The book’s title is taken from the Greek myth in which Procrustes fitted his guests to a bed – cutting to size those too tall and stretching those too short. Taleb’s crystalline nuggets of thought stand alone like esoteric poems, but together produce a sort of picture in reverse – the surrounding space shaded in to reveal the central subject: human knowledge and its limitations.Find that Financial Times piece here. New York Magazine had this to say about the book:
We are here in this French café in Morningside Heights to talk about Socrates, Seneca, Averroës, Pascal, La Rochefoucauld, Chamfort, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein. These are his forebears in the art of the aphorism, a form he took up for several months earlier this year, resulting in his new book, The Bed of Procrustes, a compendium of Talebian witticisms and skeptical philosophizing: “You are rich if and only if money you refuse tastes better than money you accept.” “Education makes the wise slightly wiser, but it makes the fool vastly more dangerous.” “You are only secure if you can lose your fortune without the additional insult of having to become humble.” It is a work very different in format from The Black Swan and Fooled by Randomness, best sellers that predicted that the mathematical models Wall Street relied on to measure risk would help bring down the world economy. When the crash of 2008 came, it secured Taleb’s fame as the oracle of the Great Recession and made him, for a time, a ubiquitous cable-news presence, inveighing against the financial-policy elite.Find that New Yorker Magazine article, here.
WNYC Radio's The Takeaway also had the author on their show, recently; listen to that podcast, just below.
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