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Comment by dinobones | Hacker News Reader

Am I the only one who did not find this book that interesting? I studied CS so it just felt like reading my class textbooks again, except with random trippy stories in between that try to shoehorn theory into a poor metaphor.

The fundamentals of CS (strings, automata, graphs) are elementary building blocks. This is by design. You can apply them to almost anything. Almost everything "is a graph", or "recursion" if you formulate them to be so.

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The point isn't that everything is recursive - the point is that systems that are recursive / self-referential cause breakdowns in logic (they are incomplete).

This is a deep philosophical insight - it rhymes with the Buddhist idea of no-self - the problems that arise because we hold onto a false sense of self.

I read it before studying cs and I thought it was fascinating and made me want to study it. After studying it at the grad school level I re read it and found the book somewhat pedantic. It’s a bit like the black swan in the regard: it package advanced under grad level stem topics with colorful anecdotes and musings.

Some of the comments here make me want to read it again, but the first time through I got bored. It kept geeking out about recursion for so laboriously long that I felt like maybe it was written in a different time for people who hadn’t already studied thunks and y-combinators and quines in school. I’m sure it was a journey of discovery in the 70s, but it felt like a lot of the ideas that made it famous had already seeped into my education and spoiled the book for me. I’m not sure exactly how much of it I read, I thought maybe two thirds, and it sounds like I either didn’t read or didn’t understand some of the themes in the book.

Middle ground opinion here. I found roughly the first third of GEB interesting. It's mind-expanding to think about self-reference and recursive structure in the context of all the other fields besides computer science, like natural language, music, art. GEB is a fun exploration of that for the first few chapters... but it doesn't get better after that, after a while it just keeps doing the same things and repeating the same stuff, and becomes a chore rather than fun to get through.

I plowed my way through about two thirds of it. Lots of interesting stuff, but I finally gave up because it seemed just too self-involved and self-referential. Building up this enormous edifice, just to be able to say "Hey! Check out my edifice!"

I guess I'm just too much of an applied engineering kinda guy.

Oh, the irony of dismissing GEB as "too self-referential."

I'm So Meta, Even This Acronym.

It was a breakthrough tome when it came out, and covers a lot more than truth tables.

Its as much a weird work of nerd art than a manual, like _whys guide to ruby_.

After several unfortunate book purchases I finally realized that the more enthusiastic comments there are about it on HN the more likely I am to not make it past the first three pages.

I started GEB a couple of weeks ago and I have to agree to some extend (I also have a CS background). The information density is low and the authors style of writing feels very self-indulgent and even pretentious. In the foreword of the recent edition he portrays himself as a very petty, narrow-minded and unpleasant person.

But at the same time, when it really gets going I can't help but being swept away and entertained by the unfiltered enthusiasm he displays and the work he has done to put it to paper. It's like a conversation with a very exhausting but at the same time very interesting person. It's like trying to put that tingling in the back of the brain when some kind of insight looms in words.

I feel like it's probably best read as a curious psychograph of a nerd in the seventies who is deeply interested in theoretical computer science and its implications on awareness and (artificial) intelligence. Not as a scientific non-fiction-book which is trying to educate the reader or trying to make a strong argument for something

I think you have to be in the right mindset. Not to say its beyond anyone's level, but I think you have to be in the "mood" to learn about the material. I can assure you, there's been times where I would have hated reading it and times where I wouldn't have been able to put it down.

When I'm more focused on the here and now, I think I would find it a chore to get through. When I feel like I have less on my plate and looking for "interesting observations" it would work really well.

I'm with you. I've heard so many raves but I've always found it a slog and sadly never was able to get into it.

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