People said it was good

People said it was good.

A third of the way through this thing, and only the sunk cost fallacy is pushing me forward.

How hard have I been meme'd, Veeky Forums?

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It's good but definitely for STEM minds, make sure you're reading it with a pen and paper handy so you can do the exercises

Am I too liberal arts to appreciate it?

I'm a writer by hobby, but I dabbled in enough logic and computer programming back when I was in school that the first several chapters have just been retreading stuff I already know. I wouldn't mind that necessarily, except that he seems to be taking forever to get to the "point" of the whole thing. 300 pages of college review and mediocre dialogues is a little tiring.

Self-indulgent pretentiousness. If you actually want to learn anything about those subjects, get a real textbook.

My undergraduate degree was in mathematics, getting a PhD in information theory right now.

This is one of those books whose name got thrown around a lot in conversations. Pretentious & uninformed people name drop it to try and intimidate others. It is not a real book about science and math. Hofstadter's GEB is basically the A New Kind of Science of the previous generation.

Read the top critical review for the book on Amazon, it's written by someone who has spent a lot more time on the book than me and he articulates its problems a lot better than I have.

I hope you don't waste too much more time on it

I was curious cuz I was reading Hofstadter section in "Mind and Consciousness: 5 Questions" so I went ahead and found that review.

Too long to post in this thread and too lazy to break it up

>amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/RF8B4NEHXVDTZ/ref=cm_cr_getr_d_rvw_ttl?ie=UTF8&ASIN=0465026567

tl;dr toss the book in the trash.

>He doesn't like the cetoloy chapter in Moby Dick
Dropped

I don't actually know anything about science but I thought the first third was pretty interesting. He holds your hand going over some pretty simple concepts that might not be obvious or intuitive to you. It's a fun book for young minds interested in higher thinking type stuff.

Die

that review is written by an unironic brainlet tho, look at how little he understands dialogues as parables
>My fourth biggest qualm with this book are the dialogues. These are presented ostensibly to provide some context and commentary on the content of the proceeding chapter. At first, I thought these dialogues would break up the dense content of this book nicely, but after a few of them I found them redundant, tiring, and even more arrogant than the chapters, if possible. This is simply more shameless ego-stroking for Hofstadter, once again revealing how clever and cultured he is. Plus the Tortoise is a dick (Hofstadter would say, “Hey! Remember I said ‘dick’ a few paragraphs ago, but in a different context? The infinite connections are so infinite. I’m so clever”). He breaks numerous expensive record players owned by the Crab just to prove a point and is constantly patronizing and antagonizing his “friend” Achilles. The Tortoise is ususally the one who represents the ideas presented in the following chapters, so it is reasonable to think of the Tortoise as GEB’s avatar for Hofstadter. Using the transitive property (I know Hofstadter would approve), we can therefore conclude that Hofstadter is a dick.

i FUCKING LOVE science