Ask HN: Is "Gödel, Escher, Bach" still worth reading?
Since it's such a famous and lauded book, I figured that perhaps I should pick it up and give it a stab. I've read conflicting opinions on it: that it's a timeless classic which intersects mathematics with philosophy and whimsical humor, that it's pretentious or that it's now outdated.
What do you guys think? Is it worth it?
48 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 105 ms ] threadIt's only pretentious if you consider, say, Neal Stephenson pretentious. I generally find that the people who say kind of thing that don't understand the topics, but are intimidated to say so.
And G, E & B are all dead, yet their work is still relevent, which makes them by definition timeless.
I remember when it came out: it swept through my high school like wildfire. I think every student had read it by the end of that year.
I would seriously doubt 10% of a university class on Comp Sci has read this book let alone a high school class of any standard. I remember reading this but can't remember finishing it so I presume I'm one of the multitude who let it slide halfway through.
A year or so back, I mentioned my admiration to a friend, who had a copy but hadn't yet read it. My friend (a CS person with a degree in Physics) tried reading it, and found it very hard going. So I looked through my own copy (signed by the author, I'll have you know).
Yes, it's all of what you listed. It looks like I mostly skipped the pretentious parts, and read the parts with whimsical humor. It was also at a time in my life where I didn't know much about recursion or self-referential statements, which made the book's ideas all the more engaging.
My suggestion is to give it a go, skim when it gets turgid, and admire some of the lengths the author went through to explore an idea. (Eg, an exploration of the three different ways to translate the abbreviated letter of a street name from Russian into English.
Read it again in 5-10 years.
I recommend with a side of Neon Genesis Evangelion, David Foster Wallace and Radiohead.
That said, you'll probably find that you need to read it more than once to glean everything from it.
Category theory and Type theory are replacing Set theory as the fundamental basis of Math, or at least it's fashionable to try to do so, and the book revolves around the Whitehead and Russel set theoretic work and Godel's deconstruction thereof. Which isn't to say that Category theory or whatever are immune to Godel's theorems, I have no idea how those would translate, and my gut tells me that they would have roughly the same outcome.
But yeah, anyways, wonderful exposition of the kind of extremely bare-bones framework fundamental mathematicians operate in, magnificient demonstration of what recursive and self-referential structures imply, and overall a great read.
Thats the only thing that comes to mind and it's only a minor quibble.
Contrast "good old-fashioned AI" with "machine learning", where the representations are as minimalistic and low-level as possible, because the only important thing is that when you update them a few billion times the right results emerge statistically.
I don't see it as a problem that this part of GEB is "dated", though, because I find GOFAI to be an interesting topic. It involves trying to think about how you think and formalize it, which rarely happens in modern AI.
Imagine a world where brute-force alpha-beta search was just not good enough to beat humans at chess; a world where advances in chess-playing computers would require chessmasters to encode their expertise in interesting data structures. This is the world that might have been, and it's the world GEB describes when it talks about AI. It's dated, but it's interesting.
It is a great read.
To ask my own...how do people who read GEB find his latest "Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking"? I'm just starting it and it has entranced me quite a bit...
It really is, in my opinion, an amazing and clever book. If you can, I would recommend taking a few weeks to really digest it, it is not a book you can read for hours and hours on end - you will need to stop, clear your mind and reflect on some of the points made - at least that is what I had to do.
Be warned, the book will start to mess with you...but it warns you when it does...most of the time.
It's a well-known book in general, particularly famous and revered among STEM circles. It also won a Pulitzer Prize back when it was released.
Then I read "I am a strange loop" and am now of the opinion Hofstadter is full of shit.
The description of Godel's incompleteness theorem is still excellent
It's my favorite book. I recommend you do try it.
Mash-up. Fusion. Outside the box.
Not a revolution, but a diversionary mind bender in its day.
A format much imitated since.
Pretentious? I don't think it pretends to be anything other that what is is: A book that weaves together similar ideas, basically, self-reference and the resulting paradoxes and mystery that self-reference can generate, from the the worlds of art, music and math in an entertaining way for the layman.
Outdated? It's a classic, and cannot go "out-of-date" as in "invalid". In the same way that Bach's music, Escher's art, or Gödel's proof cannot go out of date, they can only become "dated".
Should you read it? Only you can decide if your time would be more richly spent on something else, but I suspect the answer is yes, reading GEB is probably a good use of your time.