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The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms
| Title | The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms |
| Writer | |
| Date | 2025-07-05 19:55:22 |
| Type | |
| Link | Listen Read |
Desciption
The Bed of Procrustes is a standalone book in Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s landmark Incerto series, an investigation of opacity, luck, uncertainty, probability, human error, risk, and decision-making in a world we don’t understand. The other books in the series are Fooled by Randomness, The Black Swan, Antifragile, and Skin in the Game.By the author of the modern classic The Black Swan , this collection of aphorisms and meditations expresses his major ideas in ways you least expect.The Bed of Procrustes takes its title from Greek mythology: the story of a man who made his visitors fit his bed to perfection by either stretching them or cutting their limbs. It represents Taleb’s view of modern civilization’s hubristic side effects—modifying humans to satisfy technology, blaming reality for not fitting economic models, inventing diseases to sell drugs, defining intelligence as what can be tested in a classroom, and convincing people that employment is not slavery.Playful and irreverent, these aphorisms will surprise you by exposing self-delusions you have been living with but never recognized.With a rare combination of pointed wit and potent wisdom, Taleb plows through human illusions, contrasting the classical values of courage, elegance, and erudition against the modern diseases of nerdiness, philistinism, and phoniness.“Taleb’s crystalline nuggets of thought stand alone like esoteric poems.”— Financial Times
Review
Taleb received a $4 million advance to write this book of aphorisms as a follow-up to the Black Swan.Some of my favorites:Academia is to knowledge what prostitution is to love; close enough on the surface but, to the nonsucker, not exactly the same thing.I suspect that they put Socrates to death because there is something terribly unattractive, alienating and nonhuman in thinking with too much clarity.Education makes the wise slightly wiser, but it makes the fool vastly more dangerous.If you know in the morning, what your day looks like with any precision, you are a little bit dead--the more precision, the more dead you are.There is no intermediate state between ice and water but there is one between life and death: employment.Procrastination is the soul rebelling against entrapment.They will envy you for your success, for your wealth, for your intelligence, for your looks, for your status--but rarely for your wisdom.Many of these aphorisms are interesting. A lot of them are specific and esoteric; a retaliation against critics in Academia, economics, the working class and anyone who might think they're smart for getting good grades or scoring high on an IQ test. Taleb's aphorisms are anti-technology, anti-nerd and anti-making a living with a job that draws a salary. The dependence is what he's against, the repetition, an unstimulated life filled with monotonous patterns, notions of false humility, false models, and sports. Under a section titled ETHICS, Taleb says: Avoid calling heroes those who had no other choice. Some will call him "harsh" for a statement like that; especially firemen, moms who save children from burning buildings, guys who fix flats on the sides of roads for a smile and thank you, and especially Bruce Willis because he's terrible in romantic comedies. Others will say: maybe he's talking about himself and is trying to be humble without seeming humble because he thinks he's saving the world with his intelligence. Those people have too much time, and empathy, on their hands. Whatever Taleb is trying to say, and whoever he's trying to say it to, we might never officially know. What we do know is that he has the last laugh receiving $4 million to have a few hundred twitter posts published into a hardcover book of philosophical and political aphorisms. It's a best seller, too. A best seller which I bought, read, and am now writing a review about. Call me a sucker, or call me curious, just please don't call me a hero.
