Although not directly development related. The most impressive book I've had the pleasure of reading is "Gödel Escher Bach: An eternal golden braid" (also known as GEB) from Douglas Hofstadter.
It's hard to explain what it is about exactly, but it contains ideas and concepts from mathematics, computer science, philosophy and conscience. All of it is explained in very clear and interesting way. I can recommend it to anyone interested in these topics.
The book won a Pulitzer and to take a quote from the Scientific American about it: "Every few decades, an unknown author brings out a book of such depth, clarity, range, wit, beauty and originality that it is recognized at once as a major literary event."
I heard a story from an AI professor a few years ago, who had an interesting heuristic for picking grad student applications to trash: if it mentions GEB, off it goes into the circular file.
Fun book. Hofstadter actually doesn't like computers, apparently: this is in the record, and I've heard him mention that fact multiple times. He just likes playing with ideas.
He likes computers, he even likes AI. He doesn't buy into Ray Kurzweil's ideas about singularity [0,1]. He also (as I understand) is in Chomsky school of statistical learning as opposed to Peter Norvig (or Google) school [1,2]. Those two are highly unpopular stances to have these days, so I can see how that can be confused with not liking computers/AI.
If you read GEB, you can see in different chapters that he is a big fan of computers, simulations, attempts at AI, and the such.
I mean, the source is, I had dinner with the guy for a school dealio and he said he didn't really like computers and had grad students to do all the programming. GEB is full of mathematical content, but it isn't hung up on computers as machines and concrete things.
I'm not seeing him expressing a position on language that goes as far as Chomsky's (as described by Norvig) in that interview. Has he written more about this somewhere that you know of?
Professors are sometimes worried that students are more interested in a subject on a 'spiritual level' than they are interested in the practical, nitty gritty, hard work and math.
Perhaps this one had bad experience with people who talked too much about GEB.
Because GEB is, in many regards, pop-science (or pop-math). It's a fun introductory read, but it won't really (and by really I mean rigorously) explain (and by explain I mean prove) much of anything.
Any reference to it in the context of academia is a bit on the nose. It's like trying to study piano and saying you love Mozart. Like, yeah, okay.
What's wrong with Mozart? He is popular for a reason: he is freaking great. I hate that some people smugly dismiss things that are popular as beneath them, or conversely, that you have to like hyper-obscure artist or else you're not into real art. Bullshit, Mozart is great.
It might be that, in GP's experience, people who straightaway reply "I love Mozart" are less likely to actually have heard a substantial amount of his work, perhaps to have sat with them for some time, and (for lack of a better word) pondered over them, than someone who says they like something else but replies in a manner that sounds more sophisticated, e.g. "I enjoy the structure inherent in Bach's music" or what-have-you. (I might just be putting words in their mouth, though. Apologies if that's the case.) Answers of the latter kind can indicate that one has actually spent some time thinking about whatever it is one has learned, however elementary it might be. And that's always great!
It's probably the equivalent of someone saying "omg fractals" or "the incompleteness theorems, man, math is broken, I find that so beautiful" in response to "So you like math/CS?" After a while, that becomes a red flag that you learn to small-talk your way out of, albeit with some shame: while I agree with GP, to some extent, I do understand how this can be exclusionary, though. Almost by construction, someone who isn't in really deep is far more likely to have met the parts of a field that have been popularized than other things, and putting them down for this can be counterproductive if you're looking to attract more people or, well, just evangelize. I don't know of a good way out of this.
I do seem to have noticed that this isn't the case if you replace "fractals" by, say, "differential equations" or even "trisection". Maybe what one really needs to avoid in introductory literature is powerful ideas that are easy to lossily summarize for a lay audience in the form of really general, unexpected-sounding incorrect-when-unqualified statements that seem to say profound things about life, the universe, and everything. Leaving off the last condition shouldn't make an appreciable difference in hype/excitement-generating power: you could very well do, say, some topological/geometric staple like the hairy ball theorem, or some knot theory, and so on. That way, you retain the visual appeal that $REALLY_BIG_NUMBER-x zooms of Mandelbrot give you, while significantly decreasing the tendency for the target to go into (partial or full) "woah, dude, everything is connected and I am pure energy" mode in the way that Gödel often does.[0]
As an aside, GEB can be a good (rigorous, even) introduction to a few very powerful ideas. For me, what I call "interpreter-y thinking" was a good example, as was a healthy respect for how complex emergent behavior can arise from simple rules. This is something that's unfortunately hampered by the "bag of really cool ideas" nature that the book seemed to have when I read it four or five years ago.
[0]: I've actually heard the "everything is connected" bit from a good friend who loves watching videos like in TFV, so it isn't entirely a strawman. :)
Really what it comes down to is that if the only person you can bring up is Mozart, then you clearly don't know shit.
It takes a simple man to like a popular idea. It takes a mediocre man to like popularly unpopular ideas (ie cult classics, big only within certain circles). It takes a good man to knowingly like unpopularly popular ideas (ie liking spielberg and bay, popular directors everyone [in the know] loves to trash).
A great man will tell you why.
And only the greatest of men actually like whatever the hell they're talking about.
Generally I'd agree with you, but the parenthetical statements only make the sentence harder to read and do not change or add to the meaning at all, at least to me.
He he, good one. That reminds me of a joke I once made, in some relevant context, referencing Heisenberg and Pauli, but I'm uncertain what it was now, so I'll exclude it from here.
Nope. Strange loops are not by definition not intentionally circular (while a circular graph in a file system is in this case). He makes that clear I think in the final chapter of GEB.
I didn't get a lot out of GEB, but I pored over Metamagical Themas [0]. It was perfect for a teenager just learning programming. The bite-sized nature of it makes it extremely approachable - perhaps a case of constraints (periodic column of N words) leading to more creative output.
While I have not read the book, when I've spoken about it to reputable Bach musicologists and logicians, one group says Hofstadter misinterprets Bach's work and tries to create something that actually isn't there while the other says he oversimplifies Gödel's work to the point that it is uninteresting and misleading. I haven't found a visual artist who's read it to discuss the Escher parts. These opinions steered me away from it, so I'm curious about you having a more rewarding experience.
I'm neither a Bach musicologist or a logician (although I've had multiple logic courses). But that might be the reason why I enjoy the book very much. Hofstadter explains complex stuff in a style that makes it very accessible without needing almost any preexisting knowledge in the discussed fields.
I really enjoyed the book, but suspect (with no authority other than a gut feeling based on experience) that it's in the same genre as Guns, Germs & Steel - an attractively complete system that would not hold up to an expert in the field.
I can't comment on the Bach or Escher parts, but he does a very creditable job summarizing Gödel's work for a lay audience. Of course if you want to take up this stuff professionally, more in-depth study will be required, that goes without saying - GEB doesn't claim to be a textbook - but it is one of the best popular science books around.
My experience with the book was similar to my experiences listening to Bach's WTC, understanding Godel theorems, or looking at Escher's Relativity. Just start reading it.
I bought this book a few months ago, it's been sitting on my shelf because of its intimidating size (plus the fact that I have a few other books I want to work through) but this review has definitely bumped it up my reading list.
My experience is that non-mathematicians like to have GED on their coffee tables as a conversation piece. The related book that mathematicians like is https://www.amazon.com/Mathematical-Experience-Phillip-J-Dav.... (High school math is enough to enjoy it, but the more math you have, the more you'll get out it. All of the way up to the PhD level.)
Hofstadter gave the keynote at Strange Loop a few years ago (the conference was named after his ideas, so Alex Miller was thrilled when he accepted). Quite an interesting talk.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's hard to explain what it is about exactly, but it contains ideas and concepts from mathematics, computer science, philosophy and conscience. All of it is explained in very clear and interesting way. I can recommend it to anyone interested in these topics.
The book won a Pulitzer and to take a quote from the Scientific American about it: "Every few decades, an unknown author brings out a book of such depth, clarity, range, wit, beauty and originality that it is recognized at once as a major literary event."