Following in the great tradition of Nietzsche and La Rochefoucauld, Nassim Taleb has written The Bed of Procrustes. For those who are interested, the name of the book comes from Greek mythology.
Procrustes “the stretcher [who hammers out the metal]”), was a rogue smith and bandit who attacked people by stretching them or cutting off their legs, so as to force them to fit the size of an iron bed.
The word “Procrustean” is used to describe situations where an arbitrary standard is used to measure success, while completely disregarding obvious harm that results from the effort. Taleb’s books have broadly addressed problems of this kind, from iatrogenic medicine, to GMO’s, to clueless economists/psychologists/consultants who expect nature to fit into their iron bed of pseudo-intellectual constructs. In that spirit, this book is a collection of irreverent aphorisms – one-liners for people who read books.
In science you need to understand the world; in business you need others to misunderstand it.
Pharmaceutical companies are better at inventing diseases that match existing drugs, rather than inventing drugs to match existing diseases. – The Bed of Procrustes
You never win an argument until they attack your person.
If you can’t spontaneously detect (without analyzing) the difference between sacred and profane, you’ll never know what religion means. You will also never figure out what we commonly call art. You will never understand anything.
To be completely cured of newspapers, spend a year reading the previous week’s newspapers
The opposite of success isn’t failure; it is name-dropping.
You don’t become completely free by just avoiding to be a slave; you also need to avoid becoming a master.
Fortune punishes the greedy by making him poor and the very greedy by making him rich
Quite revealing of human preferences that more suicides come from shame or loss of financial and social status than medical diagnoses.
I went to a happiness conference; researchers looked very unhappy.
Read nothing from the past one hundred years; eat no fruits from the past one thousand years; drink nothing from the past four thousand years (just wine and water); but talk to no ordinary man over forty. A man without a heroic bent starts dying at the age of thirty.
Karl Marx, a visionary, figured out that you can control a slave much better by convincing him he is an employee.
The fastest way to become rich is to socialize with the poor; the fastest way to become poor is to socialize with the rich.
You will be civilized on the day you can spend a long period doing nothing, learning nothing, and improving nothing, without feeling the slightest amount of guilt
Modernity: we created youth without heroism, age without wisdom, and life without grandeur.
The twentieth century was the bankruptcy of the social utopia; the twenty-first will be that of the technological one.
There are two types of people: those who try to win and those who try to win arguments. They are never the same.
My only measure of success is how much time you have to kill
Only in recent history has “working hard” signaled pride rather than shame for lack of talent, finesse, and, mostly, sprezzatura.
Skills that transfer: street fights, off-path hiking, seduction, broad erudition. Skills that don’t: school, games, sports, laboratory—what’s reduced and organized.
Writers are remembered for their best work, politicians for their worst mistakes, and businessmen are almost never remembered.
No author should be considered as having failed until he starts teaching others about writing.
Hard science gives sensational results with a horribly boring process; philosophy gives boring results with a sensational process; literature gives sensational results with a sensational process; and economics gives boring results with a boring process.
With regular books, read the text and skip the footnotes; with those written by academics, read the footnotes and skip the text; and with business books, skip both the text and the footnotes.
Just like poets and artists, bureaucrats are born, not made; it takes normal humans extraordinary effort to keep attention on such boring tasks.
The costs of specialization: architects build to impress other architects; models are thin to impress other models; academics write to impress other academics; filmmakers try to impress other filmmakers; painters impress art dealers; but authors who write to impress book editors tend to fail.
The exponential information age is like a verbally incontinent person: he talks more and more as fewer and fewer people listen.
Most so-called writers keep writing and writing with the hope to, some day, find something to say.
Today, we mostly face the choice between those who write clearly about a subject they don’t understand and those who write poorly about a subject they don’t understand.
It is much less dangerous to think like a man of action than to act like a man of thought.
The sucker’s trap is when you focus on what you know and what others don’t know, rather than the reverse.
Most people need to wait for another person to say “this is beautiful art” to say “this is beautiful art”; some need to wait for two or more.
There are those who will thank you for what you gave them and others who will blame you for what you did not give them.
When conflicted between two choices, take neither.
Fragility: we have been progressively separating human courage from warfare, allowing wimps with computer skills to kill people without the slightest risk to their lives.
Happiness; we don’t know what it means, how to measure it, or how to reach it, but we know extremely well how to avoid unhappiness.
The four most influential moderns: Darwin, Marx, Freud, and (the productive) Einstein were scholars but not academics. It has always been hard to do genuine—and nonperishable—work within institutions.
The best way to spot a charlatan: someone (like a consultant or a stockbroker) who tells you what to do instead of what not to do.
Why do I have an obsessive Plato problem? Most people need to surpass their predecessors; Plato managed to surpass all his successors.
The left holds that because markets are stupid models should be smart; the right believes that because models are stupid markets should be smart. Alas, it never hit both sides that both markets and models are very stupid.