Yesterday, just after I posted here about the availability now of my Gödel book as a free PDF download, I tweeted the same news, and that tweet was retweeted dozens of times.
After 24 hours, the book has been downloaded … over 47 thousand times.
Which is a bit crazy.
The Daughter immediately had the explanation. Someone had posted a link on Hacker News, giving just the title with a direct link (but not explaining that An Introduction to Gödel’s Theorems is a long book!). And that link stayed on the front page of Hacker News for quite a while. No doubt most of those who clicked through, not reading the comments that pointed out that it is a book, and perhaps thinking they were going to download a quick read, were surprised by what they found!
But still, I guess that it is really rather good to find that so many were tempted to follow up a link to something on Gödel’s theorems. The topic (rightly!) remains of considerable interest, even fascination. Which certainly encourages me to crack on and finish reworking the cut-down version of the book, the lecture notes Gödel Without Tears. And who knows, a few people might even read the book!
I found your site by searching for “logic matters”. The phrase occurred to me as a modification of “Justice Matters”, a tagline used by by Glenn Kirschner who gives insightful commentary on current events, almost daily, on YouTube and is often a guest on news channels offering legal Insight on political happenings. I thought, what this society needs is for people to better critical thinkers, and more logical with regard to what they share on social media. Maybe some of these conspiracy theories can be shuttered because ‘logic matters’.
I think it is a nice question how much a study of logic in the narrower sense — e.g. following an introductory logic course in a philosophy department or reading An Introduction to Formal Logic! — is actually likely to make someone overall a more logical, critical, thinker in the broader sense that matters for political life. Probably less than we’d like to think! And probably no more than following many another area of study. But let’s hope logic in the narrower sense at least does no harm!
Well, I have read many of these so called “intro to Godel’s incompleteness”. Your work, though not short, is really an enjoyable read!
BTW, will you be posting the new version of GWT soon?
New GWT by the end of the month, I still hope!
I don’t know if this is true everywhere on the web but I noticed recently a change in the way my browsers respond when I click on a PDF link, downloading immediately without asking if I want to download. This may have something to do with changes in the relationship between Adobe and Microsoft?