truth and happiness

Happiness hides inside echo chambers, meanwhile truth lies outside the boxes. Happiness is a calm stasis. Truth is an endless struggle. These two concepts are as incompatible as any two concepts can get.

It is not a coincidence that the world's greatest oppressors have oppressed in the name of truth.

We have a natural inclination to care about happiness, not truth. Structures that require us to care about truth (e.g. company boards, research institutions) are cognitively repugnant since their very functionality is based on constancy of cognitive dissonance.

Truth emerges from balance and integration across many points of view, and therefore is boring. Truth in fact should be boring. (That is why the click-bait way of doing science is so dangerous.) Hence it never goes viral. You literally need to put a fight to spread truth around. Happiness on the other hand is automatically viral because it gets amplified with further synchrony.

stages of writing

Each post here goes through several stages:

Seeding

The idea is almost never born when I am sitting down in front of the screen for the purpose of writing here. It is born either in an irrelevant context completely spontaneously or while I am reading or talking about something related. At this stage, I quickly jot down something on Simplenote without paying attention to form or grammar.  I often mix Turkish and English and let everything pour out with minimal friction. This allows me to have maximum linguistic access to the initial raw and fluid idea.

Maturating

I let these drafts mature for weeks and sometimes for months. (I can do this because most of the material I write here is not based on current events.) As I mentioned in a previous post, test of time is the best way of separating the wheat from the chaff. 

Pruning

At random intervals I go back to the pipeline of drafts and delete those that no longer seem original, insightful, useful or sensical.

Harvesting

This is the most painful stage for me since I am not terribly good with words. First, I select some drafts that are ready to be harvested. Second, I decide on a single language for each draft. (For some reason, I find myself choosing Turkish for dirty, emotional and passionate stuff, and English for clean, logical and calm stuff.) Third, I flesh out the draft in the most readable and minimal form. While writing the post, I start interacting with the text itself. Things get deleted, new insights get born. This is a truly chaotic process which can be mastered only through repeated practice. (As you get better at it, you find yourself being lured away by anti-theses and enlightened by missing symmetries lurking inside the textual structure.)

Polishing

I return to the published posts a few days later to see if they can be improved further. I often end up modifying, adding and deleting a few sentences here and there.

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‘Why am I putting this idea here?’ ‘Might it not be better in an earlier section of the piece?’ ‘Should I be giving a definition here rather than simply an illustration?’ Such questions can help craft a compelling and coherent piece of text, though they can be tiresome and even painful. This is why, unlike being in flow, writing is not particularly autotelic. One writes not because writing is rewarding, but rather because one feels compelled, or one has something one needs to say, or even, because it will feel so good when it’s done. As Billy Joel told The New York Times in 2013: ‘I love having written; but I hate writing.’

- Against Flow (Barbara Gail Montero)

producing electrons

Many Turkish conglomerates invested in electricity production. Some of these projects imploded for obvious reasons. What is amazing is that these conglomerates see no risk in producing electricity, while they see tremendous risk in producing new technologies for producing electricity.

Quantum Mechanics says that you can not distinguish one electron from another. In other words, a market can not get more commoditised than this. Since everyone is a small player, a producer can not exert any control over the market price neither. The only way it can increase profit margins is by controlling the costs, in other words, by innovating on the production side.

başarının tanımı (take 2)

Burak - Bir şeyi merak ettim. Başarılarınızı tasdik ettirmek veya sadece iyi hissetmek için başkalarının takdirini arzular mısınız? Doğru düşündüğünüz yolda, kimse bir şey demese de ilerler misiniz?

Tarık - Bence yaptığın şeyin başarılı olduğunu düşündüğün anda zaten beyninde simüle ettiğin "diğerlerinin" takdirini alıyorsun / aldığını düşünüyorsun. Hayat temelinde anlamsız. Üst üste bindirilmiş, birbirine bağlanmış Quantum Field'lardan ibaret. Başarı, mutluluk gibi kavramlar ya şu anki toplumsal dinamiklerin ya da geçmişte yaşanan toplumsal dinamiklerin (evrimin yarattığı taşıyıcı araçlarla) bugüne taşınması sonucu ortaya çıkan kavramlar.

Burak - Yani o zaman, sen bu olagelen kavramların bilincinde ve bilfiil ihtiyacındasın, ama yüzeyde pek göstermiyor, kendi içinde mastürbasyon yapıyorsun :)

Tarık - Aynen. Dilin kendisi bile sosyal bir olgu zaten. Matematik dışındaki dilin tamamı, daha doğrusu. (Anlam içeren şeyler zaten matematik dışındaki kümede üretiliyor.) Yani birbirimizin hayatını anlamlı kılıyoruz. Matematiksel Quantum Field'lar bir sikimi anlamlı kılmıyor.

Burak - Muhtacız birbirimize ve sözlerimize...

Tarık - Muhtaçlık bence one-point-more bir ilişki. Topluma karşı durmak bayağı stresli, zor bir süreç... Ergenlik yaşları bunun bir simülasyonu resmen. Aile içi simülasyonu, daha doğrusu. İlk ailene karşı durmayı öğreniyorsun. Tabi bu korunaklı bir simülasyon, ailen ebeni sikmez çünkü hiç bir zaman. Topluma kafa tumak ise one-point-more bir olay.

Toplumu ileri götüren insanların büyük bir çoğunluğu başarısız damgası yemiş adamlar hayatlarında. Mozart öldüğünde mezarına sadece 2-3 müzisyen gelmiş. Galileo'yu az daha asıyormuşuz, Alan Turing'i kısırlaştırmaya kalkmışız. Buradan anla işte başarının toplumsal bir olgu olduğunu ve zamanla değişebileceğini.

Kapitalizmin yükselişi de toplumsal değer yargılarındaki paradigmatik kırılımlara denk geliyor. Şu an startupların yükselişi de... Toplum girişimciliğe status yükledikçe gençler saldırıyor. Eskiden yatırım bankacılığına saldıran mallar şimdi startuplara saldırıyor. Sivrisinek gibi bir nevi... En iyi okullardan mezun tipler bu tarz dinamiklere daha kötü kendilerini kaptırıyorlar, çünkü zaten o okullara girmek için yırtınmak da benzer patolojilerin ürünü.

Bu arada startuplara ve inovasyona verilen toplumsal değer ekonominin kötü gittiği dönemlere denk geliyor genelde. Toplum kendini inovasyonla krizden kurtarmaya çalışıyor.

Umut - Hayırdır Burak, büyük kararların arifesinde misin :)

Tarık - Evet Burak, hayırdır? Kafan karışıksa toplumun istediğini yap, mutlu olacaksın. %100 garantili!

Çınar - Bence Tarık güzel özetlemiş ama başkalarını siklemediğin ve tamamen kişisel tatmin üzerinden yaptığın çok şey var. Ayrıca takdir demokratik değil. Elalemin seni takdir etmesi belki önemli olmayabilir. Belki yakınındaki 1-2 kişi dünyalar demek... Belki de bu sayı bazı konularda sıfıra iniyor ve olay tamamen kişisel zevk meselesine dönüyor.

Bence iş daha çok parasal ve profesyönel konularda kitleselleşiyor ve dolayısıyla takdir edilmek başarıyla eş anlamlı hale geliyor.

Tarık - Aynen. Sana yakınlığına göre kişinin seni takdir ediyor olmasının önemi artıyor herhalde. O yüzden insanlar çevrelerini benzer kafada insanlarla sarmayı seviyorlar, cemaatlere katılıyorlar vs. Yani ya adapte oluyorsun ya da adapte olmana gerek kalmamasını sağlıyorsun.

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P.S. Başarının tanımı (take 1) için bu bağlantıyı takip edin.

oppression, depression and selection

Political oppression creates selective pressures on the wanna-be politicians. Only the politically savvy can survive the oppressor and rise up to bring him down. Similarly economic depressions create selective pressures on the wanna-be entrepreneurs and breed great entrepreneurial talent.

This is essentially why the best politicians and entrepreneurs always come from the most fucked up countries. Developed countries should open their doors to them without exerting further selective pressures via tough immigration policies. It is almost guaranteed that these guys will flourish given the right favourable environments.

originality and friction

Ideas are amazingly overvalued in the startup world.

Even in precise and theoretical disciplines (e.g. math, physics), a tremendous amount of propaganda is required to get an original idea accepted. Some of the greatest ideas get pushed into the fringes and stay there for decades, either to be rediscovered later by someone with more social capital or to be entirely erased from the collective memory.

In the imprecise and pragmatic world of startups, it should be even tougher for an original idea to propagate since there are additional executional hurdles on top of the already existing social frictions. (If an entrepreneur encounters only executional hurdles, then he should question the originality of his ideas.)

Hence there is no need to panic about a truly original startup idea to be stolen etc. 

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.

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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.