The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (Incerto)

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		The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (Incerto)
		The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (Incerto)

With fifty percent more material than the hardcover, this expanded edition of The Bed of Procrustes is a standalone book in Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s landmark Incerto series, an investigation of opacity, luck, uncertainty, probability, human error, risk, and decision-making in a world we don’t understand. The other books in the series are Fooled by Randomness, The Black Swan, and Antifragile.

By the author of the modern classic The Black Swan, this collection of aphorisms and meditations expresses his major ideas in ways you least expect.

The Bed of Procrustes takes its title from Greek mythology: the story of a man who made his visitors fit his bed to perfection by either stretching them or cutting their limbs. It represents Taleb’s view of modern civilization’s hubristic side effects—modifying humans to satisfy technology, blaming reality for not fitting economic models, inventing diseases to sell drugs, defining intelligence as what can be tested in a classroom, and convincing people that employment is not slavery.

Playful and irreverent, these aphorisms will surprise you by exposing self-delusions you have been living with but never recognized.

With a rare combination of pointed wit and potent wisdom, Taleb plows through human illusions, contrasting the classical values of courage, elegance, and erudition against the modern diseases of nerdiness, philistinism, and phoniness.

“Taleb’s crystalline nuggets of thought stand alone like esoteric poems.”—Financial Times


From the Trade Paperback edition.

网友对The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (Incerto)的评论

很搞笑，有时会不懂他为什么这么说，比如，"Don't hire someone who gives you more than one reason why he wants the job."原文可能不是每个字这样但大致就这样，然后和我男人讨论，就觉得像这些quotes拿出来和别人讨论很有意思。

两年前买的，现在来写这个评论。
严格地想象，作者写下这些quotes的时候应该是板着脸的，这些引得我前仰后合的句子并非插科打诨，如今想不起具体内容。只想说，我是个抑郁症患者，能让我大笑的quotes不多，向Taleb的诙谐致敬。

There is no intermediate state between ice and water but there is one between life and death: employment. 这也太扯了吧，是恶搞吗？

Taleb has made a living showing lack of robustness and fragility in our use of knowledge. Indeed, Taleb's discussion and prediction of the fiscal crises of the late aughts was totally earned, and he was aptly able to show in "The Black Swan" and "Fooled by Randomness" that epistemological humility was direly needed in both science reporting and economics. This book takes these trends and turns them into aphorism. Taking cues from Georg Christoph Lichtenberg and E.M. Cioran more than Nietzsche, Taleb's aphorisms are pithy and common sensical. Indeed, perhaps, often too common sensical.

This is short book, easy to read, and even when you disagree with Taleb, he is humorous enough not to lose you. Indeed, I find his aphoristic writing to be easier to read stylistically than his more journalistic and extended think piece works. In many senses, these aphorisms prove that Taleb is a practical philosopher, but not necessarily a precise or consistent one. Yet the theme of the need of epistemic humility and the robustness of moral and aesthetic visions versus knowledge claims dominate the value.

Once again, Taleb is presenting the reader with some brilliant observations on life, process, and product! Having read "The Black Swan" and "Fooled by Randomness, "The Bed of Procrustes" offers the reader additional wisdoms, from which to draw a parallel between current challenges, hypothetical solutions, and that "grey space" in between. To wit: "The calamity of the information age is that the toxicity of data increases much faster than its benefits." Deeply reflective, subtly humorous, and thoroughly entertaining, it will become another Taleb book you can share with friends, colleagues--even relatives, on "both sides of the aisle!"

Taleb has a lot of great wisdom in here that I wish I would have encountered much earlier in life. This is a book I will be sharing with my children some day. It makes a lot of wise perspectives very digestible, and easily approached/absorbed. I think his phrasing and careful choice of words is also a great reminder to be as succinct and expedient as one can. I have been re-visiting this book frequently since I got it, and will likely continue to do so until it's so worn I need to order another copy. This author definitely takes a more confrontational and slightly abrasive stance to some naturally controversial subject matter in his other works. HOWEVER, do not allow the arguments and perception of his attitudes in regards to his other professional endeavors turn you away from this work. Regardless of your beliefs or conclusions about his views on statistical modeling and economics, this work is brilliant, brief, and well worth the time and money you would spend on it. I'm actually going to be ordering multiple copies as gifts for colleagues and close friends.

This book is all aphorisms bunched into chapters by topic. So no one story line or idea to follow as in his other books. At times I played a game trying to read the first part of an aphorism and guess the rest. Never got it. Being Taleb's work they are much cleverer than I am and very thought provoking. Short and enjoyable reading.

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