The bed of procrustes
- ISBN: 9781846144585
- Editorial: Allen Lane Publishers
- Fecha de la edición: 2010
- Lugar de la edición: London. Reino Unido
- Encuadernación: Cartoné
- Medidas: 21 cm
- Nº Pág.: 128
- Idiomas: Inglés
In this profound and playful book, Nassim Nicholas Taleb presents his ideas about life in the form of aphorisms, the world's earliest - and most memorable - literary form. Procrustes was a character from Greek mythology who abducted travellers and invited them to spend the night in a special bed, which they had to fit to perfection. They never did. Those who were too tall had their legs chopped off; those who were too short were stretched. Every aphorism here is about a Procrustean bed of sorts - we humans, facing the limits of our knowledge, the unseen and the unknown, resolve the tension by squeezing life and the world into crisp commoditized ideas, reductive categories, specific vocabularies and pre-packaged narratives. Only by embracing the unexpected - and accepting what we don't know - can we see the world as it really is.
