4 ms·

wow, this book has the soaring rating on Amazon. I added to my "to read" list, 10x for suggestion

guelo 10y ago
I wouldn't bother, it is an incomprehensible mess, impossible to get through, pretentious, non rigurous sloppy thinking, and ultimately a disservice to Godels incompleteness theorem.
- orf 10y ago
  That's a harsh critique, can you elaborate?
  - guelo 10y ago
    Recursion, self reference, emergent properties are important topics and there are many good resources for studying them, GEB just isn't one of them. Most people that embark on the journey of reading the book fail and are unable to complete it. I believe the author tried to make the book itself some kind of self referential repeating work of art, which might be appealing to some but doesn't end up giving a rigorous treatment of the topic.
    - pierrebai 10y ago
      GEB is not a study book. It's written as a multi-layered musing on various inter-connected subjects. It's also not hard to read and entertaining. I get the feeling from the anecdote about the AI professor rejecting students based on having read it and your own reaction that people in the field resent it for not being course material? I also sense a sub-text of resentment about the positions and criticisms of the author about various approach to AI. It's clearly an exposition of his philosophical basis for his position. You might disagree with him but that's no reason to be insulting.
      - curuinor 10y ago
        It's not so much resentment inasmuch all symbolic AI is evaporating in the shadow of the new new connectionist wave (the "new" connectionist wave being the PDP stuff). Why not, for example, see it from Hinton's philosophical point of view (besides that the papers are very boring and dry, of course)? He made a very good defense against Pylyshin and Fodor and a few critiques of Hofstadter _and_ the algorithms are shipping on Google Search and things like that.
        p1esk 10y ago
        Link to the Hinton's view?
        curuinor 10y ago
        There's a lotta good citations in SEP entry: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/connectionism/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/connectionism/
    - kabdib 10y ago
      I read it when it first came out; I was 18, and it was formative in my early career in CS. For someone in their teens it was a wonderful introduction to things that my high school education never really touched. I don't know if I'd have the patience to read it today.
- aleph_naught 10y ago
  I got about 200 pages in, and just could not continue with it. 'incomprehensible mess' would perfectly describe my sentiments. As having taken undergrad/grad courses in logic and set theory, any interesting nuggets about recursion/completeness/incompleteness/etc that one could glean from GEB can much more coherently and succinctly be obtained from a proper book on logic/computability. The counterargument would be that this book is meant as entertainment: from my experience with the first ~200 pages, it was a complete chore to read, as ideas were presented enigmatically and slowly, to the point of frustration. Granted, my attempt at reading it was almost a decade ago.
  - mercer 10y ago
    I had trouble getting through GEB because I felt like I couldn't quite grasp logic/set theory/whatever beyond the first section or so. It's good to hear that perhaps they're not as well-explained as I thought and that perhaps other avenues make it more accessible to me. Do you have any suggestions where to start? Are there perhaps online 'starter kits' that would guide me through what courses/books/whatever to work through? I find that one of the most difficult parts of self-learning: there's often no clear syllabus available.

guelo 10y ago

I wouldn't bother, it is an incomprehensible mess, impossible to get through, pretentious, non rigurous sloppy thinking, and ultimately a disservice to Godels incompleteness theorem.

orf 10y ago
That's a harsh critique, can you elaborate?
- guelo 10y ago
  Recursion, self reference, emergent properties are important topics and there are many good resources for studying them, GEB just isn't one of them. Most people that embark on the journey of reading the book fail and are unable to complete it. I believe the author tried to make the book itself some kind of self referential repeating work of art, which might be appealing to some but doesn't end up giving a rigorous treatment of the topic.
  - pierrebai 10y ago
    GEB is not a study book. It's written as a multi-layered musing on various inter-connected subjects. It's also not hard to read and entertaining. I get the feeling from the anecdote about the AI professor rejecting students based on having read it and your own reaction that people in the field resent it for not being course material? I also sense a sub-text of resentment about the positions and criticisms of the author about various approach to AI. It's clearly an exposition of his philosophical basis for his position. You might disagree with him but that's no reason to be insulting.
    - curuinor 10y ago
      It's not so much resentment inasmuch all symbolic AI is evaporating in the shadow of the new new connectionist wave (the "new" connectionist wave being the PDP stuff). Why not, for example, see it from Hinton's philosophical point of view (besides that the papers are very boring and dry, of course)? He made a very good defense against Pylyshin and Fodor and a few critiques of Hofstadter _and_ the algorithms are shipping on Google Search and things like that.
      - p1esk 10y ago
        Link to the Hinton's view?
        curuinor 10y ago
        There's a lotta good citations in SEP entry: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/connectionism/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/connectionism/
  - kabdib 10y ago
    I read it when it first came out; I was 18, and it was formative in my early career in CS. For someone in their teens it was a wonderful introduction to things that my high school education never really touched. I don't know if I'd have the patience to read it today.
aleph_naught 10y ago
I got about 200 pages in, and just could not continue with it. 'incomprehensible mess' would perfectly describe my sentiments. As having taken undergrad/grad courses in logic and set theory, any interesting nuggets about recursion/completeness/incompleteness/etc that one could glean from GEB can much more coherently and succinctly be obtained from a proper book on logic/computability. The counterargument would be that this book is meant as entertainment: from my experience with the first ~200 pages, it was a complete chore to read, as ideas were presented enigmatically and slowly, to the point of frustration. Granted, my attempt at reading it was almost a decade ago.
- mercer 10y ago
  I had trouble getting through GEB because I felt like I couldn't quite grasp logic/set theory/whatever beyond the first section or so. It's good to hear that perhaps they're not as well-explained as I thought and that perhaps other avenues make it more accessible to me. Do you have any suggestions where to start? Are there perhaps online 'starter kits' that would guide me through what courses/books/whatever to work through? I find that one of the most difficult parts of self-learning: there's often no clear syllabus available.