Procustes was a character from Greek mythology who abducted travellers and invited them t spend the night in a special bed which they had to fit to perfection. They never did. Those who were too tall had their legs chopped off; those who were short were stretched.
Every aphorism here is about a Procrustean bed of sorts- we humans, facing the limits of our knowledge, the unseen and the unknown, resolve the rension by sqeezing life and the world into crisp commoditized ideas, reductive categories, specific vocabularies and pre-packaged narratives. Only by embracing the unexpected- and accetpig what we don't know- can we see the world as it really is.
How true!
Blurb from a new book by Naseem Nicholas Taleb: "The Bed of Procustes". Look forward to reading it.
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