anonymoose0112:

raptros-underscore:

anonymoose0112:

raptros-underscore:

anonymoose0112:

olena:

Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

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If you’ve ever picked this book up, you know it’s a gigantic, heavy monster. Please click through ( or { click here } ) & reblog to request that it be published on Kindle.

There are PDF’s available, but it’d be nice to have a high-quality ebook as they don’t read too well.

I too am a Strange Loop.

Oh. Hmm. Hofstadter. I guess it’d be nice even if I’m conflicted about his work.

CAN’T I ENJOY POPULAR UPPER-MIDDLE BROW READING WITHOUT THE INSINUATION THAT I MAY NOT ACTUALLY UNDERSTAND THE NUANCES OF COMPUTATION THEORY AND PHILOSOPHY OF MATHEMATICS KTHX!

Well people do it all the time, so whatever.

This reminds of when Neal Stephenson was defending Leibniz’s monads thing. Tripped me the hell out because I kept thinking of like Haskell monads.

Oh sure, we all talk about issues outside our areas of special knowledge. It’s funny, to me, whenever you talk about something you’ve read on a subject that you thought was just awesome and someone with more knowledge of the thing is like “Yeah, it was okay…” and then you suddenly wonder just how little you know about a field. 

••••••

OS:

Funny where this went. There will always be those people who know more about something, but each party has two options:

The reader can act like they suddenly know everything about a topic, or remain inquisitive and question what they read.

The “expert” can remain patient and offer their knowledge to another, they can try to answer questions and explain (or summarize) what was missing in the material… or they can be an asshole and say things like “Oh yeah it was ok, for laymen who don’t understand anything but think they do… kthnxbai!”

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