The Bed of Procrustes

I have respect for mother nature's methods of robustness (billions of years allow most of what is fragile to break); classical thought is more robust (in its respect for the unknown, the epistemic humility) than the modern post-Enlightenment naïve pseudoscientific autism. Thus my classical values make me advocate the triplet of erudition, elegance, and courage; against modernity’s phoniness, nerdiness and philistinism.

An idea starts to be interesting when you get scared of taking it to its logical conclusion.

A competitive athlete is painful to look at; trying hard to become an animal rather than a man, he will never be as fast as a cheetah or as strong as an ox.

Ethical man accords his profession to his beliefs, instead of according his beliefs to his profession.

The weak shows his strength and hides his weaknesses; the magnificent exhibits his weaknesses like ornaments.

Social science means inventing a certain brand of human we can understand.

The tragedy of virtue is that the more obvious, boring, unoriginal, and sermonizing the proverb, the harder it is to implement.

We are robust when errors in the representation of the unknown and understanding of random effects do not lead to adverse outcomes —fragile otherwise.

A good maxim allows you to have the last word without even starting a conversation.

We learn the most from fools ... yet we pay them back with the worst ingratitude.

The twentieth century was the bankruptcy of the social utopia; the twenty-first will be that of the technological one.

It takes extraordinary wisdom and self-control to accept that many things have a logic we do not understand that is smarter than our own.

Older people are most beautiful when they have what is lacking in the young: poise, , wisdom, , and this post-heroic absence of agitation.

Restaurants get you in with food to sell you liquor; religions get you in with belief to sell you rules.

For the robust, an error is information.

Academia is to knowledge what prostitution is to love.

Intelligence consists in ignoring things that are irrelevant.

Greatness starts with the replacement of hatred with polite disdain.

Someone who says “I am busy” is either declaring incompetence (and lack of control of his life) or trying to get rid of you.

Hard science gives sensational results with a horribly boring process; philosophy gives boring results with a sensational process; literature gives sensational results with a sensational process; and economics gives boring results with a boring process.

Because our minds need to reduce information, we are more likely to try to squeeze a phenomenon into the Procrustean bed of a crisp and known category (amputating the unknown), rather than suspend categorization, and make it tangible. Thanks to our detections of false patterns, along with real ones, what is random will appear less random and more certain—our overactive brains are more likely to impose the wrong, simplistic, narrative than no narrative at all.

Just as dyed hair makes older men less attractive, it is what you do to hide your weaknesses that makes them repugnant.

To be completely cured of newspapers, spend a year reading the previous week’s newspapers.

What they call “play” (gym, travel, sports) looks like work.

It’s harder to say no when you really mean it.

Asking science to explain life and vital matters is equivalent to asking a grammarian to explain poetry.

Success is becoming in middle adulthood what you dreamed to be in late childhood.

To become a philosopher, start by walking very slowly.

Using, as an excuse, others’ failure of common sense is in itself a failure of common sense.

You want to be yourself, idiosyncratic; the collective (school, rules, jobs, technology) wants you generic to the point of castration.

You have a real life if and only if you do not compete with anyone in any of your pursuits.

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.

Charm is the ability to insult people without offending them; nerdiness the reverse.

They are born, put in a box; they go home to live in a box; they study by ticking boxes; they go to what is called “work” in a box, where they sit in their cubicle box; they drive to the grocery store in a box to buy food in a box; they talk about thinking “outside the box”; and when they die they are put in a box.

The book is the only medium left that hasn’t been corrupted by the profane.

Procrastination is the soul rebelling against entrapment.

Only in recent history has “working hard” signaled pride rather than shame for lack of talent, finesse and, mostly, sprezzatura.

Modernity needs to understand that being rich and becoming rich are not mathematically, personally, socially, and ethically the same thing.

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

In science you need to understand the world; in business you need others to misunderstand it.

Mental clarity is the child of courage, not the other way around.

People used to wear ordinary clothes weekdays, and formal attire on Sunday. Today it is the exact reverse.

You exist if and only if you are free to do things without a visible objective, with no justification and, above all, outside the dictatorship of someone else’s narrative.

A man without a heroic bent starts dying at the age of thirty.

Wit seduces by signaling intelligence without nerdiness.

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

Preoccupation with efficacy is the main obstacle to a poetic, elegant, robust and heroic life.

Modernity: we created youth without heroism, age without wisdom, and life without grandeur.

You are rich if and only if money you refuse tastes better than money you accept.

When we want to do something while unconsciously certain to fail, we seek advice so we can blame someone else for the failure.

The fool generalizes the particular; the nerd particularizes the general; ... the wise does neither.

What fools call “wasting time” is most often the best investment.

The difference between slaves in Roman and Ottoman days and today’s employees is that slaves did not need to flatter their boss.

The sucker’s trap is when you focus on what you know and what others don’t know, rather than the reverse.

The best test of whether someone is extremely stupid (or extremely wise) is whether financial and political news makes sense to him.

There is a certain category of fool—the overeducated, the academic, the journalist, the newspaper reader, the mechanistic "scientist", the pseudo-empiricist, those endowed with what I call "epistemic arrogance", this wonderful ability to discount what they did not see, the unobserved.

Decomposition, for most, starts when they leave the free, social, and uncorrupted college life for the solitary confinement of professions and nuclear families.

Read nothing from the past one hundred years; eat no fruits from the past one thousand years; drink nothing from the past four thousand years (just wine and water); but talk to no ordinary man over forty.

When conflicted between two choices, take neither.