The Bed of Procrustes by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Taleb’s aphorisms are standalone compressed thoughts revolving around his main idea of how we deal, and should deal, with what we don’t know.

The title comes from a Greek myth where Procrustes would house travelers in a bed that fit each person to perfection. To do so, those who were too tall had their legs chopped off, while those too short were stretched. This metaphor “isn’t just about putting something in the wrong box; it’s mostly that inverse operation of changing the wrong variable, here the person rather than the bed.”

Top Ten:

1. The sucker’s trap is when you focus on what you know and what others don’t know, rather than the reverse.

2. Just as dyed hair makes older men less attractive, it is what you do to hide your weaknesses that makes them repugnant.

3. The characteristic feature of the loser is to bemoan, in general terms, mankind’s flaws, biases, contradictions, and irrationality – without exploiting them for fun and profit.

4. The only problem with the last laugh is that the winner has to laugh alone.

5. 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.

6. You have a real life if and only if you don’t compete against anyone in any of your pursuits.

7. An idea starts to be interesting when you get scared of taking it to its logical conclusion

8. I fail to see the difference between extreme wealth and overdose.

9. Someone from your social class who becomes poor affects you more than thousands of starving ones outside of it.

10. Contra the prevailing belief, “success” isn’t being on top of a hierarchy, it is standing outside all hierarchies.

Other Highlights:

Preludes

• To understand the liberating effect of asceticism, consider that losing all your fortune is much less painful than losing half of it.

• Academia is to knowledge what prostitution is to love; close enough on the surface but, to the nonsucker, not exactly the same thing.

• Don’t talk about “progress” in terms of longevity, safety, or comfort before comparing zoo animals to those in the wilderness.

Counter narratives

• Most of what they call humility is successfully disguised arrogance.

Matters Ontological

• We need to feel a little bit lost somewhere, physically or intellectually, at least once a day.

• It is not possible to have fun when you try.

• You exist if and only if you are free to do things without a visible objective, with no justification and, above all, outside the dictatorship of someone else’s narrative.

Chance, Success, Happiness, and Stoicism

• The opposite of success isn’t failure; it is name-dropping.

• Decline starts with the replacement of dreams with memories and ends with the replacement of memories with other memories.

• Talk to no ordinary man over forty. A man without a heroic bent starts dying at the age of thirty.

• 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.

• Someone who says “I am busy” is either declaring incompetence (and lack of control of his life) or trying to get rid of you.

• Never hire an A student unless it is to take exams.

Charming and less charming sucker problems

• People tend to whisper when they say the truth and raise their voice when they lie.

• The fact that people in countries (or cities) with cold weather tend to be harder working, richer, less relaxed, less amicable, less tolerant of idleness, more (over) organized and more harried than those in hotter climates should make us wonder whether wealth is mere indemnification, and motivation is just overcompensation for not having a real life.

Theseus, or living the paleo life

• The three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary.

• A heuristic on whether you have control of your life: can you take naps?

The Republic of Letters

• If the professor is not capable of giving a class without preparation, don’t attend. People should only teach what they have learned organically, though experience and curiosity… or get another job.

• Half of suckerhood is not realizing that what you don’t like might be loved by someone else (hence by you, later), and the reverse.

• A writer told me, "I didn't get anything done today." Answer: try to do nothing. The best way to have only good days is to not aim at getting anything done. Actually almost everything I've written that has survived was written when I didn't try to get anything done.

Fooled By Randomness

• Unless we manipulate our surroundings, we have as little control over what and whom we think about as we do over the muscles of our hearts.

Ethics

• My biggest problem with modernity may lie in the growing separation of the ethical and the legal.

• Life’s beauty: the kindest act toward you in your life may come from an outsider not interested in reciprocation.

• Anything people do, write, or say to enhance their status beyond what they give others shows like a mark on their foreheads, visible to others but not to them.

• Meditation is a way to be narcissistic without hurting anyone.

• Your duty is to scream those truths that one should shout but that are merely whispered.

• In Proust there is a character, Morel, who demonizes Nissim Bernard, a Jew who lent him money, and becomes anti-Semitic just so he can escape the feeling of gratitude.

• Virtue is when the income you wish to show the tax agency exceeds what you wish to show your neighbor.

Robustness and Antifragility

• To understand how something works, figure out how to break it.

• For the robust, an error is information; for the fragile, an error is an error.

The Lucid Fallacy and Domain Dependence

• Most can’t figure out why one can like rigorous knowledge and despise academics, yet they understand that one can like food and hate canned tuna.

Epistemology and Subtractive Knowledge

• It takes extraordinary wisdom and self-control to accept that many things have logic we do not understand that is smarter than our own.

• Happiness: we don’t know what is means, how to measure it, or how to reach it, but we know extremely well how to avoid unhappiness.

The Scandal of Prediction

• A prophet is not someone with special visions, just someone blind to most of what others see.

• They would take forecasting more seriously is it were pointed out to them that in Semitic languages the words for “forecast” and “prophecy” are the same.

Being a Philosopher and Managing to Remain One

• Real mathematicians understand completeness, real philosophers understand incompleteness, the rest don’t formally understand anything.

• It takes a lot of intellect and confidence to accept that what makes sense doesn’t really make sense.

• Let us find what risks we can measure and these are the risks we should be taking.

Economic Life and Other Very Vulgar Subjects

• The stock market, in brief: participants are calmly waiting in line to be slaughtered while thinking it is for a Broadway show.

• It is easier to macrobullshit than to microbullshit.

• Anyone who likes meetings should be banned from attending meetings.

The Sage, the Weak, and the Magnificent

• It is a sign of weakness to avoid showing signs of weakness

• Risk takers never complain. They do.

The Implicit and the Explicit

• When a woman says about a man that he is intelligent, she often means handsome; when a man says about a woman that she is dumb, he always means attractive.

• For company, you often prefer those who find you interesting over those you find interesting.

• The general principle of antifragility; it is much better to do things you cannot explain than explain things you cannot do.

• If something looks irrational – and has been so for a long time – odds are you have a wrong definition of rationality.

Postface

• The mind can be a wonderful tool for self-delusion – it was not designed to deal with complexity and nonlinear uncertainties. Counter to the common discourse, more information means more delusions; our detection of false patterns is growing faster and faster as a side effect of modernity and the information age.