> Some deep truths about human nature require instead the reflection provoked by the classics.
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
> ”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.”
I love this. I always wonder why I have almost no interest in novels now although I spent my entire youth buried in them. Occasionally I feel guilty. But I think life became the novel?
Whenever I read something about Einstein the following comes to my mind:
"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."
> 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.
How would you explain homosexuality with this model? Historically, it has actually cost in terms of status, certainly doesn't confer reproductive fitness on the individual, and sorely restricts the individual's sexual market.
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
And language is just a tool to hunt better and coordinate distribution of berries. And human consciousness is just a tool to model other minds to negotiate better. Nothing to see here.
Worldviews don't win points for being expensive and industrious. But my point, had you seen past your mood affiliation, was that explaining the origin of a phenomenon doesn't tell you its value.
That's not what I took away from the book. He mentions his own personal enjoyment of trashy television multiple times. His concern was that he believed that democracy is fundamentally incompatible with a media landscape dominated by television (s/televison/social media in 2022).
In fact, Postman went to great lengths to detail the ways in which "print culture" (including books, newspapers, and even public oration) with its great commitment to complex argumentation shaped society in ways consonant with the sustaining of a democratic republic, while warning that the modern replacement of this older culture was perhaps not so well suited to maintaining a self-governing people.
(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?
> "When we read, another person thinks for us: we merely repeat his mental process."
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 feel like there’s a lot to be gleaned here, but all I can focus on is how this - especially the last line - could be easily misrepresented to spread an anti-education message.
This treats arguments like opaque tokens where we know in advance which are good and bad, and need to make sure we have lots of good and few bad. But actually arguments have content and to know whether they are good or bad, we have to engage with them.
I'm saying you're not engaging with the substance of his point.
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."
You could say similar of any technology, as they all extend and amputate ourselves in some way. I read the Schopenhauer line as a sentiment against technosolutionism; technology like books are fine in moderation, but they are not replacements for the reality of lived experience.
See Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman for better arguments.
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].
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 !
Pretty agree with the post but it is funny he discovered that "truth" so late in his life.
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.
P&V translations are beautifully done. The older Constance Garnett translations are good, though a bit archaic sounding now. I read a very bad translation of Master & Margherita, but it was still worthwhile. Go for the P&V is you can.
> Mathematics alone is sort of "sterile" when is not used within physics knowledge.
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.
> 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.
Out of curiosity do you draw a distinction between something like Newtonian physics and areas farther removed from everyday life such as high energy physics?
I met a young and apparently highly intelligent AI researcher the other week who confessed to me that he thought fiction (books but also movies etc) was a waste of his time: there was nothing to be gained there.
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.
A person with that attitude doesn’t need a perfect list of books, they need to live more of their life. Fiction will likely find them when they’re ready for it. Seems futile to try to convince them otherwise, if they’re presently writing off fiction and film.
I'd recommend Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang [0]. It's often billed as "speculative fiction", and I'd describe it as a series of short stories that define worlds slightly-to-extremely dissimilar to ours, and explores what that means to the people who live in them. I recall the stories being fun because there's some amount of guessing what will come next in the worldbuilding, and imagining what makes sense within the rules he's establishing, but he also drenches the stories in humanity, and many of them are quite emotional.
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.
This is from someone who is woefully under-read, and only remembered my teenage love of sci-fi in the last couple of years. I thought similarly for several years, that fiction was a waste of time. But then I realized I was scrolling through Twitter every day, and that felt like eating french fries as a meal: lacking substance.
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.
> I love Asimov. I, Robot is easy because it's a collection of very short stories, but it risks being seen as shallow.
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.
He's an AI researcher, tell him to read 2001 by Arthur C. Clake. He doesn't need to read "the classics" he needs to read something proximal to his interests and then figure out which strands he'd like to follow from there.
"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.
Is this person highly cynical about human relationships and emotions and desires?
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.
There are quite a few recommendations for the classics, but if someone doesn't enjoy the slow burn of those deep books, maybe they should start with something lot more dopaminergic: animes and movies!
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.
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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.
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.
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.”
That person is just on a personal mission right now. Once he has achieved his internal goal, the space for leisure will start opening up to him. People who like video games, but are on a mission about their new thing don't really feel like they want to play video games, even though they played them a lot in their past for example.
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.
Sounds like it might be a losing battle, but the first thing that came to mind was Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut. Short, approachable, funny, and confronts topics that probably are interesting to an AI researcher.
That's a common complaint about literature. I remmeber one person who wouldn't read fiction because they said "it was just all lies". Literature isn't just a recitation of facts, it reflects the organizing principle of our values. It sparks creativity.
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.
As someone who finds most fiction to take much too long to get to any interesting points, I’d like to recommend Greg Egan’s Axiomatic, a collection of thought-provoking SF short stories.
It's likely highly dependent on the individual. There's a lot of literature is beautiful, immersive, and speaks to deep universal truths that are harder to capture in other mediums. To steelman his argument, even given that all of this is true, it's a harder sell that engaging with the works is useful to him, on an individual level.
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.
I've had the same experience; and I see no one recommendation that will make someone appreciate literature. The argument I heard from a younger AI researcher was that books/stories are just a collection of tropes that get reused over and over. For me it's easier to just recommend Dostojevsky, or perhaps a couple of dystopian classics. Even then not everyone will understand how literature is not just about information which become a story.
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.
Great question. I always recommend Anna Karenina as the one book everyone should read, but maybe it's actually a terrible thing to recommend to someone who Doesn't Like Reading.
I don't have an answer for you, but you got me thinking :)
Haha sounds like me. I used to read as a teenager but stopped, thinking it a waste of time.
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
Many good tips so far in this thread. If your friend reads a lot of papers, they might be able to "leap" into classics without being bogged down by the language and sometimes dense prose - but I'd still err on the side of accessible for getting someone into reading for pleasure.
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)
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.
> 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)
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.
Have you read the bible?
Or see the biblical lecture of Dr Peterson on Youtube?
I am surprised myself to find it useful after the stoics and other quests for meaning.
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?
Right, a waste of his time, today. Not yours or anyone else's.
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.
I think the basic impulse is correct, actually. There's a very good chance that a person with this kind of attitude is a poor reader—of literature, at least, if not in general. If you drop them right into the heavy stuff, they'll probably bounce off really fast.
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.
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.
To an adult who have never read fiction? Yes. You have to start somewhere.
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.
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)
"I was impressed for the ten thousandth time by the fact that literature illuminates life only for those to whom books are a necessity. Books are unconvertible assets, to be passed on only to those who possess them already." -- Nick Jenkins
It depends on what their interests are. For this person, perhaps something in science fiction. I second Asimov, especially the robot & foundation series. Or may be Dune.
The irony is that if all the highly intelligent and capable researchers, capitalists, and knowledge workers read more fiction the world would probably be slightly less dystopian than it currently is
Having read about 1 to 2/3rds through most of Dostoyevsky's books: I really believe they're over-hyped.
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."
What I've noticed is that Russian authors are disproportionately mentioned among anglos, and Dostoevsky is himself disproportionately mentioned among those authors.
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.
> What I've noticed is that Russian authors are disproportionately mentioned among anglos, and Dostoevsky is himself disproportionately mentioned among those authors.
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.
> 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.
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.
Yeah. If Russian classics contained some great life lessons, how do you explain Russia? Every kid reads these classics in school, and it's a shit of a country.
do they really read it, or it's "in the curricula" but no one really gives a shit, there are a few standard questions-and-answers about them and that's it, no?
Well, they have to write essays based on these books to get passing grades. And I would guess wise teachers (who read all these books!) make sure that these essays cover main life lessons, right?
FWIW I grew up in Russian culture (Donetsk). Personally, I find XX and XXI century books WAY better, more relevant, interesting, useful, etc.
> make sure that these essays cover main life lessons, right?
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.
> what I feel are the worst parts of the mythologized "Russian soul."
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.
It's odd that you regard those 19th/early 20th century authors as overly-emotional. In my experience, these works were much more blunt in their self-examinations of the human condition than the other European and American authors I've read. As for questions:
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?
If you're looking to understand today's "Russian soul" and you're good at understanding metaphors, I'd recommend to just read the lyrics of "The Russian Field of Experiments" by Egor Letov, the most famous Russian punk poet:
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.
(This is essentially word-by-word translation.)
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).
The classics are important because they are typically ‘classic’ due to their applicability over space and time. The authors managed to distil ever-recurring human drama and pathos (and the happy stuff too) into something timeless, though of course in the context of where and when they lived.
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.
I find a lot of classics to be foreign in their understanding of the human condition and generally just archaic, or deeply specific to their time and place.
Well I don’t write blogs. Or read much. Or write literary reviews. But let’s pick two.
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.
Besides Dostoevsky, there is abundant wisdom and deep truths to be found in the classics of Christianity. The apologetics of C.S. Lewis (Screwtape Letters, The Problem with Pain, The Great Divorce), Augustine's Confessions and City of God, Seven Storey Mountain by Thomas Merton and G.K. Chesterton's Everlasting Man.
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.
I have delved into the very literature you describe, and it's not simply an issue of 'kids these days'. What all these works have in common is that they are replete with thoughtful insights about human nature, but fail to convincingly present Christianity as the solution. They tend to simply drop it on the reader without explaining the logical leap or why similar but competing belief systems couldn't also play the same role.
I would say if the words of Christ are not enough to convince someone, who else could possibly say it better?
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.
I re-read Screwtape Letters some 10-12 years later at the age of 40 and was floored by how accurately depicted the various maladaptive behaviors (eg sins) within myself.
Sometimes, I’d have to put the book down and do something else because it hit so close to home.
I wish the author the best on their reading journey! I feel like this article shares a valuable experience, and I would encourage anyone who's on the fence or who views literature as a waste of time to give it an earnest try.
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.
Tolstoy also has a lot to share about programming. "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way" is a clear recommendation to use status codes as return values instead of boolean success/fail.
I remember Raskolnikov laying in his bed looking at the patterns of the wallpaper while feeling moody. That may have been the most connected I have felt with a literary character.
mine was No Longer Human when the protagonist sneaks at night to write the gift that he actually wanted from his father (when he said he wanted books earlier when asked, which was unusual). IDK why but I just felt so connected to that character. Perhaps I could see myself doing it.
So he only read 1.5 books of Dostoevsky, and now he telling everyone to read his books. I get it, I also had a religious experience when I read Crime and Punishment, but one cannot assume all his books will be that great without actually reading more of them. Call me back when you get through a few more. Or maybe change the title to "Why read Crime And Punishment".
There are many writers who have only one great book, and the others are all flops. Dosteovsky had a few that were utter flops in the literary sense. (The Idiot did not sell well, although it has its merits). You could even say he only hit his stride when he wrote Brothers.
John Kennedy Toole's "Confederacy of Dunces" was not only brilliantly comedic, but also quit profound. His other works were nothing special.
I’ve had a hard time trying to read both Dostoevsky and Tolstoy because of the names. I guess because I don’t speak Russian, the names are long and complicated and in most cases, compounding the problem, there are too many characters. It makes it very difficult to read “in my head” and keep track of what’s going on.
At least in Crime and punishment the names have a meaning. So you can look them up and see if it fits the characters. I just go by how the characters act, until have differentiated themselves enough I do not learn the names, a bit like real life.
the best translations will usually have a brief explanation of the function various forms of patronymic & affectionate name forms which carry meaning in russian. translating every instance of an affectionate name to "hun" or "buster" or whatever modern english uses would be a bit too much, i think. some of the more formal honorific aliases may have no real english equivalent but once explained its not hard to follow along with the author's intent. "oh this weasel is laying it on thick..." etc.
> Unlike scientific knowledge, Dostoevsky doesn't propose a model with a degree of accuracy and best practices on how to apply the model.
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?
I would say that the most fundamental core of science is based upon exactly two things:
- 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.
---
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.
As someone coming from social sciences, I agree with author’s assessment that scientific method used in academia isn’t suitable in explaining human nature or behaviour. However, a lot of at least sociologists are aware of that. I would suggest to author to read Wallerstein’s Herritage of Sociology [1]. Wallerstein thinks that social sciences had to imitate the method of natural sciences in order to survive (meaning to get the necessary funding).
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.
The person has read 1 and a half Dostojewskis. Fair enough, it takes a while and is quite a churn. Then wrote a blogpost about it. As the person likes to extract use out of everything he/she does, what use did he get? He found some deeper truth. Ok perfect, but where is the news? This is the reason we read novels and classics in the first place. We are not trying to extract how to get back into shape or which stocks to bet on by reading novels.
One can learn not only from books, but from all forms of great art and minds. For example: “Music Is a Higher Revelation Than All Wisdom and Philosophy”, L.v. Beethoven
One thing that's weird about Dostoevsky is that there are so many characters and their relationships with each other are very complex. "The Idiot" , ironically, was one of the more complicated books, IMHO. It made me wonder if the average Russian back in the 19th century had the ability to hold this chess like complexity in their heads or Dostoevsky just made everyone in the book unrealistically intelligent.
The Brothers Karamazov and Crime and Punishment effectively read themselves. They can't be put down. Only with exceptional discipline and great difficulty could one "take it slow," and stop for note-taking. I don't know who reads novels like that. Reading them, time stops, and you return to your life about a week later. Notes From Underground isn't easy, but it is short. The Idiot and The Possessed (Demons, The Devils), if even 100 pages can be completed, are impossible to finish. I am unaware of anyone who has read Dostoyevski's first three novels, The Village of Stepanchikovo, Humilated and Insulted, or The House of the Dead, so the assumption is they are either illegible or inscrutable, the result being they can't be read.
I recommend starting with Crime and Punishment, then reward yourself for completing with Brothers Karamazov. Then see Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanors, which is a clever retelling of both at the same time for those that read the material.
Geeks, nerds and Dostoevsky...
Guys, you will never understand anything about life and other people alive today from old books about the life of fictional people, especially written by seriously mentally ill crippled people from the past you do not understand of countries unknown to you.
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.
I read Crime and Punishment when I was in school. I was sixteen years old. It's hard to appreciate classic works at that age. But we were forced to read these books on a compulsory basis. I didn't find anything revolutionary in this book.
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 Crime and Punishment when I was in school. I was sixteen years old. It's hard to appreciate classic works at that age. But we were forced to read these books on a compulsory basis. I didn't find anything revolutionary in this book.
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.
Is there anything in this argument that can't be equally applied to religion? _"Some truth can be captured by the scientific method. But not all. Some deep truths about human nature require instead the reflection provoked by [prayer, religious experience, etc]"_
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.
There is also another great thing that can dispense knowledge, the same that inspired both classics and mathematics: real life. You mention Taleb, so you must be a bit familiar with Mandelbrot work. Well he observed reality carefully, free of prejudices, skeptically, and took it for what it is. Then built math on top of it. Sometimes going outside of recombining ideas and taking new ones from reality itself can be good. That said, I come from the opposite experience, having read my share of classics and recently discovering math (I was also taught it but always approached as yet another thing to study, not as a tool to model reality).
I used to like Taleb, but his cult is getting out of hand. Really? You needed Taleb to explain why the classics are good reading? Why literature that has been treasured for the entirety of human history is valuable? Get a grip. Mix that faux-intellectualism--slash--nouveau-englightenment with gross oversimplifications and you have a Taleb cultist.
> 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.
Taleb is another in a long line of people who have accomplished very little outside of selling themselves as a person who Really Understands The WorldTM.
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.
> You needed Taleb to explain why the classics are good reading? Why literature that has been treasured for the entirety of human history is valuable?
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.
Why should I be worried about that? Taleb is remembered now, it is relevant now, and it makes people think about Taleb now. So why not to try to understand Taleb deeper by reading Dostoevsky? If Taleb will fail to be relevant in 50 years, then no one would try to do it then. And what? Why should it worry me?
What I meant is that whether Taleb is a conduit to Dostoevsky or not has no bearing on the latter's continued relevance. Dostoevsky's relevance is not in any doubt but Taleb's is (or any other similar author).
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.
> What I meant is that whether Taleb is a conduit to Dostoevsky or not has no bearing on the latter's continued relevance.
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?
I am not claiming that techies/economists are a homogenous group. Many of them understand the humanities well; more still reject the idea of an inherent separation between these and the hard sciences. The same is true of some of the more humanities oriented persons, in a mirror image. Every group has its open-minded and close-minded individuals.
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.
I see it the other way around: classics boil things down close to what makes us human, and that has no time boundary.
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.
I agree. Taleb's book have really opened up my eyes. But that's just one of lives many lessons. Take the lesson and move on. No need to make a cult of it.
I think it reveals a deep naïveté about the author that they can simply boil things down to “Marxism bad”. However, they do seem to be learning that there is value in not being a STEMLord.
Proper STEMlord doctrine holds that Marxism is not even wrong. Also, obviously, the views/ideas of Marx turned out to be correct (well supported by empiricism) are just part of economics and sociology.
> [Taleb] showed, through his life's work, that one can make money by betting against people that believe too much in mathematics and their applicability to the real world.
I believe the author is referring to the money Taleb made during the 2008 financial crash, rather literally betting against people using mathematics to model complex systems (which collapsed and failed rather badly, much as Taleb predicts).
Wikipedia has some links to sources in the summary section:
There's this big trope about how "models don't work", because black swans, etc. (Let's not get into the fact that this claim is itself a model, and his own investment strategy is, of course, based on his model.)
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?)
I haven't read the books, but I believe his argument is not "models don't work," but rather "all models are flawed, and you can't reliably predict the critical flaws. So, don't treat them with blind trust - adapt your strategies to the fact that some of your models will fail without warning and in ways you can't predict."
"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%."
Excellent. It’s more general than mathematics, their problem is with a Platonic worldview of idealized models. Those people mistake the models for the real world and that’s their demise.
I noticed this too but I found it distracting and not useful. At first I thought it was a particle of dirty on my screen and realized it was a ligature once I looked more carefully.
I guess a good ligature is one that a reader hardly notice at all.
Yeah, this ligature struck me as intentionally ironic.
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.
Do not, I repeat, DO NOT read Dostoevsky. It's full of harmful memes which are very likely to impair your subsequent functioning, and spread out into your surroundings, by way of contaminating your intentional actions with paradox (not the fun kind, either.)
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.
Could you give some examples of these harmful memes you have found in Dostoevsky's works? Although I suppose by definition you might not be willing to do that...
The ones that don't are the ones to be afraid of. Classics are such for a reason. They don't get republished for 150 years because they had an one-time influence on people once.
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.
I binge read Doestoeski at the end of highschool and he remains a major influence on me to this day.
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.
I tried to but C&P was a struggle. I've never gotten more than 50 pages in. In this age of tiny attention spans how do you guys do it? I loved Anna Karenina and have read it cover to cover 4x, but also could not do War & Peace.
While I agree Dostoevsky is worth reading for most, some of the author's statements made me cringe a bit. Like "reading fiction is mostly a waste of time", "knowledge as a tool to gain an advantage over others" and "Communist Russia's collapse due to Marxism"... I presume the author is either somewhat young or a programmer (due to his lack of nuance). Or both.
I began reading fiction, science fiction, this year at the age 47. I started with the first book of Dune (out of 6) and now after almost 2000 pages read, I can tell it has been a life changing experience for me to the point I can't no longer watch TV series or even Sci-Fi movies. It all feels boring compared to what I get by reading sci-fi instead. I wish I had picked up this habit earlier in my life.
For the records, I also read Dostoyevsky this year, his "Crime and Punishment".
Hah - I just started on the Dune series myself too!
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.
This sort of ideology, down to the same details and views about history and culture, is extremely common among young software engineers and related professions
I had a similar reaction - the article gives vibes of reductionism and/or as someone pointed out, naivety.
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.
After you read Middlemarch by George Eliot, at least 90% of the other Western (incl. Russian, Spanish, etc translated to English) classics you read will seem stupid and pointless.
Moby Duck literally broke my brain and soul when I read it for the first time last year. I still think about that book about once a week, with some sense of foreboding excitement/dread.
i also reacted negatively to the title but found the article to be redemptively unpretentious. i think any fan of dostoevsky would agree with his conclusions and be happy that this robot found a heart.
By all means, do read Dostoyevsky. A Writer's Diary, for example. If you want to see where today's russian chauvinism and genocidal war crimes flourished in ideas, that's a place to look.
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