I was so buoyed by Nassim Nicholas Taleb's (NNT) last two books - 'Fooled by Randomness' and 'The Black Swan' - that when I heard about his new book 'The Bed of Procrustes', I couldn't hold my horses and decided to pre-order my copy. However, I was a tad disappointed when I received my copy. First, the book was way too small (I came to terms with the miniature size later as the book was meant to be an aphorisms-only text) and second, I had already read most of the aphorisms in the book. For those who are not aware, NNT was active on Twitter for the time he was actually composing this book. As a result, 80% of the aphorisms in the book were published on Twitter already. I am digressing a little here but NNT's choosing Twitter to hype up his book makes for an interesting circumstance. His aphoristic tweets got a strong word-of-mouth going long before the release (I noticed his tweets being quoted on Facebook and other such sites before the book release) and eventually might have helped in the sale of the book. I have a sneaking suspicion that NNT's well-known detestation towards media is only half the truth; his experiment with Twitter as the launchpad for his new book was anything but a concurrence. His loathing towards conventional media (TV, press) may not have any parallels with his liking towards social media, after all.  And, please don't go scurrying around Twitter now; he has long deleted his profile. I hope to see him back nonetheless, perhaps, before the launch of his new book.  

NNT banters, affronts, rants and raves in this little book. All the usual suspects - bankers, academicians, fed, journalists, corporates - are back in the firing range, much to the delight of his ardent followers. His aphorisms (short, witty remarks holding deeper knowledge), in NNT's own words, are a reflection of the gaping lacunae that exist in our understanding of this world. Coming to the book, 'The Bed of Procrustes' is a compelling collection of practical aphorisms  with various themes tying them together. Procrustes in Greek mythology was a diabolical innkeeper who, in an effort to fit the visitors to his special bed, used to chop off the limbs of those who were too tall and stretch others who were too short. The reason why Procrustes is the center of the book is that NNT finds an uncanny parallel between Procrustean bed and our present day conditioning towards knowledge. We are no better than the Procrustean bed when it comes to shoehorning our knowledge into commoditized ideas and reductive categories, according to NNT. Events that we fail to understand, events that we can’t observe often become the targets of our manipulation - confusing and complex details are left out - so that they fit in with our understanding of the events or with our preconceived notions (Narrative Fallacy & Retrospective Distortion in 'The Black Swan').

NNT's source of chagrin, seemingly, stems from an innate human tendency: our hardwiredness to simplify the complex! This world is undoubtedly way more tangled up than we ever imagine it to be. NNT's discerning posture on the human fallibilities may border on arrogance but offers deep insights, too. His deeper understanding of the world emanates from a pursuit that is at odds with modern, scientific approach to knowledge and simultaneously, from his ability to remove himself from constraints, biases, societal and political norms.

'The Bed of Procrustes' is a peep into one of the most brilliant minds, a mere microcosm of the much deeper and vaster mental framework of the self-proclaimed flaneur. It runs to 113 pages with 22 groupings of aphorisms. Broadly speaking, almost all the groupings/categories barring a few have philosophy and logic as their backdrops. So you have NNT talking about 'The Sacred and The Profane', 'The Universal and The Particular', 'Fooled by Randomness', 'Epistemology & Subtractive Knowledge' and so on. Those who want more of Nassim Nicholas Taleb would do well to read 'Fooled by Randomness' and 'The Black Swan' (I suggest read in the order).

Finally, following is the list of my own personal favorite aphorisms from 'The Bed of Procrustes':

•  In science you need to understand the world, in business you need others to misunderstand it.
• There is no intermediate state between ice and water but there is one between life and death: employment.
• People reserve standard compliments for those who don't threaten their pride; the others they often praise by calling "arrogant".
• You exist if and only if you are free to do things without a visible objective, with no justification and, above all, outside the dictatorship of someone else's narrative.
• The book is the only medium that hasn't been corrupted by the profane; everything else on your eyelids manipulates you with an ad.
• People focus on role models; it is more effective to find anti-models-people you don't want to resemble when you grow up.
• Those who do not think employment is systemic slavery are either blind or employed.
• Only in recent history has "working hard" signaled pride rather than shame for lack of talent, finesse and mostly, sprezzatura.
• We are hunters; we are only truly alive in those moments when we improvise; no schedule, just small surprises and stimuli from the environment.
• A good maxim/tweet allows you to have the last word without even starting a conversation.
• Just as there are authors who enjoy having written and others who enjoy writing; there are books you enjoy reading and others you enjoy having read.
• What we call "business books" is an eliminative category invented by bookstores for writings that have no depth, no empirical rigour, and no linguistic sophistication.
• Some books can't be summarized (real literature), some can be compressed to 10 pages; the majority to zero pages.
• The calamity of information age is that the toxicity of data increases much faster than its benefits.
• Games were created to give non-heroes the illusion of winning.
• They read Gibbon's Decline and Fall on an eReader but refuse to drink Chateau Lynch-Bages in a Styrofoam cup.
• 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.
• 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.
• Knowledge is subtractive, not additive - what we subtract (reduction by what doesn't work, what not to do), not what we add (what to do).
• The ancients knew that the only way to understand events was to cause them.
• Conscious ignorance, if you can practice it, expands your world; it can make things infinite.
• What they call risk is I call opportunity; but what they call "low risk" opportunity I call sucker problem.