PeterS comments on A question of rationality - Less Wrong

4 Post author: mormon2 13 December 2009 02:37AM

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Comment author: PeterS 14 December 2009 11:26:17PM *  1 point [-]

To be honest, maybe they didn't. Those crude analogies interspersed between the chapters - some as long as a chapter itself! - were too often unnecessary. The book was long enough without them... but with them? Most could have been summed up in a paragraph.

If you need magical stories about turtles and crabs drinking hot tea before a rabbit shows up with a device which allows him to enter paintings to understand recursion, then you're never going to get it.

On the other hand, if the author's introduction of stories in that manner is necessary to explain his subject or thesis, then something is either wrong with the subject or with his expose of it.

I know GEB is like the Book around Less Wrong, but what I'm saying here isn't heresy. Admittedly, Hofstadter had to write I Am a Strange Loop because people couldn't understand GEB.

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 15 December 2009 12:25:03AM 6 points [-]

It's a question of aesthetics. Of course math doesn't have to be presented this way, but a lot of people like the presentation.

You should make explicit what you are arguing. It seems to me that the cause of your argument is simply "I don't like the presentation", but you are trying to argue (rationalize) it as a universal. There is a proper generalization somewhere in between, like "it's not an efficient way to [something specific]".

Comment author: Blueberry 15 December 2009 01:44:20AM 0 points [-]

Admittedly, Hofstadter had to write I Am a Strange Loop because people couldn't understand GEB.

Wait, what? I Am a Strange Loop was written about 30 years later. Hofstadter wrote four other books on mind and pattern in the meantime, so this doesn't make any sense.

Comment author: PeterS 15 December 2009 01:54:38AM *  7 points [-]

An interview with Douglas R. Hofstadter

What led you to write the book? (I Am a Strange Loop)

. . . two philosophers [Ken Williford and Uriah Kriegel] asked me if I would write about my thoughts about what an "I" is. They said that they had appreciated what I had said of these ideas in Gödel, Escher, Bach many years ago, but that they knew that I felt that my message had not really been absorbed—that Gödel, Escher, Bach had become popular but that the driving force behind the book had not really been perceived by most readers, let alone absorbed by a large number of people, and I was frustrated with this. I felt I had reached people, but not exactly as I had hoped. I had greater success with the book than I'd ever expected, but I didn't have the exact type of success that I wanted. . .

I thought, "This is a good opportunity to at least address the world of philosophers of mind. It's a narrow world, but if I can say it well, at least they'll know what I intended to do in my book GEB almost 30 years ago."

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