The Bed of Procrustes by Nassim Taleb

Summary

A great collection of aphorisms that gets you thinking. It summarizes Taleb’s philosophy of antifragility and asymmetry in life well. Don’t read this as your first Taleb book.

Key Takeaways

People are much less interested in what you are trying to show them than in what you are trying to hide.
The test of whether you really liked someone’s company is if you are ready to meet him again and again.
It is a very powerful manipulation to let others win the small battles.
For life to be really fun, what you fear should line up with what you desire.
Decline starts with the replacement of dreams with memories and ends with the replacement of memories with other memories.
To see if you like where you are check if you are as happy returning as you were leaving.
People focus on role models; it is more effective to find antimodels.
The most unsuccessful people give the most advice.
Fasting: every human should learn to read, write, respect the weak, take risks in voicing disrespect for the powerful when warranted, and fast.
Technology can degrade (and endanger) every aspect of a sucker’s life while convincing him that it is becoming more “efficient.”
In real life exams, someone gives you an answer and you have to find the best corresponding questions.
For everything, use boredom in place of a clock.
If the professor is not capable of giving a class without preparation, don’t attend. People should only teach what they have learned organically, through experience and curiosity…or get another job.
Most people write so they can remember things; I write to forget.
Literature comes alive when covering up vices, defects, weaknesses, and confusions; it dies with every trace of preaching.
In any subject, if you don’t feel that you don’t know enough, you don’t know enough.
Regular minds find similarities in stories (and situations); finer minds detect differences.
Mental clarity is the child of courage, not the other way around.
We are most motivated to help those who need us the least.
To value a person, consider the difference between how impressive he or she was at the first encounter and the most recent one.
It is easy for others, but not for you, to detect the asymmetry between what you gain and what you give by doing, writing, or saying.
To understand how something works, figure out how to break it.
When conflicted between two choices, take neither.
Change your anchor to what did not happen rather than what did happen.
Knowledge is subtractive, not additive—what we subtract (reduction by what does not work, what not to do), not what we add (what to do).
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.
Let us find what risks we can measure and these are the risks we should be taking.
The general principle of antifragility: it is much better to do things you cannot explain than explain things you cannot do.

What I got out of it

Taleb’s The Bed of Procrustes is more rational and less philosophical and meta-physical than Bruce Lee’s collection of aphorisms. Regardless, I’ve enjoyed each in its own way.

Compared to Antifragile, there wasn’t anything groundbreaking in this book, but it’s a great summary for people who’ve read Taleb’s earlier work. He’s been able to condense much of what he preaches into this 100-page book with oneliners.

The aphorisms that (a) were contrary to my belief system at the time, (b) I want to remind me of (for life or business) or (c) have practical value, can be found in the Key Takeaways above. I’ll revisit this list often.

Summary Notes

Procrustes

it’s mostly that inverse operation of changing the wrong variable, here the person rather than the bed. Note that every failure of what we call “wisdom” (coupled with technical proficiency) can be reduced to a Procrustean bed situation.

Preludes

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

To understand the liberating effect of asceticism, consider that losing all your fortune is much less painful than losing only half of it.

An erudite is someone who displays less than he knows; a journalist or consultant, the opposite.

Work destroys your soul by stealthily invading your brain during the hours not officially spent working; be selective about professions.

Counter Narratives

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

They will envy you for your success, for your wealth, for your intelligence, for your looks, for your status—but rarely for your wisdom.

The test of whether you really liked a book is if you reread it (and how many times); the test of whether you really liked someone’s company is if you are ready to meet him again and again—the rest is spin, or that variety of sentiment now called self-esteem.

The opposite of manliness isn’t cowardice; it’s technology.

Usually, what we call a “good listener” is someone with skillfully polished indifference.

People feel deep anxiety finding out that someone they thought was stupid is actually more intelligent than they are.

It is a very powerful manipulation to let others win the small battles.

Matters Ontological

Life is about execution rather than purpose.

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

The good life—the vita beata—is like reading a Russian novel: It takes two hundred pages of struggling with the characters before one can start enjoying things. Then the agitation starts to make sense.

For life to be really fun, what you fear should line up with what you desire.

The Sacred And The Profane

You can replace lies with truth; but myth is only displaced with a narrative.

One categorical: it is easier to fast than diet. You cannot be “slightly” kosher or halal by only eating a small portion of ham.

Chance, Success, Happiness, And Stoicism

Fortune punishes the greedy by making him poor and the very greedy by making him rich.

Studying the work and intellectual habits of a “genius” to learn from him is like studying the garb of a chef to emulate his cooking.

What fools call “wasting time” is most often the best investment.

Decline starts with the replacement of dreams with memories and ends with the replacement of memories with other memories.

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 fastest way to become rich is to socialize with the poor; the fastest way to become poor is to socialize with the rich.

Success in all endeavors requires the absence of specific qualities.

To succeed in crime requires absence of empathy,
To succeed in banking you need absence of shame at hiding risks,
To succeed in school requires absence of common sense,
To succeed in economics requires absence of understanding of probability, risk, second-order effects, or about anything,
To succeed in journalism requires an inability to think about matters that have even an infinitesimally small chance of being relevant next January,
But to succeed in life requires a total inability to do anything that makes you uncomfortable when you look at yourself in the mirror.

To see if you like where you are, without the chains of dependence, check if you are as happy returning as you were leaving.

People focus on role models; it is more effective to find antimodels—people you don’t want to resemble when you grow up.

Charming And Less Charming Sucker Problems

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

There are two types of people: those who try to win and those who try to win arguments. They are never the same.

For so many, instead of looking for “cause of death” when they expire, we should be looking for “cause of life” when they are still around.

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

If someone gives you more than one reason why he wants the job, don’t hire him.

Theseus, Or Living The Paleo Life

The most important aspect of fasting is that you feel deep, undirected gratitude when you break the fast.

A good book gets better on the second reading. A great book on the third. Any book not worth rereading isn’t worth reading.

Fasting: every human should learn to read, write, respect the weak, take risks in voicing disrespect for the powerful when warranted, and fast.

Technology can degrade (and endanger) every aspect of a sucker’s life while convincing him that it is becoming more “efficient.”

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

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

We are hunters; we are only truly alive in those moments when we improvise; no schedule, just small surprises and stimuli from the environment.

For everything, use boredom in place of a clock, as a biological wristwatch, though under constraints of politeness.

One of the shortest books I’ve ever read had 745 pages.

The longest book I’ve ever read was 205 pages.

Skills that transfer: street fights, off-path hiking, seduction, broad erudition.

Skills that don’t: school, games, sports, laboratory—what’s reduced and organized.

The Republic Of Letters

Writing is the art of repeating oneself without anyone noticing.

Most people write so they can remember things; I write to forget.

If the professor is not capable of giving a class without preparation, don’t attend.

People should only teach what they have learned organically, through experience and curiosity…or get another job.

Writers are remembered for their best work, politicians for their worst mistakes, and businessmen are almost never remembered.

You need to keep reminding yourself of the obvious: charm lies in the unsaid, the unwritten, and the undisplayed. It takes mastery to control silence.

Hard science gives sensational results with a horribly boring process; philosophy gives boring results with a sensational process; literature gives sensational results with a sensational process; and economics gives boring results with a boring process.

A writer told me, “I didn’t get anything done today.” Answer: try to do nothing.

The best way to have only good days is to not aim at getting anything done.

Actually almost everything I’ve written that has survived was written when I didn’t try to get anything done.

With regular books, read the text and skip the footnotes; with those written by academics, read the footnotes and skip the text; and with business books, skip both the text and the footnotes.

What we call “business books” is an eliminative category invented by bookstores for writings that have no depth, no style, no empirical rigour, and no linguistic sophistication.

Remove all empty words from writings, résumés, conversation, except when they aim at courtesy.

It is a waste of emotions to answer critics; better to stay in print long after they are dead.

Some books cannot be summarized (real literature, poetry); some can be compressed to about ten pages; the majority to zero pages.

Most so-called writers keep writing and writing with the hope to, some day, find something to say.

We are better at (involuntarily) doing out of the box than (voluntarily) thinking out of the box.

Literature comes alive when covering up vices, defects, weaknesses, and confusions; it dies with every trace of preaching.

In any subject, if you don’t feel that you don’t know enough, you don’t know enough.

The Universal And The Particular

What I learned on my own I still remember.

Regular minds find similarities in stories (and situations); finer minds detect differences.

The fool generalizes the particular; the nerd particularizes the general; some do both; and the wise does neither.

True love is the complete victory of the particular over the general, and the unconditional over the conditional.

For an honest person, freedom requires having no friends; and, one step above, sainthood requires having no family.

Fooled By Randomness

The tragedy is that much of what you think is random is in your control and, what’s worse, the opposite.

The fool views himself as more unique and others more generic; the wise views himself as more generic and others more unique.

Medieval man was a cog in a wheel he did not understand; modern man is a cog in a complicated system he thinks he understands.

The calamity of the information age is that the toxicity of data increases much faster than its benefits.

Mental clarity is the child of courage, not the other way around.
The biggest error since Socrates has been to believe that lack of clarity is the source of all our ills, not the result of them.

Probability is the intersection of the most rigorous mathematics and the messiest of life.

To rephrase, every human should at all times have equality in probability (which we can control), not equality in outcome.

Finer men tolerate others’ small inconsistencies though not the large ones; the weak tolerate others’ large inconsistencies though not small ones.

Aesthetics

Art is a one-sided conversation with the unobserved.

To understand “progress”: all places we call ugly are both man-made and modern (Newark), never natural or historical (Rome).

Your silence is only informational if you can speak skillfully.

Almutanabbi boasted that he was the greatest of all Arab poets, but he said so in the greatest of all Arab poems.

Ethics

If you find any reason why you and someone are friends, you are not friends.

People reveal much more about themselves while lying than when they tell the truth.

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

It is a great compliment for an honest person to be mistaken for a crook by a crook.

We are most motivated to help those who need us the least.

To value a person, consider the difference between how impressive he or she was at the first encounter and the most recent one.

You can only convince people who think they can benefit from being convinced.

Trust people who make a living lying down or standing up more than those who do so sitting down.

Never take advice from a salesman, or any advice that benefits the advice giver.

Your duty is to scream those truths that one should shout but that are merely whispered.

It is easy for others, but not for you, to detect the asymmetry between what you gain and what you give by doing, writing, or saying.

Avoid calling heroes those who had no other choice.

Trust those who trust you and distrust those who are suspicious of others.

Multiplicative generosity: limit your generosity to those who, in turn, given the circumstances, would be equally generous toward others.

In a crowd of a hundred, 50 percent of the wealth, 90 percent of the imagination, and 100 percent of the intellectual courage will reside in a single person—not necessarily the same one.

Robustness And Antifragility

To understand how something works, figure out how to break it.

General principle: the solutions (on balance) need to be simpler than the problems.

The trick in life (and risk management) is to have as much respect for experience before one acquires said experience as one would after.

Robustness is progress without impatience.

When conflicted between two choices, take neither.

The problem with the idea of “learning from one’s mistakes” is that most of what people call mistakes aren’t mistakes.

Failure-resistant is achievable; failure-free is not.

The only valid political system is one that can handle an imbecile in power without suffering from it.

You can expect blowups and explosive errors in fields where there is a penalty for simplicity.

The Ludic Fallacy And Domain Dependency

Just as eating cow meat doesn’t turn you into a cow, studying philosophy doesn’t make you wiser.

Those who can’t do shouldn’t teach.

Ludic is Latin for “related to games”; the fallacy prevalent in The Black Swan about making life resemble games (or formal setups) with crisp rules rather than the reverse.
Domain dependence is when one acts in a certain way in an environment (say, the gym) and a different way in another.

Epistemology And Subtractive Knowledge

Change your anchor to what did not happen rather than what did happen.

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.

Knowledge is subtractive, not additive—what we subtract (reduction by what does not work, what not to do), not what we add (what to do).
The best way to spot a charlatan: someone (like a consultant or a stockbroker) who tells you what to do instead of what not to do.

They think that intelligence is about noticing things that are relevant (detecting patterns); in a complex world, intelligence consists in ignoring things that are irrelevant (avoiding false patterns).

In a conflict, the middle ground is least likely to be correct.

Happiness: we don’t know what it means, how to measure it, or how to reach it, but we know extremely well how to avoid unhappiness.

The imagination of the genius vastly surpasses his intellect; the intellect of the academic vastly surpasses his imagination.

The ideal trivium education, and the least harmful one to society and pupils, would be mathematics, logic, and Latin; a double dose of Latin authors to compensate for the severe loss of wisdom that comes from mathematics; just enough mathematics and logic to control verbiage and rhetoric.

The Scandal Of Prediction

A prophet is not someone with special visions, just someone blind to most of what others see.

The ancients knew very well that the only way to understand events was to cause them.

They would take forecasting more seriously if it were pointed out to them that in Semitic languages the words for “forecast” and “prophecy” are the same.

Being A Philosopher And Managing To Remain One

To become a philosopher, start by walking very slowly.

In twenty-five centuries, no human came along with the brilliance, depth, elegance, wit, and imagination to match Plato—to protect us from his legacy.

A philosopher uses logic without statistics, an economist uses statistics without logic, a physicist uses both.

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.

Conscious ignorance, if you can practice it, expands your world; it can make things infinite.

For the classics, philosophical insight was the product of a life of leisure; for us, a life of leisure can be the product of philosophical insight.

Let us find what risks we can measure and these are the risks we should be taking.

Economic Life And Other Very Vulgar Subjects

What they call “risk” I call opportunity; but what they call “low risk” opportunity I call sucker problem.

What makes us fragile is that institutions cannot have the same virtues (honor, truthfulness, courage, loyalty, tenacity) as individuals.

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

To have a great day:

Smile at a stranger,
Surprise someone by saying something unexpectedly nice,
Give some genuine attention to an elderly person,
Invite someone who doesn’t have many friends for coffee,
Humiliate an economist, publicly, or create deep anxiety inside a Harvard professor.

The Sage, The Weak, And The Magnificent

To be a person of virtue you need to be boringly virtuous in every single small action. To be a person of honour all you need is to be honourable in a few important things (risk your life or career or reputation for a just cause, say, or live up to your word when nobody else has the guts to do so).

The weak shows his strength and hides his weaknesses; the magnificent exhibits his weaknesses like ornaments.

Contra the prevailing belief, “success” isn’t being on top of a hierarchy, it is standing outside all hierarchies.

The magnificent believes half of what he hears and twice what he says.

Virtue is a sequence of small acts of omission. Honour and grandeur can be a single gutsy, momentous, and self-sacrificial act of commission.

When you cite some old wisdom-style quote and add “important truth,” “to remember,” or “something to live by,” you are not doing so because it is good, only because it is inapplicable. Had it been both good and applicable you would not have had to cite it. Wisdom that is hard to execute isn’t really wisdom.

The Implicit And The Explicit

You know you have influence when people start noticing your absence more than the presence of others.

The only people who think that real world experience doesn’t matter are those who never had real world experience.

A happier world is one in which everyone realizes that

It is not what you tell people, it is how you say it that makes them feel bad;
It is not what you do to them but how you make them look that gets them angry;
They should be the ones putting themselves in a specific category.

The general principle of antifragility: it is much better to do things you cannot explain than explain things you cannot do.

On The Varieties Of Love And Nonlove

At any stage, humans can thirst for money, knowledge, or love; sometimes for two, never for three.

Love without sacrifice is like theft.

Humans need to complain just as they need to breathe. Never stop them; just manipulate them by controlling what they complain about and supply them with reasons to complain. They will complain but be thankful.

A good foe is far more loyal, far more predictable, and, to the clever, far more useful than the most valuable admirer.

We often benefit from harm done to us by others, almost never from self-inflicted injuries.

The End

Wisdom isn’t about understanding things (and people); it is knowing what they can do to you.

Postface

My classical values make me advocate the triplet of erudition, elegance, and courage; against modernity’s phoniness, nerdiness, and philistinism.