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Why read Dostoevsky? A programmer's perspective

• jakubadamw 4y ago
  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.
• dvt 4y ago
  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.
  • ordu 4y ago
    > 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.
    • libertine 4y ago
      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.
    • dvt 4y ago
      > It means he is still relevant. 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.
      • ordu 4y ago
        > Of course he's still relevant, he's Dostoevsky. 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.
    • Bakary 4y ago
      You should be more worried about Taleb being remembered in 50 years than Dostoevsky
      • ordu 4y ago
        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?
        • Bakary 4y ago
          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.
          • ordu 4y ago
            > 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?
  • c0mptonFP 4y ago
    > > From Communist Russia's collapse due to Marxism... The delivery of this nonchalant line in particular made me cringe hard.
    • devonallie 4y ago
      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.
      • pas 4y ago
        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.
  • kcatskcolbdi 4y ago
    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.
    • brnaftr361 4y ago
      To me this is non-sequitur. 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.
  • jmartrican 4y ago
    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.
• deleted 4y ago
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• ordu 4y ago
  > 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?
  • somenameforme 4y ago
    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.
    • ordu 4y ago
      > Maybe if you squint hard enough, you might claim what he did was a scientific case study. 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.
• dvko 4y ago
  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.
  • fithisux 4y ago
    young or a programmer or a capitalist, probably the last two.
  • rodolphoarruda 4y ago
    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".
    • dvko 4y ago
      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.
  • dakull 4y ago
    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.
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• mongol 4y ago
  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.
  • kajaktum 4y ago
    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.
• np_tedious 4y ago
  The st ligature is interesting. Never seen that before
  • frankohn 4y ago
    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.
    • cvoss 4y ago
      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.
• frankohn 4y ago
  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.
  • acchow 4y ago
    > Mathematics alone is sort of "sterile" when is not used within physics knowledge. Surely you can’t believe this anymore with the discovery of computer science, AI, type theory , etc?
    • frankohn 4y ago
      > 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.
• dotsam 4y ago
  > 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
  • Forgeties79 4y ago
    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.
    • newaccount2021 4y ago
    • jorvi 4y ago
      To me it reads like anti-consumerism. 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].
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    • psychomugs 4y ago
• kieckerjan 4y ago
  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. Any tips would be welcome!
  • cehrlich 4y ago
    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 :)
    • newaccount2021 4y ago
  • Antoniocl 4y ago
    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.
  • cvoss 4y ago
    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.
• Sin2x 4y ago
  Is the crime of desperation really a crime?...
• zigman1 4y ago
  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.
  • florg 4y ago
    I guess [1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0011392199047001002 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0011392199047001002 with the option to download the PDF directly.
• john61 4y ago
  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
  • hprotagonist 4y ago
    “It’s impossible for me to say one word about all that music has meant to me in my life. How, then, can I hope to be understood?” wittgenstein
• user3939382 4y ago
  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.
  • emj 4y ago
    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.
  • jmartrican 4y ago
    I had similar problem. The audio version helped. I never remembered any of their names, but their voices stood out.
  • np_tedious 4y ago
    Wonder if "translating" names could help?
    • ashika 4y ago
      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.
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• armitron 4y ago
  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.
  • mattgreenrocks 4y ago
    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. A beautiful, timeless work.
  • Bakary 4y ago
    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.
    • felix318 4y ago
      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.
• pythko 4y ago
  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.
• throwaway74829 4y ago
  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." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Idiot#Reception https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Idiot#Reception
  • ABraidotti 4y ago
    > 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.
  • Dracophoenix 4y ago
    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?
• amelius 4y ago
  > [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. Does anyone know any good examples of this?
  • hedgehog0 4y ago
    I do not know if this is relevant, but I think Newton and Kayes (or some other econonmist) used math in the stock market and lost heavily.
  • NateEag 4y ago
    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: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nassim_Nicholas_Taleb https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nassim_Nicholas_Taleb
    • pas 4y ago
      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?)
      • NateEag 4y ago
        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."
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• avgcorrection 4y ago
  Reading literature might cure scientism.
• jmartrican 4y ago
  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".
  • starkd 4y ago
    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.
• mikrl 4y ago
  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.
  • oneoff786 4y ago
    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.
    • bckr 4y ago
      Can you give an example? I would love to read a blog post about this perspective
      • oneoff786 4y ago
        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.
• osigurdson 4y ago
  I think Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is particularly relevant to programming (perhaps thought in general).
• fedeb95 4y ago
  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).
• SnowHill9902 4y ago
  Dostoevsky has been a better psychologist to me than actual licensed psychologists.
• kuramitropolis 4y ago
  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.
  • Bakary 4y ago
    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...
    • kuramitropolis 4y ago
      >Although I suppose by definition you might not be willing to do that... 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.
    • EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 4y ago
      I could totally imagine how out of 100000 programmers having read Crime and Punishment, a few would take an axe to their local pawn shop.
      • 4y ago
• scrubs 4y ago
  A _programmer_perspective_ on classic literature? This is why English majors who don't like nerds. I agree.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • ashika 4y ago
    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.
  • starkd 4y ago
    Except today many english majors don't read enough of the classics.
• scop 4y ago
  I only read nonfiction until I was diagnosed with cancer. After that diagnosis, I have almost exclusively read fiction.
  • hedgehog0 4y ago
    May I ask why?
• ashika 4y ago
  this guy is going to love moby dick
  • scop 4y ago
    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.
• tehchromic 4y ago
  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.
• zazaulola 4y ago
  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. https://archive.org/details/fartherreachesof00masl/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/fartherreachesof00masl/mode/2up
  • BeetleB 4y ago
    > 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.
• narrator 4y ago
  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.
• carabiner 4y ago
  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.
• Maursault 4y ago
  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.
  • HellDunkel 4y ago
    Interesting. I tried "The Idiot" once but was put off by Dostojewski until now. Nobody tells you these things.
    • Maursault 4y ago
      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.
      • HellDunkel 4y ago
        Will follow your advice.
• imran0 4y ago
  Dostoevsky's mastery on human psychology aside, Crime and Punishment is one of the best thrillers I have ever read.
• HellDunkel 4y ago
  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.
• odd_noises 4y ago
  Appreciate the suggestion. I love human nature books but haven't actually stopped to read one since I finished 48 Laws of Power and Art of Seduction
• gregcoombe 4y ago
  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.
• ozim 4y ago
  OK article is touching on the issue that no book will learn you how to live. 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 ;)
• vario 4y ago
  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.
• azubinski 4y ago
  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.
• kar5pt 4y ago
  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.