Book · recommended on 4 episodes
Godel, Escher, Bach
Douglas Hofstadter ISBN 9783608949063
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Douglas Hofstadter ISBN 9783608949063
Find it on AmazonAffiliate link — we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you.
This book by Douglas Hofstadter has come up 4 times across 2 different shows: Lex Fridman, Tim Ferriss. 4 of those mentions were genuine on-air recommendations, not just passing references. The people who brought it up: Chris Dixon, Guido van Rossum, Leslie Kaelbling, guest. The earliest mention we indexed is from 2018-11-22 and the most recent from 2021-10-30. Every occurrence below links to the episode page and to the exact second it was said on YouTube.
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize A metaphorical fugue on minds and machines in the spirit of Lewis Carroll Douglas Hofstadter's book is concerned directly with the nature of "maps" or links between formal systems. However, according to Hofstadter, the formal system that underlies all mental activity transcends the system that supports it. If life can grow out of the formal chemical substrate of the cell, if consciousness can emerge out of a formal system of firing neurons, then so too will computers attain human intelligence.
“i read this book gerda escherbach which was sort of mind-blowing book at the time and it's all about kind of the connection between computer science and music and philosophy”— Chris Dixon
The guest here is Chris Dixon and Naval Ravikant: Chris Dixon is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) leading its crypto investments, and a serial founder of startups acquired by McAfee and eBay. Naval Ravikant is co-founder and chairman of AngelList, a prolific angel investor (Twitter, Uber, Notion), and a widely followed thinker on wealth and happiness. Chris Dixon and Naval Ravikant explain Web3, NFTs, tokens, and DAOs as a user-owned internet revolution with Tim Ferriss.
“the one book that really influenced me a lot when i was building starting out this company maybe 10 years ago uh was gb go to leicester block”— guest
The guest here is Eugenia Kuyda: Co-founder and CEO of Replika, an app that lets users build a chatbot AI friend that connects emotionally. A former Russian investigative journalist who created the first version of the tech to memorialize a close friend who died. Replika founder Eugenia Kuyda on loneliness, losing her best friend, and building an AI companion born from grief.
“I read girdle eer Bach when I was in high school that was pretty formative for me because it exposed the interestingness of Primitives”— Leslie Kaelbling
The guest here is Leslie Kaelbling: Roboticist and professor at MIT known for work in reinforcement learning, planning, and robot navigation; won the IJCAI Computers and Thought Award and founded the Journal of Machine Learning Research. MIT roboticist Leslie Kaelbling on reinforcement learning, planning under uncertainty, abstraction, and what to build in versus learn for intelligent robots.
“the most influential thing that I read in my early 20s was girlish ABBA that was about consciousness and that was a big eye-opener”— Guido van Rossum
The guest here is Guido van Rossum: Dutch programmer, creator of the Python programming language and its longtime benevolent dictator for life (BDFL). Python creator Guido van Rossum on language design, consciousness, the limits of AI, and stepping down as benevolent dictator for life.
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