babalar ve gölgeleri

Başarılı bir babanın yapabileceği en büyük kötülük çocuğunu kendi izinde gitmeye zorlamaktır. Statü göreceli bir kavramdır. Çocuklar ne kadar yol katetseler de, babalarını aşamadıkları sürece kendilerini başarısız hissederler. 

Büyük başarılar büyük egolardan doğar. Büyük egoya sahip bir baba da (kimseyi beğenmediği için) çocuğunun dışarı kaynaklardan beslenerek gelişmesini istemez. Fakat bu yaklaşım çocuğunun onu aşmasını daha da zorlaştırır. Bir insanın tek bilgi ve tecrübe kaynağını aşması imkansızdır.

Babanın birikiminin çöpe gitmemesini sağlayan en güzel çözüm çocuğun başka bir kulvarda koşmasıdır. Bu kulvar çocuğun kendisini babasıyla karşılaştıramayacağı kadar uzak mesafede, fakat babanın birikimini alakasız kılmayacak kadar da paralel doğrultuda olmalıdır.

Başka bir çözüm de babanın birikimlerini daha soyut bir düzeye taşımasıdır. Bilgi erdemselleştiği an paralel olmayan kulvarlara da transfer edilebilir hale gelir. Fakat başarılı babaların bir çoğu bu kapasiteye sahip değildir. (Yüksek ego ve erdemlilik genelde ters orantılıdır.)

freedom as naivety

The freedom that new mathematicians and designers feel is based on a misconception stemming from inexperience and naivety. The actual configuration space of good theories and designs is very small.

The reason why mathematicians and designers look uncreative to outsiders is precisely because their jobs require extreme creativity to succeed in. Artists on the other hand look a lot more creative since they are innovating under no constraints.

being first, second and third

In business life, it is stressful to be the first in your sector. Creating new markets and innovating are costly processes fraught with unknown unknowns. You pave the way and the guy behind you effortless walks through it. He experiences drastically lower sales costs. He also has the liberty to improve on your product. After all, achieving the product-market fit becomes much easier after someone releases a draft version and people start using it.

Similarly, being the most beautiful girl in a social circle is actually a great curse. You attract so much noise that you end up making wrong mating choices.

In competitive sports, even being second sucks. Winning the bronze medal makes you feel great because you could have received no medal at all. Meanwhile the guy who got the silver medal is unhappy because he just missed the gold one.

fundamentality as nonlinearity

In mathematics, the fundamental things are obvious. They are the axioms and the definitions. You play with them and the entire edifice changes. A single additional condition in your definition can cause a chain reaction resulting in a tremendous number of revisions in proofs that are dependent on your definition.

What is fundamental in product design is not that obvious. Features like Facebook's feed and Tinder's swiping unleashed an immense creative activity resulting in thousands of new analogical startups. Sometimes small UX changes like Snapchat's ephemerality can cause drastic changes in behaviour. 

In essence, what is fundamental can only be recognised when you nudge it. In other words, fundamentality is a perturbative notion: Greater the nonlinearity, greater the fundamentality. 

This interpretation works even in areas outside of mathematics, where there is no observable derivational depth. Large nonlinearities may be manifestations of aggregations of many small nonlinearities (as in mathematics and physics) or single "atomic" instances (as in social sciences where the human mind can short-circuit the observable causality diagrams).

feeds vs stories

Because of my new project about celebrities, I wanted to analyse the "stories" format of Snapchat from a celebrity's point of view and compare it to the usual "feeds" format of other social media platforms.

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Advantages

- There is only a single advantage I can think of. Stories open up full screen and thereby lead to an immersive experience. A celebrity would enjoy being the sole attention.

Disadvantages

- Instead of releasing plenty of cheap content, celebrities prefer to create few, high-quality content. They need the quality because they want to project and maintain a certain image. They need the artificial scarcity because they want to stay fresh and avoid getting depleted.

- Celebrities do not want their content to disappear, because they put a lot of effort into it. Fans do not want it to disappear neither, because they want to be able to return to it.

- Fans can react to a story only by sending a private message, but the celebrity can not possibly respond to thousands of messages. Of course, thousands of public comments left on a post inside a feed structure is also unmanageable. But a few replies can nevertheless create a big effect due the simple reason that everybody can see them. In particular, they will cause the other commentators to think that they may one day receive a reply as well.

- Each story needs to be tapped to be opened. This is a nice feature for the general public since not everyone posts interesting things all the time. But fans are different. They do not want to miss any of their celebrity's content. Making them tap all the time leads to a bad user experience.

- Celebrities love to receive likes and compare themselves to the other celebrities in their league. Stories can not be liked and their view counts are kept private.

- Before they are tapped, all stories appear as tiny circles presented linearly next to each other inside a tiny rectangle. Generally speaking, the current state of social media is already "too flat" for many celebrities. This compactification flattens the hierarchy even more by making the celebrity look as if she is waiting in a bus line.

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Don't get me wrong. Stories is a very successful invention. It solves several important problems for the general public by placing an emphasis on rawness and ephemerality.

The fact that stories disappear after a while radically decreases the number of things to be consumed and creates a feeling of finiteness which is further reinforced by the compactification I mentioned above.

Feeds, on the other hand, often overwhelm people with their never-ending scrolling. Algorithmic filtering partially mitigates this problem by destroying the chronological flow and emphasizing the highly engaging posts, but it creates new supply-side problems and does not decrease the absolute number of outstanding posts waiting to be consumed. The already stressful process of content creation becomes even more stressful due to the added worry about receiving a high algorithmic score. People become more conservative and start emulating others who are already successful at "gaming" the system. Moreover, if they feel that they are getting filtered out, then they will simply stop publishing.

Of course, if the average person had followed a manageable number of accounts and created a reasonable number of posts per day, then there would have been no problems in the first place.

The reason why the feed structure is failing for the general public today is because it was born directly out of an analogy with the traditional publishing world, the world of celebrities.

Social media was an enormous success because it democratised fame, just like capitalism democratised money and democracy democratised power.* But it still needs some time to settle on the correct form. In particular, the structures people need to rise to fame may not overlap exactly with what they need to enjoy their fame.

Stories is a good format for the general public (i.e. amateur broadcasters starting off with no audience) because it takes into consideration our tendency to overwhelm ourselves and each other in costless, restriction-free** environments. Feeds on the other hand is a perfect format for celebrities (i.e. professional broadcasters with already existing large audiences) since it was born directly out of their own world anyway.

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* Each wave of democratisation had a traumatic effect on masses. Fame is now something you have to run after, just like the other democratised forms of status. Your innate talents no longer limit you, just like your blood line no longer does. Of course, this also implies that if you fail to rise to fame, there is no one to blame but yourself. Since status is a relative good, distribution of fame within the society keeps getting renormalized over time. In other words, with the arrival of social media, we have successfully created yet another category where 99% of the population is mathematically guaranteed to fail.

** Democratisation of fame happened long after democratisations of power and money, because it had to wait for the development of technologies that made costless, restriction-free broadcasting possible. Before the digitalisation of media people used to routinely pay to follow their favourite celebrities. They would have never done that to follow each other.

maximisation, averaging and beauty

We mistakenly think of beauty as an edge case resulting from the maximisation of some complex parameters. This misconception has linguistic origins. (We say "very beautiful" and "very" implies a maximisation of some sort.) Beauty emerges not from a maximisation process but from an averaging one. That is why as more faces get pasted together using image editing tools, the resulting face looks more beautiful. 

Our biological craving for normality has a sound basis since normality often implies healthiness. But when everyone craves for normality, the genetic pool quickly becomes a mono culture and this creates a vulnerability against new health threats. Hence there is a concurrent biological need for cross cultural genetic marriages as well. That is why the sweat of genetically furthest away people smells the best in blindfolded tests.

Combining the previous two observations, we conclude that what people crave for the most is the average of the furthest away genetic pool. In other words, beauty involves both a low-level averaging process and a high-level maximisation process.

youth and maturity in research

Young researchers do local random jumps in their thinking. In other words, they think of many stupid things and can only see one step ahead. Hence the reason why they need the guidance and filters of the old researchers to stay on track and see which ninety percent of their ideas are actually stupid. 

Mature researchers, on the other hand, do global deterministic jumps in their thinking. Their great knowledge and experience catalyse into a solid style and vision. But while they are flying over the forest, they miss some of the gems hiding among the trees. Hence the reason why they need the young researchers to scavenge for the seeds of new revolutions.

beceriksizlik, inat, kibir

Kişiler arası karakter uyuşmazlıkları çeşitli vakalar üzerinden çatışmalar çıkartır. Toplum içinde yaşamanın ve insan olmanın birlikte getirdiği önlenemez bir gerçektir bu.

Uyarılarla karakter değişmez. Dolayısıyla çatışmaları çözmenin yolu onları tetikleyen vakaları iyi analiz edip, ileride bu tarz vakaların yaşanmaması için çabalamaktır. İlişki yönetimi denen şey de özünde budur.

Sürekli saçma vakalardan dolayı kriz yaşayan insanlar ilişki yönetimini beceremiyor demektir. Saçma vakalar doğaları gereği önlenebilirlerdir. Yönetim becerisi olmasına rağmen önlenememeleri inattan, önlenemeyenlerin derin çatışmalara yol açması ise kibirden kaynaklanır.

İlişkileri, önemli vakalardan doğan çatışmalar veya beceriksizlik-inat-kibir üçlüsü bitirir. Mükemmel uyumun peşinden koşmak ise romantik (ve aslında bencil) bir hayaldir.

my simple life algorithm

It took me a fantastically long amount of time to realize what I have really been doing with my life: I have just been trying to maximize my uniqueness.

All the important decisions I made were simply outputs of this algorithm. I have always worked on stuff that made maximal use of my strengths, knowledge, resources and network. In other words, I have always worked on things that few others would prefer or excel at.

Note that there is something dangerous lurking behind this desire to maximize one's uniqueness. It is sort of like a secular person's jealous approximation to the notion of being chosen. On the other hand, it is not an egotistical desire at all, since the entire exercise of identifying your uniqueness is done from a societal point of view. (We are all collectively better off when everyone realizes his or her own uniqueness.)

math vs science vs arts vs design

Math vs. Science

Here is Prof. Janelidze's take on the distinction between math and science. It is a paraphrase of things he said during a discussion where I proposed a dynamical interpretation of a certain subclass of groupoids. 

"At an early age you confuse love with sexual attraction. Then the two separates. At some point, you will experience the same for math and science, and you will no longer be interested in science. You will grow up and stop reading or doing philosophy... It is hard for me to express this state of mind. You will feel it yourself when the time is ripe... Science is like a painting whereas math is like a photograph of God's mind. Why waste time with paintings?"

Science vs. Arts

Below is a paraphrase of a dialogue between Prof. Janelidze and me.

Prof. Janelidze: In science, you try to discover what others will eventually discover too. In arts, you try to discover what others will never be able to discover.

Tarık: Does that mean scientists are just pawns?

Prof. Janelidze: No, they are not just pawns! Being first to discover something matters. 

Tarık: But being first does not sound that significant...

Prof. Janelidze: You don't believe in God. That is why it is hard to explain these things to you. Being there first happens for a reason. You are meant to discover whatever you discovered.

Arts vs. Design

Sanat kendini ifade etmek, dizayn ise problem çözmektir. Sanat içe dönük, dizayn ise dışa dönüktür. Sanat yıkar, dizayn toparlar. Sanat ölmez, dizayn ise belirli bir amaçla doğduğu için ölebilir.