The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (Incerto Book 4)
“He who writes in blood and aphorisms does not want to be read, he wants to be learned by heart.” - Friedrich Nietzsche
Preludes
Page 4
To bankrupt a fool, give him information.
Page 5
I suspect that they put Socrates to death because there is something terribly unattractive, alienating, and nonhuman in thinking with too much clarity.
Page 6
If your anger decreases with time, you did injustice; if it increases, you suffered injustice.
Page 9
Erudition without bullshit, intellect without cowardice, courage without imprudence, mathematics without nerdiness, scholarship without academia, intelligence without shrewdness, religiosity without intolerance, elegance without softness, sociality without dependence, enjoyment without addiction, religion without tolerance, and, above all, nothing without skin in the game.
Counter Narratives
Page 13
Hatred is love with a typo somewhere in the computer code, correctable but very hard to find.
Page 14
The characteristic feature of the loser is to bemoan, in general terms, mankind’s flaws, biases, contradictions, and irrationality—without exploiting them for fun and profit.
Page 14
The test of whether you really liked a book is if you reread it (and how many times); the test of whether you really liked someone’s company is if you are ready to meet him again and again—the rest is spin, or that variety of sentiment now called self-esteem.
Page 17
Almost all those caught making a logical fallacy interpret it as a “disagreement.”
Page 18
If powerful assholes don’t find you “arrogant,” it means you are doing something wrong.
Page 20
Wisdom in the young is as unattractive as frivolity in the elderly.
Matters Ontological
Page 22
Life is about execution rather than purpose.
Page 22
If you get easily bored, it means that your BS detector is functioning properly; if you forget (some) things, it means that your mind knows how to filter; and if you feel sadness, it means that you are human.
Page 24
For life to be really fun, what you fear should line up with what you desire.
Chance, Success, Happiness, and Stoicism
Page 30
The opposite of success isn’t failure; it is name-dropping.
Page 32
Studying the work and intellectual habits of a “genius” to learn from him is like studying the garb of a chef to emulate his cooking.
Page 41
Charm is the ability to insult people without offending them; nerdiness the reverse.
Page 42
They are born, then put in a box; they go home to live in a box; they study by ticking boxes; they go to what is called “work” in a box, where they sit in their cubicle box; they drive to the grocery store in a box to buy food in a box; they go to the gym in a box to sit in a box; they talk about thinking “outside the box”; and when they die they are put in a box. All boxes, Euclidian, geometrically smooth boxes.
Theseus, or Living the Paleo Life
Page 52
Any book not worth rereading isn’t worth reading.
Page 52
Men destroy each other during war; themselves during peacetime.
Page 53
High Modernity: routine in place of physical effort, physical effort in place of mental expenditure, and mental expenditure in place of mental clarity.
Page 55
Some ideas are born as you write them down, others become dead.
Page 56
Life is about early detection of the reversal point beyond which your own belongings (say, a house, country house, car, or business) start owning you.
Page 56
use boredom in place of a clock, as a biological wristwatch,
Page 58
Real life (vita beata) is when your choices correspond to your duties.
Page 59
Every social association that is not face-to-face is injurious to your health.
The Republic of Letters
Page 62
There is a distinction between expressive hypochondria and literature, just as there is one between self-help and philosophy.
Page 62
You need to keep reminding yourself of the obvious: charm lies in the unsaid, the unwritten, and the undisplayed. It takes mastery to control silence.
Page 65
What we call “business books” is an eliminative category invented by bookstores for writings that have no depth, no style, no empirical rigor, and no linguistic sophistication.
Page 65
Remove all empty words from writings, résumés, conversation, except when they aim at courtesy.
Page 66
I can predict when an author is about to plagiarize me, and poorly so when he writes that Taleb “popularized” the theory of Black Swan events.*
Page 67
Newspaper readers exposed to real prose are like deaf persons at a Puccini opera: they may like a thing or two while wondering, “what’s the point?”
Page 67
Some books cannot be summarized (real literature, poetry); some can be compressed to about ten pages; the majority to zero pages. The exponential information age is like a verbally incontinent person: he talks more and more as fewer and fewer people listen.
Page 69
It is much less dangerous to think like a man of action than to act like a man of thought.
Page 70
Literature comes alive when covering up vices, defects, weaknesses, and confusions; it dies with every trace of preaching.
Page 70
In any subject, if you don’t feel that you don’t know enough, you don’t know enough.
Fooled by Randomness
Page 77
The calamity of the information age is that the toxicity of data increases much faster than its benefits.
Aesthetics
Page 80
A golden saddle on a sick horse makes the problem feel worse; pomp and slickness in form make absence of substance nauseating.
Page 82
Wit seduces by signaling intelligence without nerdiness.
Ethics
Page 85
People reveal much more about themselves while lying than when they tell the truth.
Page 94
Virtue is when the income you wish to show the tax agency exceeds what you wish to show your neighbor.
Robustness and Antifragility
Page 99
Robustness is progress without impatience.
The Ludic Fallacy and Domain Dependence
Page 107
Most can’t figure out why one can like rigorous knowledge and despise academics, yet they understand that one can like food and hate canned tuna.
Epistemology and Subtractive Knowledge
Page 110
They think that intelligence is about noticing things that are relevant (detecting patterns); in a complex world, intelligence consists in ignoring things that are irrelevant (avoiding false patterns).
Page 111
The best way to spot a charlatan: someone (like a consultant or a stockbroker) who tells you what to do instead of what not to do.
The Scandal of Prediction
Page 112
The ancients knew very well that the only way to understand events was to cause them.
Being a Philosopher and Managing to Remain One
Page 118
Salaried people are just stepparents. They can be good stepparents but never match the biological.
Economic Life and Other Very Vulgar Subjects
Page 127
Never take investment advice from someone who has to work for a living.
The Sage, the Weak, and the Magnificent
Page 129
Mediocre men tend to be outraged by small insults but passive, subdued, and silent in front of very large ones.*
Page 129
It is a sign of weakness to avoid showing signs of weakness.
Page 131
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.
Page 133
Contra the prevailing belief, “success” isn’t being on top of a hierarchy, it is standing outside all hierarchies.
Page 134
It is very easy to be stoic, in failure.
Page 134
The first, and hardest, step to wisdom: avert the standard assumption that people know what they want.
The Implicit and the Explicit
Page 139
The Internet broke the private-public wall; impulsive and inelegant utterances that used to be kept private are now available for literal interpretation.
On The Varieties of Love and Nonlove
Page 146
When people call you intelligent it is almost always because they agree with you. Otherwise they just call you arrogant.