Home Feed
Home
Search
Search
Add Review, Blurb, Quote
Add
Activity
Activity
Profile
Profile
Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms
Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms | Nassim Nicholas Taleb
12 posts | 6 read | 1 reading | 8 to read
With fifty percent more material than the hardcover, this expanded edition of 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, and Antifragile. 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"
Amazon Indiebound Barnes and Noble WorldCat Goodreads LibraryThing
Pick icon
100%
quote
GoneFishing

Love without sacrifice is like theft.

37 likes1 comment
quote
GoneFishing

You want to be yourself, idiosyncratic; the collective (school, rules, jobs, technology) wants you generic to the point of castration.

24 likes1 stack add
quote
GoneFishing

Engineers can compute but not define, mathematicians can define but not compute, economists can neither define nor compute.

quote
GoneFishing

Over the long term, you are more likely to fool yourself than others.

Izai.Amorim So true! 8y
37 likes1 comment
quote
GoneFishing

Pharmaceutical companies are better at inventing diseases that match existing drugs, rather than inventing drugs to match existing diseases.

quote
GoneFishing

Your reputation is harmed the most by what you say to defend it.

quote
GoneFishing

You can tell how uninteresting a person is by asking him whom he finds interesting.

quote
GoneFishing

Universities have been progressing from providing scholarship for a small fee into selling degrees at a large cost.

quote
GoneFishing

You have a real life if and only if you do not compete wth anyone in any of your pursuits.

quote
GoneFishing

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

quote
GoneFishing

It is those who use others who are the most upset when someone uses them.

26 likes2 stack adds
quote
GoneFishing

The problem of knowledge is that there are many more books on birds written by ornithologists than books on birds written by birds and books on ornithologists written by birds