Review(ish thing) of ‘The Bed of Procrustes’ by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
full disclosure i think Nassim Taleb is a contemporary sage on par with some of my (& his) historic intellectual heroes :
heraclitus
seneca
schopenhaur
nietzsche
wittgenstein
turing
claude shannon
mcluhan
jane jacobs
mandelbrot
etc etc*
(and joining contemporaries like
wolfram
kimberle crenshaw
aaron swartz
ta-nehasi coates
nate silver)
& like the above Taleb is imperfect , inconsistent , problematic etc , without the benefit of history to smooth the rough spots & filter his output for the enduring over the everyday . as such , both are on display in this book.
i only became more deeply familiar w Taleb far too recently , having long consigned his work in my mind to the vile genre of Cutesy-Contrarian-Pop-Social-Science-Potboilers peddled usually by TED-talky charlatans (Gladwell, Pinker et al) & more rarely by genuine intellects (James Gleick, Nate Silver et al) . In fact , its not Black Swan — for which he is best known, which most fits the genre & which is often (wrongly & ironically) credited with predicting the financial crisis of 2008 just a year prior — that most earns his place among the above luminaries imo (& its def not this book currently being reviewed).
instead, i think his theory of Antifragility represents the sort of paradigm-advancing intellectual achievement on par with Turing’s computation theory , Shannon’s Information Theory , Bertalanffy / Ashby / Senge’s Systems Theory , McLuhan’s Media Theory , etc . It’s perhaps more incremental , less sui generis than some of those (and im not gonna explain it here, click the links if interested), but it strikes me as a potentially comparatively intellectually productive insight (as a citation search seems to bear out, with results ranging from mathematical finance to organizational management to computer science to biochemistry , complexity studies & linguistics).
It’s a concept developed subsequent to The Black Swan (2007) and this book (2010). In the latter he refers repeatedly only to the binary pair of robustness / fragility , even claiming that ‘robust’ systems ‘benefit’ from cataclysms such as Black Swan events — when of course the insight of his Antifragile theory is that robustness (which is immune to stress) is not the opposite of fragility (which breaks under stress); the opposite is Antifragility (which benefits from stress).
anyway , even tho developed later , its an idea that clearly proceeds from his earlier work & is readily apparent within that work , though not yet named or formalized . (and as he often tells , it’s an idea that pervaded his financial career as an options trader — where it’s known as being ‘long gamma’ — and where he deployed it winningly to gain financial independence , sometimes referred to in the literature as ‘fuck you money’). indeed , there’s a remarkable coherence of mission in all of Taleb’s published literary works , starting with 2001's Fooled by Randomness straight up thru 2012's Antifragile . that mission is probably best summarized as : convincing us how bad we are at knowing things — particularly as our methods for ‘knowing’ become ever more elaborate & complex , & the things known evermore profuse — & the likely catastrophic results of our errors . this seems like a counter-intuitive project for someone who leveraged mathematical finance to achieve affluence , and makes him in this way kin to both Wittgenstein (the highborn prodigious engineering student turned trojan logical-positivist turned penniless anti-foundationalist gardener) & Nate Silver (the ex-online poker maven & undisputed people’s champ of predictive statistics who regularly rails against the general use of and reliance on predictive statistics and prognostication of all stripes) .
in The Bed of Procrustes , Taleb extends this mission thru (ostensibly) thematically-organized but freely roaming aphorisms , conceptually anchored in an obscure (to me) figure of greek mythology who strapped his unlucky visitors to a bed either too small or too large for their bodies , adjusting for the poor fit by either stretching them with chains (medieval torture style) , or chopping off their overhanging limbs :
Every aphorism here is about a Procrustean bed of sorts — we humans, facing limits of knowledge, and things we do not observe, the unseen and the unknown, resolve the tension by squeezing life and the world into crisp commoditized ideas, reductive categories, specific vocabularies, and prepackaged narratives, which, on the occasion, has explosive consequences.
- [from the introduction]
and it’s mostly pretty good , if at times redundant
To bankrupt a fool, give him information.
…
Education makes the wise slightly wiser, but it makes the fool vastly more dangerous.Work destroys your soul by stealthily invading your brain during the hours not officially spent working; be selective about professions.
…
There is no intermediate state between ice and water but there is one between life and death: employment.
…
The three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary.
obvious
Asking science to explain life and vital matters is equivalent to asking a grammarian to explain poetry.
Don’t talk about “progress” in terms of longevity, safety, or comfort before comparing zoo animals to those in the wilderness.
There is nothing deemed harmful (in general) that cannot be beneficial in some particular instances, and nothing deemed beneficial that cannot harm you in some circumstances. The more complex the system, the weaker the notion of Universal.
reprehensible
When she shouts that what you did was unforgivable, she has already started to forgive you.
In the past, only some of the males, but all of the females, were able to procreate. Equality is more natural for females.
inconsistent
Older people are most beautiful when they have what is lacking in the young: poise, erudition, wisdom, phronesis, and this post-heroic absence of agitation.
…
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.The ancients knew very well that the only way to understand events was to cause them.
…
To be a philosopher is to know through long walks, by reasoning, and reasoning only, a priori, what others can only potentially learn from their mistakes, crises, accidents, and bankruptcies — that is, a posteriori.
incomprehensible
Sports feminize men and masculinize women.
The nation-state: apartheid without political incorrectness.
Half the people lie with their lips; the other half with their tears.
Marriage is the institutional process of feminizing men — and feminizing women.
The opposite of manliness isn’t cowardice; it’s technology.
senselessly amazing
The traits I respect are erudition and the courage to stand up when half-men are afraid for their reputation. *Any idiot can be intelligent.* [emphasis mine]
formulaic
Some people are only funny when they try to be serious.
I went to a happiness conference; the researchers looked very unhappy.
The fastest way to become rich is to socialize with the poor, the fastest way to become poor is to socialize with the rich.
People used to wear ordinary clothes on weekdays and formal attire on Sunday. Today it is the exact reverse.
An erudite is someone who displays less than he knows; a journalist or consultant, the opposite.
(^ a plurality seem to take this form of facile ‘jarring’ reversal. the phrases ‘the opposite’ , ‘the reverse’ or ‘equivalent’ appear in about 20 aphorisms.)
but also profound , moving , funny , affirming :
Men destroy each other during war; themselves during peacetime.
I wonder whether a bitter enemy would be jealous if he discovered that I hated someone else.
For the compassionate, sorrow is more easily displaced by another sorrow than by joy.
Over the long term, you are more likely to fool yourself than others.
There are two types of people: those who try to win and those who try to win arguments. They are never the same.
People often need to suspend their self-promotion, and have someone in their lives they do not need to impress. This explains dog ownership.
Some books cannot be summarized (real literature, poetry); some can be compressed to about ten pages; the majority to zero pages.
To understand the liberating effect of asceticism, consider that losing all your fortune is much less painful than losing only half of it.
Fortune punishes the greedy by making him poor and the very greedy by making him rich.
“Wealthy” is meaningless and has no robust absolute measure; use intead the subtractive measure “unwealth,” that is, the difference, at any point in time, between what you have and what you would like to have.
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.
The rationalist imagines an imbecile-free society; the empiricist an imbecile-proof one, or, even better, a rationalist-proof one.
It takes extraordinary wisdom and self-control to accept that many things have a logic we do not understand that is smarter than our own.
It takes a lot of intellect and confidence to accept that what makes sense doesn’t really make sense.
Don’t cross a river [that] is on average four feet deep. This is also known as Jensen’s inequality.
The twentieth century was the bankruptcy of the social utopia; the twenty-first will be that of the technological one.
The difference between legal and ethical increases in a complex system … then blows it up.
They are born, then put in a box; they go home to live in a box; they study by ticking boxes; they go to what is called “work” in a box, where they sit in their cubicle box; they drive to the grocery store in a box to buy food in a box; they go to the gym in a box to sit in a box; they talk about thinking “outside the box”; and when they die they are put in a box. All boxes, Euclidian, geometrically smooth boxes.
Decline starts with the replacement of dreams with memories and ends with the replacement of memories with other memories.
You may outlive your strength, never your wisdom.
i expect that it’s maybe difficult to fully appreciate even the best of these epigrams without an apprehension of Taleb’s very broad & peculiar persona , where the chauvinistic reactionary classicist commingles w/ the cosmopolitan high-finance guru , anti-corporate quant , localist anti-GMO activist , lebanese christian arab grecophile , etc.
this vastness and tortuousness of character is part of what makes him such a compelling (and rare) modern figure (tho his weighty intellectual & technical contributions r more consequential). he def seems more suited to the classical era of honor and silly shit like manliness that he so esteems . it gives me an intimation of what it may have been like to witness ‘great’ , inscrutable , inflammatory figures of the past (Nietzsche et al) in their own lifetime , for better & worse. he seems to belong to a rare class of thinkers thruout the ages .
and i’ve omitted the most compelling epistemic / procrustes related entries cuz theres too many and i plan to leverage them for another post on Information & Its Discontents drawing on Taleb & Silver insights among others , as well as my own experience with what ive come to term infophelia
finally : it took me embarrassingly too long to recognize (until explicitly acknowledged by Taleb himself in the Postface) that not only does this book primarily concern itself with Procrustean Beds , but is also comprised of them — the reductive , simplistic , absolutist aphorisms that , by brutalizing & truncating truth , capture & express more of it .
ps : this is the fourth book of aphoristic persuasion that i’ve reviewed , n it continues to be a favorite format of mine . here are the others :
- Bluets by Maggie Nelson
- the kinda dumb Letters to Wendy by Joe Wenderoth
- Reality Hunger by David Shields kinda qualifies
- this kinda silly flash fiction collection too i guess
pps : some more Taleb resources if u find urself similarly dumbsessed
- http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMBclvY_EMA
- https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8uY6yLP9BS4BUc9BSc0Jww?feature=watch
cross-posted from goodreads
