Category Archives: Haters

Digested read: The Bed of Procrustes by Nassim Nicholas Taleb | Books | The Guardian

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Shared by JohnH

This fellow apparently doesn’t think much of The Bed of Procrustes, or NNT for that matter, but in the interest of balance, and because the graphic is hilarious, I’m passing it along. HatTip to Dave Lull.

Digested read The Bed of Procrustes Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Illustration for the Guardian by Neal Fox.

Procrustes, in Greek myth, was the cruel owner of an estate in Attica who abducted travellers and cut off their heads to ensure they fitted his bed perfectly. Every aphorism here is about a Procrustean bed of sorts: faced with the imperfection of the unknown and the unobserved, we humans tend to backfit the world into reductive categories such that only someone of my immense intellect is able to point out the inherent futility of modern life.

Update: Dave sends a link to another NNT ‘hater’. This one doesn’t really warrant a quote, he’s not very clever and a quick look around leads me to conclude that hating is his MO. It also originates in the U.K.  http://www.standpointmag.co.uk/node/3651/full.  Anyway, there’s been enough activity in this area lately that I’ve decided to add a ‘Hater’ category. I’ll only share the best of them.

Nassim Taleb Educates a Quant

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Now you all know I’m a Taleb super-fan, but this is excellent and hilarious. It’s not going to mean much to the general public, but to those of us following the argument it’s genius.  Would love to watch NNT’s face as he saw it for the first time. I like to think that he’d get a few laughs out of it as well, but who knows?
It has 55 views so far and was created with the very fun Xtranormal software. Here’s the link.  It’s attributed to Peter Cotton. Snooping around on the net I see a Peter Cotton associated with Taleb’s name here, which leads me to believe that it may have been created this Peter Cotton. Would love to get confirmation on that if only to thank him for a good laugh.