Free The Bed of Procrustes by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

PROCRUSTES
    Procrustes, in Greek mythology, was the cruel owner of a small estate in Corydalus in Attica, on the way between Athens and Eleusis, where the mystery rites were performed. Procrustes had a peculiar sense of hospitality: he abducted travelers, provided them with a generous dinner, then invited them to spend the night in a rather special bed. He wanted the bed to fit the traveler to perfection. Those who were too tall had their legs chopped off with a sharp hatchet; those who were too short were stretched (his name was said to be Damastes, or Polyphemon, but he was nicknamed Procrustes, which meant “the stretcher”).
    In the purest of poetic justice, Procrustes was hoisted by his own petard. One of the travelers happened to be the fearless Theseus, who slayed the Minotaur later in his heroic career. After the customary dinner, Theseus made Procrustes lie in his own bed. Then, to make him fit in it to the customary perfection, he decapitated him. Theseus thus followed Hercules’s method of paying back in kind.
    In more sinister versions (such as the one in Pseudo-Apollodorus’s
Bibliotheca
), Procrustes owned two beds, onesmall, one large; he made short victims lie in the large bed, and the tall victims in the short one.
    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. Further, we seem unaware of this backward fitting, much like tailors who take great pride in delivering the perfectly fitting suit—but do so by surgically altering the limbs of their customers. For instance, few realize that we are changing the brains of schoolchildren through medication in order to make them adjust to the curriculum, rather than the reverse.
    Since aphorisms lose their charm whenever explained, I only hint for now at the central theme of this book—I relegate further discussions to the postface. These are stand-alone compressed thoughts revolving around my main idea of
how we deal, and should deal, with what we don’t know
, matters more deeply discussed in my books
The Black Swan
and
Fooled by Randomness
. *
    * My use of the metaphor of the Procrustes bed isn’t just about putting something in the wrong box; 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
    The person you are the most afraid to contradict is yourself.
    –
    An idea starts to be interesting when you get scared of taking it to its logical conclusion.
    –
    Pharmaceutical companies are better at inventing diseases that match existing drugs, rather than inventing drugs to match existing diseases.
    –
    To understand the liberating effect of asceticism, consider that losing all your fortune is much less painful than losing only half of it.
    –
    To bankrupt a fool, give him information.
    –
    Academia is to knowledge what prostitution is to love; close enough on the surface but, to the nonsucker, not exactly the same thing. *
    –
    In science you need to understand the world; in business you need others to misunderstand it.
    –
    I suspect that they put Socrates to death because there is something terribly unattractive, alienating, and nonhuman in thinking with too much clarity.
    –
    Education makes the wise slightly wiser, but it makes the fool vastly more dangerous.
    –
    The test of originality for an idea is not the absence of one single predecessor but the presence of multiple but incompatible ones.
    –
    Modernity’s double punishment is to make us both age prematurely and live longer.
    –
    An erudite is someone who displays less than he knows;