User blog comment:Alemagno12/googology 4 dummies/@comment-31837178-20180129014036

Alemagno12 - great stuff, thanks for putting this post out, and Edwin - excellent points as usual.

My two cents:

Cent #1 - the corollary to rule 1 = "Don't be discouraged by not being equipped to create the largest number.  Ever." The joy of learning about these great and ridiculous and often mind-blowing numbers and the techniques for creating these should be an end to itself. In my case, since I haven't gone past toe-deep into set theory, I'm having to be content with playing around with recursion and diagonalization to make my own "googological machines". And if the fruit of my efforts gets dominated to a wisp by TREE(n), I've at least gained a perspective of how ridiculously powerful the TREE(n) paradigm is.

Cent #2 - for anyone looking to get a jump on recursion, diagonalization, and ordinals, I recommend picking up David Metzler's "Ridiculously huge numbers" video series beginning with part 5, which is his introduction to the fast-growing hierarchy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-mDIuPI8Rk