Taleb coined the term "Black Swan" and the phrase never ceased to be ringed out of our minds since. From Tsunami to Sub-prime crisis, from freak terrorist attacks to epic catastrophes, anything that's remote and rare to occur is being attributed to a Black Swan event - meaning a tail risk event whose probability is rarest of rarities to occur. A few years ago, apart from writing books such as "Fooled by Randomness" and "Black Swan" and other thick books on exotic hedging derivatives, Taleb assembled his lifetime of observations in a compact volume of aphorisms - both philosophical and practical. "The Book of Procrustes" is a joy and celebration of some funny and many fantastic insights into human behavior and the world at large.
No speculative gyaan, its pure reassuring wisdom - sometimes profane and sometimes profound codified into about 25 chapters. Each chapter is enticingly captioned. "The scandal of Prediction" or "The Implicit and the Explicit" or "Economic Life and Other Very Vulgar Subjects" are few examples of how cryptic and yet endowed with sutble humor they are. As Taleb outlines in the preface, aphorisms lose their beauty and cadence if explained to death. So, he retains the surgical length of an aphorism in its purest form - out of his ingenious mind and vast body of experience- both worldly and otherwise. "What I learned on my own I still remember", as one aphorism goes probably strikes a chord with all of us who remember what we learnt conceptually rather than by rote.
Some are downright emphatic and indisputable ("What I learned on my own I still remember"). Some appear to be uproariously reflective ("We ...amplify commonalities with friends, dissimilarities with strangers, and contrasts with enemies."). Sometimes, he leads you through clear concepts into something that sounds good but abstract. ("Knowledge is subtractive, not additive - what we subtract, not what we add." Taleb has an opinion on everything from Freud and Einstein to Education and Ethics, from stockmarket to banks - on which he makes lot of money for jam, bread and butter. Hear this nugget that seems to tell all without telling it all: "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". Or, this one on scams: "It is much easier to scam people for billions than for just millions." (inspired by Madoff episode).
You can make out he has scant respect for ideology, orderliness, equilibrium and prediction abilities of experts. He has a take on too big to fail banks too as well as on Government bailouts. "The main difference between government bailouts and smoking is that in some rare cases the statement - this is my last cigarette - holds true." On banks, he says ,"The difference between banks and the Mafia is that banks have better legal-regulatory expertise, but the Mafia understands public opinion."
You cannot argue with a man like Taleb - he bares it all, warts and all, and most of them have such rhetorical rectitude resting on the fulcrums of logic, wisdom and timeless appeal that it becomes a gospel like a Pythagoras theorem or Aesop's Fables or Panchatantra. Greek Mythology goes that Procrustes used to be a slayer of people invited to sleep on a specially prepared bed - where if the sleeper's body parts are protruding outside the rectangle of the bed - those body parts - be they limbs or head or fingers were ordered to be chopped off. Finally, Procrustes was slain on his own bed by a courageous Theseus who beats Procrustes at his own game. Similarly, the truths and nontruths in this volume are made to fit logic, wisdom and knowledge and the bed actually is the reader. So, instead of fitting the wisdom nuggets in the wrong box, its made like an inverse operation of changing the "wisdom" to the bed-like situation in life.That, friends, that comeuppance or a chance to be proved wrong after what we accept as truth is the essence of what Taleb wants us to imbibe when we see life through our prisms, our paradigms and our ways of seeing. Its a blast of a book something I would like to read and ponder, re-read and wonder. It will keep us anchored to the unfathomable unpredictability of life and appreciate that life cannot be an equation to analyse.
No speculative gyaan, its pure reassuring wisdom - sometimes profane and sometimes profound codified into about 25 chapters. Each chapter is enticingly captioned. "The scandal of Prediction" or "The Implicit and the Explicit" or "Economic Life and Other Very Vulgar Subjects" are few examples of how cryptic and yet endowed with sutble humor they are. As Taleb outlines in the preface, aphorisms lose their beauty and cadence if explained to death. So, he retains the surgical length of an aphorism in its purest form - out of his ingenious mind and vast body of experience- both worldly and otherwise. "What I learned on my own I still remember", as one aphorism goes probably strikes a chord with all of us who remember what we learnt conceptually rather than by rote.
Some are downright emphatic and indisputable ("What I learned on my own I still remember"). Some appear to be uproariously reflective ("We ...amplify commonalities with friends, dissimilarities with strangers, and contrasts with enemies."). Sometimes, he leads you through clear concepts into something that sounds good but abstract. ("Knowledge is subtractive, not additive - what we subtract, not what we add." Taleb has an opinion on everything from Freud and Einstein to Education and Ethics, from stockmarket to banks - on which he makes lot of money for jam, bread and butter. Hear this nugget that seems to tell all without telling it all: "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". Or, this one on scams: "It is much easier to scam people for billions than for just millions." (inspired by Madoff episode).
You can make out he has scant respect for ideology, orderliness, equilibrium and prediction abilities of experts. He has a take on too big to fail banks too as well as on Government bailouts. "The main difference between government bailouts and smoking is that in some rare cases the statement - this is my last cigarette - holds true." On banks, he says ,"The difference between banks and the Mafia is that banks have better legal-regulatory expertise, but the Mafia understands public opinion."
You cannot argue with a man like Taleb - he bares it all, warts and all, and most of them have such rhetorical rectitude resting on the fulcrums of logic, wisdom and timeless appeal that it becomes a gospel like a Pythagoras theorem or Aesop's Fables or Panchatantra. Greek Mythology goes that Procrustes used to be a slayer of people invited to sleep on a specially prepared bed - where if the sleeper's body parts are protruding outside the rectangle of the bed - those body parts - be they limbs or head or fingers were ordered to be chopped off. Finally, Procrustes was slain on his own bed by a courageous Theseus who beats Procrustes at his own game. Similarly, the truths and nontruths in this volume are made to fit logic, wisdom and knowledge and the bed actually is the reader. So, instead of fitting the wisdom nuggets in the wrong box, its made like an inverse operation of changing the "wisdom" to the bed-like situation in life.That, friends, that comeuppance or a chance to be proved wrong after what we accept as truth is the essence of what Taleb wants us to imbibe when we see life through our prisms, our paradigms and our ways of seeing. Its a blast of a book something I would like to read and ponder, re-read and wonder. It will keep us anchored to the unfathomable unpredictability of life and appreciate that life cannot be an equation to analyse.
