[LINK] Gödel, Escher, Bach read through starting on Reddit

Karmakaiser

http://www.reddit.com/r/GEB/comments/nmy4p/starting_a_readthrough_january_17/

[Context: [1] waingro and I want to start a Reddit read-through of GEB.

I've done an [2] in-person MIT seminar where we read through the book twice before. I think a subreddit would be a great way to make the same experience available to anyone on the Internet!

My plan for when to start would be around January 17. Yes, that's almost a month from now, but it allows time for:

Publicizing this subreddit
Allowing people to find copies of the book if they don't own it
Most importantly, it's after the [3] MIT Mystery Hunt which will be consuming all of my recreational brainpower until then.]

The read through is organized and run by Rob Speer who taught a seminar on GEB once as a senior and once as a grad student at MIT [1](http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/special-programs/sp-258-goedel-escher-bach-spring-2007/). GEB is occasionally referenced on LessWrong and is considered and influential book by Eliezer Yudkowsky, the subject of a short review by LukeProg who recently claimed that it "[...] defied summary more than all the other books I had previously said "defied summary." If you are interested in reading GEB but have not taken the time to do so, I do not need to cite the research on how mechanisms such as commitment contracts are helpful to reaching goals. Joining this group would make the goal read Gödel, Escher, Bach more reachable than it otherwise would have been.

http://www.reddit.com/r/GEB/comments/nmy4p/starting_a_readthrough_january_17/

[Context: [1] waingro and I want to start a Reddit read-through of GEB.

I've done an [2] in-person MIT seminar where we read through the book twice before. I think a subreddit would be a great way to make the same experience available to anyone on the Internet!

My plan for when to start would be around January 17. Yes, that's almost a month from now, but it allows time for:

Publicizing this subreddit
Allowing people to find copies of the book if they don't own it
Most importantly, it's after the [3] MIT Mystery Hunt which will be consuming all of my recreational brainpower until then.]

Go along with redditors, infect them with rationality and x-risk memes. That's worth creating a reddit account if you don't have one already.

infect them

PSA: If someone wrote up a LW article summarizing interesting results from the psychology of contamination I'd totally upvote it at least once. On a related note LW should totally all get baptized before they make a desperate effort to become better rationalists! Or at least take a very serious bath. (ETA: E.g. Nick Tarleton showed me a study about how hand-washing changes people's risk aversion/seeking. As someone who takes a totally insane number of baths this wouldn't surprise me.)