Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a mathematician and securities trader who also waxes philosophical. The last of his books that I am reading is entitled “The Bed of Procrustes.” Now the title alone would guarantee I would want to know about it. In Greek Mythology, Procrustes is one of those idiosyncratic monsters that the Hero, such as Heracles or as in this case Theseus must conquer in order to eliminate Chaos and promote civilization or something like that. Freud made much soup from this sort of thing.
So, Procrustes had a bed that he let travelers sleep on at night. The catch was that if the sleeper was shorter than the bed then Procrustes would stretch him to the correct size. And if the sleeper was longer than the bed then he would trim him down to fit. According to the story up until Theseus arrived the bed-sleeper length optimization procedure had been 100% fatal to the “sleeper.” And when Theseus shows up he turns the tables (more furniture!) on Procrustes and performs a bed fitting exercise on him.
Taleb is using the metaphor of Procrustes Bed to represent how often in life humans look at situations from the wrong point of view. And he returns to one of the oldest formats to address his subject, the aphorism or proverb or wise saying.
The Bed of Procrustes is one hundred and fifty-six pages long. His other books like the “Black Swan” are four or five times as long. His next book will be written on the back of a match book cover. I approve of this trend.
I’ve started reading them. Some of them are pretty good. I’m comparing them to those other aphoristic writers Solomon, Confucious and Robert A. Heinlein (through the agency of his alter ego Lazarus Long). The emphasis is different. Taleb is talking about life from the point of view of a savvy operator not a philosopher or a saint. He has more in common with Lazarus Long. But there are many interesting observations and some of them are original in some aspect. When I finish reading Procrustes Bed and do some comparison to his peers I’ll probably have more to say, but one thing that occurs to me is to put out a regular quote of the day (week?) from someone. I’m sure it will make me appear wiser. Here’s the first one:
“What fools call “wasting time” is most often the best investment.”
Shakespeare has Polonius declare that brevity is the soul of wit. Polonius is a windbag so you have to wonder whether Old Will believed this statement or not. But I find that, many times, less is decidedly more, especially when you’re under the gun to fit in blog posting into a busy day. I see that many bloggers churn out a couple of thousand words in a post. I like to put up about five hundred or so (and sometimes less). I know everybody is busy nowadays and I don’t want to impose so let’s stop right here.