The Bed of Procrustes Read online

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  For Seneca, the Stoic sage should withdraw from public efforts when unheeded and the state is corrupt beyond repair. It is wiser to wait for self-destruction.

  BEING A PHILOSOPHER AND MANAGING TO REMAIN ONE

  To become a philosopher, start by walking very slowly.

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  Real mathematicians understand completeness, real philosophers understand incompleteness, the rest don’t formally understand anything.

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  In twenty-five centuries, no human came along with the brilliance, depth, elegance, wit, and imagination to match Plato—to protect us from his legacy.

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  Why do I have an obsessive Plato problem? Most people need to surpass their predecessors; Plato managed to surpass all his successors.

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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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  Engineers can compute but not define, mathematicians can define but not compute, economists can neither define nor compute.

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  Something finite but with unknown upper bounds is epistemically equivalent to something infinite. This is epistemic infinity.

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  Conscious ignorance, if you can practice it, expands your world; it can make things infinite.

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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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  It takes a lot of intellect and confidence to accept that what makes sense doesn’t really make sense.

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  A theological Procrustean bed: for the Orthodox since Gregory Palamas and for the Arabs since Algazel, attempts to define God using the language of philosophical universals were a rationalistic mistake. I am still waiting for a modern to take notice.

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  Saying “the mathematics of uncertainty” is like saying “the chastity of sex”—what is mathematized is no longer uncertain, and vice versa.

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  Sadly, we learn the most from fools, economists, and other reverse role models, yet we pay them back with the worst ingratitude.

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  In Plato’s Protagoras, Socrates contrasts philosophy as the collaborative search for truth with the sophist’s use of rhetoric to gain the upper hand in argument for fame and money. Twenty-five centuries later, this is exactly the salaried researcher and the modern tenure-loving academic. Progress.

  ECONOMIC LIFE AND OTHER VERY VULGAR SUBJECTS

  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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  What they call “risk” I call opportunity; but what they call “low risk” opportunity I call sucker problem.

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  Organizations are like caffeinated dupes unknowingly jogging backward; you only hear of the few who reach their destination.

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  The best test of whether someone is extremely stupid (or extremely wise) is whether financial and political news makes sense to him.

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  The left holds that because markets are stupid models should be smart; the right believes that because models are stupid markets should be smart. Alas, it never hit both sides that both markets and models are very stupid.

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  Economics is like a dead star that still seems to produce light; but you know it is dead.

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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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  What makes us fragile is that institutions cannot have the same virtues (honor, truthfulness, courage, loyalty, tenacity) as individuals.

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  The worst damage has been caused by competent people trying to do good; the best improvements have been brought by incompetent ones not trying to do good.

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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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  “It is much easier to scam people for billions than for just millions.”*

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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.*

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  Journalists as reverse aphorists: my statement “you need skills to get a BMW, skills plus luck to become a Warren Buffett” was summarized as “Taleb says Buffett has no skills.”

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  The curious mind embraces science; the gifted and sensitive, the arts; the practical, business; the leftover becomes an economist.

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  Public companies, like human cells, are programmed for apoptosis, suicide through debt and hidden risks. Bailouts invest the process with a historical dimension.

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  In poor countries, officials receive explicit bribes; in D.C. they get the sophisticated implicit, unspoken promise to work for large corporations.

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  Fate is at its cruelest when a banker ends up in poverty.

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  We should make students recompute their GPAs by counting their grades in finance and economics backward.

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  The agency problem drives every company, thanks to the buildup of hidden risks, to maximal fragility.

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  In politics we face the choice between warmongering, nation-state-loving, big-business agents on one hand; and risk-blind, top-down, epistemic arrogant big servants of large employers on the other. But we have a choice.

  * Inspired by the Madoff episode.

  * Don’t cross a river, because it is on average four feet deep. This is also known as Jensen’s inequality.

  THE SAGE, THE WEAK, AND THE MAGNIFICENT*

  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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  Those who have nothing to prove never say that they have nothing to prove.

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  The weak shows his strength and hides his weaknesses; the magnificent exhibits his weaknesses like ornaments.

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  How superb to become wise without being boring; how sad to be boring without being wise.*

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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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  The mediocre regret their words more than their silence; finer men regret their silence more than their words; the magnificent has nothing to regret.

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  Regular men are a certain varying number of meals away from lying, stealing, ki
lling, or even working as forecasters for the Federal Reserve in Washington; never the magnificent.*

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  Social science means inventing a certain brand of human we can understand.

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  When expressing “good luck” to a peer, the weak wishes the opposite; the strong is mildly indifferent; but only the magnificent means it.

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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 magnificent believes half of what he hears and twice what he says.

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  A verbal threat is the most authentic certificate of impotence.

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  The two most celebrated acts of courage in history aren’t Homeric fighters but two Eastern Mediterranean fellows who died, even sought death, for their ideas.

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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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  By all means, avoid words—threats, complaints, justification, narratives, reframing, attempts to win arguments, supplications; avoid words!

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  According to Lucian of Samosata, the philosopher Demonax stopped a Spartan from beating his servant. “You are making him your equal,” he said.

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  The classical man’s worst fear was inglorious death; the modern man’s worst fear is just death.

  * In Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, the megalopsychos, which I translate as the magnificent, is the “great-souled” who thinks of himself as worthy of great things and, aware of his own position in life, abides by a certain system of ethics that excludes pettiness. This notion of great soul, though displaced by Christian ethics advocating humility, remains present in Levantine culture, with the literal Kabir al-nafs. Among other attributes, the magnificent walks slowly.

  † Consider the reaction to the banking and economics establishments.

  * Looking at Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke.

  * I had to read Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics Book IV ten times before realizing what he didn’t say explicitly (but knew): the magnificent (megalopsychos) is all about unconditionals.

  THE IMPLICIT AND THE EXPLICIT

  You know you have influence when people start noticing your absence more than the presence of others.

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  You are guaranteed a repetition when you hear the declaration “never again!”

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  Some reticent people use silence to conceal their intelligence; but most do so to hide the lack of it.

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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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  Bad-mouthing is the only genuine, never faked expression of admiration.

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  When a woman says about a man that he is intelligent, she often means handsome; when a man says about a woman that she is dumb, he always means attractive.

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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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  The Internet broke the private-public wall; impulsive and inelegant utterances that used to be kept private are now available for literal interpretation.

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  One of the problems with social networks is that it is getting harder and harder for others to complain about you behind your back.

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  You can be certain that a person has the means but not the will to help you when he says “there is nothing else I can do.” And you can be certain that a person has neither means nor will to help you when he says “I am here to help.”

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  We expect places and products to be less attractive than in marketing brochures, but we never forgive humans for being worse than their first impressions.

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  When someone starts a sentence with “simply,” you should expect to hear something very complicated.

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  Half the people lie with their lips; the other half with their tears.

  ON THE VARIETIES OF LOVE AND NONLOVE

  At any stage, humans can thirst for money, knowledge, or love; sometimes for two, never for three.

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  Love without sacrifice is like theft.

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  Marriage is the institutional process of feminizing men—and feminizing women.

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  There are men who surround themselves with women (and seek wealth) for ostentation; others who do so mostly for consumption; they are rarely the same.

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  Outside of friendship and love, it is very hard to find situations with bilateral, two-way suckers.

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  I attended a symposium, an event named after a fifth-century (B.C.) Athenian drinking party in which nonnerds talked about love; alas, there was no drinking and, mercifully, nobody talked about love.

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  You will get the most attention from those who hate you. No friend, no admirer, and no partner will flatter you with as much curiosity.

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  When a young woman partners with an otherwise uninteresting rich man, she can sincerely believe that she is attracted to some very specific body part (say, his nose, neck, or knee).

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  A good foe is far more loyal, far more predictable, and, to the clever, far more useful than the most valuable admirer.

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  If my detractors knew me better they would hate me even more.

  THE END

  Platonic minds expect life to be like film, with defined terminal endings; a-Platonic ones expect film to be like life and, except for a few irreversible conditions such as death, distrust the terminal nature of all human-declared endings.

  POSTFACE

  The general theme of my work is the limitations of human knowledge, and the charming and less charming errors and biases when working with matters that lie outside our field of observation, the unobserved and the unobservables—the unknown; what lies on the other side of the veil of opacity.

  Because our minds need to reduce information, we are more likely to try to squeeze a phenomenon into the Procrustean bed of a crisp and known category (amputating the unknown), rather than suspend categorization, and make it tangible. Thanks to our detections of false patterns, along with real ones, what is random will appear less random and more certain—our overactive brains are more likely to impose the wrong, simplistic narrative than no narrative at all.*

  The mind can be a wonderful tool for self-delusion—it was not designed to deal with complexity and nonlinear uncertainties.* Counter to the common discourse, more information means more delusions: our detection of false patterns is growing faster and faster as a side effect of modernity and the information age: there is this mismatch between the messy randomness of the information-rich current world, with its complex interactions, and our intuitions of events, derived in a simpler ancestral habitat. Our mental architecture is at an increased mismatch with the world in which we live.

  This leads to sucker problems: when the map does not correspond to the territory, there is a certain category of fool—the overeducated, the academic, the journalist, the newspaper reader, the mechanistic “scientist,” the pseudo-empiricist, those endowed with what I call “epistemic arrogance,” this wonderful ability to discount what they did not see, the unobserved—who enter a state of denial, imagining the territory as fitting his map. More generally, the fool here is someone who does the wrong reduction for the sake of reduction, or removes something essential, cutting off the legs, or, better, part of the head of a visitor while insisting that he preserved his persona with 95 percent accuracy. Look around at the Procrustean beds we’ve created, some beneficial, some more questio
nable: regulations, top-down governments, academia, gyms, commutes, high-rise office buildings, involuntary human relationships, employment, etc.

  Since the Enlightenment, in the great tension between rationalism (how we would like things to be so they make sense to us) and empiricism (how things are), we have been blaming the world for not fitting the beds of “rational” models, have tried to change humans to fit technology, fudged our ethics to fit our needs for employment, asked economic life to fit the theories of economists, and asked human life to squeeze into some narrative.

  We are robust when errors in the representation of the unknown and understanding of random effects do not lead to adverse outcomes—fragile otherwise. The robust benefits from Black Swan events,* the fragile is severely hit by them. We are more and more fragile to a certain brand of scientific autism making confident claims about the unknown—leading to expert problems, risk, massive dependence on human error. As the reader can see from my aphorisms, I have respect for mother nature’s methods of robustness (billions of years allow most of what is fragile to break); classical thought is more robust (in its respect for the unknown, the epistemic humility) than the modern post-Enlightenment naïve pseudoscientific autism. Thus my classical values make me advocate the triplet of erudition, elegance, and courage; against modernity’s phoniness, nerdiness, and philistinism.*

  Art is robust; science, not always (to put it mildly). Some Procrustean beds make life worth living: art and, the most potent of all, the poetic aphorism.