Dostoevsky

The heuristic is that a foreigner loots the best of your country, like he'll come and wander around the city center, not like you, through suburban areas and industrial zones. But this heuristic is very fragile. Dostoevsky is the worst Russian classic I know, a pure mixture of depression and dysfunction. You can't pick up anything useful, even by chance, at the ethnographic level. Perhaps it's a joke among Western aristocrats that they forced F.M.'s "suicide depression" so their wannabes would kill themselves trying to develop. But it's more likely that they're just shit eaters. In a good way... I mean, there are some important micronutrients they're deficient in. In short, heuristics systematically make mistakes, so a deeper understanding of the mechanisms is needed, not just rules of thumb.