The Bed of Procrustes – Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Penguin | Aphorisms and Personal Observations

There is a particular pleasure in a book that does not ask you to start at the beginning. Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s The Bed of Procrustes is that kind of book: a collection of aphorisms that can be opened anywhere, read for five minutes or fifty, and set down without guilt. It is, in the best sense, a book for the unhurried.

The title comes from Greek mythology. Procrustes was the innkeeper who stretched or cut his guests to fit his bed — a metaphor Taleb uses for the human tendency to force reality into our existing frameworks rather than adjusting our frameworks to reality. We cut the world to fit our models. We trim the evidence to fit our theories. The bed, Taleb suggests, is everywhere.

What follows is a series of observations — sharp, sometimes abrasive, often funny — on knowledge, fragility, modernity, and the particular foolishness of people who confuse education with intelligence. Taleb has little patience for what he calls the “Soviet-Harvard” style of thinking: top-down, theoretical, disconnected from the grain of real experience. His aphorisms are the opposite, bottom-up, earned, occasionally wounding.

Some examples land like small explosions. Others require sitting with. A few will annoy you. This is, one suspects, entirely intentional.

The Bed of Procrustes is not Taleb’s most famous book, nor his most ambitious. But it may be his most purely pleasurable, a cabinet of observations to return to, to argue with, to copy into notebooks. Read it slowly. Read it twice. It rewards the kind of attention that most books never receive.