STREET DOGS: On tortured truths
There is an infinite amount of stuff that can't be answered with maths, facts or formulas
From Nassim Taleb’s book The Bed of Procrustes: "Procrustes, in Greek mythology, was the cruel owner of an estate in Corydalus in Attica, between Athens and Eleusis. "Procrustes had a peculiar sense of hospitality: he abducted travellers, provided them with dinner, then invited them to spend the night in a 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." Who would do such a thing? Who would take something that doesn’t fit and make it fit? Taleb thinks we do it all the time. Not with people but with ideas. "We humans," he says, "facing limits of knowledge, and things we do not observe, the unseen and the unknown, resolve tension by squeezing life and the world into crisp commoditised ideas, reductive categories, specific vocabularies, and pre-packaged narratives, which, on the occasion, has explosive consequences." As Morgan Housel wrote in The Motley F...
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