The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (Incerto)

You will be civilized on the day you can spend a long period doing nothing, learning nothing, and improving nothing, without feeling the slightest amount of guilt.

If you know, in the morning, what your day looks like with any precision, you are a little bit dead—the more precision, the more dead you are.

The characteristic feature of the loser is to bemoan, in general terms, mankind’s flaws, biases, contradictions, and irrationality—without exploiting them for fun and profit.

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.

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

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).

Work destroys your soul by stealthily invading your brain during the hours not officially spent working; be selective about professions.

Your brain is most intelligent when you don’t instruct it on what to do—something people who take showers discover on occasion.

People focus on role models; it is more effective to find antimodels—people you don’t want to resemble when you grow up.

The three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary.

Every aphorism here is about a Procrustean bed of sorts—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.

how we deal, and should deal, with what we don’t know,

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

Work destroys your soul by stealthily invading your brain during the hours not officially spent working; be selective about professions.

The characteristic feature of the loser is to bemoan, in general terms, mankind’s flaws, biases, contradictions, and irrationality—without exploiting them for fun and profit.

It is the appearance of inconsistency, and not its absence, that makes people attractive.

A friendship that ends was never one; there was at least one sucker in it.

It is a very powerful manipulation to let others win the small battles. If you want strangers to help you, smile. For those close to you, cry.

Life is about execution rather than purpose. If you get easily bored, it means that your BS detector is functioning properly; if you forget (some) things, it means that your mind knows how to filter; and if you feel sadness, it means that you are human. It is a very recent disease to mistake the unobserved for the nonexistent; but some are plagued with the worse disease of mistaking the unobserved for the unobservable.

The good life—the vita beata—is like reading a Russian novel: It takes two hundred pages of struggling with the characters before one can start enjoying things. Then the agitation starts to make sense.

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.

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

You will be civilized on the day you can spend a long period doing nothing, learning nothing, and improving nothing, without feeling the slightest amount of guilt.

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

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

People focus on role models; it is more effective to find antimodels—people you don’t want to resemble when you grow up.

There are two types of people: those who try to win and those who try to win arguments. They are never the same.

Modernity inflicts a sucker narrative on activities; now we “walk for exercise,” not “walk” with no justification; for hidden reasons.

Bureaucracy is a construction designed to maximize the distance between a decision-maker and the risks of the decision.

The three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary.

Men destroy each other during war; themselves during peacetime.

Fasting: every human should learn to read, write, respect the weak, take risks in voicing disrespect for the powerful when warranted, and fast.

Life is about early detection of the reversal point beyond which your own belongings (say, a house, country house, car, or business) start owning you.

are hunters; we are only truly alive in those moments when we improvise; no schedule, just small surprises and stimuli from the environment.

If the professor is not capable of giving a class without preparation, don’t attend. People should only teach what they have learned organically, through experience and curiosity…or get another job.

You need to keep reminding yourself of the obvious: charm lies in the unsaid, the unwritten, and the undisplayed. It takes mastery to control silence.

Just like poets and artists, bureaucrats are born, not made; it takes normal humans extraordinary effort to keep attention on such boring tasks.

The costs of specialization: architects build to impress other architects; models are thin to impress other models; academics write to impress other academics; filmmakers try to impress other filmmakers; painters impress art dealers; but authors who write to impress book editors tend to fail.

The information-rich Dark Ages: in 2010, 600,000 books were published, just in English, with few memorable quotes. Circa AD zero, a handful of books were written. In spite of the few that survived, there are loads of quotes.

What I learned on my own I still remember.

It is very difficult to argue with salaried people that the simple can be important and the important can be simple.

The tragedy is that much of what you think is random is in your control and, what’s worse, the opposite.

An academic cannot lose his tenure, but a businessman and risk taker, poor or rich, can go bankrupt. That is the infuriating inequality.

Probability is the intersection of the most rigorous mathematics and the messiest of life. To rephrase, every human should at all times have equality in probability (which we can control), not equality in outcome.

My biggest problem with modernity may lie in the growing separation of the ethical and the legal.

Life’s beauty: the kindest act toward you in your life may come from an outsider not interested in reciprocation.

The difference between the politician and the philosopher is that, in a debate, the politician doesn’t try to convince the other side, only the audience.

You may outlive your strength, never your wisdom.

Weak men act to satisfy their needs, stronger men their duties.

The difference between magnificence and arrogance is in what one does when nobody is looking. Accept the rationality of time, never its fairness and morality.

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

General principle: the solutions (on balance) need to be simpler than the problems.

Nation-states like war; city-states like commerce; families like stability; and individuals like entertainment.

Academics are only useful when they try to be useless (say, as in mathematics and philosophy) and dangerous when they try to be useful.

Fragility: we have been progressively separating human courage from warfare, allowing wimps with computer skills to kill people without the slightest risk to their lives. Those who can’t do shouldn’t teach.

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.

Knowledge is subtractive, not additive—what we subtract (reduction by what does not work, what not to do), not what we add (what to do).

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).

In the medical and social domains, treatment should never be equivalent to silencing symptoms.

Let us find what risks we can measure and these are the risks we should be taking.

When positive, show net; when negative, show gross.

What makes us fragile is that institutions cannot have the same virtues (honor, truthfulness, courage, loyalty, tenacity) as individuals.

Those with brains and no balls become mathematicians, those with balls and no brains join the Mafia, those with no balls and no brains become economists.

In politics we face the choice between warmongering, nation-state-loving, big-business agents on one hand; and risk-blind, top-down, epistemic arrogant big servants of large employers on the other. But we have a choice.

Bring the good news in trickles, the bad news in lumps.

To be a person of virtue you need to be boringly virtuous in every single small action. To be a person of honor all you need is to be honorable in a few important things (risk your life or career or reputation for a just cause, say, or live up to your word when nobody else has the guts to do so).

The first, and hardest, step to wisdom: avert the standard assumption that people know what they want.

A happier world is one in which everyone realizes that 1) it is not what you tell people, it is how you say it that makes them feel bad; 2) it is not what you do to them but how you make them look that gets them angry; 3) they should be the ones putting themselves in a specific category.

Wisdom isn’t about understanding things (and people); it is knowing what they can do to you.

For rewards, be predictable; for punishment, unpredictable.

Golf was invented to prevent those who shouldn’t be reading books from reading bad books.

If you must explain it, don’t.

Elephant: my favorite animal: takes no crap, gives no crap, harms no one, but when one tries to harm it, it has no clemency and never, never forgets.

One reason we think the past was more violent than reality is because historians have an incentive to discuss wars, not peace.

The problem with cost-benefit analysis is that while you may sometimes know the benefits, you never really know the costs.

Mediterraneans scorn instructions but bow to authority; Anglo-Saxons bow to instructions but scorn authority.