Book description
In this profound and playful book, Nassim Nicholas Taleb presents his
ideas about life in the form of aphorisms, the world's earliest - and
most memorable - literary form.
Procrustes was a character from Greek mythology who abducted
travellers and invited them to spend the night in a special bed, which
they had to fit to perfection. They never did. Those who were too tall
had their legs chopped off; those who were too short were stretched.
Every aphorism here is about a Procrustean bed of sorts - we humans,
facing the limits of our knowledge, the unseen and the unknown,
resolve the tension by squeezing life and the world into crisp
commoditized ideas, reductive categories, specific vocabularies and
pre-packaged narratives. Only by embracing the unexpected - and
accepting what we don't know - can we see the world as it really is.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb spends most of his time as a fl neur,
meditating in caf s across the planet. A former trader, he is
currently Distinguished Professor at New York University's Polytechnic
Institute. His
books Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan have
been published in thirty-one languages.
