An colorful aphorism coined by Nassim Nicholas Taleb based on the Greek myth of Procrustes, who kidnapped travelers and cut off limbs from their bodies in order to resize them to fit onto an iron bed of predetermined length. The metaphor refers to how we crudely cut the world into oversimplified constructs, categories and concepts, and in the process often miss critical nuance and details. This is related to other Taleb quips such as “Life happens in the tails” and the difference between Mediocristan and Extremistan. This is also related to Einstein’s quip,

As the skill of deciding whether something is “close enough” is useful, we have a brain area that performs this function (TE1p – Procrustes).