From: hal@finney.org
Date: Tue Aug 03 1999 - 15:59:34 MDT
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky, <sentience@pobox.com>, writes:
> I can't for the life of me remember anything in _GEB_, _Metamagical
> Themas_, or _Fluid Concepts_ that could be taken as arrogant. Even when
> he was ripping apart the "Structure Mapping Engine" in _Fluid_, he was a
> lot nicer about it than I would have been.
The main places I see what might be called arrogance in Hofstadter are
his politically oriented articles collected in Themas. He writes about
super-rationality and is just so disappointed in society that we don't
see the truth and turn into a bunch of self-sacrificing altruists. Here
is his comment after running his "Luring Lottery" to test whether people
would cooperate in a symmetric situation. (They didn't.)
"Did I find this amusing? Somewhat, of course. But at the same time, I
found it disturbing and disappointing. Not that I hadn't expected it.
Indeed, it was precisely what I expected..."
Hofstadter goes on to announce,
"And with this perhaps sobering conclusion, I would like to draw my term
as a columnist for Scientific American to a close."
When you read those together it makes it sound like Hofstadter was so
embittered by the painful confirmation of the fundamental stupidity of
humanity that he isn't willing to go on with the column.
This chapter is followed in the book by his infuriatingly moralistic "Tale
of Happiton", a metaphor for the danger of nuclear war, with its lesson
that if people would just spend 15 minutes a day working for nuclear
peace, the problem could be overcome. Hofstadter's sad devotion to the
terribly misguided nuclear freeze movement and his lecturing about how
we all need to do something to make the world a better place sat very
poorly with me.
Hal
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