Daniel_Burfoot comments on On Things that are Awesome - Less Wrong

23 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 24 March 2009 03:24AM

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Comment author: Daniel_Burfoot 24 March 2009 03:46:20AM 5 points [-]

It's interesting that you name both Jaynes and Hofstadter, since they represent diametrically opposed approaches to the unmentionable objective (I don't think Bayes' rule is ever mentioned in GEB).

Do Jaynes' awesome points come primarily from his book, or from his MaxEnt work?

We should compose a list of things deemed to be awesome by the LW empirical personspace cluster.

Comment author: MichaelGR 24 March 2009 05:10:28PM 2 points [-]

We should compose a list of things deemed to be awesome by the LW empirical personspace cluster.

I would support that, even if a non-official attempt. I've gotten so much out of recommendations from people here.

In fact, I think I read Godël, Escher, Bach only after I saw it mentioned in comments on Overcoming Bias. It had been on my list for years, but I never got around to it (I was a bit intimidated by the reviews that talked about the math), and I bought Judgement Under Uncertainty and Rational Choice in an Uncertain World because of recommendations from Eliezer. I admit I'm still intimidated by E.T. Jaynes and Judea Pearl...

Would love to know what others here think is awesome, including textbooks (I'm currently reading Molecular Biology of the Cell, 5th edition, by Alberts & al., and plan to read MITECS, the Feynman lectures on physics, and Tortora's Principles of anatomy and physiology next)

Comment author: HughRistik 24 March 2009 05:40:27PM 2 points [-]

Invariances: The Structure of the Objective World by Robert Nozick is awesome.