A condensed guide to life, Nassim Nicholas Taleb's The Bed of Procrustes is an invaluable collection of aphorisms to help you navigate the modern world.
Why are we so often unwilling to accept that life is unpredictable? In this brilliant book Nassim Nicholas Taleb distils his idiosyncratic wisdom to demolish our illusions, contrasting the classical values of courage, elegance and erudition against modern philistinism and phoniness. Only by accepting what we don't know, he shows, can we see the world as it really is.
'Happily provocative ... blistering ... his observations concern superiority, wealth, suckerdom, academia, modernity, technology and the all-purpose, ignorant "they" ... very quotable' The New York Times
'A master philosopher' The Times
'Taleb's crystalline nuggets of thought stand alone like esoteric poems' Financial Times
'Opinionated and witty ... It showcases his wit and learning, and provides ways to fillet his enemies' Independent on Sunday
Nassim Nicholas Taleb is an uncompromizing no-nonsense thinker for our times. He has spent his life immersing himself in problems of luck, uncertainty, probability, and knowledge, and he has led three high-profile careers around his ideas, as a man of letters, as a businessman-trader, and as a university professor and researcher. He is currently Distinguished Professor of Risk Engineering at New York University's School of Engineering. He is the author of the 4-volume INCERTO (Antifragile, The Black Swan, Fooled by Randomness, and The Bed of Procrustes). Taleb refuses all awards and honours as they debase knowledge by turning it into competitive sports.