag…

> You can skim sections, you can skip parts, you don't have to understand everything

This was very true of the first (several) times I read through the book. I pulled the book off the shelf of my Dad's library at the age of maybe 10-12 (it had the coolest cover), and couldn't make head nor tail out of most of it. It did have a bunch of interesting pictures and I skipped most of the prose to read the funny and intriguing dialogues.

Each time I re-read the book I felt like I got more out of it, I think I'd read it more than ten times over by the time I was 20.

Having been through GEB a few times made Metamagical Themas easier too, and the same rule of "skip to the next section, or just take a break if I'm not getting it" worked well there too.

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

#179

Post by beaconstudios »

lisper wrote: post #149
beaconstudios wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

alright, if you're going to resort to nitpicking and being wilfully insulting then I see there's not much point discussing this further with you.

Let me rephrase that to hopefully make it sound a little less insulting: if you are able to identify an aspect of computation that cannot be described mathematically then you will be remembered alongside Turing, Godel and von Neuman as one of the greatest thinkers humanity has ever produced. (But a priori, the odds of your being able to do that seem pretty low to me.)

well you've just gone and been inaccurate yourself - I said that I didn't believe all mathematical discoveries had an impact on computability, but you just suggested I was saying that not all computation is based in mathematics. Which is absurd and it's clear you think I'm stupid, where to me it's pretty clear you are misinterpreting what I'm saying, whether that's poor communication on my part or uncharitable interpretation on yours.

I've been friends with academics before who had an unyielding desire to interpret lay speak as an attempt to be rigorous and then criticise it as such, as you have done with me saying "self-evident", but surely you realise I'm not trying to say "self-evident" in some kind of rigorous mathematical sense? I mean if you're just trying to be obtuse it's working well but it comes off like you're trying to hold my conversational and largely intuition-based ideas to a much higher standard than I am trying to meet. I don't understand the impulse at all. If I were trying to be totally rigorous with my thoughts rather than just conversationally trying to communicate an idea that is still taking shape, I would be learning the correct syntax to write a paper and sharing that instead.

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

#180

Post by sls »

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.

Have you had a chance to look at the Theoretical Minimum books by Susskind, Hrabovsky, and Friedman?
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