The Bed of Procrustes | Book review | Ruffer

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Articles by Chris

Chris Bacon

Chief Executive

9 March 2022

Aphorisms, done well, convey the wisdom of the proverb, with the power of poetry. Similar in form to a tweet, the two should not, must not, be confused or conflated.

A tweet has always been an act of advertising, the eventual audience influencing the mind of the composer – sometimes faintly, often loudly. A tweet is inherently public; an aphorism is principally private.

The aphorism is the writer distilling his own thoughts, as his own first audience. The act of creation begins in the right hemisphere of the brain, the hemisphere of breadth and flexibility and open attention, the hemisphere that sees the whole, the totality, the world that is more than disparate elements. The left hemisphere – the speaking hemisphere, the domain of focus and utility – is then brought to bear. To capture the insight, and to convey it in words.

A tweet lives in the kingdom of billboards and wine labels and the curriculum vitae. The aphorism seeks the company of the sonata, to dance with the water around a bend in a stream. In that, the aphorism should be closer to art. And art is, as Nassim Taleb expresses it in The Bed of Procrustes, “a one-sided conversation with the unobserved”.

BEYOND THE UNIFORM STANDARD

Taleb has one big theme running through his work – the limitations of human knowledge. He’s interested in “the unobserved and the unobservables … what lies on the other side of the veil of opacity”. He is a thinker on risk and decision-making amid uncertainty, on foolishness, probability and luck.

The Bed of Procrustes is Taleb’s collection of his own aphorisms. It forms part of a five-volume work he calls the Incerto, alongside The Black Swan, Fooled by Randomness, Skin in the Game and Antifragile. Those new to Taleb are encouraged to start with Antifragile; those who like what they encounter should find at least something of value in The Bed of Procrustes. (While those who dislike Taleb the Caustic should read something else.)

Named after an innkeeper in an ancient Greek tale, The Bed of Procrustes challenges all who follow Procrustes in enforcing conformity to a uniform standard. The book’s subjects range from the scandal of prediction to the many forms of love, from the vulgarity of employment to the republic of letters.

There is practical advice – “To understand how something works, figure out how to break it.”

There are shortcuts to live by – “I trust everyone except those who tell me they are trustworthy.”

And there is the inversion of norms – “It is always good practice to apologise, except when you have done something wrong.”

CHALLENGING CHERISHED BELIEFS

Investors are in the business of reducing and processing information – in a world of complexity, uncertainty and non-linear outcomes. Humans are not well wired to do this. And our wiring creates problems, problems that get worse in an era of abundant information. In Taleb’s framing, more information means more delusions. It creates more false patterns that deceive us. There is more randomness to be fooled by.

As psychiatrist and scholar Iain McGilchrist puts it: “We’d rather deny obvious truths than let go of a cherished belief”. And it’s in challenging cherished beliefs – sometimes whacking at their foundations, sometimes pulling at their weak spots to lessen their grip – that The Bed of Procrustes is at its most useful.

The way usefulness is experienced will vary reader by reader. My cherished beliefs will differ from yours; you deny your obvious truths, while I deny mine. But we can both benefit from re-examining our own thinking. Probing our excessive certainties. And from acknowledging the places where we’re bending messy realities to fit a little too neatly into Procrustes’s bed.

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Book review – The Bed of Procrustes