I think I benefited less from the letter of the Law, than through the spirit of it. My first exposure was very indirect coming from a decision analysis textbook, that motivated the construction of decision trees from something like the benefits of making distinctions, which were well-defined. (From that representation it becomes simple to analyze what conditional probabilities are relevant to your decision-making context.)

They cited GSB through Francisco Varela who proposed that making distinctions was the fundamental operation of all cognitive thought. I found the idea compelling (if we know the roots of thinking, could that give us the levers to improve it?) but found Varela to be near-impenetrable.

So I picked up GSB in hopes that this thin tome could shed some light on the manner.

My god. You start seeing distinctions then you start seeing them everywhere. You understand what computational types are and why the adjunctions are ubquitous – and important. You get a sense of why psychological time must exist. You get why information always requires there to be an observer, and how the combination of all perspectives will necessarily be empty - our limitations to comprehension form the richness of our universe. You see the freedom we have in letting some things be distinguished over others and why people get confused about whether mathematics is discovered or invented. Surely it is neither, or both: we let something be to find out what it is.

And the fact that you can draw a knot-theorist, a biologist, a decision theorist, and a Taoist out from the conceptual framework is a testament to how rich it is.

Still, eventually I'm going to have to learn how to calculate with it.