The Bed of Procrustes by Nassim Taleb
Three Point Summary | Aphorisms from one of the great thinkers of our time
“If you get easily bored, it means that your BS detector is functioning properly;
if you forget (some) things, it means that your mind knows how to filter;
and if you feel sadness, it means that you are human.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb a Lebanese-American renowned for his work as a writer, trader, statistician, and risk analyst. Also multilingual, he is one of the most influential thinkers of our time thanks to his contrarianism and wit.
Whenever I read Taleb it’s strange, because it’s like getting punched in the nose by a book but being happy about it. His words often turn my understanding of topics upside down in a blunt but sophisticated way.
The following is a collection of maxims that stuck with me from his book The Bed of Procrustes:
“Education makes the wise slightly wiser, but it makes the fool vastly more dangerous.”
“The best revenge on a liar is to convince him that you believe what he said.”
“Never say no twice if you mean it.”
“Your reputation is harmed the most by what you say to defend it.”
“The main reason to go to school is to learn how not to think like a professor.”
“People feel deep anxiety finding out that someone they thought was stupid is actually more intelligent than they are.”
“For life to be really fun, what you fear should line up with what you desire.”
“Atheists are just modern versions of religious fundamentalists: both take religion too literally.”
“Work destroys your soul by stealthily invading your brain during the hours not officially spent working; be selective about professions.”
“Most of what they call humility is successfully disguised arrogance.”
“The opposite of success isn’t failure; it is name-dropping.”
“A man without a heroic bent starts dying at the age of thirty.”
“We need to feel a little bit lost somewhere, physically or intellectually, at least once a day.”
“The fastest way to become rich is to socialize with the poor; the fastest way to become poor is to socialize with the rich.”
“For most, success is the harmful passage from the camp of the hating to the camp of the hated.”
“People focus on role models; it is more effective to find antimodels—people you don’t want to resemble when you grow up.”
“Universities have been progressing from providing scholarship for a small fee into selling degrees at a large cost.”
“There are two types of people: those who try to win and those who try to win arguments. They are never the same.”
“A good book gets better on the second reading. A great book on the third. Any book not worth rereading isn’t worth reading.”
“If you need to listen to music while walking, don’t walk; and please don’t listen to music.”
“Skills that transfer: street fights, off-path hiking, seduction, broad erudition. Skills that don’t: school, games, sports, laboratory—what’s reduced and organized.”
“Writing is the art of repeating oneself without anyone noticing.”
“Supposedly, if you are uncompromising or intolerant with BS you lose friends. But you will also make friends, better friends.”
“There is a distinction between expressive hypochondria and literature, just as there is one between self-help and philosophy.”
“Unless we manipulate our surroundings, we have as little control over what and whom we think about as we do over the muscles of our hearts.”
“Your duty is to scream those truths that one should shout but that are merely whispered.”
“The tragedy is that much of what you think is random is in your control and, what’s worse, the opposite.”
“The sucker’s trap is when you focus on what you know and what others don’t know, rather than the reverse.”
“Wit seduces by signaling intelligence without nerdiness.”
“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).”
“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).”
“To have a great day: 1) Smile at a stranger, 2) surprise someone by saying something unexpectedly nice, 3) give some genuine attention to an elderly person, 4) invite someone who doesn’t have many friends for coffee.”
“Magnificence is defined by the intersection of reluctant praise by your enemies and criticism by your friends, greatness by their union.”
“People are more convincing when they don’t seem to care.”
“The first, and hardest, step to wisdom: avert the standard assumption that people know what they want.”
“Language is largely made to show off, gossip, confuse people, delude them, charm them, seduce them, scare them, and exploit them. And, as a side effect, convey information. Just a side effect, you know.”
“Jokes cannot be jokes unless they are offensive somewhere.”
“When you say something, you think you are just saying something, but you are largely communicating why you had to say it.”
“Counter to the common discourse, more information means more delusions: our detection of false patterns is growing faster and faster as a side effect of modernity and the information age: there is this mismatch between the messy randomness of the information-rich current world, with its complex interactions, and our intuitions of events, derived in a simpler ancestral habitat. Our mental architecture is at an increased mismatch with the world in which we live.”
“My classical values make me advocate the triplet of erudition, elegance, and courage; against modernity’s phoniness, nerdiness, and philistinism.”