Digested read: The Bed of Procrustes by Nassim Nicholas Taleb | Books | The Guardian

Shared by JohnH

This fellow apparently doesn’t think much of The Bed of Procrustes, or NNT for that matter, but in the interest of balance, and because the graphic is hilarious, I’m passing it along. HatTip to Dave Lull.

Digested read The Bed of Procrustes Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Illustration for the Guardian by Neal Fox.

Procrustes, in Greek myth, was the cruel owner of an estate in Attica who abducted travellers and cut off their heads to ensure they fitted his bed perfectly. Every aphorism here is about a Procrustean bed of sorts: faced with the imperfection of the unknown and the unobserved, we humans tend to backfit the world into reductive categories such that only someone of my immense intellect is able to point out the inherent futility of modern life.

Update: Dave sends a link to another NNT ‘hater’. This one doesn’t really warrant a quote, he’s not very clever and a quick look around leads me to conclude that hating is his MO. It also originates in the U.K.  http://www.standpointmag.co.uk/node/3651/full.  Anyway, there’s been enough activity in this area lately that I’ve decided to add a ‘Hater’ category. I’ll only share the best of them.

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