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Bret Victor's favourite books

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Re: Bret Victor's favourite books

#41
post #33

Literature is notably absent...

Yeah, for some reason it is culturally unacceptable in our society to claim that fiction literature is unimportant. We live in a society where it's fine to make shocking arguments about just about anything, but if anyone were to dare argue "What Dostoyevsky and Shakespeare had to say is pretty irrelevant and uninteresting at this point" they are a social pariah.

You've touched on something incredibly deep here.

Fact and fiction are one and the same in storytelling, that is, in the conveying of ideas from one person to another.

A mathematical system of symbolic logic is just a strange loop. It is a fiction. It is rooted in nature, in the world that we observe, but so is a poem.

There's been a trend since the Enlightenment to split the world in to RATIONAL SCIENCE and OTHER THINGS. The goal was mainly to finally remove all of the religious mumbo-jumbo and superstition from the realms of science. In the process however, we ignored our qualities of perception and language. Not only is the majority of what is important and true in our lives expressed through words and feelings but it also colors every aspect of mathematics and science. It basically took those fields eating their own tails to realize the ultimate folly of their philosophical pursuits.

Thoughts like these are often misinterpreted as attacks on reason and rationality. They are merely illustrations of the limitation of pure reason, a topic that has been broached by the great thinkers time and again. The lessons never seem to sit. Language and metaphor are constantly shifting yet our written records are set in stone, destined for misinterpretation.

But life without folly, without mystery, what life is that?

Re: Bret Victor's favourite books

#42
post #33

Literature is notably absent...

Yeah, for some reason it is culturally unacceptable in our society to claim that fiction literature is unimportant. We live in a society where it's fine to make shocking arguments about just about anything, but if anyone were to dare argue "What Dostoyevsky and Shakespeare had to say is pretty irrelevant and uninteresting at this point" they are a social pariah.

I used to read a lot more fiction before I got into computer science. I still have a fairly large library of fantasy novels and other fiction. I would like to get back into reading that sort of thing, but it seems like I never have the massive amount of time it takes to get into stuff like that now that I spend a lot of time reading technical literature as well. Any ideas?

Edit: I also find a lot of technical/programmer/etc... types don't really know much about film, which is really an amazing art form if you look beyond the typical hollywood stuff (e.g. Kurosawa, Herzog, Tarkovsky, etc...)

Re: Bret Victor's favourite books

#44
post #40

Not sure Howard Zinn's "A People’s History of the United States" is a good pick unless you are already very well versed in history (and many other subjects) and know what to ignore. While an interesting read he takes a strongly biased point of view and many of its claims have not stood the test of time (e.g. Rosenberg's atomic spying). So you may learn may things but many of them will be false.

I agree with you. I thought I was buying that book to read about US history, but it's more of an alternate US history for those who already know US history pretty well. His writing style also annoyed me very much as he'd jump from timeframe to timeframe which makes it hard for you to follow.

Re: Bret Victor's favourite books

#48
post #22

I thought Godel, Escher, Bach was a total snooze. It was like 800 pages of Hofstadter trying to prove he was clever.

Have a look at the "The mind's I" [1]. It is a collection of essays and other short texts on consciousness, self, AI and strange loops with added commentary by Hofstadter and Dennett.

[1]: http://www.amazon.com/Minds-Fantasies-Reflections-Self-Soul/...

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