The Bed of Procrustes Book Review
This book is filled with aphorisms – an observation that contains a general truth. Basically a rule of thumb. Usually true, but not always.
I love aphorisms, proverbs, sayings, tweets as they distill wisdom in condensed form, in easily disgestible bite sized chunks. The book is similar but longer than Fragments by Heraclitus.
In the author’s words the book is about:
These are stand-alone compressed thoughts revolving around my main idea of how we deal, and should deal, with what we don’t.
Must read if you looking for wisdom with a high return on your time invested. Or if you like me love aphorisms.
Read. Learn. Enjoy.
The Bed of Procrustes Book Summary
Note: This summary is made up of my notes, thoughts and highlights of important passages while reading the book. I keep updating the summary when I revisit it, and occasionally may edit it to reduce summary length. Don’t be surprised if it has changed between visits. The author’s words are in normal font, while my interpretations are in italics.
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.
People are much less interested in what you are trying to show them than in what you are trying to hide.
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.
Education makes the wise slightly wiser, but it makes the fool vastly more dangerous.
In your prayers substitute “Protect us from evil” with “Protect us from those who improve things for a salary.”
It is the appearance of inconsistency, and not its absence, that makes people attractive.
It is a very powerful manipulation to let others win the small battles.
Matters Ontological
Life is about execution rather than purpose.
We need to feel a little bit lost somewhere, physically or intellectually, at least once a day.
The ultimate freedom lies in not having to explain why you did something.
You exist if and only if you are free to do things without a visible objective, with no justification and, above all, outside the dictatorship of someone else’s narrative.
The fewer the gods, the greater the dogma and theological intolerance.
Chance, Success, Happiness, and Stoicism
You don’t become completely free by just avoiding to be a slave; you also need to avoid becoming a master.
Read nothing from the past one hundred years; eat no fruits from the past one thousand years; drink nothing from the past four thousand years (just wine and water); but talk to no ordinary man over forty.
A man without a heroic bent starts dying at the age of thirty.
Karl Marx, a visionary, figured out that you can control a slave much better by convincing him he is an employee.
Charming and Less Charming Sucker Problems
It seems that it is the most unsuccessful people who give the most advice, particularly for writing and financial matters.
Rumors are only valuable when they are denied.
There are two types of people: those who try to win and those who try to win arguments. They are never the same.
Never show a risk number, even if it is right.
I need to keep reminding myself that a truly independent thinker may look like an accountant.
Theseus, or Living the Paleo Life
The three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary.
My only measure of success is how much time you have to kill.
Any book not worth rereading isn’t worth reading.
You have a real life if and only if you do not compete with anyone in any of your pursuits.
Only in recent history has “working hard” signaled pride rather than shame for lack of talent, finesse, and, mostly, sprezzatura.
Modernity replaced process with result and the relational with the transactional.
Some ideas are born as you write them down, others become dead.
Their idea of the sabbatical is to work six days and rest for one; my idea of the sabbatical is to work for (part of) a day and rest for six.
Life is about early detection of the reversal point beyond which your own belongings (say, a house, country house, car, or business) start owning you.
Most modern efficiencies are deferred punishment.
We are hunters; we are only truly alive in those moments when we improvise; no schedule, just small surprises and stimuli from the environment.
You exist in full if and only if your conversation (or writings) cannot be easily reconstructed with clips from other conversations.
Real life (vita beata) is when your choices correspond to your duties.
Technology is at its best when it is invisible.
The Republic of Letters
Writing is the art of repeating oneself without anyone noticing.
Writers are remembered for their best work, politicians for their worst mistakes, and businessmen are almost never remembered.
You need to keep reminding yourself of the obvious: charm lies in the unsaid, the unwritten, and the undisplayed. It takes mastery to control silence.
A good maxim allows you to have the last word without even starting a conversation.
A genius is someone with flaws harder to imitate than his qualities.
Some books cannot be summarized (real literature, poetry); some can be compressed to about ten pages; the majority to zero pages.
It’s much harder to write a book review for a book you’ve read than for a book you haven’t read.
The Universal and the Particular
What I learned on my own I still remember.
For an honest person, freedom requires having no friends; and, one step above, sainthood requires having no family.
Fooled by Randomness
The tragedy is that much of what you think is random is in your control and, what’s worse, the opposite.
What made medicine fool people for so long was that its successes were prominently displayed and its mistakes (literally) buried.
Mental clarity is the child of courage, not the other way around.
Probability is the intersection of the most rigorous mathematics and the messiest of life.
Aesthetics
Your silence is only informational if you can speak skillfully.
Wit seduces by signaling intelligence without nerdiness.
Just as no monkey is as good-looking as the ugliest of humans, no academic is worthier than the worst of the creators.
Ethics
Biggest problem with modernity may lie in the growing separation of the ethical and the legal.
Life’s beauty: the kindest act toward you in your life may come from an outsider not interested in reciprocation.
We are most motivated to help those who need us the least.
If you are uncompromising or intolerant with BS you lose friends. But you will also make friends, better friends.
Meditation is a way to be narcissistic without hurting anyone.
The difference between the politician and the philosopher is that, in a debate, the politician doesn’t try to convince the other side, only the audience.
Another marker for charlatans: they don’t voice opinions that can get them in trouble.
Trust people who make a living lying down or standing up more than those who do so sitting down.
Any action one takes with the aim of winning an award, any award, corrupts to the core.
Trust those who are greedy for money a thousand times more than those who are greedy for credentials.
The bottom half has typically been screwed by the middle class. That’s the entire story of Rome.
The Ludic Fallacy and Domain Dependence
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.
Those who can’t do shouldn’t teach.
Epistemology and Subtractive Knowledge
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).
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 Scandal of Prediction
A prophet is not someone with special visions, just someone blind to most of what others see.
Being a Philosopher and Managing to Remain One
To become a philosopher, start by walking very slowly.
To be a philosopher is to know through long walks, by reasoning, and reasoning only, a priori, what others can only potentially learn from their mistakes, crises, accidents, and bankruptcies – that is, a posteriori.
Conscious ignorance, if you can practice it, expands your world; it can make things infinite.
For the classics, philosophical insight was the product of a life of leisure; for us, a life of leisure can be the product of philosophical insight.
Let us find what risks we can measure and these are the risks we should be taking.
Economic Life and Other Very Vulgar Subjects
A mathematician starts with a problem and creates a solution; a consultant starts by offering a “solution” and creates a problem.
Financial inequalities are ephemeral, one crash away from reallocation; inequalities of status are there to stay.
There are three types of large corporations:
- those about to go bankrupt,
- those that are bankrupt and hide it,
- those that are bankrupt and don’t know it.
Economics is like a dead star that still seems to produce light; but you know it is dead.
What makes us fragile is that institutions cannot have the same virtues (honor, truthfulness, courage, loyalty, tenacity) as individuals.
It is much easier to scam people for billions than for just millions.
The curious mind embraces science; the gifted and sensitive, the arts; the practical, business; the leftover becomes an economist.
Never take investment advice from someone who has to work for a living.
The agency problem drives every company, thanks to the buildup of hidden risks, to maximal fragility.
To have a great day:
- Smile at a stranger
- surprise someone by saying something unexpectedly nice
- give some genuine attention to an elderly person
- invite someone who doesn’t have many friends for coffee
- humiliate an economist.
Bring the good news in trickles, the bad news in lumps.
The Sage, the Weak, and the Magnificent
Those who have nothing to prove never say that they have nothing to prove.
To be a person of virtue you need to be boringly virtuous in every single small action.
To be a person of honor all you need is to be honorable in a few important things.
The mediocre regret their words more than their silence; finer men regret their silence more than their words; the magnificent has nothing to regret.
The first, and hardest, step to wisdom: avert the standard assumption that people know what they want.
Virtue is a sequence of small acts of omission. Honour and grandeur can be a single gutsy, momentous, and self-sacrificial act of commission.
You are free in inverse proportion to the number of people to whom you can’t say “f* you.”
But you are honorable in proportion to the number of people to whom you can say “f* you” with impunity but don’t.
Wisdom that is hard to execute isn’t really wisdom.
The Implicit and the Explicit
You know you have influence when people start noticing your absence more than the presence of others.
Complaints don’t deliver complaints, they mostly reveal your weakness.
Swearing on occasion, amid a rich vocabulary, is costly signaling that you are self-owned.
If your beard is gray, produce heuristics but explain the “why.”
If your beard is white, skip the why, just say what should be done.
The general principle of antifragility: it is much better to do things you cannot explain than explain things you cannot do.
On the Varieties of Love and Nonlove
At any stage, humans can thirst for money, knowledge, or love; sometimes for two, never for three.
Love without sacrifice is like theft.
Never stop them; just manipulate them by controlling what they complain about and supply them with reasons to complain. They will complain but be thankful.
When people call you intelligent it is almost always because they agree with you. Otherwise they just call you arrogant.
The End
The only problem with the last laugh is that the winner has to laugh alone.
More information means more delusions.
Aphorisms, maxims, proverbs, short sayings, even, to some extent, epigrams are the earliest literary form – often integrated into what we now call poetry.
Aphorisms carry the cognitive compactness of the sound bite with some show of bravado in the ability of the author to compress powerful ideas in a handful of words – particularly in an oral format.
Those who could produce powerful thoughts in such a way were invested with talismanic powers.
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