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Comment by jimmyvalmer | Hacker News Reader

You might be thinking of nonfiction, particularly nonfiction about programming.

I think I'm most interested in works with a clearly mathematical, complex, multi-layered structure or language usage. Like the experiments of Georges Perec [1], for example.

I wonder how would reading this kind of stuff actually stimulate our brain, as compared to solving coding or maths puzzles.

E.g. the book linked above, Perec's "Life: A User's Manual", was "heartly recommended" by Don Knuth [2].

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life:_A_User%27s_Manual

2: https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/retd.html

People such as yourself get a hard-on about Godel, Escher, Bach. Myself? If I want to learn about basic number theory and recursion, I'll google it. Verbosity is an existential threat.

GEB is pretty dense. Comparing GEB to short stories by Borges, I feel like Borges is able to capture the same ideas (recursion, infinite permutations) in a more engaging way and at a fraction of GEB's length.

Or... just read about fixed point recursion. It's hard enough hitting a nail on the head, much more so when you've limited yourself to a socket wrench for its "abstract, literary" qualities.

This is anecdotal, can't find the reference, but I think Hofstadter himself later considered "I Am a Strange Loop" (2007, a mere 412 pages) a better explanation of the ideas he had laid out in GEB.

> Verbosity is an existential threat.

.. maybe I likes the verbosity?

Asteroids are an existential threat. Verbosity is a style that some people enjoy.

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