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On Tolstoy's “War and Peace”

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Re: On Tolstoy's “War and Peace”

#91

Post by barry-cotter »

rjf72 wrote: post #75
beloch wrote: post #24

War and Peace reminds me of David Lynch's "Dune". Aspects of it are utterly brilliant. Perhaps unsurpassed. As a whole though, it suffers from the effects of poor decisions. Tolstoy famously said that he didn't even consider War and Peace to be a novel, but something else that sort of passes for one. Where another author with an axe to grind would tell a story that leads the reader to the desired conclusion, Tolstoy…

Out of curiosity, why would you consider such a thing a philosophy as opposed to something that can be demonstrated, or challenged, with evidence? For instance the stock market is an example of a complex system that ought be trivial to create a very strong deterministic model of. Though it qualifies as complex, in reality it's quite a trivial system. Things tend to go up on good news, down on bad news, and all actors…

> Yet in spite of its triviality and the fact that there has likely been more manpower and money dedicated to 'solving' the stock market than perhaps any other endeavor ever, we still remain completely clueless.

It is precisely because of the effort to predict and exploit the stock market that predicting it is so difficult.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/h24JGbmweNpWZfBkM/markets-ar...

Markets Are Anti-Inductive

Let's say you see me flipping a coin. It is not necessarily a fair coin. It's a biased coin, and you don't know the bias. I flip the coin nine times, and the coin comes up "heads" each time. I flip the coin a tenth time. What is the probability that it comes up heads?

If you answered "ten-elevenths, by Laplace's Rule of Succession", you are a fine scientist in ordinary environments, but you will lose money in finance.

In finance the correct reply is, "Well... if everyone else also saw the coin coming up heads... then by now the odds are probably back to fifty-fifty."

Recently on Hacker News I saw a commenter insisting that stock prices had nowhere to go but down, because the economy was in such awful shape. If stock prices have nowhere to go but down, and everyone knows it, then trades won't clear - remember, for every seller there must be a buyer - until prices have gone down far enough that there is once again a possibility of prices going up.

Re: On Tolstoy's “War and Peace”

#92

Post by mezentius »

beloch wrote: post #24

War and Peace reminds me of David Lynch's "Dune". Aspects of it are utterly brilliant. Perhaps unsurpassed. As a whole though, it suffers from the effects of poor decisions. Tolstoy famously said that he didn't even consider War and Peace to be a novel, but something else that sort of passes for one. Where another author with an axe to grind would tell a story that leads the reader to the desired conclusion, Tolstoy…

According to Nigel Nicolson in "Napoleon 1812," Tolstoy's fatalistic outlook about the war (if not all of his historical detail) is actually fairly accurate. The Russians didn't fend off Napoleon by understanding the nature of the complex system in which they were embedded, but rather through sheer indecision, which had the effect of an accidental Fabian strategy: preserving their army by avoiding any catastrophic battle in which it would have been entirely destroyed. The one major action fought at Borodino — which has a near-mystical significance for Russians — was motivated mostly by political pressure (to avoid the appearance of cowardice), but probably wasn't necessary at all. It was likely that Napoleon had already doomed his army the minute he crossed the Neman, due to his refusal to grasp the sheer scale of the supply and transport problem related to marching half a million troops into Western Russia in late June. In fact, his Marshals had mostly recommended against it — but due to the caprice of one man, one million people died in a year. It's hard to argue that one could understand, predict, or mitigate this.

Nicolson goes on to point out how the Nazis — who were well aware of the example — made many of the same mistakes as Napoleon, who himself was repeating the same mistakes as Charles XII in his doomed invasion a hundred years earlier.

It's not to say that the problems of war and society are impossible to understand — but human factors such as hubris, bias, cults of personality, politics by committee, etc. usually conspire to obscure their solutions, even with the perspective of time.

Re: On Tolstoy's “War and Peace”

#93

Post by cafard »

baud147258 wrote: post #87
cafard wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Victor Hugo was born to make Tolstoy seem laconic. Tolstoy can be prolix, but Austerlitz and Borodino are critical to the action of the novel. Waterloo has a minor plot justification inn Les Miserable , but most of the twelve chapters on Waterloo are just Hugo's excuse for spinning his theories.

I'm pretty sure Hugo being a fan of Napoleon helped.

Quite. But somebody commenting mentioned Stendhal, who greatly admired Napoleon, and who managed to keep his account of Waterloo far shorter.

Re: On Tolstoy's “War and Peace”

#94

Post by baud147258 »

cafard wrote: post #93
baud147258 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure Hugo being a fan of Napoleon helped.

Quite. But somebody commenting mentioned Stendhal, who greatly admired Napoleon, and who managed to keep his account of Waterloo far shorter.

Good point. I don't know very well Stendhal, thank you.

Re: On Tolstoy's “War and Peace”

#95

Post by tk75x »

_4gzn wrote: post #6
lstodd wrote: post #5

it's "War and Society", not "War and Peace" ah, whatever.

No. http://gramota.ru/lenta/news/8_784

I read that article. It says there is an alternate spelling of the word "peace" in Russian which can be interpreted to mean "humanity/people" but that it was found only once in a 1913 version of the book which was identified as a typo.

Re: On Tolstoy's “War and Peace”

#96

Post by m0zg »

alimw wrote: post #89
m0zg wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose a lot of meaning and cultural context is lost in translation. I never understood how people in the West even approach these masterworks of Russian literature. They're challenging even for the natives. That having been said, War and Peace is my favorite Russian novel by far. First time I read it I was 15, they force you to read it high school. I disliked it intensely. Second time I read it I was 40. I absolu…

Do you really believe that a person's comprehension of the world must be tied so irreversibly to the land they grew up on? There were some similarly condescending comments in a recent thread about the Master and Margarita. Personally I am more likely to respect someone's views on Shakespeare if they've read a lot of Shakespeare than if they were born in Stratford.

No doubt in my mind whatsoever. Books aren't just the words on the page. They also rely significantly on implied cultural contexts, meanings, things that _do not_ need to be said.

It's not condescension, it's just a simple fact. This actually becomes blindingly obvious only when you move to live in another culture/country about which you might have had some preconceived notions.

Re: On Tolstoy's “War and Peace”

#97

Post by potatoyogurt »

ethelward wrote: post #84
potatoyogurt wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you read his link? It directly addresses your point. I will summarize and add some context, since I don't know if you read Russian. The word мир in Russian has two meanings, "peace" and something that is translated in different contexts more like "the world" or "society." These were once different words with different spellings, but during the Soviet Union, authorities decided that some letters had to be purged b…

> but during the Soviet Union, authorities decided that some letters had to be purged because they were naughty Just for reference, the grammatical reform had been designed during the tsarist times, started by the ephemeral Provisional Government, and only finished by the Soviets.

Thanks for clarifying! I was 90% just joking, but I wasn't actually aware that it had such a long history.

Re: On Tolstoy's “War and Peace”

#98

Post by Endy »

aidenn0 wrote: post #52
Endy wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me, Anna Karenina is really mostly notable for having the second-greatest opening line in all literature.

And the greatest?

Kafka. "One day, Gregor Samsa awoke to find himself transformed into a giant cockroach."

Re: On Tolstoy's “War and Peace”

#99

Post by ethelward »

potatoyogurt wrote: post #97
ethelward wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but during the Soviet Union, authorities decided that some letters had to be purged because they were naughty Just for reference, the grammatical reform had been designed during the tsarist times, started by the ephemeral Provisional Government, and only finished by the Soviets.

Thanks for clarifying! I was 90% just joking, but I wasn't actually aware that it had such a long history.

You're welcome! I found it interesting enough that this reform survives three widely different governments to mention it.

Re: On Tolstoy's “War and Peace”

#100

Post by Endy »

coldtea wrote: post #82
rjf72 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel." Definitely the greatest line I've ever read. Such extensive imagery and metaphor (well beyond just the sky), tucked into 15 words.

And teens today (or soon) would not visually know what "television tuned to a dead channel" meant...

It's almost more profound in some ways - on a lot of modern TVs, a dead channel is displayed as being a solid field of bright blue. So, it changes the way Sprawl's sky appears to each reader, but it makes the change take place in Case's head. If it's bright blue, and a person recognizes that first as related to a TV, what does that say about the way they perceive the world? Especially with how bad Case wants digital access.
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