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Comment by jrflowers | Hacker News Reader

GEB is crucial reading in that if you want to appear intellectually superior all you have to do is sprinkle “Ho ho! Much like the eternal golden braid I must say!” into conversation and no one will call you out on it or ask you to extrapolate (or if in the off chance that they do, you can say anything and still get away with it)

The best response to someone bringing up GEB in casual conversation is to look them dead in the eye and simply say “I have also read that book.”

This will instantly create palatable tension and a change of topic

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> palatable tension and a change of topic

When someone enthusiastically mentions something they liked and wanted to talk about and you immediately take a shit on it, it's not really a surprise that this creates "palatable tension" and a change of subject (and likely a longer-term wariness to share when talking to you). If you really dislike discussing related topics, there are surely less condescending ways of expressing that.

They’re implying that many people use it as a way to take some moral high ground in a conversation, not knowing that others might also have acquired this ‘intellectual power’.

My experience is that when faced with what seems at first like pseudo-intellectual nonsense, it's usually more productive to either explicitly say I don't feel like discussing the topic, or else try to get someone into a serious conversation about the details, instead of trying to insult or shame the other person. Sometimes people are just bad at smalltalk / earnestly oblivious to the impression they leave / trying hard to impress for whatever reason, and aren't really trying to be pretentious even if they initially come across that way. YMMV.

I took the book with me on holiday and I couldn't put it down, almost literally reading right up until lights out each night. I was surprised and somewhat disappointed to be done in short time. The literary writing combined with the deep mathematical/philosophical meanings is entrancing.

I don't often get to meet people IRL who have read the book and wish I had more opportunities to discuss it. One (of the many things) that stuck out to me was the idea of foreground and background. Prime numbers to me is background that remains when you construct all the composite numbers, so technically they're 'non-composite' lacking the property of being a product of distinct numbers.

Is it possible these people are attempting to make conversation and link fun ideas together, rather than just trying to appear "smart"?

That's what makes it tricky: Both are possible.

> GEB is crucial reading in that if you want to appear intellectually superior... This will instantly create palatable tension and a change of topic

Ouch... Why would you assume that the other party's goal is to appear "superior", and not that they are legitimately passionate about something? Do you dislike when people are passionate about topics that don't interest you? Or do you just believe that it is fair to assume that everyone who outwardly likes this book is secretly doing so because they want to seem smart or something? Or something else?

This is my impression as well. Kinda similar in its "bragging rights" to The Art of Computer Programming.

GEB was a frustrating read. I mean, it's interesting in places, but it's just all over the place, jumping between many different topics. The central theme is meant to be the strange loops, but it's IMHO not very interesting concept and his application on the cognition is just author's personal conjecture.

It's utterly unlike TAOCP. One is a comprehensive algorithms reference full of (hard) technical problems. The other is an extended personal essay. (Neither one is worth "bragging" about reading in my opinion.)

"Reading" all of TAOCP would take literally years of intense effort even if you set aside all other activity. There are a lot of great problems inside, and plenty of dry humor, and I would recommend people try to at least skim sections of TAOCP which seem interesting or relevant to their work, but very few people are going to even nominally work through the whole thing, and the people who might are professional scholars of the topic.

Reading GEB can be done leisurely over the course of a few days or maybe weeks, depending on how much time someone spends reading every day. It's not quite as easy a read as a pulp novel or comic book, but it also doesn't take any inordinate amount of work to make basic sense of, or require any special skills or background understanding to start on. It's a fun book to hand to a ~13–16 year old.

You are absolutely right. It was a great book to hand to a 21 year old me.

I've often read the hate on this site for this book. At least for me, I find the discussions and analogies to help me in thinking about, and eventually understanding the material. I contrast it with a graduate intro to Recursion Theory which can leave a reader feeling that they followed all the precise arguments but still somehow missed a lot.

I compared the two in the sense how it's fashionable to have them on your bookshelf, but IMHO few people actually enjoy them and understand them beyond the surface level.

This discussion is evidence that some people really liked GEB and other people found it boring or too unfocused. It can't be that many people who bought it just to look cool on a shelf. The people who found it boring should perhaps try to appreciate that sometimes other people can genuinely like things they don't like (and vice versa I guess).

Again, if you do any work with computer algorithms, it's worth checking out TAOCP at the library and skimming the sections relevant to your work. If you might need it as a reference, it's not a bad source to have at hand; I look things up in there maybe a few times a year for the past decade. Some parts are now a bit outdated in this fast-moving field, but it's still the best available survey source about some topics, and there are some nice explanations and a lot of great problems in there. Knuth is a pretty funny writer if you enjoy dry humor.

>"bragging rights" to The Art of Computer Programming

Or bragging rights to "The Anatomy of Lisp"!

https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/20...

thanks for this link, i'd never read it before!

If that didn't make your head explode, try Essential COM by Don Box!

https://github.com/spb59h2/spb5

Once you grok it for what it actually is (C++ pure virtual classes), COM is really pretty beautiful. Until you get to the DCOM stuff...

Let’s be clear. No one has just read the Art of Computer Programming.

Mr Knuth almost certainly has

No, he wrote it only.

Debatable. How much did he dictate to a ghost writer?

I feel like it's not that kind of book, but I suppose you never know...

This is very different from my experience. Whenever someone I was in a conversation with brought up GEB, it was always a great pleasure of mine. I'd get the chance to discuss the main ideas of the book, and the way I assimilated them. I tend to not even engage in conversations with people who do it mostly to show off the extent of their knowledge. I believe this second point is the important one. GEB is completely orthogonal to the problem you describe.

Your response to somebody appearing to be intellectually superior because they bring up GEB is to act even more intellectually superior? It sounds like you feel you're so far beyond them, you won't even engage in a discussion about it.

Do you also harass people for wanting to discuss a movie they just watched?

Or you can read it and not tell anyone. This comment is a pretty pathetic attempt at shaming anyone who displays even a modicum of discourse higher than the baser level. Congratulations.

This is funny but GEB is also good so you wouldn't want it to go much further than this. Congratulations for getting there, now it would be great if you could focus that same energy on shooting down people trying to build upon or me-too this snark.

It is a good book, but it is a shame that so many pitch it as being a portal into a new and transcendent plane of understanding. Especially with it being a rather difficult read it leads to people trying to get more out of it than was in it to begin with.

To quote one of my professors from back in the day: “Life is short and you don’t have to read it if you don’t want to”

There is also the issue that it takes longer to read than you expect it to, even when taking into account that it will take longer to read than expected... ;)

I'm with you. It's legit good snark; the problem is that it's asymptotically good. :)

My favorite response is to ask deadpan if they've finished reading the book. There is only one appropriate answer, IYKYK.

I don't know. Tell me Kevin. Damm.

Well, I don't want to give too much away but... it has something to do with one of the interpretations of RICERCAR.

The best response is to actually know things about Godel, Escher and Bach

What if they counter with “do you like apples?”

I offer them an apple slice from the bag that I carry around in my pocket

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