Three scientists and their gods
by Wright, Robert · first published 1988
6mentions
4recommended by
6HN commenters
2011–2023first – last mentioned
67% recommend33% neutral
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Three Scientists and their Gods: This book foreshadows the meaning and purpose of science+tech https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/214570.Three_Scientists_... Scifi: The Three Body problem (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20518872-the-three-body-...)…
on “Ask HN: What are your favorite books of all time, and why?” ↗Three Scientists and their Gods is such a good book! Almost anything by Robert Wright has been a must buy for me ever since!
on “Ed Fredkin Has Died” ↗I first learnt about him from a very interesting book, "Three scientists and their Gods". I think the chapter about him is excerpted in this Atlantic piece: https://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/88apr/wright.ht...
on “Ed Fredkin Has Died” ↗…two alternatives seem, the harder it can be to choose between them—no matter that, to the same degree, the choice can only matter less." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fredkin%27s_paradox RIP. I loved Three Scientists and Their Gods and had the privilege of seeing him speak at CMU in 2001. He was hysterical and brilliant.
on “Ed Fredkin Has Died” ↗Hey, I'm not a particle physicist, but I've read a bunch of books by people who think the universe is a computer. (Three Scientists and Their Gods, A New Kind Of Science, and The Recursive Universe (this last is out of print and much better than Wolfram's newer but more turgid ANKOS.) I don't think the universe is a computer either, but I don't…
on “Rebooting the cosmos?” ↗Memories by Paul Abrahams: https://paulabrahams.substack.com/p/memories-of-ed-fredkin In a comment, I mentioned the Three Scientists and Their Gods profile (which someone else in the comments has also mentioned) and also that Fredkin was apparently the ultimate origin of a very widespread anecdote about overfitting in machine learning: https://gwern.net/tank
on “Ed Fredkin Has Died” ↗