<quote>…well, it would have been, but for some reason I kept struggling to get through it. I thought highly of it, but my secret shame was that my admiration for the book was based mostly on the first two hundred or so pages. It took slogging effort to get myself through the rest, effort sporadically applied over the course of years. I did eventually make my way through the whole thing, but even now, I can’t necessarily be sure I’ve read and absorbed every page, even though I’ve certainly looked at each one. By the end, my impression of the book was much more reserved: it does have some genuine high points and I can understand how it came to have its classic reputation, but I also felt it had a number of problems I’ve rarely seen discussed. For me personally, it ended up falling short of its reputation as a sparkling, effervescent text that drew together art, mathematics, and culture, and given how little I’ve seen this discussed, I wanted to write down why I feel this way.
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That's not the point. So what if you don't get everything? Are you supposed to get everything in Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming on the first read?
The record-playing example is a wonderful metaphor for Godel's theorem, not a terrible one.
Yes, I also felt this reading his post. I think that he is rather ignorant of the fact that the vast majority of people reading the book (it won the Pulitzer Prize, after all) WON'T have a working knowledge of Godel's theorem. He's not well-placed to judge the efficacy of the record player analogy.
You are making a simple assertion that the metaphor was good without any explanation, while the author made a deep and cutting explanation as to why he he believes it’s a terrible metaphor. You’ve made no counter argument.
Maybe Hofstadter hadn't chosen the best metaphor, but criticizing it from the point that it contains too many irrelevant details isn't unlike dismissing the use of apples for teaching counting numbers (what happens if I bite an apple, what if an apple is larger than another one and so on).
That's not the point. So what if you don't get everything? Are you supposed to get everything in Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming on the first read?
The record-playing example is a wonderful metaphor for Godel's theorem, not a terrible one.