November 16, 2010

By JANET MASLIN
In his happily provocative new book of aphorisms, the fiscal prophet and self-appointed flâneur
Nassim Nicholas Taleb aims particular scorn at anyone who thinks aphorisms require explanation.
And he differentiates the aphorism from the equally short-form sound bite by noting that the
aphorism enhances knowledge while the sound bite shrinks it.

That said, it is extremely foolhardy to try to paraphrase any of Mr. Taleb’s pronouncements. This is a man who
suffers fools impatiently, and his intellect makes his hauteur largely justified. Watch any video clip in which he
is being interviewed — or, worse, has to keep quiet while someone else tries and fails to understand whatever he
has just said — if you need convincing.

No readers of “The Black Swan,” “Fooled by Randomness” or any of Mr. Taleb’s academic writings about
economics, probability, risk, fragility, philosophy of statistics, applied epistemology, etc., will question whether
he is qualified to dish out wisdom. And none will be surprised that Mr. Taleb, unlike the inspirational writer he
calls “my compatriot from a neighboring (and warring) village in northern Lebanon, Kahlil Gibran, author of
‘The Prophet,’ ” can be blistering. His observations concern superiority, wealth, suckerdom, academia,
modernity, technology and the all-purpose, ignorant “they” who dare to doubt him.

Even his book’s title, “The Bed of Procrustes,” is intentionally harsh. As he reminds readers in a brief
introduction, the Procrustes of Greek mythology was the cruel and ill-advised fool who stretched or shortened
people to make them fit his inflexible bed. Mr. Taleb’s new book addresses the latter-day ways in which “we
humans, facing limits of knowledge, and things we do not observe, the unseen and the unknown, resolve the
tension by squeezing life and the world into crisp commoditized ideas, reductive categories, specific
vocabularies, and prepackaged narratives, which, on the occasion, has explosive consequences.”

That excerpt comes from the essay that begins this short, intense book. It goes without saying that his actual
aphorisms are more concise than that.

The book’s very quotable pronouncements fall into distinct categories. They are not necessarily those of its
chapter headings: when Mr. Taleb titles a chapter “The Ludic Fallacy and Domain Dependence” he needs a
footnote to explain what both terms mean. Some aperçus are about the latter-day art of war, and are as apt to be
quoted as Sun Tzu’s classic strategy guide of that title. “There are two types of people: those who try to win and
those who try to win arguments,” he codifies with his usual authority. “They are never the same.”

Also in the realm of hostility and competition: “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.” And: “Games were created to give
nonheroes the illusion of winning. In real life, you don’t know who really won or lost (except too late), but you
can tell who is heroic and who is not.” And: “You remember e-mails you sent that were not answered better than
e-mails you did not answer.”

Mr. Taleb’s self-image permeates each dictum in “The Bed of Procrustes” just as surely as the personalities of
Friedrich Nietzche, Ayn Rand or the youngPaul Simon (circa “I Am a Rock”) permeated theirs. “My only
measure of success is how much time you have to kill,” says this former trader and stunning financial
clairvoyant, underscoring the fact that he has a luxurious amount of time on his hands. Also: “You are rich if
and only if money you refuse tastes better than money you accept.” The same autobiographical note extends to
this: “Most people write so they can remember things; I write to forget.” Interspersed with these declarations of
independence are many scornful dismissals of those enslaved by conventional forms of wage-earning
employment.

Will this condescension keep “The Bed of Procrustes” from being widely read, oft-quoted and closely followed?
Absolutely not: Mr. Taleb might as well have written an aphorism about how well the ordinary Joe tries to heed
the hedge-fund guy. Besides, Mr. Taleb’s real wisdom is proudly rooted in classical philosophy, which
guarantees it a contemporary appeal. “My classical values make me advocate the triplet of erudition, elegance
and courage,” he writes, “against modernity’s phoniness, nerdiness and philistinism.”

Mr. Taleb’s most engaging formulations are, of course, the knotty ones. “The rationalist imagines an imbecile-
free society,” he writes deductively; “the empiricist an imbecile-proof one, or, even better, a rationalist-proof
one.” Or, addressing the area in which his authority is so enormous: “Randomness is indistinguishable from
complicated, undetected and undetectable order; but order itself is indistinguishable from artful randomness.”
His simplest, most resonant and quotable formulation is arguably this one: “Modernity: We created youth
without heroism, age without wisdom, and life without grandeur.”

Occasionally he sounds dead wrong, especially at those very rare times when his thoughts include women. (“In
the past, only some of the males, but all of the females, were able to procreate. Equality is more natural for
females.”) And the ad hominem attacks are meant to leap out, as when he sideswipes Robert E. Rubin in a
footnote as “perhaps the biggest thief in history” and the Nobel Prize-winning economist Edmund Phelps “for
writings no one reads, theories no one uses, and lectures no one understands.”

Last month Mr. Taleb, in this same combative mode, reportedly suggested that investors sue the Swedish
Central Bank for awarding the Nobel Prize to economists whose theories helped to bring down the global
economy. Naturally, he has an angry aphorism about useless journalists who misquote him.

Mr. Taleb is so calculatedly abrasive in this smart, attention-getting little book that he achieves his main
objective. “A good maxim,” he writes, “allows you to have the last word without even starting a conversation.”

THE BED OF
PROCRUSTES
Philosophical and Practical
Aphorisms
By Nassim Nicholas Taleb
112 pages. Random House.
$18.