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We humans, facing limits of knowledge, and things we do not observe, the unseen and the unknown, resolve the tension by squeezing life and the world into crisp commoditized ideas, reductive categories, specific vocabularies, and prepackaged narratives, which, on the occasion, has explosive consequences.

nassim taleb
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (b. 1960) Lebanese-American essayist, statistician, risk analyst, aphorist.
The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms, Introduction (2010)
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Added on 10-Feb-25 | Last updated 10-Feb-25
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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.

nassim taleb
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (b. 1960) Lebanese-American essayist, statistician, risk analyst, aphorist.
The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms, “Postface” (2010)
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Added on 27-Jan-25 | Last updated 27-Jan-25
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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).

nassim taleb
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (b. 1960) Lebanese-American essayist, statistician, risk analyst, aphorist.
The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms, “Epistomology and Subtractive Knowledge” (2010)
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Added on 6-Jan-25 | Last updated 6-Jan-25
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People don’t alter history any more than birds alter the sky, they just make brief patterns in it.

Terry Pratchett (1948-2015) English author
Mort (1987)
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Added on 28-Dec-18 | Last updated 28-Dec-18
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Everybody thought, “this time is different.” In my view, those are the most frightening words in the English language. If you look at the crises that have infected the world, the term, “this time, it’s different” has almost always been the hubris that comes before nemesis.

Andrew Crockett (1943-2012) British banker, economist, author, public servant
Speech, Pomona College, Claremont, Calif. (Apr 2009)
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Referring to the period leading up to the 2008 financial crisis.
 
Added on 3-Aug-17 | Last updated 3-Aug-17
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Since history is not an objective reality, but only an imaginative reconstruction of vanished events, the pattern that appears useful or agreeable to one generation is never entirely so to the next.

Carl L. Becker (1873-1945) American historian
The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers (1932)
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Added on 16-Dec-14 | Last updated 16-Dec-14
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