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  • Published: 2 December 2010
  • ISBN: 9780141969244
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 160
Categories:

The Bed of Procrustes

Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms




The world's most iconoclastic thinker gives us his words of wisdom in brilliant bite-sized form

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.

  • Published: 2 December 2010
  • ISBN: 9780141969244
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 160
Categories:

About the author

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Nassim Nicholas Taleb has devoted his life to immersing himself in problems of luck, uncertainty, probability and knowledge. Part literary essayist, part empiricist, part no-nonsense mathematical trader, he is currently Dean's Professor in the Science of Uncertainty at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. His last book, the bestseller Fooled by Randomness, has been published in eighteen languages and was selected by Fortune magazine as one of "The Smartest Books of All Time". Taleb lives mostly in New York.

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