The Bed of Procrustes

by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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  It is much less dangerous to think like a man of action than to act like a man of thought.

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  Literature comes alive when covering up vices, defects, weaknesses, and confusions; it dies with every trace of preaching.

  * It is also an indicator that he will imitate, “me, too” style, my business.

  THE UNIVERSAL AND THE PARTICULAR

  What I learned on my own I still remember.

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  Regular minds find similarities in stories (and situations); finer minds detect differences.

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  To grasp the difference between Universal and Particular, consider that some dress better to impress a single, specific person than an entire crowd.

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  We unwittingly amplify commonalities with friends, dissimilarities with strangers, and contrasts with enemies.

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  Many are so unoriginal they study history to find mistakes to repeat.

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  There is nothing deemed harmful (in general) that cannot be beneficial in some particular instances, and nothing deemed beneficial that cannot harm you in some circumstances. The more complex the system, the weaker the notion of Universal.

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  The fool generalizes the particular; the nerd particularizes the general; some do both; and the wise does neither.

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  You want to be yourself, idiosyncratic; the collective (school, rules, jobs, technology) wants you generic to the point of castration.

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  True love is the complete victory of the particular over the general, and the unconditional over the conditional.

  FOOLED BY RANDOMNESS

  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.

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  Corollary to Moore’s Law: every ten years, collective wisdom degrades by half.*

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  Never rid anyone of an illusion unless you can replace it in his mind with another illusion. (But don’t work too hard on it; the replacement illusion does not even have to be more convincing than the initial one.)

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  The tragedy is that much of what you think is random is in your control and, what’s worse, the opposite.

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  The fool views himself as more unique and others more generic; the wise views himself as more generic and others more unique.

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  What made medicine fool people for so long was that its successes were prominently displayed and its mistakes (literally) buried.

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  The sucker’s trap is when you focus on what you know and what others don’t know, rather than the reverse.

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  Medieval man was a cog in a wheel he did not understand; modern man is a cog in a complicated system he thinks he understands.

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  The calamity of the information age is that the toxicity of data increases much faster than its benefits.

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  The role of the media is best seen in the journey from Cato the Elder to a modern politician.* Do some extrapolation if you want to be scared.

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  Mental clarity is the child of courage, not the other way around.† Most info-Web-media-newspaper types have a hard time swallowing the idea that knowledge is reached (mostly) by removing junk from people’s heads.

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  Finer men tolerate others’ small inconsistencies though not the large ones; the weak tolerate others’ large inconsistencies though not small ones.

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  Randomness is indistinguishable from complicated, undetected, and undetectable order; but order itself is indistinguishable from artful randomness.

  * Moore’s Law stipulates that computational power doubles every eighteen months.

  * Say, Sarah Palin.

  † The biggest error since Socrates has been to believe that lack of clarity is the source of all our ills, not the result of them.

  AESTHETICS

  Art is a one-sided conversation with the unobserved.

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  The genius of Benoît Mandelbrot is in achieving aesthetic simplicity without having recourse to smoothness.

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  Beauty is enhanced by unashamed irregularities; magnificence by a façade of blunder.

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  To understand “progress”: all places we call ugly are both man-made and modern (Newark), never natural or historical (Rome).

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  We love imperfection, the right kind of imperfection; we pay up for original art and typo-laden first editions.

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  Most people need to wait for another person to say “this is beautiful art” to say “this is beautiful art”; some need to wait for two or more.

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  Almutanabbi boasted that he was the greatest of all Arab poets, but he said so in the greatest of all Arab poems.

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  Wit seduces by signaling intelligence without nerdiness.

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  In classical renderings of prominent figures, males are lean and females are plump; in modern photographs, the opposite.

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  Just as no monkey is as good-looking as the ugliest of humans, no academic is worthier than the worst of the creators.

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  If you want to annoy a poet, explain his poetry.

  ETHICS

  If you find any reason why you and someone are friends, you are not friends.

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  My biggest problem with modernity may lie in the growing separation of the ethical and the legal.*

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  Life’s beauty: the kindest act toward you in your life may come from an outsider not interested in reciprocation.*

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  We are most motivated to help those who need us the least.

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  To value a person, consider the difference between how impressive he or she was at the first encounter and the most recent one.

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  Meditation is a way to be narcissistic without hurting anyone.

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  True humility is when you can surprise yourself more than others; the rest is either shyness or good marketing.

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  We find it to be in extremely bad taste for individuals to boast of their accomplishments; but when countries do so we call it “national pride.”

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  You can only convince people who think they can benefit from being convinced.

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  Greatness starts with the replacement of hatred with polite disdain.

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  Trust people who make a living lying down or standing up more than those who do so sitting down. The tragedy of virtue is that the more obvious, boring, unoriginal, and sermonizing the proverb, the harder it is to implement.

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  Even the cheapest misers can be generous with advice.

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  If you lie to me, keep lying; don’t hurt me by suddenly telling the truth.

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  Don’t trust a man who needs an income—except if it is minimum wage.*

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  You may outlive your strength, never your wisdom.

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  Weak men act to satisfy their needs, stronger men their duties.

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  Religions and ethics have evolved from promising heaven if you do good, to promising heaven while you do good, to making you promise to do good.

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  Avoid calling heroes those who had no other choice.

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  There are those who will thank you for what you gave them and others who will blame you for what you did not give them.

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  Ethical man accords his profession to his beliefs, instead of according his beliefs to his profession. This has been rarer and rarer since the Middle Ages.

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  I trust everyone except those who tell me th
ey are trustworthy.

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  People often need to suspend their self-promotion, and have someone in their lives they do not need to impress. This explains dog ownership.

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  Pure generosity is when you help the ingrate. Every other form is self-serving.*

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  I wonder if crooks can conceive that honest people can be shrewder than they.

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  In Proust there is a character, Morel, who demonizes Nissim Bernard, a Jew who lent him money, and becomes anti-Semitic just so he can escape the feeling of gratitude.

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  Promising someone good luck as a reward for good deeds sounds like a bribe—perhaps the remnant of an archaic, pre-deontic pre-classical morality.

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  The difference between magnificence and arrogance is in what one does when nobody is looking.

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  The nation-state: apartheid without political incorrectness.

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  In a crowd of a hundred, 50 percent of the wealth, 90 percent of the imagination, and 100 percent of the intellectual courage will reside in a single person—not necessarily the same one.

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  Just as dyed hair makes older men less attractive, it is what you do to hide your weaknesses that makes them repugnant.

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  For soldiers, we use the term “mercenary,” but we absolve employees of responsibility with “everybody needs to make a living.”

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  English does not distinguish between arrogant-up (irreverence toward the temporarily powerful) and arrogant-down (directed at the small guy).

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  Someone from your social class who becomes poor affects you more than thousands of starving ones outside of it.

  * Former U.S. Treasury secretary “bankster” Robert Rubin, perhaps the biggest thief in history, broke no law. The difference between legal and ethical increases in a complex system … then blows it up.

  * The flip side: the worst pain inflicted on you will come from someone who at some point in your life cared about you.

  * Those in corporate captivity would do anything to “feed a family.”

  * Kantian ethics.

  ROBUSTNESS AND FRAGILITY

  You are only secure if you can lose your fortune without the additional worse insult of having to become humble.*

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  To test someone’s robustness to reputational errors, ask a man in front of an audience if he is “still doing poorly” or if he is “still losing money” and watch his reaction.

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  Robustness is progress without impatience.

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  When conflicted between two choices, take neither.

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  Nation-states like war; city-states like commerce; families like stability; and individuals like entertainment.

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  Robust is when you care more about the few who like your work than the multitude who dislike it (artists); fragile when you care more about the few who dislike your work than the multitude who like it (politicians).

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  The rationalist imagines an imbecile-free society; the empiricist an imbecile-proof one, or, even better, a rationalist-proof one.

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  Academics are only useful when they try to be useless (say, as in mathematics and philosophy) and dangerous when they try to be useful.

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  For the robust, an error is information; for the fragile, an error is an error.

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  The best test of robustness to reputational damage is your emotional state (fear, joy, boredom) when you get an email from a journalist.

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  The main disadvantage of being a writer, particularly in Britain, is that there is nothing you can do in public or private that would damage your reputation.

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  Passionate hate (by nations and individuals) ends by rotation to another subject of hate; mediocrity cannot handle more than one enemy. This makes warring statelings with shifting alliances and enmities a robust system.

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  I find it inconsistent (and corrupt) to dislike big government while favoring big business—but (alas) not the reverse.

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  How often have you arrived one, three, or six hours late on a transatlantic flight as opposed to one, three, or six hours early? This explains why deficits tend to be larger, rarely smaller, than planned.

  * My great-great-great-great-great grandfather’s rule.

  THE LUDIC FALLACY AND DOMAIN DEPENDENCE*

  Sports are commoditized and, alas, prostituted randomness.

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  When you beat up someone physically, you get exercise and stress relief; when you assault him verbally on the Internet, you just harm yourself. Just as smooth surfaces, competitive sports, and specialized work fossilize mind and body, competitive academia fossilizes the soul.

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  They agree that chess training only improves chess skills but disagree that classroom training (almost) only improves classroom skills.

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  Upon arriving at the hotel in Dubai, the businessman had a porter carry his luggage; I later saw him lifting free weights in the gym.

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  Games were created to give nonheroes the illusion of winning. In real life, you don’t know who really won or lost (except too late), but you can tell who is heroic and who is not.

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  I suspect that IQ, SAT, and school grades are tests designed by nerds so they can get high scores in order to call each other intelligent.*

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  They read Gibbon’s Decline and Fall on an eReader but refuse to drink Château Lynch-Bages in a Styrofoam cup.

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  My best example of the domain dependence of our minds, from my recent visit to Paris: at lunch in a French restaurant, my friends ate the salmon and threw away the skin; at dinner, at a sushi bar, the very same friends ate the skin and threw away the salmon.

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  Fragility: we have been progressively separating human courage from warfare, allowing wimps with computer skills to kill people without the slightest risk to their lives.

  * Ludic is Latin for “related to games”; the fallacy prevalent in The Black Swan about making life resemble games (or formal setups) with crisp rules rather than the reverse. Domain dependence is when one acts in a certain way in an environment (say, the gym) and a different way in another.

  * Smart and wise people who score low on IQ tests, or patently intellectually defective ones, like former U.S. president George W. Bush, who score high on them (130), are testing the test and not the reverse.

  EPISTEMOLOGY AND SUBTRACTIVE KNOWLEDGE

  Since Plato, Western thought and the theory of knowledge have focused on the notions of True-False; as commendable as it was, it is high time to shift the concern to Robust-Fragile, and social epistemology to the more serious problem of Sucker-Nonsucker.

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  The problem of knowledge is that there are many more books on birds written by ornithologists than books on birds written by birds and books on ornithologists written by birds.

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  The perfect sucker understands that pigs can stare at pearls but doesn’t realize he can be in an analog situation.

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  It takes extraordinary wisdom and self-control to accept that many things have a logic we do not understand that is smarter than our own.

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  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).*

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  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).

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  Happiness; we don’t know what it means, how to measure it, or how to reach it, but we know extremely well how to avoid unhappiness.


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  The imagination of the genius vastly surpasses his intellect; the intellect of the academic vastly surpasses his imagination.

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  The ideal trivium education, and the least harmful one to society and pupils, would be mathematics, logic, and Latin; a double dose of Latin authors to compensate for the severe loss of wisdom that comes from mathematics; just enough mathematics and logic to control verbiage and rhetoric.

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  The four most influential moderns: Darwin, Marx, Freud, and (the productive) Einstein were scholars but not academics. It has always been hard to do genuine—and nonperishable—work within institutions.

  * The best way to spot a charlatan: someone (like a consultant or a stockbroker) who tells you what to do instead of what not to do.

  THE SCANDAL OF PREDICTION

  A prophet is not someone with special visions, just someone blind to most of what others see.

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  For the ancients, forecasting historical events was an insult to the God(s); for me, it is an insult to man—that is, for some, to science.

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  The ancients knew very well that the only way to understand events was to cause them.

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  Anyone voicing a forecast or expressing an opinion without something at risk has some element of phoniness. Unless he risks going down with the ship this would be like watching an adventure movie.

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  They would take forecasting more seriously if it were pointed out to them that in Semitic languages the words for forecast and “prophecy” are the same.