Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a mathematician and securities trader who also waxes philosophical.\u00a0 The last of his books that I am reading is entitled \u201cThe Bed of Procrustes.\u201d\u00a0 Now the title alone would guarantee I would want to know about it.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Freud made much soup from this sort of thing.<\/p>\n
So, Procrustes had a bed that he let travelers sleep on at night.\u00a0 The catch was that if the sleeper was shorter than the bed then Procrustes would stretch him to the correct size.\u00a0 And if the sleeper was longer than the bed then he would trim him down to fit.\u00a0 According to the story up until Theseus arrived the bed-sleeper length optimization procedure had been 100% fatal to the \u201csleeper.\u201d\u00a0 And when Theseus shows up he turns the tables (more furniture!) on Procrustes and performs a bed fitting exercise on him.<\/p>\n
Taleb is using the metaphor of Procrustes Bed to represent how often in life humans look at situations from the wrong point of view.\u00a0 And he returns to one of the oldest formats to address his subject, the aphorism or proverb or wise saying.<\/p>\n
The Bed of Procrustes is one hundred and fifty-six pages long.\u00a0 His other books like the \u201cBlack Swan\u201d are four or five times as long. \u00a0His next book will be written on the back of a match book cover.\u00a0 I approve of this trend.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve started reading them.\u00a0 Some of them are pretty good.\u00a0 I\u2019m comparing them to those other aphoristic writers Solomon, Confucious and Robert A. Heinlein (through the agency of his alter ego Lazarus Long).\u00a0 The emphasis is different.\u00a0 Taleb is talking about life from the point of view of a savvy operator not a philosopher or a saint.\u00a0 He has more in common with Lazarus Long.\u00a0 But there are many interesting observations and some of them are original in some aspect.\u00a0 When I finish reading Procrustes Bed and do some comparison to his peers I\u2019ll 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.\u00a0 I\u2019m sure it will make me appear wiser.\u00a0 Here\u2019s the first one:<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat fools call \u201cwasting time\u201d is most often the best investment.\u201d<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n Shakespeare has Polonius declare that brevity is the soul of wit.\u00a0 Polonius is a windbag so you have to wonder whether Old Will believed this statement or not.\u00a0 But I find that, many times, less is decidedly more, especially when you\u2019re under the gun to fit in blog posting into a busy day.\u00a0 I see that many bloggers churn out a couple of thousand words in a post.\u00a0 I like to put up about five hundred or so (and sometimes less).\u00a0 I know everybody is busy nowadays and I don\u2019t want to impose so let\u2019s stop right here.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a mathematician and securities trader who also waxes philosophical.\u00a0 The last of his books that I am reading is entitled \u201cThe<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[241,701,237],"tags":[703,709,92,710,702,706,711,568,704,705,708,707],"class_list":["post-2173","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-reviews","category-quote-of-the-day","category-reviews","tag-aphorisms","tag-confucious","tag-heinlein","tag-lazarus-long","tag-nassim-nicholas-taleb","tag-proverbs","tag-robert-a-heinlein","tag-solomon","tag-the-bed-of-procrustes","tag-the-black-swan","tag-wisdom","tag-wise-sayings"],"yoast_head":"\n