= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Vladimir_Nesov comments on A question of rationality - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (93)
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.
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]".