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This book is fantastic as a tool. I have used it in many classrooms to teach students about how to identify pseudoscience. This and "Quantum Learning" are exc
by stonogo 13y ago
This book is fantastic as a tool. I have used it in many classrooms to teach students about how to identify pseudoscience. This and "Quantum Learning" are excellent examples of the work of well-read blowhards contributing nothing to human knowledge (aside from a very stylish series of handwaving and cargo cults).
Like most popular gibberish of this ilk, the most valuable part of the book is the reference list; most pseudo-philosophers are very careful to make as many references as possible to really excellent works, probably in an attempt for 'success by association.'
- GrantS 13y agoI'm curious what particular claim you think Hofstadter is pushing that is unwarranted -- I don't see how a book of wandering musings could earn the label "pseudoscience" when it doesn't claim to be scientific in the first place (as far as I recall -- it's been about 15 years since I read it). It's a bunch of interesting ideas he ties together in clever ways. The best I can come up with is that you're talking about his idea that self-reference lies at the heart of consciousness, which I think an intelligent reader can see is just a guess of his. Whether or not it's true, we can still see how it's useful to think of ant colonies as organisms, and we still learn about the incompleteness theorem, and we now understand what a fugue is and how it has textual and visual analogues, etc. Maybe there's a group of people who treat GEB's claims differently than I do that I'm unaware of?
- psychometry 13y agoWhat exactly is your job that entails you teaching nonsense to students in classrooms? If GEB is the best example of pseudoscience you can come up with, I'd venture to guess you're a piss-poor educator. Very disturbing.