attempts, failures and retries

"Someone else did this before and failed." is a horrible feedback to give to an entrepreneur. 

An entrepreneur does not build products for the sake of building products. He is out there to solve a problem. The first iteration of the product is a hypothetical solution to this problem. After the first iteration is launched, if the entrepreneur is flexible and capable enough, the product goes through an evolutionary product-market-fit process. Only upon the completion of this process can the product be equated with the problem itself.

In other words, past failed attempts to solve a problem does not mean that the problem is no longer there or that the problem does not have a viable solution. (e.g. The failures could be due to wide-off-the-mark first iterations or mismanaged product-market-fit processes.)

collective flexibility

A young mind is like a dough. It is extremely flexible but also useless. As it ages, it becomes more useful but less flexible.

However this trade-off occurs only at the individual level. The collective mind does not lose any flexibility at all, because it solves different types of problems by mobilising different types of individuals.

As people age, they lose mental flexibility but gain physical and social mobility which in turn allows the collective mind to work its magic.

Remember. We are all servants of the collective mind. What looks like an arbitrary trade-off at an individual level is often the local manifestation of an optimal solution to a global problem.

invention and genius

Invention depends on two processes. The first generates a collection of alternatives, the other chooses, recognising what is desirable and appears important among that produced by the first. What one calls “genius” is much less the contribution of the first, the one that collects the alternatives, than the facility of the second in recognising the value in what has been presented, and seizing upon it.
Paul Valery as translated by Bill Buxton

I could not agree more.

People say we live in an age of data, but data deluge has been with us since the inception of life. Reality constantly bombards us with incalculably large amounts of data. Success of a species is directly determined by how well its members can filter this bombardment for the purpose of survival. Put in the words of Paul Valery, genius is built into life.

Similarly, there are two sources of creativity: Cross-fertilisation and isolation.

Our current super-social, impatient generation is utilizing more of the former. Locations where different cultures and ethnicities interact have become hot spots. Co-working spaces, meet-ups, conferences have multiplied. But, as Paul Valery remarks, cross-fertilisation represents the inferior part of the creative process. It exposes people to others' ideas and lets them see what other variations are composed on the same themes. The real genius lies in isolation where most of the selection and synthesis processes occur.

Sooner or later we will cross-fertilize ourselves to homogeneity. Then we will need to turn to isolation as our source of creativity. Groups and individuals will severe ties with each other and continue their explorations independently. Being a loner will again be back in fashion.

Of course this cycle will repeat itself... But without a sustained period of isolation, cross-fertilization can never work out its magic. Today we need another Galapagos Island, not another merging of continents via tectonic movements.

time and healing

Time heals all wounds. However, just like one is sentenced to different lengths of time in prison depending on the crime committed, the time required for a wound to heal depends on the depth of the wound inflicted.

If someone really fucks you up, it takes a longer period of time for you to forgive that person. However, unlike the pact between an individual and society at large, a relationship between two individuals can not be put on hold forever.

The maximum amount of time a relationship can be put on hold depends on its current strength. If that maximum is shorter than the expected length of the healing period, we drop the relationship completely and write that person off.

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.