One of the sombre aphorisms in ‘The Bed of Procrustes’ by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (www.landmarkonthenet.com) reads thus: “The calamity of the information age is that the toxicity of data increases much faster than its benefits.”
Another aphorism brings out the difference between the medieval man and his modern counterpart – that the former was a cog in a wheel he did not understand, while the latter is a cog in a complicated system he thinks he understands. “Most info-Web-media-newspaper types have a hard time swallowing the idea that knowledge is reached (mostly) by removing junk from people’s heads,” is Taleb-speak for the bold.
He narrates the story of Procrustes, from Greek mythology, the cruel owner of a small estate who had a peculiar sense of hospitality. “He abducted travellers, provided them with a generous dinner, then invited them to spend the night in a rather special bed. He wanted the bed to fit the traveller to perfection. Those who were too tall had their legs chopped off with a sharp hatchet; those who were too short were stretched…”
But what is the connection, you may wonder. The answer, as the author explains, is that 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 commoditised ideas, reductive categories, specific vocabularies, and pre-packaged narratives.
Further, as he frets, we seem unaware of this backward fitting, much like tailors who take great pride in delivering the perfectly fitting suit, but do so by surgically altering the limbs of their customers! “For instance, few realise that we are changing the brains of schoolchildren through medication in order to make them adjust to the curriculum, rather than the reverse.”
In the ‘Postface,’ the author reasons that because our minds need to reduce information, we are more likely to try to squeeze a phenomenon into the Procrustean bed of a crisp and known category (amputating the unknown), rather than suspend categorisation, and make it tangible. “Thanks to our detections of false patterns, along with real ones, what is random will appear less random and more certain – our overactive brains are more likely to impose the wrong, simplistic narrative than no narrative at all.”
Cautioning that the mind can be a wonderful tool for self-delusion, because it was not designed to deal with complexity and nonlinear uncertainties, Taleb avers that more information means more delusions, and that our detection of false patterns is growing faster and faster as a side effect of modernity and the information age. “There is this mismatch between the messy randomness of the information-rich current world, with its complex interactions, and our intuitions of events, derived in a simpler ancestral habitat…”
A book that can keep you awake.
**
Tailpiece
“To detect the errors in the ‘most wanted’ list, we ran an advanced AI program…”
“And it cleaned up the list?”
“We believe so, because it rejected all the 50 names and presented a whole new set of 500!”
**
BookPeek.blogspot.com
