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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

#231

Post by [deleted] »

stuntkite wrote: post #93
vanderZwan wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Thank you for sharing your experience, I may have to give `I am a Strange Loop` a try after all, and do the skip-300-pages trick with GEB. I've tried to get through it multiple times, but I never managed to get far into the later chapters without lit…

I also live with ADHD. I think that's maybe why the dialogs at the beginning were so impenetrable to me without context. They are important and do a great job of illustrating what he's getting to, but for me it just felt like reading nonsense until I had some context about why they were exploring. I found myself in my initial readings not just bored but kind of offended by how wanky they were. Once I got a better und…

[deleted]

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

#232

Post by throw7 »

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…

Thanks for this info. I've attempted and put down geb about 3 times never getting too far. The stories were just childish to me.

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

#233

Post by mos_basik »

prr123 wrote: post #132
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…

From what I got from the essay (it's been a while...), people who chose a "serious" path in life see no value in things that do not contribute to their goal. E.g.: If you focus too much on engineering, you stop being able to see value in other aspect of life, such as philosophy. De Beauvoir describes a couple of states of freedom of mind: 1. Children who believe in what they're told and don't think about their freedo…

Thanks for that overview of her categories; it got me interested and searching a bit for a more detailed version. Now I think I'll give the original essay a shot, and I hardly ever read philosophy. Link to save anyone else 10 seconds of googling: http://faculty.webster.edu/corbetre/philosophy/existentialis...

(Also, this feels eerily similar to the first time I realized "Oh, going and reading the source of $LIBRARY is an option if the docs are too vague.")

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

#234

Post by wwweston »

vanderZwan wrote: post #86
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'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. Thank you for sharing your experience, I may have to give `I am a Strange Loop` a try after all, and do the skip-300-pages trick with GEB. I've tried to get through it multiple times, but I never managed to get far into the later chapters without lit…

> "The Master & His Emissary", an incredibly flawed but also very inspiring tome mixing loose interpretations of brain science, art history and philosophy

What are some of the flaws? Or what would I be able to read in order to notice them?

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

#235

Post by mindcrime »

dang wrote: post #230
greggarious wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks, that is useful but I upvote lots of stuff so a separate saved list can also be useful :) For now, I have a bookmarks folder for stuff like this.

The 'favorites' feature is a saved list. It's not widely used. Maybe we should promote it, or maybe get rid of it.

My humble suggestion(s) to make "favorites" more useful (and hopefully more used):

1. add the ability to "favorite" from the front page. I rarely "favorite" anything, because I grew accustomed to using "upvote" as the mechanism to save stories. I would switch, but that extra little bit of friction of needing to click through first, means I stick with my old habit.

2. Add "favorite" for comments as well.

3. (maybe) - consider renaming "favorite" to "save"? Possibly people who are used to seeing the "save" link on Reddit would find that more intuitive.

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

#236

Post by mindcrime »

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…

What you really need to do is pad out the book with text that looks as much as possible like the real book, but isn't.

One of the best things I've seen in that regard (although I doubt this was the reason for it) is simply the old "preview of forthcoming novel FOO by $AUTHOR" section.

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

#237

Post by _emacsomancer_ »

guiambros wrote: post #92
greggarious wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for sharing this course, very interesting. I wish HN had an easy way to save comments like Reddit, but this reply should do the trick :)

Pinboard [0] solves it for me. I tag all the interesting stories with "hackernews", so I can easily go back and search. I noticed over the years that my use of Pinboard is very asymmetrical: I save several URLs every month, but retrieve at most a handful per year. But knowing that my memories are safely stored gives me peace of mind (and, just to be safe, I make a backup every year or so). [0] https://pinboard.in

I use org-protocol-capture[0] (in Emacs) along with Syncthing to push my .org files to all of my devices (including mobile). That way it's local but accessible from 'anywhere' (for me).

[0] https://github.com/alphapapa/org-protocol-capture-html

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

#238

Post by tptacek »

pvg wrote: post #194
pnathan wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Oh, I'm an unrepentant TAOCP and Knuth fanboy. TAOCP is undoubtedly a Great Work™. I'm just bothered by the notion that someone would feel bad or inadequate for not having read it. GEB, on the other hand is... I dunno, an ok monitor riser if you don't have anything else handy.

That's what Cormen/Rivest is for. Much sturdier, too.

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

#239

Post by copperx »

jvagner wrote: post #184
stuntkite wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The site is sadly broken on Firefox.

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

#240

Post by commandlinefan »

pvg wrote: post #134
Tomte wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the same way as both chocolate ice cream and riding a rollercoaster make me happy, but are totally different. :-)

Right but do you feel you have to read, to pick a slightly less fraught example, the white algorithms book? Or Patterson and Hennessy? Like TAOCP, those work perfectly well skimmed or read in bits and parked on your bookshelf or in your bathroom. GEB (or Moby Dick) are intended to be read in entirety.

I assume you mean CLRS when you say "the white algorithms book" - if so, I'm not sure I necessarily agree that any of these books are meant as reference works or "not intended to be read entirely". They're textbooks, of course, so there's something of an expectation that you'll read them over the course of months or years, but I do believe that all three of your examples are _meant_ to be read cover to cover rather than used as a reference book like a dictionary or a thesaurus or even a cookbook; if you pick up any of these books and start at a random chapter (much less a random section) you're likely to be lost. You might use them as references once you've finished them, but you are expected to start on page 1 and finish on page 1,892 (or whatever insane page count these books have now).
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