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alisarae 's review for:
Notes from Underground
by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Going into this book I had a vague idea that it was about Dostoevsky's time in prison, or being politically persecuted... or something to that nature. I was so surprised that it is totally not about that, and still just as good as I had hoped.
I was completely blown away by the opening discussion on how algorithms will fail to accurately predict human behavior because they will not take into account that humans will act against their better interests out of spite for being called predictable. Take that, The Man! Lol. While I knew that scientific ideas had strong circulation in the 19th century (Frankenstein, etc), I had not thought about how refined the discussion could be, such that 150 years later Dostoevsky's argument is even more relevant now than it was during his time.
The second part is a day in the life of the narrator that kind of illustrates the anti-algorithm argument. The narrator is an antihero (he makes a coy meta reference to this at the end of the book): a man who has no friends because he refuses to play along by society's rules and thinks himself more intelligent because of it, who would be pitiable except he is so self-aggrandizing, who recognizes that the source of his mysogyny is his own self-hatred and self-loathing. In other words, the narrator is a portrait of chan internet.
A few days ago I read Max Read's analysis of the new David Fincher movie The Killer (maxread.substack.com/p/david-finchers-new-movie-the-killer) and his article describes the Loser Internet's ideal man, the "sigma male." So that description was fresh in my mind when I was reading Notes from Underground and I found the overlap between the two quite stunning. The Max Read article explains a brief history of the sigma male and how to recognize its characteristics, but if you want to deeply understand the psychology of why trolls reject society and hate women and idealize the sigma male, you will not find a better explanation than in Notes from Underground.
(PS Now that I think about it, I think the audiobook narrator I listened to also narrated Lolita? Interesting juxtaposition.)
I was completely blown away by the opening discussion on how algorithms will fail to accurately predict human behavior because they will not take into account that humans will act against their better interests out of spite for being called predictable. Take that, The Man! Lol. While I knew that scientific ideas had strong circulation in the 19th century (Frankenstein, etc), I had not thought about how refined the discussion could be, such that 150 years later Dostoevsky's argument is even more relevant now than it was during his time.
The second part is a day in the life of the narrator that kind of illustrates the anti-algorithm argument. The narrator is an antihero (he makes a coy meta reference to this at the end of the book): a man who has no friends because he refuses to play along by society's rules and thinks himself more intelligent because of it, who would be pitiable except he is so self-aggrandizing, who recognizes that the source of his mysogyny is his own self-hatred and self-loathing. In other words, the narrator is a portrait of chan internet.
A few days ago I read Max Read's analysis of the new David Fincher movie The Killer (maxread.substack.com/p/david-finchers-new-movie-the-killer) and his article describes the Loser Internet's ideal man, the "sigma male." So that description was fresh in my mind when I was reading Notes from Underground and I found the overlap between the two quite stunning. The Max Read article explains a brief history of the sigma male and how to recognize its characteristics, but if you want to deeply understand the psychology of why trolls reject society and hate women and idealize the sigma male, you will not find a better explanation than in Notes from Underground.
(PS Now that I think about it, I think the audiobook narrator I listened to also narrated Lolita? Interesting juxtaposition.)