The Bed of Procrustes

These short and often contrarian meditations take readers on a journey through both the unseen and complex worlds of risk, randomness, uncertainty, and knowledge. The Bed of Procrustes takes its title from Greek mythology: the story of a man who made his visitors fit his bed to perfection by either stretching them or cutting their limbs. It represents Taleb’s view of modern civilization’s hubristic side effects—modifying humans to satisfy technology, blaming reality for not fitting economic models, inventing diseases to sell drugs, defining intelligence as what can be tested in a classroom, and convincing people that employment is not slavery. In aphoristic prose that cuts like a knife and with trademark dark humor, Taleb has co-written an antidote for our modern condition—one where we face unnecessary suffering due to the harmful illusion of control.