WIST Quotations

Taleb, Nassim Nicholas -- The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms, Introduction (2010)

Dave — Mon, 10 Feb 2025 18:41:56 +0000

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 Nicholas Taleb (b. 1960) Lebanese-American essayist, statistician, risk analyst, aphorist
The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms, Introduction (2010)
(Source)

Taleb, Nassim Nicholas -- The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms, “Postface” (2010)

Dave — Mon, 27 Jan 2025 17:48:20 +0000

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 Nicholas Taleb (b. 1960) Lebanese-American essayist, statistician, risk analyst, aphorist
The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms, “Postface” (2010)
(Source)

Taleb, Nassim Nicholas -- The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms, “Epistomology and Subtractive Knowledge” (2010)

Dave — Mon, 06 Jan 2025 18:18:50 +0000

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 Nicholas Taleb (b. 1960) Lebanese-American essayist, statistician, risk analyst, aphorist
The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms, “Epistomology and Subtractive Knowledge” (2010)
(Source)

Pratchett, Terry -- Discworld No. 4, Mort (1987)

Dave — Fri, 28 Dec 2018 20:21:10 +0000

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
Discworld No. 4, Mort (1987)
(Source)

Crockett, Andrew -- Speech, Pomona College, Claremont, Calif. (Apr 2009)

Dave — Thu, 03 Aug 2017 18:01:45 +0000

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)
(Source)

Referring to the period leading up to the 2008 financial crisis.

Becker, Carl -- The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers (1932)

Dave — Tue, 16 Dec 2014 13:01:46 +0000

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)
(Source)