Every aphorism here is about a Procrustean bed of sorts—we humans, facing limits of knowledge, and things we do not observe, the unseen and the unknown, resolve the tension by squeezing life and the world into crisp commoditized ideas, reductive categories, specific vocabularies, and prepackaged narratives, which, on the occasion, has explosive consequences. Further, we seem unaware of this backward fitting, much like tailors who take great pride in delivering the perfectly fitting suit—but do so by surgically altering the limbs of their customers. For instance, few realize that we are changing the brains of schoolchildren through medication in order to make them adjust to the curriculum, rather than the reverse.
Since aphorisms lose their charm whenever explained, I only hint for now at the central theme of this book—I relegate further discussions to the postface. These are stand-alone compressed thoughts revolving around my main idea of how we deal, and should deal, with what we don’t know, matters more deeply discussed in my books The Black Swan and Fooled by Randomness.*
* My use of the metaphor of the Procrustes bed isn’t just about putting something in the wrong box; it’s mostly that inverse operation of changing the wrong variable, here the person rather than the bed. Note that every failure of what we call “wisdom” (coupled with technical proficiency) can be reduced to a Procrustean bed situation.
An idea starts to be interesting when you get scared of taking it to its logical conclusion.
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Pharmaceutical companies are better at inventing diseases that match existing drugs, rather than inventing drugs to match existing diseases.
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I suspect that they put Socrates to death because there is something terribly unattractive, alienating, and nonhuman in thinking with too much clarity.
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Education makes the wise slightly wiser, but it makes the fool vastly more dangerous.
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An erudite is someone who displays less than he knows; a journalist or consultant, the opposite.
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Those who think religion is about “belief” don’t understand religion, and don’t understand belief.
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Don’t talk about “progress” in terms of longevity, safety, or comfort before comparing zoo animals to those in the wilderness.
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Your reputation is harmed the most by what you say to defend it.
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Most of what they call humility is successfully disguised arrogance.
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Usually, what we call a “good listener” is someone with skillfully polished indifference.
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Some people are only funny when they try to be serious.
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There is no intermediate state between ice and water but there is one between life and death: employment.
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You cannot express the holy in terms made for the profane, but you can discuss the profane in terms made for the holy.
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Atheism (materialism) means treating the dead as if they were unborn. I won’t. By accepting the sacred, you reinvent religion.
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If you can’t spontaneously detect (without analyzing) the difference between sacred and profane, you’ll never know what religion means. You will also never figure out what we commonly call art. You will never understand anything.
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To mark a separation between holy and profane, I take a ritual bath after any contact, or correspondence (even emails), with consultants, economists, Harvard Business School professors, journalists, and those in similarly depraved pursuits; I then feel and act purified from the profane until the next episode.
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The book is the only medium left that hasn’t been corrupted by the profane: everything else on your eyelids manipulates you with an ad.*– [*A comment here. After a long diet from the media, I came to realize that there is nothing that’s not (clumsily) trying to sell you something. I only trust my library. There is nothing wrong with the ownership of the physical book as a manifestation of human weakness, desire to show off, peacock tail–style signaling of superiority, it’s the commercial agenda outside the book that corrupts.]
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Many people said to be unbribable are just too expensive.
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You don’t become completely free by just avoiding to be a slave; you also need to avoid becoming a master.*–[*Versions of this point have been repeated and rediscovered throughout history—the last convincing one by Montaigne.]
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“Wealthy” is meaningless and has no robust absolute measure; use intead the subtractive measure “unwealth,” that is, the difference, at any point in time, between what you have and what you would like to have.
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Older people are most beautiful when they have what is lacking in the young: poise, erudition, wisdom, phronesis, and this post-heroic absence of agitation.
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What fools call “wasting time” is most often the best investment.
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Karl Marx, a visionary, figured out that you can control a slave much better by convincing him he is an employee.
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Someone who says “I am busy” is either declaring incompetence (and lack of control of his life) or trying to get rid of you.
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The difference between slaves in Roman and Ottoman days and today’s employees is that slaves did not need to flatter their boss.
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For most, success is the harmful passage from the camp of the hating to the camp of the hated.
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Modernity: we created youth without heroism, age without wisdom, and life without grandeur.
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You can tell how uninteresting a person is by asking him whom he finds interesting.
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People focus on role models; it is more effective to find antimodels—people you don’t want to resemble when you grow up.
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Those who do not think that employment is systemic slavery are either blind or employed.
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The twentieth century was the bankruptcy of the social utopia; the twenty-first will be that of the technological one.
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It seems that it is the most unsuccessful people who give the most advice, particularly for writing and financial matters.
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Rumors are only valuable when they are denied.
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Over the long term, you are more likely to fool yourself than others.
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There are two types of people: those who try to win and those who try to win arguments. They are never the same.
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Social media are severely antisocial, health foods are empirically unhealthy, knowledge workers are very ignorant, and social sciences aren’t scientific at all.
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For so many, instead of looking for “cause of death” when they expire, we should be looking for “cause of life” when they are still around.
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Social networks present information about what people like; more informative if, instead, they described what they don’t like.
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The three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary.
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My only measure of success is how much time you have to kill.
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If you need to listen to music while walking, don’t walk; and please don’t listen to music.
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Men destroy each other during war; themselves during peacetime.
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Sports feminize men and masculinize women.
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With terminal disease, nature lets you die with abbreviated suffering; medicine lets you suffer with prolonged dying.
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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.
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For most, work and what comes with it have the eroding effect of chronic injury.
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What they call philosophy I call literature; what they call literature I call journalism; what they call journalism I call gossip; and what they call gossip I call (generously) voyeurism.
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Critics may appear to blame the author for not writing the book they wanted to read; but in truth they are blaming him for writing the book they wanted, but were unable, to write.
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No author should be considered as having failed until he starts teaching others about writing.
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A good maxim allows you to have the last word without even starting a conversation.
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Newspaper readers exposed to real prose are like deaf persons at a Puccini opera: they may like a thing or two while wondering, “what’s the point?”
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For pleasure, read one chapter by Nabokov. For punishment, two.
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Most so-called writers keep writing and writing with the hope to, some day, find something to say.
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Today, we mostly face the choice between those who write clearly about a subject they don’t understand and those who write poorly about a subject they don’t understand.
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The information-rich Dark Ages: in 2010, 600,000 books were published, just in English, with few memorable quotes. Circa AD zero, a handful of books were written. In spite of the few that survived, there are loads of quotes.
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We are better at (involuntarily) doing out of the box than (voluntarily) thinking out of the box.
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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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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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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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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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My biggest problem with modernity may lie in the growing separation of the ethical and the legal.* [*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.]
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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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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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Weak men act to satisfy their needs, stronger men their duties.
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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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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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The rationalist imagines an imbecile-free society; the empiricist an imbecile-proof one, or, even better, a rationalist-proof one.
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For the robust, an error is information; for the fragile, an error is an error.
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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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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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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.
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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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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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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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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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A prophet is not someone with special visions, just someone blind to most of what others see.
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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.
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For the classics, philosophical insight was the product of a life of leisure; for me, a life of leisure is the product of philosophical insight.
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There are designations, like “economist,” “prostitute,” or “consultant,” for which additional characterization doesn’t add information.
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A mathematician starts with a problem and creates a solution; a consultant starts by offering a “solution” and creates a problem.
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Suckers think that you cure greed with money, addiction with substances, expert problems with experts, banking with bankers, economics with economists, and debt crises with debt spending.
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You can be certain that the head of a corporation has a lot to worry about when he announces publicly that “there is nothing to worry about.”
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The stock market, in brief: participants are calmly waiting in line to be slaughtered while thinking it is for a Broadway show.
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The main difference between government bailouts and smoking is that in some rare cases the statement “this is my last cigarette” holds true.
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The difference between banks and the Mafia: banks have better legal-regulatory expertise, but the Mafia understands public opinion.
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At a panel in Moscow, I watched the economist Edmund Phelps, who got the “Nobel” for writings no one reads, theories no one uses, and lectures no one understands.
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One of the failures of “scientific approximation” in the nonlinear domain comes from the inconvenient fact that the average of expectations is different from the expectation of averages.* [*Don’t cross a river, because it is on average four feet deep. This is also known as Jensen’s inequality.]
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Mediocre men tend to be outraged by small insults but passive, subdued, and silent in front of very large ones.
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The only definition of an alpha male: if you try to be an alpha male, you will never be one.
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The traits I respect are erudition and the courage to stand up when half-men are afraid for their reputation. Any idiot can be intelligent.
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In the past, only some of the males, but all of the females, were able to procreate. Equality is more natural for females.
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The weak cannot be good; or, perhaps, he can only be good within an exhaustive and overreaching legal system.
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The classical man’s worst fear was inglorious death; the modern man’s worst fear is just death.
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When someone says “I am not that stupid,” it often means that he is more stupid than he thinks.
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What organized dating sites fail to understand is that people are far more interesting in what they don’t say about themselves.
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For company, you often prefer those who find you interesting over those you find interesting.
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If my detractors knew me better they would hate me even more.
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The weak shows his strength and hides his weaknesses; the magnificent exhibits his weaknesses like ornaments.
The bed of Procrustes: philosophical and practical aphorisms
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