The Procrustean bed: we humans, facing limits of knowledge and things we do not observe, the unseen and the unknown, resolve the tension by squeezing life into crisp commoditized ideas, reductive categories, specific vocabularies, and prepackaged narratives. These are the aphorisms that resist that squeezing.
On Freedom and Existence
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. This is the cat in its purest form — identity constructed by looking at the universe rather than the social mountain.
Procrastination is the soul rebelling against entrapment. The antifragile frame: procrastination is our natural defense, letting things take care of themselves and exercise their antifragility. The power-process adds the flip side: when procrastination persists on goals that genuinely matter, the soul is not rebelling against entrapment — it is avoiding the real edge.
You don’t become completely free by just avoiding being a slave; you also need to avoid becoming a master. Freedom requires both directions. The master moralist who dominates others is as unfree as the slave moralist who resents them.
What fools call “wasting time” is most often the best investment. The depth that compounds is built in hours that look useless from outside.
On Character and Status
They will envy you for your success, for your wealth, for your intelligence, for your looks, for your status — but rarely for your wisdom. Wisdom is the one thing that cannot be weaponized for status.
Most of what they call humility is successfully disguised arrogance. The Johnstone insight: being humble when receiving praise actually raises your status by implying the praiser has bad taste.
Hatred is much harder to fake than love. You hear of fake love; never of fake hate. This is why neediness leaks — love can be performed, but the body confesses what the persona tries to hide.
By praising someone for his lack of defects you are also implying his lack of virtues. Via negativa applied to compliments.
The opposite of success isn’t failure; it is name-dropping. The second-hander in a single sentence.
For most, success is the harmful passage from the camp of the hating to the camp of the hated.
The fastest way to become rich is to socialize with the poor; the fastest way to become poor is to socialize with the rich. Reference point bias as financial strategy.
You can tell how uninteresting a person is by asking him whom he finds interesting.
On Self-Deception and Motivation
When we want to do something while unconsciously certain to fail, we seek advice so we can blame someone else for the failure. The locally optimal version of decision-making — outsource the decision so the failure is not yours.
Nobody wants to be perfectly transparent; not to others, certainly not to himself. Self-knowledge is the threat that every self-rejection strategy is designed to avoid.
People often need to suspend their self-promotion, and have someone in their lives they do not need to impress. This explains dog ownership. The need for a relationship free from performance.
Just as dyed hair makes older men less attractive, it is what you do to hide your weaknesses that makes them repugnant. Concealment signals the weakness more loudly than the weakness itself.
On Institutions and Knowledge
Education makes the wise slightly wiser, but it makes the fool vastly more dangerous. The priesthood problem: the institution amplifies whatever raw material enters it.
What makes us fragile is that institutions cannot have the same virtues (honor, truthfulness, courage, loyalty, tenacity) as individuals. The structural limit of every organization.
Competitive academia fossilizes the soul. The paradigm locks in and the person locks in with it.
Skills that transfer: street fights, off-path hiking, seduction, broad erudition. Skills that don’t: school, games, sports, laboratory — what’s reduced and organized. The foxhog applied to education: broad, chaotic, high-dimensional experience transfers. Narrow, structured, low-dimensional training does not.
It’s much harder to write a book review for a book you’ve read than for a book you haven’t read.
On Society and Power
Karl Marx, a visionary, figured out that you can control a slave much better by convincing him he is an employee. Legibility as invisible chain.
Religions get you in with belief to sell you rules. Restaurants get you in with food to sell you liquor.
What made medicine fool people for so long was that its successes were prominently displayed and its mistakes (literally) buried. Survivorship bias as institutional protection.
Finer men tolerate others’ small inconsistencies though not the large ones; the weak tolerate others’ large inconsistencies though not small ones. Strength is calibrated attention. Weakness fixates on what it can control.
It is said that the best horses lose when they compete with slower ones, and win against better rivals. Undercompensation from the absence of a stressor — inverse hormesis. In Baudelaire’s phrase, “The albatross’s giant wings prevent him from walking.” The barbell insight: the system that never faces real challenge atrophies. Many do better in Calculus 103 than Calculus 101.
On Truth and Communication
I suspect that they put Socrates to death because there is something terribly unattractive, alienating, and nonhuman in thinking with too much clarity. The exasperation of expertise taken to its lethal conclusion.
The test of originality for an idea is not the absence of one single predecessor but the presence of multiple but incompatible ones.
It is difficult to stop the impulse to reveal secrets in conversation, as if information had the desire to live and the power to multiply.
With terminal disease, nature lets you die with abbreviated suffering; medicine lets you suffer with prolonged dying.
References:
- Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms