Why read Dostoevsky? A programmer's perspective
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fhur.me
Yes, read Dostoevsky and the classics. There is so much to learn and to enjoy.
But remember that great authors didn't discover deep truths of human nature from books alone, but from their attention to the experiences of real life.
“When we read, another person thinks for us: we merely repeat his mental process. In learning to write, the pupil goes over with his pen what the teacher has outlined in pencil: so in reading; the greater part of the work of thought is already done for us. This is why it relieves us to take up a book after being occupied with our own thoughts. And in reading, the mind is, in fact, only the playground of another’s thoughts. So it comes about that if anyone spends almost the whole day in reading, and by way of relaxation devotes the intervals to some thoughtless pastime, he gradually loses the capacity for thinking; just as the man who always rides, at last forgets how to walk. This is the case with many learned persons: they have read themselves stupid.” - Arthur Schopenhauer
If you only consume and don’t create, your mind gradually loses its capacity for creativity [and you will eventually have to reacquire it, the same way a comatose patient needs to relearn walking].
See Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman for better arguments.
It’s a subtle message. Technology giveth and technology taketh. Use of any technology is a trade off.
If I were to say, "America had a negative impact in geopolitics when it invaded Iraq," it's like you responded with "I'm sorry, but that just seems anti-American."
But since when is all reading "education"? I see a lot of people reading a lot of trash and could be spending their time reading Dostoevsky, or better yet plotting their own murder + burglaries !
I can imagine that all human deepness is, not unlike the very sofisticated feathers of the peacock, just a tool to increase status & SMV.
People who are truly out of the market like postmenopausal women often feel a lack of motivation and their physical activity measurably decreases.
It falls apart rather quickly without the tell-tale signs of a tortured model, like modelling our solar system as the motion of circles because you won't admit the ellipse. You can do it, but you probably just need a better model.
For starters, the over-focus on the individual misses competition at level above and below, genes and groups. Secondly, it glosses over emergent phenomena too glibly. If you try to model a presidential election in terms of quantum physics and general relativity, you won't get very far. I can even point out an emergent phenomenon that radically changes this calculus, the human frontal lobes. Unlike most animals, we can suppress our immediate reactions and get mental time and distance from the world, to remap our motivations and act in ways completely absurd from the point of status and sexual market value, like suicide bombings. Status and sexual market value drop to dead zero. You can try to tie it back to status and sexual market value, passing through the activity of the frontal lobes, which would only prove my point about emergent phenomena and a tortured model.
"For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong." - H. L. Mencken
> ”Much reading after a certain age diverts the mind from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking, just as the man who spends too much time in the theaters is apt to be content with living vicariously instead of living his own life.”
"The people told me, however, that the big ear was not only a man, but a great man, a genius. But I never believed in the people when they spake of great men - and I hold to my belief that it was a reversed cripple, who had too little of everything, and too much of one thing."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_and_philosophical_...
> From all this it may be concluded that thoughts put down on paper are nothing more than footprints in the sand: one sees the road the man has taken, but in order to know what he saw on the way, one requires his eyes.
https://www.amazon.com/Amusing-Ourselves-Death-Discourse-Bus...
(edit) Social media / the internet more generally enables 2-way communication in a way that was not possible in either print nor TV culture. Conceptually it lowers barriers to entry to near-zero for communicating one's ideas & learning from others. Earlier forms depended much more heavily on gatekeepers. Is a more nominally democratic form of media culture than this even possible?
Doesn't this depend a lot on what and how we're reading? I put a lot more thought into some passages from a book than a Stack Overflow code snippet. HN posts fall somewhere in between, and sometimes even those can permanently reshape how I think about something.
I generally consider mathematics and physics as being the higher achievements of human knowledge and it is normal to "worship" them as the most important field of study so much that some people dedicate their entire life to them with the same devotion of true monks.
It is surprising that the author didn't include Physics in the fields that provides valuable and durable knowledge worth to acquire. Mathematics alone is sort of "sterile" when is not used within physics knowledge. Without physics it is a sort of highly abstract beauty that people pursuit only for the sake of it's beauty.
On the other side we have to recognize that both mathematics and physics capture nothing about the experience of life as a human being. For this we need real life experience, knowing other people and exchange with them, study history and read historical and social essays in addition to literature classics.
One will not find in them the sharp accuracy and simple laws that physics and mathematics provides but I guess there is no other way to learn what life is and its partial, imperfect truths.
I also cannot resist to recommend, for those who love reading Dostoevsky, to read also Bulgakov's master and Marguerite which is a true masterpiece of beauty and gives a sharp and deep view of what humanity is.
Surely you can’t believe this anymore with the discovery of computer science, AI, type theory , etc?
Well, I guess in some way we observe that now mathematics can be coupled, in addition to physics, to some new fields like AI, computer science and cryptography.
In any case I still think that mathematics becomes more interesting and worthy to study when it is applied into another field like the one we mentioned. In some sense its applications give more sense and more depth to mathematics itself.
Some people don't want to learn mathematics because they don't see how it is useful and they don't see its beauty neither. Yet sometime it happens that, later, they discover some applications where mathematics is needed and at this moment the understand how useful and deep mathematics is, just because they see its applications and they understand its meaning.
It's also a very fun book! (Apparantly not all the translations are that good though, but O'Connor and Burgin's https://www.panmacmillan.com/authors/mikhail-bulgakov/the-ma... is.)
Oh no, mathematics is many things. For me - a mathematician - it started with Galois' proof about the nonsolvability of polynomial equations with degree >= 5. No physics is required for this way of thinking about symmetries. Same with number theory, primes and indefinitely more things. Many gained applications to physical problems later, many not. The latter is not a sign that something is missing.
Being a lover of fiction myself, I huffed and puffed and he challenged me to name him a book that would change his mind. Usually when people ask me where to start in literature, I advise them to start at the top (Chekhov, say) because life is short and you might be dead tomorrow and then you missed out on the best. With an antagonistic reader like this , I am not sure that is the best choice though.
Any tips would be welcome!
I don't have an answer for you, but you got me thinking :)
For me, Infinite Jest helped me be more empathetic, which was an area I lacked a lot at the time, to the point that reading it was just clearly useful to me.
But other than that? It's hard to say. I derive a lot of pleasure from fiction, and find the experiences I get from them to be highly meaningful and to sometimes stay with me for years, not unlike memories of times with good friends. Whether or not that's of value to you as an individual just depends on your values.
If so, that makes your job a whole lot harder, but you may be able to challenge that by linking a moving work of fiction with an actual closely held relationship or desire in this person's life. But do not expect to be able to just hand him a book and watch it happen. Speaking from personal experience, I frequently require someone to discuss fiction with before it will "hit home", and I'm not even antagonistic to fiction at all. I'm just bad at it unless I can talk it through with somebody who can be my guide.
Only recently rediscovered my love for sci-fi after randomly picking up Isaac Asimov's foundation series on a whim while waiting for a flight at a book store.
Not saying it's the best thing ever or necessarily what I'd recommend. But maybe try and think what genere would be interesting to them and then pick one from someone's top x list.
I plan on doing that now using this list https://youtu.be/pP0XnfC1jVM and am very keen to build a bookshelf now haha
Casablanca is also up there.
For me Crime and Punishment was perhaps a bit painful for me as a teenager I remember entering the same state of mind as the main character Raskolnikov from reading it, but it was also a good capstone to connect the feeling from books by Boje, Strindberg and Chekhov.
If you're trying to get him to read a classic specifically, maybe it would help to start with some non-fiction pieces. David Foster Wallace has an essay on what makes Dostoevsky great and worth reading [1]. And there are plenty of other essays and books out there on "why read the classics." If you think presenting your case through the lens of scientific rigor would be helpful, there are numerous studies showing that reading fiction increases empathy with others [2] (and if that's not appealing to him, you're probably in for a very long and uphill battle). For a classic recommendation, I think that similar to the article, Crime and Punishment is a good choice. It's pretty approachable language-wise, it's not crazy long, and it hits all those points of universal themes, some humor, and a deep empathy from the author to his main character.
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[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/223380.Stories_of_Your_L...
[1] https://www.villagevoice.com/2019/07/04/feodors-guide-joseph...
[2] https://www.discovermagazine.com/mind/how-reading-fiction-in...
That sounded interesting. But it was “worlds”, not “words.”
What is his current view of the world of humans, etc.
Once you have a grasp of that, there is probably a fiction that can show him how his vision is incomplete.
We are after knowledge and to be useful and interesting the new knowledge need to be just a bit farther than we are at the moment. (zone of proximal development)
Not a book, but for AI I enjoyed watching Joshua Bach interview (consciousness is a simulation)
I agree that most movies are a waste of time at the moment. They mostly repeat the same propaganda.
I feel like I’ve run out of new proximal ideas. I used to devour (not only) science-fiction, but now I find it very hard to find anything whose concepts I’m not already familiar with. Or you have to read through 400 pages to get to just one interesting idea or plot point, and you can’t tell a priori if that will even happen.
It’ hard for me to suggest without any pointer to where you are. Maybe I don’t have anything for you?
What is the last thing you found interesting? How is your life?
Family, friends, career, hobies, plan for the next 6 month?
reading HP is fast and loose fun. the characters are okay, the world is okay-ish, the story is the standard good vs evil, there are some interesting dilemmas and the whole setting makes it a lot more palatable than the classic classics :)
(of course there are huuuuuuge plotholes and anyone with a more than two bits of imagination/curiosity starts to pick at the surface of the world it falls apart, like almost anything with magic in it)
People are just suggesting their own favorite books, but nobody started reading fiction with Anna Karenina. But many started with HP and went on to more challenging stuff.
But I will concede I've tried other YA series and just couldn't get on with it.
I certainly would, but probably not Harry Potter (personal preference - I think "magic" has been done better, and I think "boarding school" has been done better).
So maybe "Earthsea" by Ursula LeGuin, for example.
It's a skill you have to develop, like when you encounter a new musical genre. Lots of people get stuck at the "this sucks and is probably bad and overrated anyway" stage and don't open their minds and challenge themselves to understand why people like it, when encountering literature early on, similar to how many people get stuck in that same place for any musical genres they didn't learn to appreciate by age 25.
At best, they end up reading very light fiction for the rest of their lives—perhaps even YA, which is widely read among adults, in fact. At worst they decide the whole thing's a pretentious sham and they're smarter for not having engaged, which seems to be closer to the case here.
Not sure I'd go with YA if you're trying to convince someone of value in literature beyond entertainment, though. But lighter high-school tier literature, maybe. Salinger (but probably not Catcher in the Rye) or Vonnegut are decent choices, being at about the lightest end that'll still (if the reader's open to it) work those muscles. Gotta start small to develop the skills & taste to appreciate the sublime when it's expressed in written words, and to find meaning, enjoyment, and new mental tools that novice readers largely miss—which is why they often think well-regarded literature is boring and stuffy.
"The Classics" are at this point literary archeology: they've influenced a lot, but unless you're actually inspired to follow that chain back they're just going to wind up seeming "samey" to things that came after because they were already heavily referenced, extrapolated, deconstructed and their essential ideas endlessly debated.
I agree with him for the most part. However, enjoying something while wasting time is its own reward.
Reading long form prose increases your attention span and the shape of your thoughts.
Reading fiction stimulates the imagination, which opens up the space of ideas that the mind can generate.
Fiction is a compressed simulation of life. By reading good fiction one lives more life.
Fiction is a cultural touchstone. New relationships open up when there are shared understandings of stories.
Good, hard science fiction is a record of what some of the most imaginative scientific thinkers (not necessarily scientists) have pondered. Again, mind expanding.
Science fiction stimulates curiosity by asking "what if"?
We all have to engage in lower energy activities and "waste time". Watching documentaries is a "waste of time" for someone not engaged in professional research on the relevant subject. Do you use Reddit? That's a waste of time. Having a science fiction book next to the toilet will leave you feeling more nourished after you've done your business (I look forward to using the bathroom when I know there's a delicious book waiting for me that I only read there).
Dead tree books are better for someone who has a hard time reading. Studies show there's a big difference in retention between words on a screen and words in print. Dead tree books also benefit from being "things" that can be left in the intended reading location, and give a sense of progress and of conquering when completed.
The tactile nature of flipping pages and of breaking in a paperback is lovely. The cover art attracts the eyes to the book.
Reading a book is a different action than looking at your phone or computer, and it has a different set of feelings, emotions, thought patterns. There's the smell of a printed book.
I love Asimov. I, Robot is easy because it's a collection of very short stories, but it risks being seen as shallow. The End of Eternity is considered Asimov's best novel, and it's not too long. I hear good things about The Last Question. Foundation is lovely.
Be right back, going to buy more Asimov.
Haha, funny you mention it, because now that I think about it, it hits that attention-span-needed spot right in-between blog/reddit posts and novels. Which, is a pretty nice and gentle way to ease someone into reading novel-sized material.
It greatly helps that reading Asimov's short stories today still feels very gripping and relevant, probably even moreso than back when it was originally published. Though this is more of a feeling, as I obviously cannot verify how it actually felt to read it back then.
PsychoPass, Akira, Cowboy Bebop, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Attack on Titan.
So, movies. I only saw The Shawshank Redemption a few years ago, and it's really really good. Classic. Human. Touching. I'm not even sure how to characterize it except yes, really go see it, it's really at the top of the power distribution of movies.
12 Angry Men. At this point it's the cliché of old but good movies. At this point it's a satire of a socially interesting movie due to its naivete, yet for someone who seems a bit close minded it might be just the right thing. (Or not? :D)
The Pianist. Again, simple. Brutal. Or the recent Joker.
. . .
But really when it comes to AI and fiction.
Blade Runner. If that's not fiction that's worth investing time into, then what is? Even typing this I've got the chills thinking about Roy Batty.
There were tons of crappy voice overs explaining what was going on. Theological content was removed - the “confession” scene where the robot murdered his creator, the stigmata-style wounds, the dove flying up to heaven. Even the famous “I’ve seen things …” speech was gone.
When home movies became a thing it was re-edited. It became a classic in the “cuts.”
I don’t know if there’s a lesson there. Maybe “don’t worry about re-editing stinkers.”
I totally agree with everything on this list, except Akira and NGE. And I am saying that as someone for whom NGE is the all-time personal favorite piece of animated media (and I like Akira a lot too, just not as much).
Akira and NGE are pretty much deconstructions of genres, and are really heavy on at least some basic level of previous exposure and understanding of the context. I am fairly certain that if you make someone without much previous exposure to the context watch Akira, you will get a very resounding "what the fuck did you just make me watch". Watched it in a movie theater myself around 5 years ago, and it was definitely a wild ride. With NGE, I rewatched it many times, partially because I almost always discovered something new on subsequent rewatches.
The rest of the ones you've mentioned are great for easing-in though, and are not shallow even in the slightest. I would also add Ghost in the Shell: Stand-alone Complex series to the list of recommendations.
Doesn't literature teach that it's different strokes for different folks? :)
There is no need for anyone to convert others to their hobby of choice - his challenge was a response to you huffing and puffing, not a genuine request.
If the classics feel to archaic or they are too inaccessible, you also might try some contemporary authors. Michael Crichton is very accessible. I think his works can be equally inspiring and creative.
"Artists use lies to tell the truth. Yes, I created a lie. But because you believed it, you found something true about yourself."
- Alan Moore, V for Vendetta
I'd recommend for example (in no particular order - just some great books imnho):
Earthsea quartet by LeGuin
Dune by Herbert
South of the Border by Murakami
Islands in the Net by Sterling
Foundation trilogy by Asimov
Speed of Dark, by Moon
Accelerando, by Stross
Murderbot diaries, by Wells
A Fire Upon the Deep, by Vinge (and Rainbow's End by same)
2312, by Robinson
And many more, I'm sure :)
Also some people are just missing things neurologically that make certain things compelling for most people. Some people just don't care for music much because it doesn't do much for them and concerts are kind of confusing enjoyment wise. Same with many people in software for watching sports, they're just not that into it.
For others, it moves them greatly. Maybe he doesn't create the internal world required for fiction when he reads fiction.
So either he is on a mission (people who are noticeably good at something tend to be) or they are just missing the thing that would make it enjoyable for them.
Same with Pushkin, Tolstoy, Bulgakov, and so on -- with the only exception of Solzhenitsyn.
I think the difference is I'm Slavic, speak a few of the languages, and come from the cultures that succeeded those authors; so they read mostly as sentimental, overly-emotional, and superstitious, i.e. what I feel are the worst parts of the mythologized "Russian soul." Their works don't feel new, novel, and original: I've seen parts and pieces of it, reflections of its essence, expressed all over the average Slavic person.
> Dostoevsky's genius lies in his deep understanding of human nature and of spelling out truths about it in ways that inspire reflection.
If you resonate with this statement, perhaps you should also watch Tarkovsky's The Mirror.
But for me, the only truth Dostoyevsky has shown me is that people are very flawed, are the source of all of their own problems, and that Fyodor was a deeply emotional person. But I am not, and I find his expression of those emotions to be grating.
I resonate more with the quotes in the Wikipedia article for Idyot:
> However the chief criticism, among both reviewers and general readers, was in the "fantasticality" of the characters. The radical critic D.I. Minaev wrote: "People meet, fall in love, slap each other's face—and all at the author's first whim, without any artistic truth." V.P. Burenin, a liberal, described the novel's presentation of the younger generation as "the purest fruit of the writer's subjective fancy" and the novel as a whole as "a belletristic compilation, concocted from a multitude of absurd personages and events, without any concern for any kind of artistic objectivity."
I think I understand. I like reading postcolonial literary criticism because it asks us to consider any kind of national literary identification with skepticism. So I gotta ask: when you were growing up, what American literature did you encounter and what did you think of it?
FWIW I think I like Gogol's and Maxim Gorky's short stories most of all the Russian lit I've read.
What do you think of Russian-American writers like Ayn Rand and Nabokov?
In your view, what philosophical fiction provides a "deeper" and less antiquated understanding of today's "Russian soul"?
What American/European/foreign works do you or other Slavs consider to be world-shaping?
https://lyricstranslate.com/en/russkoe-pole-eksperimentov-ru... (translation #1 seems to be the most accurate although not perfect)
Or you can read the lyrics while listening to the song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bCLuW7jDnM8
Perhaps I'm missing something, but my general understanding of the song is that every pursuit of ideals in Russia has brought about ruin and unless man butchers his own aspirations, the cycle of pursuit, destruction, and loss is only going to repeat itself.
If so, then that's a very nihilistic assessment on life (albeit an eloquent one) but not a wholly original concept. I guess I was hoping for something a little more novel or profound with a more explicated psychological/epistemic position behind it. Something beyond philosophical pessimism.
First, there's a famous Tyutchev poem from 1866 which is known by pretty much every Russian
Russia cannot be understood with the mind alone,
No ordinary yardstick can span her greatness:
She stands alone, unique –
In Russia, one can only believe.
So Tyutchev claims that Russia is so unique it cannot be analyzed. I think "The Russian Field ..." represents an analysis of Russia's uniqueness through enumeration of paradoxical archetypes which Russian culture holds, which makes Russian history/existence itself paradoxical, and thus uniquely fucked up.
The song mentions elements of the following archetypes/themes:
1. greater aspirations - God, etc. 2. lust 3. brutality, desire for destruction 4. desire for greatness/domination
Of course, they are present in every human culture. However, song combines them in a paradoxical way. It's as if different layers which are supposed to be distinct are brutally mixed. And the resultant mix is not pretty.
How did it happen? The song does not answer directly, but we can figure from the history: Russia's societal development got delayed, particularly, in XIX century. It was still an agrarian country with deeply religious population, but at the same time it got aspirations to play a global role.
So e.g. suppose you're a peasant. In Church you've heard there's God, God set Tsar to rule Russia, you're supposed to love your Tsar or you're a bad man. Then you're recruited into an army and go to war and shoot at other people. Why? I guess nobody would explain, but presumably God wants and because you love Tsar you have to do it.
The song might reference this retarded societal development in line "On the patriarchal landfill of obsolete concepts", "patriarchal" referencing Orthodox Christianity and Tsar-father as a head of everything.
Thus we have a mixture of 'greater aspirations' layer with 'brutality of war', e.g. in song this paradoxical mixture is referenced e.g. in "Laws of etiquette for mortars" line. There the word for "etiquette" is actually more vague term which can be found in Bible teachings, so it hints of mixture of ethical teachings with howitzers.
But then Russia went from insanity of Orthodox monarchism straight into the insanity of communism, famous for its double-think, etc. So Russia's collective unconscious never had a chance to clean up and unmix different layers, but got even more confused.
As a result, greater aspirations did not become a guidance, but merely a veneer hiding the brutality.
You can see this happening now - Putin talks about God, unity, saving brothers, etc. But people are brutally killed and raped. And for Russians it makes sense, it is a part of an archetype - God. Greater good. Howitzers go BOOM. They are used to this.
I asked my friend "So you want to save Russian-speaking people in Mariupol from "nazis". Why are you bombing the city?!" He replied: "Of course, it makes sense - that's how liberate a city from nazis, you gotta bomb it, that's how they did it in WWII". For him, it makes sense, he saw that in movies.
So anyway, I don't think it's nihilism. Letov describes some dark fucked-up archetypes under a veneer of Russian culture, but he doesn't make predictions about the future here (aside from a possibility of these archetypes materializing - which we see, unfortunately).
FWIW I grew up in Russian culture (Donetsk). Personally, I find XX and XXI century books WAY better, more relevant, interesting, useful, etc.
interesting approach :)
I'm Hungarian, we had to "study" a few of the classics (some Russians included too). I never read any of them. We were supposed to read them during the summer break. I fell for that in the first year. Fuck that. Still managed to pass the tests, but there was no requirement of writing essays, or distilling great conclusions, or life lessons from the books.
But spent my youth glued to other books. And as the years went by I just noticed I don't really want to read about other people's misery in so much detail thank you, at least add some interesting details, like in crime thrillers.
My hypothesis is that it's not just the orientalist appeal of the "Russian soul" you mentioned but its combination with Christian themes which means it is still familiar and easy to understand for Westerners. A bit like the equivalent of a rockstar: titillating but not deeply challenging.
On the Internet perhaps, but 19th Russian literature had and still has a literary impact in formerly Communist countries, India, and Japan. Maybe a certain kind of American is prone to over-stating Dostoyevsky's importance, but personally I would argue Tolstoy is more disproportionately mentioned.
> My hypothesis is that it's not just the orientalist appeal of the "Russian soul" you mentioned but its combination with Christian themes which means it is still familiar and easy to understand for Westerners. A bit like the equivalent of a rockstar: titillating but not deeply challenging.
Oddly enough, what appealed to me was the discussion of morality without the overt Christian proselytization. No hackneyed metaphor for Jesus or salvation. Just man, his actions in the real world, and how he and the audience must examine them.
If there is any "orientalist" familiarity to these works that I enjoy, it's how self-examination is presented as a knight's/bogatyr's quest rather than a self-pitying confession of weakness and sin.
The problem with the classics is they become so inspiring to future artists and readers that the themes, parts and other things disseminate into the culture to become stereotypical and boring. It's a big chicken and egg problem often enough. What was slavic art like before these people I wonder. Something impossible to separate.
Every generation when it comes up will think they’re the first and best ones to experience anything, it’s just normal and always has been. Once the real world sets in or you hit your mid 20s angst (whichever comes first) the classics are a comfort and will connect you to a raw world of the past. You aren’t alone, nor especially abnormal nor special. Dostoevsky knew what you’d go through. Tolstoy already got your bullcrap. Hell, even Ovid can show you things and the Roman Empire is long dead.
Not everyone has to enjoy the same things and some haute things are definitely overrated. However, if you want to know yourself, your world and the other people in it in a way that transcends the capricious day-to-day, and has a bit more fuzziness, dimensionality (and spirit) than clinical psychology, the classics are waiting for you. They’ve seen it all before.
The odyssey is a very old classic. The framework of the adventure is still great. But Odysseus is a supremacist dick. He’s pretty similar to MCU Iron Man in terms of narrative and depth. We get the sense that it’s ok to kill the people in his home at the end because he is mighty Odysseus but I think that’s pretty lame. I could go on but it’s been too long to cite examples from memory.
A tale of two cities was another one I enjoyed a lot as a teen. The sloppy romanticism of the dude who devotes his life to a love he will never have seemed really quaint, but now seems just pathetic. I’m actually really annoyed when I see behavior like this in fiction now. It’s very frequent in token gay characters because a lot of writers seem to assume that gay people fall in love with straight people and can never get over it.
Stuff that’s resonated with me at a more thematic level recently… let’s say Parasite (Korean film), Mob Psycho 100 (anime, season 1), Over the Garden Wall, Bojack Horseman, and the midnight gospel. Not very universal, but they felt more relevant and more profound. The last one cheating a bit as it’s literally philosophical interviews.
Good literature is entertaining and conveys some greater meaning. Classics tend to do a pretty good job on this, but entertainment and thematic relevance she over time quite a bit.
The original SpongeBob SquarePants movie was a copy of the odyssey’s plot for entertainment but focused on a coming of age theme of what it means to be an adult and whether it was something to strive for. Dare I ask which of the SpongeBob SquarePants Movie and the Odyssey is a better piece of literature for a 21st century kid?
I think it’s a harder question than many would give credit. But I think regardless we should be more eager to discuss thematic comprehension of art with children for the stuff they watch. Because I spent a few years in school writing essays about how every book contained the theme of “Caring” and man that was fucking dumb.
These are seldom read (or known) by young people today and I see that as a tragedy. Western spirituality was demolished and nothing substantial has emerged to fill the void left, besides a coterie of self-help charlatans and intellectual tricksters, with the predictable results that we see all around us today.
This is also something that Nassim Taleb (a voracious reader and lifelong student of the Western classics but also an Orthodox Christian) frequently outlines.
Sometimes, I’d have to put the book down and do something else because it hit so close to home.
A beautiful, timeless work.
I’ve read lots of Chesterton and CS Lewis, and they didn’t change my perception of Christianity a single bit. What they did though was expose the enormous inconsistencies of the materialistic worldview. It’s not an argument for Christianity as much as a critique of its critics.
Christ didn't write anything.
The words attributed to him, a few hundred years later, are inconsistent and unreliable.
I'd love to hear from the man. I'm pretty unimpressed by those who claim to represent him.
Jumping straight into the classics can be hard due to the differences in language, cultural assumptions, and even just the fact that some of them are over-hyped, and it's tough to enjoy a book on its own terms when it's presented as "one of the best books ever."
Find some recommendations on the internet, go to the library, and check out a couple. If they don't strike your fancy, don't worry about it, and move on to the next recommendation until you find something you connect with and you want to keep reading.
John Kennedy Toole's "Confederacy of Dunces" was not only brilliantly comedic, but also quit profound. His other works were nothing special.
Isn't a case study is a part of science?
Please correct me if I'm wrong. One can study one particular case in depth and call themself a scientist. Dostoevsky is not a scientist because he made up his stories instead of gathering data on real cases, not because his stories cannot be replicated.
Experimental science is good, but it applicable only after a researcher came up with a hypothesis and hypothesis can be formulated if there is some theory. It is very restrictive, just like the author of the blog post writes. But where theories and hypotheses come from? From preliminary research, in particular from case studies. These case studies are also scientific knowledge, aren't they?
- Novel predictions: Predictions of things (the more the better) that would not be expected to happen normally (and the more unlikely the better), but would happen only (or as close to "only" as possible) if your hypothesis is correct. The sun rising again tomorrow is not a prediction, but the sun not rising tomorrow most certainly would be!
- Falsifiability: A hypothesis needs to be able to be falsified, by which it can be safely assumed to be wrong. This is most often simply a failure of the novel predictions to emerge, but the more failure conditions for your hypothesis - the "stronger" it becomes.
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The path to get there and anything beyond that is largely inconsequential. For instance, much of Einstein's work for instance was largely driven by simply 'thinking it up.' When publishing his most fundamental works, he had absolutely no access to any unique resources, knowledge, or ability to carry out significant studies. He was working in a patent office as a low level inspector!
Maybe if you squint hard enough, you might claim what he did was a scientific case study. On the other hand, there are also the more common contemporary "case studies" of the sort of where you run a quick survey on Amazon Turk and then make grand, largely unfalsifiable, claims based solely on that with 0 meaningful predictive value. I would not call that science.
If Einstein gathered facts about reality then it might be a case study. If he didn't then it was not a case study by the definition of a case study.
... but doesn't he? Isn't his model is that given this and this circumstances people will do this and this (eg. commit crimes and reflect/regret)?
After that diagnosis, I have almost exclusively read fiction.
I’m out of time right now, but if I remember I’ll write more about it in the afternoon. Wallerstein and Braudel are one of the few authors that influenced me the most during my studies and changed the way I perceive both Sociology as a subject and society around me. Couldn’t recommend them more.
[1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0011392199047001002
with the option to download the PDF directly.
wittgenstein
If you are interested in plots, all possible plots are in the Old Testament. That is why this book lives so long, regardless of any religiosity. It just has all the plots in it. You can also read Winnie the Pooh, but it is better to read this book aloud in the evenings to your children (it's a great pleasure for both children and parents).
Everything else is around you: living non-cardboard people, suffering, joy, communication, freedom, enjoyment of work and idleness, whatever.
Ten years later I experienced a similar enthusiasm as the author of the post while reading the works of Abraham Maslow. I recommend everyone to read at least the last book written by Maslow. The book is non-fiction, but written in first person.
I read it at 18. Borrowed it from a friend and found it so boring I could read only a few pages at a time. Then I stopped reading. Some months later, I realized I needed to return his book. So I forced myself to read the rest of the book (over half) all in one night. I didn't care if my brain tuned out as I read the pages. I just wanted to be done with it.
I was glad to be rid of something so boring.
Not long after, I had a dream. I was hanging out with friends outside at about 1am. Then one of my friends says "Hey, I just heard on the radio they found another body - someone was murdered tonight!"
I froze. I was that murderer. I'd killed a bunch of people lately. How should I respond to this? Should I ignore it? Make a joke about it? Talk about it seriously? How do I say it so none of them suspect me?
We eventually walk back to where we had parked our motorbikes. Mine was not there. Had the police found it while searching for me? I woke up.
Years later, I talked to a few people who had read the book. Some hated it. Some loved it. But they all said they really felt like Raskalnikov - either while reading it or in some dream they later had. I give credit to the book being so powerful.
Years after that I read The Brothers Karamazov. A much bigger book, and even more boring. Had no effect on me. I've forgotten all of it.
Maybe there's value in literature, but I don't know if "truth" is the right word for it. I find when people find "truth" in literature, they're mostly using fictional anecdotes to support their preconceived notions about human nature and/or morality. They interpret the books in ways that support what they already think is true.
> From Communist Russia's collapse due to Marxism...
I'm no Russian sympathizer, but this is such an oversimplification it borders on parody. The irony being that this follows a spiel about the world being complex. Maybe this is parody and I'm just too dense.
Classics are good reading because every new generation of readers can find there something valuable. Every new generation of readers can find something new, or at least rediscover something old. Everyone find in classics their own things.
If the author sees Dostoevsky through the lens of a modern author (Taleb), the better for Dostoevsky. It means he is still relevant.
It will always be relevant and insightful, no matter the state of some human constructs, or new society standards - in the end human condition will always be with us.
Yeah, that's kind of my point. Of course he's still relevant, he's Dostoevsky. I'm in the middle of Moby Dick. Not because Taleb (or Jordan Peterson, or any other twitter "intellectual") told me about this cool 19th century author named Herman Melville, but because, you know, it's Moby freakin' Dick.
It is a theoretical prediction: Dostoevsky will be relevant forever.
When someone reads Dostoevsky and sees Taleb's ideas there, it is not an insult to Dostoevsky, it is an evidence supporting the theory.
The GP was a bit hyperbolic but I am inclined to agree with their viewpoint. The intellectual trend they are highlighting (which goes way beyond Taleb) has real consequences because it is so prevalent among tech workers and capital owners who have enormous influence on modern life.
Yeah. And then others will come to have no bearing on Dostoevsky's continued relevance.
Dostoevsky relevant while there are people to read him. If people didn't read him, then Dostoevsky would be irrelevant, wouldn't he? If all the people die for example, Dostoevsky would be irrelevant then. Isn't it a causal link? Modern people and their beliefs are a necessary cause of relevance of Dostoevsky.
> The intellectual trend they are highlighting (which goes way beyond Taleb) has real consequences because it is so prevalent among tech workers and capital owners who have enormous influence on modern life.
Didn't you considered a question: why techies and economists are so excited about Taleb? Why them? Why not plumbers for example? I can propose an answer. Techies and economists are two groups who rely on models the most. It is impossible to use math to solve a problem without conducting a math model of that problem first. So when Taleb had shown them that their models are not good enough, how did they feel? Their art failed them. Their methods can commit not just random blunders, they are guaranteed to blunder in unpredictable ways. Of course they are obsessed with Taleb.
And it is a good thing, exactly because "tech workers and capital owners [...] have enormous influence on modern life". Their blunders can hurt a lot.
I see as nonconstructive the attitude of scowling at techies discovering Dostoevsky and seeking there ways to refine their art of modelling. If you know better how to deal with a failure of a model, then help them kindly. Suggest them Shakespeare, or Plato, or something else to read that can help them to learn to walk without crutches of models. You can really try to see world their way, and you can really help them, if you are so good.
But I remember literature lessons from my youth, and history, and I hate them. I hated them then, I hate them now. I'm sure all these humanities' people are unable to understand a techie, and they are unable to explain themselves because of it. It doesn't surprise me that techies have difficulties when trying to understand people, but why humanities' people fail to understand tech people and moreover how they can be proud of it I cannot grasp. It is their specialty to understand others isn't it? Shouldn't they be obsessed with Taleb because they cannot understand why techies obsessed with him? Why they obsessed with Taleb more than with Judea Pearl? It is just because Pearl solves problems he stated, while Taleb does not propose a satisfying solution? Or maybe because Taleb's stated problem is more thrilling for them?
Why all these arts people think more about the relevance of long dead Dostoevsky than of people who live now? Dostoevsky was concerned of living people and of problems that were relevant at his time. Crime and Punishment is about a young man who had read too much of Nietzsche. More then it was good for him. Nietzsche was a thinker like Taleb. So now we have a lot of people who read too much of Taleb. More than it is good for them. Isn't it exciting? Isn't the best path is to help them and to write a novel predicting their punishment, than to scowl at them?
The problem isn't Taleb specifically. As it happens, I do like his books quite a bit. He just happens to be a common figure in the problem we are describing here. What is happening is that there is a strong trend in some parts of the tech and science crowd to apply a halo effect to themselves and to reject certain sources of knowledge on account of it. If this halo did not exist, Taleb might not have been the target of obsession because his audience would not have fallen into the belief that they could apply models to everything and call it a day in the first place.
It's true that we could be kinder to people such as the blog post author, and suggest more things to read. But at the same time, reading is not sufficient and a booster shot of self-awareness and humility is needed to move past the halo. To the author's credit, he does write about his rejection of certain types of scientism, but moving past viewing the non-STEM world through a filter is necessary and that in itself requires a shift that is more easily attained by direct confrontation such as what the GP attempted rather than reading your way out of it over a period of years.
Besides, the tech crowd won't be the ones suffering from their way of thinking: they'll have enough capital and surplus to fall back on. It's the rest of the population that is at the mercy of FAANGs and other assorted "move fast and break things" aficionados.
The delivery of this nonchalant line in particular made me cringe hard.
His central thesis that models can't account for everything is............................painfully obvious. He's Malcolm Gladwell if Malcom Gladwell's selling point was that he predicted that, during obvious market bubbles, those bubbles would pop.
If it was so obvious, no institution would rely on the model, nor would people rely on institutions that use the models.
Objectively there would be a perpetual hedge - and that is how it is from the perspective of a scientist - but from the perspective of practitioners of theory, the model presents an accurate enough picture that it possesses a degree of truth which is illusory. But even with some arbitrarily defined 99% success, you can never predict when the 1% failure will occur, and if we allow Mandelbrot's postulate
Now in things like celestial bodies and their trajectories - it's relegated to some distant inanity that extraordinarily curious people have derived, getting it wrong doesn't change the way the planets revolve around the sun.
In the facets of civilization which they can affect, such as economics, they become a serious hazard, because they can and do affect the way the planet moves. It's a pernicious effect, that were it so known and obvious, would be forcibly relegated to oblivion. When probability is measured in infinitesimal fractions of continuous time a 1% fail rate becomes very substantial, and especially when it isn't accounted for in every dimension, to give an example:
"The “spreads” between brokers’ bid and ask prices widened sharply—as much as 19 percent above the industry’s norms (that translates into an instantaneous windfall to any broker who called it right, and near-ruin to those who got it wrong). The turmoil spread around the globe: The Hong Kong index fell 14 percent, London 9 percent. In the final twenty-four minutes before the New York market closed at 3:30, prices plummeted at an average rate of 0.10 percent a minute, or 6 percent an hour, the SEC calculated. Put that into perspective: The value of American business was falling $100 million a second. The next morning, prices roared in the opposite direction even faster. But the fastest action of all concentrated into three isolated minutes in the whole twenty-four hours: between 3:12 and 3:14 p.m. New York time, and between 3:24 and 3:25 p.m. This was no mere financial storm. It was a hurricane."
-Mandelbrot, The (mis)Behavior of Markets
Your position is also highly reductionist, Taleb covers a lot of broad ground, including his own models, which are duly hedged from his perspective as a staunch empiricist.
Does anyone know any good examples of this?
Wikipedia has some links to sources in the summary section:
But the question is, is this really true? Why isn't Taleb the richest person? (I remember reading somewhere that his strategy of betting against the mainstream underperformed, but he might have made a biiig windfall due to COVID & the war? But are those enough to offset the previous underperformances?)
"Universa’s flagship “Black Swan Protection Protocol” fund earned its near two dozen institutional investors a staggering 3,612% in March, putting its 2020 gains at 4,144%."
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-08/taleb-adv...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/antoinegara/2020/04/13/how-a-go...
I guess a good ligature is one that a reader hardly notice at all.
Look at it's design: it's an entirely unnecessary loop that goes way up out of the way of the bits that are supposed to be connected and makes a sharp turn. Opposite to the actual function of a ligature, which is to correct a visual quirk of juxtaposing two letters, it goes out of its way to introduce a visual quirk.
So, it's not so much a "bad" ligature as it is a caricature of one.
I would generally suggest avoiding Russian literature entirely, especially if you're a programmer. Unless you've somehow made yourself basilisk-proof (and note that the reverse Algernon method won't work, their whole deal's bootstrapped)
EDIT:
OP says:
> Try applying the scientific method to define the psychology of the criminal. You will end up writing and sending a questionnaire, then publishing a paper in Science of how 80% of respondents (n=12) selected option A in the questionnaire. Try even finding 12 criminals willing to reply honestly to your questionnaire. Then ask yourself why social science papers don't replicate.
Now imagine a society with institutions that have the knowledge of how to force their way through the above issue, and decide for yourself whether you really wish to integrate any intellectual outputs from that society in your decision making process.
That's not part of the definition. Would have much fewer of the things kicking around if they precluded their own distribution, no?
Thankfully the ones that do are a subset, otherwise basilisk spotting would be a much more introspective activity.
Picture the pawnbroker, having remained on the market precisely due to some insights from Dostoevsky, which had come in handy when dealing with the dregs of society. He buys the axe, kills the programmer with it, then fast-tracks redemption and just, like, carries on.
Russian literature has so many different ways of fucking with your head. Savage stuff, in the best of senses. I start finding it relevant to anything at all, I nope the fuck out of there. After all, life is known to imitate fiction, esp. when there's the less friendly kind of crazy aboard.
Best outcome for a programmer from reading Dostoevsky would be to stop being a programmer.
The reason is that, encountering life's most challenging experiences (which are always human in their origin), these novels are like a preset pattern of meditation by which one can find the ground.
You have to live your life and make the mistakes on your own.
Reading books helps maybe only with getting "AHA" moment of realization - after or just before you do something stupid ;)
For the records, I also read Dostoyevsky this year, his "Crime and Punishment".
Am only a hundred pages in or so, but seeing the progress on my e-reader at only 2% makes me quite stoked for what's to come. Sadly I saw the movie (for pt. 1) first, but even so the books add a lot to what the movie attempts to portray.
It should be self-evident after a certain point (age) that approaching life through the lense of “what could give me an advantage over others”, whether that’s maths or just knowledge it won’t get you very far or if it does, it will at a severe cost on how you’re perceived in society furthermore interhuman connections will take a toll.