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.
Why read Dostoevsky? A programmer's perspective
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Re: Why read Dostoevsky? A programmer's perspective
#32The st ligature is interesting. Never seen that before
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.
Re: Why read Dostoevsky? A programmer's perspective
#33I 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 sy…
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.
Re: Why read Dostoevsky? A programmer's perspective
#34I 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…
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
Re: Why read Dostoevsky? A programmer's perspective
#35[deleted]
Re: Why read Dostoevsky? A programmer's perspective
#36I 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…
Stranger In A Strange Land is the chart-topper. The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress is my personal favorite.
Casablanca is also up there.
Re: Why read Dostoevsky? A programmer's perspective
#37I 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…
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.
Re: Why read Dostoevsky? A programmer's perspective
#38> 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…
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.
Re: Why read Dostoevsky? A programmer's perspective
#39> 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…
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.
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The path to get there and anything beyond that is largely inconsequential. For instance, much of Einstein's work for instance was largely driven by simply 'thinking it up.' When publishing his most fundamental works, he had absolutely no access to any unique resources, knowledge, or ability to carry out significant studies. He was working in a patent office as a low level inspector!
Maybe if you squint hard enough, you might claim what he did was a scientific case study. On the other hand, there are also the more common contemporary "case studies" of the sort of where you run a quick survey on Amazon Turk and then make grand, largely unfalsifiable, claims based solely on that with 0 meaningful predictive value. I would not call that science.
Re: Why read Dostoevsky? A programmer's perspective
#40I 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…
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.
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[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/223380.Stories_of_Your_L...
[1] https://www.villagevoice.com/2019/07/04/feodors-guide-joseph...
[2] https://www.discovermagazine.com/mind/how-reading-fiction-in...