Heroes Not Zombies

Nassim Nicholas Taleb (The “Black Swan” guy) has a new book out which is a collection of aphorisms. It’s called The Bed of Procrustes (ISBN 1846144582).

I like books of aphorisms. You can dip and dive into them and just stop where something provokes or captures you. Here are a few of his which have made me stop and think so far.

Don’t talk about ‘progress’ in terms of longevity, safety or comfort before comparing zoo animals to those in the wilderness.

Who doesn’t want longevity, safety and comfort? But he’s right, there’s a difference between being a zoo animal and living free in the wild. Can we have the longevity, safety and comfort AND the freedom and excitement of the wild??

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.

This is pretty close to my heroes not zombies theme. If your every day is scheduled to death, is that satisfying? Is there some room for spontaneity, for freedom to respond to events and circumstances? If life can’t be fully controlled, it certainly can’t be fully planned. Globally, we’re caught up in command and control methods based on a delusion of the certainties revealed by science – whether it’s economic science, earthquake science, or medical science. The events of the last few years in particular are really showing the extent to which these theories and approaches are delusional and only further power and control over the individual.

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.

This is a bit like Rumsfeld’s famous knowns and unknowns, isn’t it? But there’s also the issue of is reality only that which can be seen and measured?

Asking science to explain life and vital matters is equivalent to asking a grammarian to explain poetry.

This reminded me of Mary Midgely‘s superb “Science and Poetry” – one of my favourite philosophy books. Science isn’t everything and it can’t explain everything either….