The Bed of Procrustes

Excerpts

Work destroys your soul by stealthily invading your brain during the hours not officially spent working; be selective about professions.

Quite revealing of human preferences that more suicides come from shame or loss of Dnancial and social status than medical diagnoses.

You will be civilized on the day you can spend a long period doing nothing, learning nothing, and improving nothing, without feeling the slightest amount of guilt.

You can tell how uninteresting a person is by asking him whom he finds interesting.

The Web is an unhealthy place for someone hungry for attention.

People focus on role models; it is more eEective to Dnd antimodels—people you don’t want to resemble when you grow up.

Don’t complain too loud about wrongs done you; you may give ideas to your less imaginative enemies.

Most feed their obsessions by trying to get rid of them.

It is as difficult to change someone’s opinions as it is to change his tastes.

Those who do not think that employment is systemic slavery are either blind or employed.

The Web’s “connectedness” creates a peculiar form of informational and pseudosocial promiscuity, which makes one feel clean after Web rationing.

In most debates, people seem to be trying to convince one another; but all they can hope for is new arguments to convince themselves.

Over the long term, you are more likely to fool yourself than others.

There are two types of people: those who try to win and those who try to win arguments. They are never the same.

Modernity inflicts a sucker narrative on activities; now we “walk for exercise,” not “walk” with no justification; for hidden reasons.

Social media are severely antisocial, health foods are empirically unhealthy, knowledge workers are very ignorant, and social sciences aren’t scientific at all.

For so many, instead of looking for “cause of death” when they expire, we should be looking for “cause of life” when they are still around.

Social networks present information about what people like; more informative if, instead, they described what they don’t like.

People are so prone to overcausation that you can make the reticent turn loquacious by dropping an occasional “why?” in the conversation.

If you need to listen to music while walking, don’t walk; and please don’t listen to music.

Technology can degrade (and endanger) every aspect of a sucker’s life while convincing him that it is becoming more “efficient.”

We are satisfied with natural (or old) objects like vistas or classical paintings but insatiable with technologies, amplifying small improvements in versions, obsessed about 2.0, caught in a mental treadmill.

We are hunters; we are only truly alive in those moments when we improvise; no schedule, just small surprises and stimuli from the environment.

You exist in full if and only if your conversation (or writings) cannot be easily reconstructed with clips from other conversations.

Technology is at its best when it is invisible.

Most people write so they can remember things; I write to forget.

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.

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.

With regular books, read the text and skip the footnotes; with those written by academics, read the footnotes and skip the text; and with business books, skip both the text and the footnotes.

Double a man’s erudition; you will halve his citations.

The costs of specialization: architects build to impress other architects; models are thin to impress other models; academics write to impress other academics; filmmakers try to impress other filmmakers; painters impress art dealers; but authors who write to impress book editors tend to fail.

It is a waste of emotions to answer critics; better to stay in print long after they are dead.

Some books cannot be summarized (real literature, poetry); some can be compressed to about ten pages; the majority to zero pages.

It’s much harder to write a book review for a book you’ve read than for a book you haven’t read.

Most so-called writers keep writing and writing with the hope to, some day, find something to say.

What I learned on my own I still remember.

Randomness is indistinguishable from complicated, undetected, and undetectable order; but order itself is indistinguishable from artful randomness.

For the robust, an error is information; for the fragile, an error is an error.

When you beat up someone physically, you get exercise and stress relief; when you assault him verbally on the Internet, you just harm yourself. Just as smooth surfaces, competitive sports, and specialized work fossilize mind and body, competitive academia fossilizes the soul.

Upon arriving at the hotel in Dubai, the businessman had a porter carry his luggage; I later saw him lifting free weights in the gym.

I suspect that IQ, SAT, and school grades are tests designed by nerds so they can get high scores in order to call each other intelligent.

Since Plato, Western thought and the theory of knowledge have focused on the notions of True-False; as commendable as it was, it is high time to shift the concern to Robust-Fragile, and social epistemology to the more serious problem of Sucker-Nonsucker.

The problem of knowledge is that there are many more books on birds written by ornithologists than books on birds written by birds and books on ornithologists written by birds.

Knowledge is subtractive, not additive—what we subtract (reduction by what does not work, what not to do), not what we add (what to do).

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).

The four most influential moderns: Darwin, Marx, Freud, and (the productive) Einstein were scholars but not academics. It has always been hard to do genuine—and nonperishable—work within institutions.

To become a philosopher, start by walking very slowly.

Real mathematicians understand completeness, real philosophers understand incompleteness, the rest don’t formally understand anything.

To be a philosopher is to know through long walks, by reasoning, and reasoning only, a priori, what others can only potentially learn from their mistakes, crises, accidents, and bankruptcies—that is, a posteriori.

Something finite but with unknown upper bounds is epistemically equivalent to something infinite. This is epistemic infinity.

For the classics, philosophical insight was the product of a life of leisure; for me, a life of leisure is the product of philosophical insight.

In Plato’s Protagoras, Socrates contrasts philosophy as the collaborative search for truth with the sophist’s use of rhetoric to gain the upper hand in argument for fame and money. Twenty-Dve centuries later, this is exactly the salaried researcher and the modern tenure-loving academic. Progress.

A mathematician starts with a problem and creates a solution; a consultant starts by offering a “solution” and creates a problem.

Organizations are like caEeinated dupes unknowingly jogging backward; you only hear of the few who reach their destination.

What makes us fragile is that institutions cannot have the same virtues (honor, truthfulness, courage, loyalty, tenacity) as individuals.

At a panel in Moscow, I watched the economist Edmund Phelps, who got the “Nobel” for writings no one reads, theories no one uses, and lectures no one understands.

One of the failures of “scientific approximation” in the nonlinear domain comes from the inconvenient fact that the average of expectations is diEerent from the expectation of averages.

Public companies, like human cells, are programmed for apoptosis, suicide through debt and hidden risks. Bailouts invest the process with a historical dimension.

Those who have nothing to prove never say that they have nothing to prove.

A verbal threat is the most authentic certificate of impotence.

You know you have influence when people start noticing your absence more than the presence of others.

For company, you often prefer those who find you interesting over those you find interesting.

When someone starts a sentence with “simply,” you should expect to hear something very complicated.

More generally, the fool here is someone who does the wrong reduction for the sake of reduction, or removes something essential, cutting off the legs, or, better, part of the head of a visitor while insisting that he preserved his persona with 95 percent accuracy.

Aphorisms require us to change our reading habits and approach them in small doses; each one of them is a complete unit, a complete narrative dissociated from others.