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comment by user-inactivated
user-inactivated  ·  3675 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: 'bl00's Reviews #6: Godel Escher Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter

    He's the only one I know who even attempted to pretend enjoying this book, and says it's the greatest piece of literature he's read since Principia Mathematica..

A famously unreadable effort, and one of the few books of which I would say it is much more important to know the arguments than to have read it proper.

Unless you're talking about Bertrand Russell's thing.





user-inactivated  ·  3675 days ago  ·  link  ·  

No one reads Bertrand Russell's thing. You pick it up, if you are into logic, and you are very impressed that he and Whitehead toughed it out as long as they did. Then you read Bourbaki instead.

user-inactivated  ·  3675 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Duly noted. Is that your field?

user-inactivated  ·  3675 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Logic and probability were. Working on an AI degree now, which is more or less the same thing with more debugging. I do love pedantry.

nowaypablo  ·  3675 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Nope meant Newton's. Not even gonna bother opening that till college. Sadly at the rate I was going growing up (read the Republic in 7th grade and wrote a 12-page paper about it)– and despite attributing all the knowledge and capacity I have today to the books I read when I was 12– I have absolutely no time to gain knowledge from reading because I'm too busy with school. The fucking irony.