political backdoors

Last week, Turkish citizens voted to switch from an all-inclusive parliamentary regime where potentially 100 percent of the population can have a say in politics to a majoritarian presidential regime where 51 percent of the population can rule over the remaining 49 percent.

Guess what percentage of citizens voted in favour of such a transition? 51 percent!

Amazing, right? How can an all-inclusive regime contain a backdoor that allows 51 percent of the population to transform it into a majoritarian regime?

Now I am doubly amazed. How come nobody has exploited this backdoor for 94 years?

mathematics and ux design

Just like mathematics, UX design is a discipline with very few principles and many manifestations of those same principles over and over again. But as human beings we often mistakenly focus on manifestations and forget the underlying structures. Appearances can be fooling.

Notice that the tendency to mistake unity for multiplicity is another fundamental UX principle. (For instance, similar objects should be grouped together to hint at an underlying unity.)

Hence, just like mathematics, UX design is a discipline that is strong enough to take itself as its subject. One can study UX design itself from a UX point of view, just like one can study mathematics itself using mathematics.

nostalgia as garbage

Memory is not about looking backwards, that is not why we have it. It’s there so that your past experiences will make you more adaptive in the here and now and in the future.
- Craig Stark as quoted in Total Recall by Linda Rodriguez McRobbie

Over the years I have become increasingly more at ease with my weak memory.

Firstly, I recognised that being able to forget is a vital strength in creative endeavours. Secondly, forgetting does not necessarily have to be bad.

Forgetting is like the garbage collection mechanisms baked into the architecture of software systems. Often the stuff I forget are the details that (although I am not willing to socially admit) I unconsciously judged to be unimportant at the time of the event.

Unconscious works pragmatically. It is not programmed for nostalgia. It does not discriminate in favour of beautiful moments neither. It just helps us survive.

philosophy of neural pruning

The difference between math and science is baked into our brains.

Math is perfect knowledge. A mathematical statement is either true or false. But a finite brain can not cope with the incredible amount of data flowing from its environment by using such a perfect knowledge framework. Instead it uses a statistical pattern recognition framework that does not have a black-or-white view on how the world works.

The mind is pragmatic. It builds and discards models on the go without giving a shit about their ontological status. In fact, anything with a sufficiently low probability of occurrence is deemed not to exist at all. (Neural pruning is conducted using non-zero thresholds.)

death and succession

Proper time management is impossible for the simple reason that you do not know when you will die. You can not just take the longevity statistics of your population and do a global optimisation over your whole lifetime, because these statistics are meaningless on an individual level.

Do not live as if you will die tomorrow. (Otherwise you will quickly turn into an hedonist.) Do not live as if you will live until 75 neither. (Otherwise you will be making naively long unrealistic plans.) The best is to imagine that you still have another couple of years to go.

Imagining far future makes me anxious. The feeling that something great lies ahead reminds me of death.

People spend a lot of effort to switch from a goal-oriented mindset to a process-oriented one. For me, this happens automatically for all the long-term tasks. Deep down I feel that I will never be able to complete these tasks anyway. In other words, I have no choice but to climb for the sake of climbing.

After my daughter's birth, a lot has changed. In fact, things started changing even before her birth. 

I have become more afraid of dying. I have also started to feel this hard-to-describe "succession urge". I want to help her navigate through life. (For instance, I secretly wish that she will read all the stuff I have written here when she grows up.)

But who am I to entertain such thoughts? I rejected my own dad's dreams of succession. Ela will probably reject mine as well. That is how adolescents build-up character, right? May be I am wrong and these instinctive feelings are there for a reason. Perhaps a proper hand-over of accumulated knowledge, wealth etc does not need to fuck up the character build-up process. May be it is all about how something is handed over rather than what is actually handed over.

education and thinking

This is a film about a man and a fish
This is a film about dramatic relationship between man and fish
The man stands between life and death
The man thinks
The horse thinks
The sheep thinks
The cow thinks
The dog thinks
The fish doesn't think
The fish is mute, expressionless
The fish doesn't think because the fish knows everything
The fish knows everything

Goran Bregovic - Lyrics of "This is a Film"

Thinking is for the weak. You stop to think, you die.

Goal of education is to learn how not to think, not how to think.

As you move up the steps of mastery, knowledge becomes increasingly more intuitional. Towards the final stages, you start to understand everything effortlessly. You counter arguments like a master ping pong player.

Thought is born of failure. When action satisfies there is no residue to hold the attention; to think is to confess a lack of adjustment which we must stop to consider.

Lancelot Whyte as quoted in Tao The Watercourse Way (Page 112)

A good education is an interplay between passive consumption and active production, similar to how the mind operates, continuously modeling from the environment and projecting onto the environment.

Training the conscious (which is what education mostly does) is not any different than training the unconscious. The difference is just a matter of speed. Former is slow but versatile, while latter is fast but non-versatile. Minimally-changing repeating phenomena eventually get automated down to unconscious. Models become more specific, but also faster. This is not any different than how standardized software eventually gets baked into hardware. Notice that even hardware is not really “hard” but just evolves at a much slower pace.

Generally speaking, evolutionary history is a grand story of automation. Evolution minimizes cost and what is automatable eventually gets automated.

Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.
- Alfred North Whitehead

Saying that “the goal of education should be to learn how not to think” is basically the same thing as saying that the goal should be to familiarize the unfamiliar so that one no longer has to think.

It is by logic that we prove, but by intuition that we discover.
- Henri Poincare.

PhD thesis topics are usually handed over by the advisor to the student, because the advisor has a far more developed intuition about the subject matter and can literally see ahead. In some sense, we use our rational mind to pedantically verify what the superior intuitive mind has already discovered in a lightening fast fashion.

The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant.
- Albert Einstein

Of course every master goes through the so-called servant period. One can train the intuition only through a repeated variation of rational exercises. (This holds for all types of learning, including physical ones like martial arts.) Rote jerky repetition and slow pedantic dissection are all necessary to develop the muscles so that one can make those masterful fast and smooth movements later on.

There is a lot of dangerous misinformation floating out there (especially among the liberals) containing claims against any sort of memorization in education. If the mind needs to look up something externally all the time, it can not achieve the degree of internalization needed to automate and speed up the target circuits by sinking them down to the intuition level.

work as meaning

All meaning is derived from uniquenesses or extreme low frequencies.

Working towards a goal creates meaning by artificially decreasing the number of times one can reach that goal in a single lifespan. Taking shortcuts on the other hand diminishes meaning by vastly increasing the frequency of gratification events.

In the short run, technology decreases the frequency-based meaning-effect of work by increasing both productivity and lifespan. In the long run, it renders all work obsolete.

One can switch from a goal-oriented framework to a process-oriented one and drop the frequentist approach to meaning-generation altogether. But this switch is quiet unnatural and requires a heavy retraining of the mind.

An easier alternative is to drop work as a source of meaning altogether and focus on relationships with friends and family which will retain their uniqueness forever.

Technological progress takes place at a much faster pace than biological evolution does. As a rule of thumb, one should always ride the slower waves whenever the primary concern is meaningfulness.

obsession with number two

I am obsessed with number two. I do not remember clearly when this obsession started, but it has certainly gotten worse over the last two years.

Although it can cause considerable stress in certain situations, it can be quiet beneficial as well:

  • By forcing me to trim things down to two, it puts me on a healthy information diet.

  • By forcing me to pair individual things into sets of two, it helps me uncover analogies and dualities that I would have otherwise missed.

mystery of two and three

Number one symbolises uniqueness. It is prevalent in both mathematics and physics. Beyond number one, mathematics and physics diverge in a mysterious way.

In mathematics, if you have three examples of a given structure, then it is extremely likely that there are infinitely many other examples as well. In other words, beyond uniqueness, the only finite number mathematics favours is the number two.*

In physics, number three plays the same role that number two plays in mathematics.** It underlies all plural ontologies.

  • There are three spatial dimensions.

  • There are three gauge theories corresponding to the three fundamental forces.

  • There are three generations of leptons and quarks.

  • Only the first three fundamental representations of the double cover of the Poincare group matter for calculating the spins of fundamental particles.

  • Only the first three orders of the generic Lagrangian matter for describing the dynamics of non-interacting particles.

* Hat tip to Prof. George Janelidze

** Hat tip to Physics from Symmetry by Jakob Schwichtenberg

facebook as a cultural hype

There are hypes of different periodicities. Cultural shifts are among the slowest. (Quantitative traders are well aware of the fractal nature of cycles.)

Mark Zuckerberg is a serious man. He does not like hype. He prefers utility over coolness.

General opinion is that Facebook owns "the social layer" and Mark is connecting the world. But this is complete bullshit for anyone who knows a little bit of sociology.

Facebook does not own the social layer. It is the social layer who owns Facebook.

Mark may detest coolness, but the early adopters of social platforms are always among the youngsters and the youngsters care a lot about coolness. In fact, Facebook owes its wildfire growth among university campuses to its cool beginnings.

Now the youngsters have shifted to other platforms and Mark is going crazy realising that he will not be able to buy all these platforms off. (Public markets serve an enormously important social role: For a company like Snapchat, going public is the only option for realising value for its investors without submitting itself to a greater behemoth.)

Youngsters disrupt the status quo set by their elders.  (It is their sociological role to do so.) They are catalysers of change. They challenge for the sake of challenging. They test which social structures deserve to survive by shaking them to their cores.

And make no mistake, Facebook will crumble too.

Mark is not connecting the world. It is the opposite. Mark is disconnecting the world by virtualising the already-existing real friendships. 

The very word "friend" has lost its meaning. We have become estranged from each other, turning into wanna-be celebrities broadcasting to our own friends and anxiously building fake images. We are now meeting up less often in the real world because we are meeting up more often in the virtual world.

Mark is riding a massive cultural wave and creating a positive feedback loop that is accelerating the death of this very wave. The hegemony of self-exhibitionist narcissistic openness will soon come to a halt. (Early adopters have already fled this trend.) The pendulum has shifted too much in the direction of openness and atomistic individualism. Now, along with the massive conservativeness wave in politics, it will shift back to reservedness and community-oriented holism.

True. The most tangible network is our friendship network. But that should not make you think that Facebook is built on better foundations than something like Twitter which is built on interest-based networks. In fact, the opposite is true: It is platforms like Twitter which serve a real need rather than Facebook.

Interest-based communities existed before Facebook and will continue to exist after Facebook. The true strength of the internet has lied in its ability bring out the long tail in everything. Thanks to the internet, a substantial number of people can gather around a very niche topic and buy stuff related to a very niche interest, stuff which would have never made it to the physical shelves due to the diffuse geographic distribution of the demand.

Soon people will realise that the only real value offered by Facebook lies in its ability to connect us to our long-lost friends, and Facebook will be used primarily as a catalogue of expired friendships and our long-lost friends will upgrade from a mass grave to a proper cemetery.

So Mark, why so serious?