The Bed of Procrustes
by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Random House, 2010), pp. xii., 112.

A healthy information diet contains a regular dose of aphorism, short sayings that provoke thought by cleverly expressing interesting ideas (as distinct from “sound bites”, which encapsulate petty ideas in a way that bullies thought). Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s The Bed of Procrustes contains some good ones. The broader theme of the book is our lack of humility in the face of uncertainty, something which causes us to force-fit what we observe into simplistic categories and mental models. Here are ten of my favourites:

• “An erudite is someone who displays less than he knows; a journalist or consultant, the opposite.” (p. 5)
• “A mathematician starts with a problem and creates a solution; a consultant starts by offering a ‘solution’ and creates a problem.” (p. 86)
• “Usually, what we call a ‘good listener’ is someone with skillfully polished indifference.” (p. 13)
• “There are two types of people: those who try to win and those who try to win arguments. They are never the same.” (p. 34)
• “Only in recent history has ‘working hard’ signalled pride rather than shame for lack of talent, finesse, and, mostly, sprezzatura [nonchalance about making the difficult seem easy] (p. 39)
• “You exist in full if and only if your conversations (or writings) cannot be easily reconstructed with clips from other conversations.” (p. 40)
• “Midieval man was a cog in a wheel he did not understand; modern man is a cog in a complicated system he thinks he understands.” (p. 57)
• “Most info-Web-media-newspaper types have a hard time swallowing the idea that knowledge is reached (mostly) by removing junk from people’s heads.” (p. 58)
• “The rationalist imagines an imbecile-free society; the empiricist an imbecile-proof one, or, even better, a rationalist-proof one.” (p. 71)
• “For the robust, an error is information; for the fragile, an error is an error.” (p. 72)

The Bed of Procrustes my pick for beach reading this summer, although think twice before loading it on your iPad. As Taleb taunts: “They read Gibbon’s Decline and Fall on an eReader but refuse to drink Château Lynch-Bages in a Styrofoam cup.” (p. 76)

Posted by Peter Stoyko (16.06.2011)