141–150 of 219 posts
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Perhaps the Harry Potter books? Don’t throw Tolstoy at someone who havent read fiction before.
Would you really recommend YA to an adult?
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Perhaps the Harry Potter books? Don’t throw Tolstoy at someone who havent read fiction before.
Would you really recommend YA to an adult?
But I will concede I've tried other YA series and just couldn't get on with it.
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 w…
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: titil…
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.
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…
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.
A _programmer_perspective_ on classic literature? This is why English majors who don't like nerds. I agree.
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 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.
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.
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 alway…
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.
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 w…
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.
> 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…
... but doesn't he? Isn't his model is that given this and this circumstances people will do this and this (eg. commit crimes and reflect/regret)?