Multi-Disciplinary Reading – Book Reviews

The Bed of Procrustes, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, 2016 – The title has a hilarious connotation, having arisen from the Greek mythology where Procrustes invites visitors and feeds them well and offers them a bed to sleep, but makes them fit the bed, by sawing the legs off of tall visitors and stretching the shorter ones. We do its equivalent all the time by fitting our thoughts into commoditized ideas, reductive categories and prepackaged narratives. This book of aphorisms (pithy observations with general truth, as per dictionary) has an old world charm of ancient wisdom and will very likely end up timeless.

This is very short book but just like Calvin & Hobbes or Dilbert, you would do well to consume them in short bites over several months to enjoy them the way they are intended. I love pretty much all of Taleb’s work, including his mathematical work and knew this would be brash, hilarious and insightful. It is. 9/10

Don’t read ahead if you are planning to buy the book.

Some of my favorites aphorisms from the book

• People are much less interested in what you are trying to show them than in what you are trying to hide

• Pharma companies are very good at inventing diseases that match their existing drugs than inventing drugs for existing diseases

• To bankrupt a fool, give him information

• In science you need to understand the world; in business you need others to misunderstand it

• Education makes the wise slightly wiser. It makes the fool vastly 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

• Hatred is much harder to fake than love

• What we call a good listener is someone with skillfully polished indifference

• In your prayers, substitute “Protect us from evil” with “Protect us from those who improve things for a salary”

• It is a very powerful manipulation to let other win small battles

• The ultimate freedom lies in not having to explain why you did something

• To be completely cured of newspapers, spend a week reading last week’s newspapers

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

• You don’t become completely free by avoiding being a slave, you also need to avoid being a master

• Karl Marx, a visionary figured out that you can control a slave much better by convincing him he is an employee

• You will be civilised on the day you can spend a long period doing nothing, learning nothing, and improving nothing, without feeling the slightest amount of guilt

• You are rich if and only if money you refuse tastes better than the money you accept

• It seems it is the most unsuccessful people who give the most advice, particularly for writing and financial matters

• People usually apologize so they can do it again

• Bureaucracy is a construction designed to maximise the distance between a decision-maker and the risks of the decision

• All rumours about a public figure are deemed to be untrue until he threatens to sue

• The three most successful addictions are heroin, carbs and a monthly salary

• My only measure of success is how much time you have to kill

• The difference between technology and slavery is that slaves are fully aware that they are not free

• In real life exams, someone gives you an answer and you have to find the best corresponding questions

• Some ideas are born as you write them down, others become dead

• Life is about early detection of the reversal point beyond which your belongings (say, a house, country house, car or business) start owning you

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

• The English have random Mediterranean weather, but they go to Spain because their free hours aren’t free

• Corollary to Moore’s Law: every ten years, collective wisdom degrades by half

• Knowledge is reached by removing junk from people’s heads

• Most people need to wait for someone to say “this is beautiful art” to say “this is beautiful art”; some need to wait for two or more

• Meditation is a way to be narcissistic without hurting anyone

• The problem with learning from mistakes is that most of what people deem mistakes aren’t mistakes

• Anyone who likes meetings should be banned from attending meetings

• Average of expectations is different from expectation of averages (Jenson’s inequality)

• Never take investment advice from someone who has to work for a living

• “Success” isn’t being on top of a hierarchy, it is standing outside all hierarchies