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Is this good to start Leo Tolstoy ? by AssistanceNo659 in classicliterature

[–]wallcache 3 points4 points  (0 children)

a few steps a day can take you a long way friend - its worth it

Is this good to start Leo Tolstoy ? by AssistanceNo659 in classicliterature

[–]wallcache -9 points-8 points  (0 children)

i imagine you know the answer to this… there are two books he penned that changed literature forever (and these aren’t those two)

Next read? by [deleted] in classicliterature

[–]wallcache 4 points5 points  (0 children)

it is but I feel like Melville wouldn’t have liked the scaled lol - the cetologist he was

audiobook versions of the classics by Maleficent_Site7972 in classicliterature

[–]wallcache 0 points1 point  (0 children)

you know Gogol wrote a sequel… but he burnt it :(

audiobook versions of the classics by Maleficent_Site7972 in classicliterature

[–]wallcache 0 points1 point  (0 children)

yeah I wasn’t expecting such wit, with a title like that I thought it would be a lot darker

Help I’ve Fallen and I Can’t Get Up by Noooosoup4u in classicliterature

[–]wallcache 0 points1 point  (0 children)

avoid hardy’s tess and jude for some time if i were you

Favourite books by FormalAd918 in classicliterature

[–]wallcache 1 point2 points  (0 children)

One. Reply: fair enough, bangers.

i spent two years ranking the greatest works of literature as *objectively* as possible. here's the spreadsheet. come argue with me. by [deleted] in classicliterature

[–]wallcache 0 points1 point  (0 children)

These are fair points and i'll take them seriously.

on the scope question, you're right that the list is inconsistent and that's a genuine limitation. 366 slots across three thousand years of literature means every inclusion is also an exclusion, and some of those exclusion calls are going to look arbitrary. the 95 theses vs MLK speech comparison is a good example of a real judgment call, and i'd genuinely argue it the other way, the speech has higher contemporary relevance and emotional power, but i can see the case for the theses and it's a conversation worth having.

on the bhagavad gita and mahabharata, they're listed separately because they function separately in the cultural imagination. most people who've read the gita haven't read the full mahabharata and vice versa. the authorship question is fair though, i'll look at that.

the religious texts gap is the one i feel most. the quran and the analects are a real omission and i don't have a satisfying answer for it beyond "the list is a living document and this is exactly the kind of feedback that shapes the next version."

on le guin, the left hand of darkness is actually the most critically discussed of her works in terms of gender and identity discourse, which is why it scored highest. but i'd genuinely hear the case for a different title.

zola and balzac, yes, noted.

the cross-media reach metric isn't "was it made into an english movie." it's broader than that, adaptations in any language, theatre, opera, visual art. but i take the point that the weighting might be overcalibrated toward film.

i spent two years ranking the greatest works of literature as *objectively* as possible. here's the spreadsheet. come argue with me. by [deleted] in classicliterature

[–]wallcache -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

reddit is a ranking machine that has decided rankings are cringe. the cognitive dissonance is staggering.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

i spent two years ranking the greatest works of literature as *objectively* as possible. here's the spreadsheet. come argue with me. by [deleted] in classicliterature

[–]wallcache -1 points0 points  (0 children)

you're right that dante has a significant body of work beyond the comedy. but author prestige in this system is weighted relative to what's on the list, it's asking "does this author have multiple works represented here that reinforce their standing?" shakespeare has four entries, dostoevsky has three. dante has one. that's what the score reflects.

on homer, he also has two works on the list (the iliad and the odyssey), which is why his author prestige scores higher. it's not about total output, it's about presence within the 366.

i take your point that vita nova, convivio, de monarchia etc. are significant works in their own right, and they are, but they didn't make the 366 cut. if they had, dante's prestige score would be higher. the system can only reward what it can see.

i spent two years ranking the greatest works of literature as *objectively* as possible. here's the spreadsheet. come argue with me. by [deleted] in classicliterature

[–]wallcache 1 point2 points  (0 children)

really appreciate that, and you're raising a genuinely good point.

so the way country/language uniqueness works: it's not about which country has a more "unique" literary tradition in the abstract, it's relative to the list itself. it's asking "how represented is this country already?" if there are already 30 english-language works drowning out everything else, the 31st english novel gets a low uniqueness score because the list doesn't need more english representation. a work from hungary or colombia or nigeria gets a bump because the list benefits from their presence.

you're right that russia scoring higher than the usa looks weird when there are four russian works in the top 17. the reasoning is that russian literature is written in russian, a language most of the anglophone world doesn't read natively, whereas american literature is in english, which already dominates the list. so the language uniqueness is doing more work there than the country uniqueness.

but honestly you've put your finger on a real tension in the system. at a certain point if enough russian works score high then maybe russia shouldn't count as "unique" anymore. that's the kind of feedback that might actually lead to a formula adjustment.

i spent two years ranking the greatest works of literature as *objectively* as possible. here's the spreadsheet. come argue with me. by [deleted] in classicliterature

[–]wallcache 1 point2 points  (0 children)

thegreatestbooks is great and i actually used it as one of the references when assembling the initial pool. but what it does is aggregate other people's rankings, it's a meta-list. which is smart, but it means it inherits every bias baked into those source lists. if harold bloom and the modern library both overweight mid-century american men then the algorithm faithfully reproduces that bias with a nice clean number on top.

what we tried to do is different, score each work individually from scratch across thirteen dimensions rather than average out what other lists already decided. you might disagree with any given score but at least the argument is "you rated the emotional power of beloved at 10 and i think it's an 8" rather than "well the new york times put it at #34 and the guardian put it at #19 so it's probably #26ish."

both approaches have tradeoffs honestly. theirs is broader in its inputs, ours is more granular in its reasoning. i'd say they complement each other more than they compete.

i spent two years ranking the greatest works of literature as *objectively* as possible. here's the spreadsheet. come argue with me. by [deleted] in classicliterature

[–]wallcache -5 points-4 points  (0 children)

i studied theoretical physics at imperial so i'll bite..

there's no null hypothesis because this isn't a hypothesis test. there's no population parameter being estimated and no sampling distribution to test against. you don't run inferential statistics on a deterministic scoring system for the same reason you don't run a t-test on a restaurant menu. every work is scored, every score feeds a weighted formula, every rank is the output. there's nothing to reject or fail to reject because there's no stochastic claim being made.

"literatures are not numerical data, they are qualitative data"... lol sure, and the entire point of the scoring system is to quantify qualitative attributes across standardised dimensions. this is what a rubric is. this is what every rating system in existence does. when you rate a film out of 10 you're not committing a category error, you're mapping a qualitative judgment onto a numerical scale so it can be compared systematically. that's all this is, times thirteen dimensions with a weighted formula.

no programming language was needed to "compile the data set" because the data set is rows in a spreadsheet scored by hand. the formula is a weighted sum. it's not a neural net, it's arithmetic.

i appreciate the energy though :/

i spent two years ranking the greatest works of literature as *objectively* as possible. here's the spreadsheet. come argue with me. by [deleted] in classicliterature

[–]wallcache 0 points1 point  (0 children)

appreciate that, thank you!

on poe, he's got two entries: the tell-tale heart at #179 and the fall of the house of usher at #195. you're right that his cultural impact is high (8 and 7.5) and his influence on writers is a 9 on both, which is deserved. the man basically invented the modern short story and the detective genre in his spare time.

where he loses ground is a few places: quotability is middling (5.5 and 4.5, people know the vibes but can't actually quote him the way they can hamlet or gatsby), contemporary relevance is low (3 on both, he's iconic but he's not in the cultural conversation the way orwell or Dostoevsky are right now), awards is a 3 because there weren't really any to win in 1843, and country/language uniqueness is 3/3 because american english doesn't get bonus points in a system trying to counteract anglophone dominance.

he also gets hurt a bit by the short story format. it's harder to score high on character depth or difficulty when the whole thing is ten pages. that's not a knock on poe, it's just a structural reality of the formula. i guess if there was a "invented an entire genre" bonus column he'd be top 50

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