Doug Hofstadter’s 6 word autobiography, according to XKCD.
I’m so META,
even this acronym.
aka “The reference implementation of the self-referential joke.”
Thanks to Psybertron Jr for spotting it. Even as recently as two of the last three posts, the word has been meta and the reference has been Hofstadter.
Meta has been the word since 1999/2000 when most other people were distracted by the impending millennium bug, but The Economist no less predicted that “Meta will be the word of the noughties”. We were almost right, maybe in the teenies we’ll get there. No-one in the dot.com-boom spotted the impending explosion in media opportunities to spread memetically the lowest common denominator of obvious “old knowledge” and that this would be a drag on advancing attention on new “meta” knowledge, recognizing the underlying reality of [meta(meta)^n]-knowledge. The Religion vs Science debate has been just as distracting in creating an artificial binary opposition of old knowledge – attention grabbing in the media spotlight.
Thanks to Quine, Hofstadter (and Dennett) got there before most of the rest of us. Attention is the valuable commodity.
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