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Hardcover
112 pages
ISBN 9781400069972 Published Nov. 2010
Random House
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Posted Feb. 29, 2012 7:44 a.m. by dylan
In - 800 CEO Read Blog
Theseus was always in search of his next adventure, choosing to travel overland to meet his father in Athens so he could clear the road of its notorious monsters and villains (such as Procrustes, who business book readers may recognize from Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Bed of Procrustes) rather than taking the safer sea route suggested by his grandfather. And when he learned that Athens was sending seven young men and seven women in war tribute each year to be devoured by the Minotaur—the half-bull, half man pet monster of the cruel King Minos of Crete—he decided he would be one of the fourteen to go, that he would try to rid the world of yet another monster.
The story of New is the story of human progress, and the first part of the book explores the origins and evolution of our neophilia. As Gallagher puts it: "As we've moved from the epoch of hunter-gatherers—the vast majority of our time as a species—to the agricultural, industrial, and information ages, our neophilia has changed and developed with us." It's a story given greater depth from recent advances in neuroscience and and increased understanding of how the brain functions—advances that are well documented and made easy-to-understand in the book. Early on, Gallagher helps us begin to view our brains less as an impartial data crunchers and more as surprise detectors, focusing on what's new and different in the world around us, reacting to the dangers and opportunities presented. This has profound implications for how we understand the world, shapes our interactions with and reactions to it. As Gallagher explains it:
The main reason you're drawn to the novel or surprising is that it can upset the safe, predictable status quo and the game plan you've based on it, perhaps even jeopardizing your survival. [...] To survive, you must be aroused by the new and different. To be efficient and productive, however, you must focus your finite mental energy and attention on those novel sights and sounds, thoughts and feelings that somehow matter and screen out the rest. Just as arousal alerts and orients you to new things, the complementary process of adaptation helps you filter out the unimportant ones.
This has been critically important not just for how we understand the world and evolve as a group, but for how we develop as individual personalities. So, the second part of the book focuses on our personal inclinations for novelty and what that means for us as individuals. Ms. Gallagher writes that "The tendency either to approach or avoid novelty is the most important stable behavioral difference among individuals in the same species, period." But it is not just orientation to and adaption of novelty that is important, it is the adaption to and reorientation of perception, the ability to reinterpret, to find something unknown in what most assumed was already known, to find something novel in what has become commonplace. It is how we innovate in the arts, in the sciences, in business. Gallagher offers up the example of Einstein:
Einstein's ability to interpret the same old math and science that his peers knew by heart in bold new ways testifies to his virtuosity in ... neophilic, uninhibited, right-brain thinking. As [Oshin Vartanian, a psychologist at Defense Research and Development Canada-Toronto] says, "Novelty-seeking is talked about as if there's a novel object out there somewhere that you find, but usually it's the perceiver who has to interpret it as novel. Creative people can see things in a fresh way and produce new ideas because they can relax the usual perceptual and conceptual constraints that define entities."
That holds true in every field and for almost every innovation. The author could have just as easily used the example of Steve Jobs in consumer technology, Pablo Picasso in the arts, or Bill James in baseball to illustrate her point. Each found new dimensions to explore in an established order, exploded preconceptions, and altered the fields they worked in (and the culture) forever.
Even here, though, in the exploration of psychology, human temperament and how individuals can shape the culture, there are stories of how the culture around us shapes our neophilia. One such example is illustrated by the fascinating etymology of words such as "curiosity" and "interesting." Rarely used before, the words became more commonplace with the increased number of, and time for, "curiosities" and objects of "interest" during the the industrial revolution. These novelties became so commonplace that the lack of such distraction began to equal "boredom," a term that didn't appear in the English language until the later eighteenth century. Since then, boredom has gone from being viewed as an individual vice to the natural state of man, with a steady stream of new inventions and entertainments devised to feed our neophilia.
This brings us to third part of the book, which explores how our environment shapes our neophilia and what the digital information revolution is doing to it. Technology has gone from something that simply helps us cultivate and navigate the world to become a labyrinth of consumer choice and novelty that needs to be cultivated and navigated in its own right. The complexities range from information overload—we now have access to more information than we'll ever need, want, or use at our literal fingertips every waking moment of our lives, and it can now take us hours just to check our mail everyday—to navigating a world we're increasingly living online, creating a lot of "something's gotta give" dilemmas.
The simplest one concerns a basic quality shared by all living things: responsiveness to the environment around you. As you know if you've had a run-in on the sidewalk or highway with someone who was engrossed in his or her wonder phone, you can't live in a screen and the real world at the same time.
These seem like modern annoyances that come in tandem with modern conveniences, but at some point we have to reevaluate whether it's all even convenient anymore—what with all the overload and distraction these devices are producing. And all the while it's changing the way our brains are wired and societies are structured. We're creating a new Minotaur, half man, half bull to navigate. Gallagher sums up the difficulty we now face.
The larger problem that underlies the pursuit of new things just because they're new isn't the waste of time and money per se but the fact that we've lost touch with neophilia's purpose. This great gift isn't meant to push us to buy stuff we don't need or seek constant entertainment but to help us adapt to change, from the economy's volatility to the climate crisis, and learn about and create useful new things. [...] Like the agricultural age's plow and the industrial age's steam engine, the information age's electronics have changed the human experience as previous generations have known it. Just as we once focused our neophilia on advancing the ways of life enabled by farming, and then by powerful machines that mass-produced goods, we're now concentrating it on processing and organizing all kinds of electronic data that are the foundations of our work and play. Like the upheavals that preceded it, this revolution is already propelling us into the next phase of our cultural if not quasibiological evolution. If we're to make the best use of our neophilia in a new epoch of endless novelty, we must make conscious decisions to ensure that it's working for us, rather than the other way around.
The bells and whistles can be incredibly invigorating, entertaining and even helpful, but it's important to step away from time to time to make sure the technologies we adapt into our everyday lives serve their intended purpose—to help us stop the needless yearly sacrifice of Athenian youths to the man-beast Minotaur. Or as Gallagher more accurately and succinctly puts it:
Our capacity for handling new things is already being tested by an unprecedented explosion of them. Figuring out how to respond to this embarrassment of riches by becoming more productive rather than more distracted is easier if you understand a few basics of how and why you brain reacts to new things.
It is not that the digital revolution is inherently good or bad for us or our businesses—it's not, or it's both. Or it can be either depending on how we use it. It can distract us or make us more efficient. As Nicholas Carr writes in The Shallows, Douglas Rushkoff talks about in Program or Be Programmed, and Charles Duhigg will teach us in his upcoming book The Power of Habit, we have to be conscious of how we're being conscious. We have to mindful of what we're mindful of. We have to make a habit out of forming good habits. Add Winifred Gallagher to that important chorus of voices, and let's hope their song is catchy enough to get stuck in people's heads.
Before entering the Labyrinth to battle the Minotaur, King Minos's daughter Ariadne became smitten with Theseus and his cause, and gave him a ball of thread so that he could find his way out again if he could indeed defeat the beast. In this book, our neophilia is our Theseus and Winifred Gallagher our Ariadne, showing us deep into the labyrinthine structure of our brains, our culture, and our technologies, helping us explode myths and misconceptions along the way, and unraveling just enough thread for us to find our way out again with a more complete understanding of ourselves and the moment we find ourselves in.
What do we know?
Posted Aug. 9, 2011 9:29 a.m. by jon
In - 800 CEO Read Blog
I love the feeling of having my expectations broken. Most of us can point to a time where we received special treatment beyond what we assumed, or knew from previous experience, and that's always a great experience. But what I really enjoy is when I discover something very obvious, so obvious that I never saw it. That realization is profound because it really makes me understand how easy it is to become complacent, or perceive the world in ways that I myself created, which isn't necessarily true.
A friend's father, who used to be a policeman, commented that the best criminals are the ones who build the most consistently normal appearing lives. By doing so, they remove suspicion that they would be involved in anything other than what any other person would be. When caught, policemen and civilians would be shocked that something illegal was going on when everything seemed so normal. To be the officer who discovered and caught the criminal must be so much more exciting than catching the obvious bank robber, etc. because of the situation's ability to shatter expectations.
Business books can certainly create this phenomena as well. We might be managers or sales people or CEOs or marketers and to a certain degree, we know about those roles - we know how to work within them, what's expected of them, and how to apply our own ideas to enhance them. Then sometimes we can read a book and think, "Wow, that seems so obvious, yet it's incredibly important, and I have never considered that before." That's a great feeling, because it's real learning. It's us understanding that we know a lot, but not everything, and that's inspiring on many levels.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Bed of Procrustes is a great list of insightful aphorisms that shift your perspective 1% - which is all it takes to make you think, "Wow, I never thought about it like that before."
David McRaney's forthcoming (October) book You Are Not So Smart clearly reveals how our assumptions and beliefs cause us to see the world much more incorrectly than we think.
And even Jonathan Fields' Uncertainty trumpets the fact that we know very little about any given situation, but that shouldn't hold us back from discovering the truth on our own terms.
Books like these reveal the direct knowledge of their content, but also allow a personal experience to take place, as we discover there are many details we've missed, and will continue to miss. But that's ok, as long as we're open to learning about them, and not letting their absence hold us back from taking chances and stumbling onto great things.
An Excerpt from THE BED OF PROCRUSTES
Posted Nov. 22, 2010 12:41 p.m. by dylan
In - 800 CEO Read Blog
This week we have an excerpt from The Bed of Procrustes by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. You may remember Taleb from his bestselling The Black Swan or his first book, Fooled by Randomness.
Taleb is a big thinker, and The Bed of Procrustes is a collection of "philosophical and practical aphorisms" from the author. In the excerpt, the author explains who Procrustes was, how the story is a metaphor for our modern age, and why he decided to write the book as he did. The book itself will be released next week.
Procrustes
In the purest of poetic justice, Procrustes was hoisted by his own petard. One of the travelers happened to be the fearless Theseus who slayed the Minotaur later on in his heroic career. After the customary dinner, Theseus made Procrustes lie in his own bed. Then, to make him fit in it to the customary perfection, he decapitated him. Theseus thus followed Hercules’ method of paying back in kind.
In more sinister versions (such as the one in Pseudo-Apollodorus’ Bibliotheca), Procrustes owned two beds, one small, one large; he made short victims lie in the large bed, and the tall victims in the short one.
Every aphorism here is about a Procrustean bed of sorts—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 commoditized ideas, reductive categories, specific vocabularies, and prepackaged narratives, which, on the occasion, has explosive consequences. Further, 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 realize that we are changing the brains of schoolchildren through medication in order to make them adjust to the curriculum, rather than the reverse.
Since aphorisms lose their charm whenever explained, I only hint for now the central theme of [The Bed of Procrustes]—I relegate further discussions to the postface. These are standalone compressed thoughts revolving around my main idea of how we deal, and should deal, with what we don’t know more deeply discussed in my books The Black Swan and Fooled by Randomness.
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The person you are the most afraid to contradict is yourself.
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An idea starts to be interesting when you get scared of taking it to its logical conclusion.
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Pharmaceutical companies are better at inventing diseases that match existing drugs, rather than inventing drugs to match existing diseases.
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To understand the liberating effect of asceticism, consider that losing all your fortune is much less painful than losing only half of it.
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To bankrupt a fool, give him information.
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Academia is to knowledge what prostitution is to love; close enough on the surface but, to the nonsucker, not exactly the same thing.
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In science you need to understand the world; in business you need others to misunderstand it.
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I suspect that they put Socrates to death because there is something terribly unattractive, alienating, and nonhuman in thinking with too much clarity.
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Education makes the wise slightly wiser; but it makes the fool vastly more dangerous.
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The test of originality for an idea is not the absence of one single predecessor, but the presence of multiple but incompatible ones.
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Modernity’s double punishment is to make us both age prematurely and live longer.
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An erudite is someone who displays less than he knows; a journalist and consultant, the opposite; most others fall somewhere in between.
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Your brain is most intelligent when you don’t instruct it on what to do—something people who take showers discover on occasion.
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If your anger decreases with time, you did injustice; if it increases, you suffered injustice.
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I wonder if those who advocate generosity for its rewards notice the inconsistency, or if what they call generosity is an attractive investment strategy.
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Those who think religion is about “belief” don’t understand religion, and don’t understand belief.
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Work destroys your soul by stealthily invading your brain during the hours not officially spent working; be selective about professions.
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In nature we never repeat the same motion. In captivity (office, gym, commute, sports), life is just repetitive stress injury. No randomness.
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Using, as excuse, others’ failure of common sense is in itself a failure of common sense.
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Compliance with the straightjacket of narrow (Aristotelian) logic and avoidance of fatal inconsistencies are not the same thing.
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Economics cannot digest the idea that the collective (and the aggregate) are disproportionately less predictable than individuals.
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Don’t talk about “progress” in terms of longevity, safety, or comfort before comparing zoo animals to those in the wilderness.
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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.
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There is no intermediate state between ice and water but there is one between life and death: employment.
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You have a calibrated life when most of what you fear has the titillating prospect of adventure.
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Nobody wants to be perfectly transparent; not to others, certainly not to himself.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Nassim Nicholas Taleb has devoted his life to immersing himself in problems of luck, randomness, human error, probability, and the philosophy of knowledge. He managed to transform his interests into three successful careers, as a man of letters, businessman-trader-risk manager, and university professor.
Although he spends most of his time as a flâneur, meditating in cafés across the planet, he is currently Distinguished Professor at New York University's Polytechnic Institute. His books Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan have been published in 31 languages. He is widely recognized as the foremost thinker on probability and uncertainty.
Excerpted from The Bed of Procrustes
2010 © Copyright by N. N. Taleb
Published by Random House
