real-time mentorship

Quality of your mentorship skills can only be gauged real-time.

Researchers and entrepreneurs fight on the frontiers and frontiers are by definition unique territories beset with unique problems. Therefore, you can not mentor these people in pre-packaged formats (e.g. lectures) in artificial environments (e.g. classrooms). You need to go to the battle with them, shoulder-to-shoulder.

What distinguishes the mentor from the mentee on the battle ground is the speed of problem solving. Mentor too learns alongside the mentee since the problems at the frontier are always unique and new. His only difference is that he learns faster.

Mentee who sees the mentor in action learns better since learning is essentially a mimetic process.

sharing class notes

Sharing (or worse selling) class notes online is either ethically questionable or educationally destructive:

- If those notes are simply dictations of what is communicated by the teacher, then they are the property of the teacher and can not be shared or sold by the student without the teacher's consent.

- If those notes are a student's own synthesis of what is communicated by the teacher, then the student does harm to his peers by sharing the notes with them, for the following two reasons:

1. His synthesis may contain wrong assumptions or deductions. 
2. Learning happens exactly when new material gets synthesised into the body of already known material. In other words, synthesis is the entire goal of education. This is a painful process that needs to be individually conducted. It is not a social exercise. Each student's past cognitive endowment is different and therefore each end result of synthesis will be different.

machine-to-human communication

Black box models make us feel uneasy. We want to have an intuitive grasp of how a computer reaches a certain conclusion. (For legal considerations, this is actually a must-have feature, not just a nice-to-have one.)

However, to exhibit such a capacity, a computer needs to be able to

1. model its thought processes and,
2. communicate the resulting model in a human understandable way.

Let us recall the correspondence between physical phenomena and cognitive models from the previous blog post on domains of cognition:

• Environment <-> Perceptions
• Body <-> Emotions
• Brain <-> Consciousness

Hence, the first step of a model being able to model itself is akin to it having some sort of consciousness. Tough problem indeed!

The second step of turning the (quantitative) model of a model into something (qualitatively) communicable amounts to formation or adoption of a language which chunks the world into equivalence classes. (We call these equivalence classes "words".)

Qualitative communication of fundamentally quantitative phenomena is bound to be lossy because at each successive modelling information gets lost. 

• That is essentially why writing good poetry is so hard. Words are like primitive modelling tools.
• Good visual artists bypass this problem by directly constructing perceptions to convey perceptions. That is why conceptual art can feel so tasteless and backward. Art that needs explanation is not art. It is something else. 
• Similarly, good companions can peer into each others' consciousnesses without speaking a word. 

Instead of expecting machines to make a discontinuous jump to language formation, we should first endow them with bodies that allow them to sense the world which they can then chunk into equivalence classes.

momentum of growing up

We grow into our roles, not the other way around. You need to fake it until you make it as they say. This is more or less a mathematical necessity since titles are discretely compartmentalised while self-improvement is a continuous process. In other words, a healthy, developing ego is always in a state of pretension. (While rational ones draw confidence from past establishments and competencies, delusional ones draw hope straight from religion and astrology.)

All the great figures of history were to a certain extent self-delusional. They either constantly underestimated their capacity for achieving great things, or thought they were above everyone else. A spring oscillates only when it is pulled in either one of the directions. People who are negatively self-delusional tell themselves "I need to do better than this." People who are positively self-delusional tell themselves "I can do better than this." In either case there is some momentum. A person who is fully aware of his limitations will be utterly incapable of taking the necessary steps to improve himself. He will never have a chance to discover the fact that his limitations are partly dependent on how much he is daring push them.

There is also the issue of building a momentum. Say your top potential is X. You will reach X faster if you aim for 2X rather than X. In other words, it can be optimal to overshoot a little more to gain speed. Of course, this can easily turn into a dangerous exercise and steer you into the territory of delusions.

P.S. You may also enjoy reading the old blog post Momentum of Aging.

dynamics of loneliness

Friends are divided into three circles: inner, middle and outer. Outer circle feeds the middle circle which in turn feeds the inner circle. All new inflow enters the outer circle first. Each circle suffers from a natural rate of entropy. The outer circle experiences the greatest flux while the inner circle is relatively stable.

What success and fame does is to destroy the middle circle by unleashing a tremendous hurricane blasting through all emotional blisters no matter how small. While the outer circle experiences a sudden cancerous growth, the inner circle (cut off from its supply of new blood from the middle circle) dwindles slowly at its natural entropy rate. Soon a deep sense of loneliness starts sinking in despite the presence of such a large number of people.

mastery and agency

We predicted that people would experience a greater sense of identity with the virtual hand when it was pulsing synchronously with their heartbeat, and this is just what we found. Other laboratories are finding that similar principles apply to other aspects of conscious self. For example, we experience agency over events when incoming sensory data match the predicted consequences of actions – and breakdowns in experienced agency, which can happen in conditions such as schizophrenia – can be traced to abnormalities in this predictive process.

- The Real Problem (Anil Seth)

When we master a subject, we literally have agency over it. In other words, the subject becomes part of us. We feel at ease.

That is also why we never feel at home when we keep moving and changing our neighbourhoods.

We are what we can master and control, be it a hand, a car, an idea or a corporation. Identity is a diffused notion. It can expand and contract, flex and solidify. What is left outside is called the environment. (Remember it is always us against the environment.)

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Tebdil-i mekanda ferahlık vardır atasözünün doğruluğu yukarıda bahsi geçen kontrol yitimine dayanır. Mekan alışıldıkça, kimliğin bir parçası haline geldikçe mekansallığını yitirir. Dış zamanla içleşir, boşluk iç bunaltılarımızla dolar.

İçselleştirme ve sahiplenme benzer olgulardır, fakat cebirsel açıdan önemli bir farklılık gösterirler: Bir mekan, aynı anda, birden farklı kişi tarafından tamamen içselleştirilebilirken, sadece bir kişi tarafından tamamen sahiplenilebilir. (Bu farklılık parçacık fiziğinde bozonlar ve feymiyonların Pauli dışarlama ilkesiyle ayrışmasına benzer.)

Misafiriniz ziyarete geldiğinde kelimenin tam anlamıyla sizi ziyarete gelmiş olur.

sharing as a sign of poverty

We used to have our own rooms to work inside. Then the walls came down and open offices became the new cool thing. We started sharing the same space with our colleagues. Now it is even worse. We share it with complete fucking strangers.

Everyone knows that shared offices do not increase creativity or productivity. They are only good for meeting new people. But no one is calling out this bullshit because the underlying truth is grim and mostly of economic nature.

Shared office spaces is just one manifestation of the increasing dominance of shared economy. True, sharing allows better use of resources, but there are many specific downsides to it as well. For instance, not sharing can be convenient and convenience makes people happy. After all what are we striving for? We do not seek greater efficiency for the sake of greater efficiency. We seek it for a little bit of convenience and luxury.

We are all wabi-sabi enthusiasts now, right? Permanence is illusionary! Why own anything while you can subscribe to everything?

I feel genuinely sorry for the next generation who will be inheriting our worthless subscription accounts. I am also afraid that with the greater data available, we will eventually turn ourselves into pure optimisation machines, seeking happiness in minute incremental shit.

Somehow we forgot that the biggest psychological benefit of getting rich is the ability to be more relaxed with deployment of resources, including the most precious resource which is time.

But it is not entirely our fault. Just look at this graph.

Source: National Bureau of Economic Research

People have started crowdfunding their medical expenses for God's sake! How can we still not see the truth?

Today everyone shares and freelances, not because our generation is intrinsically more creative, generous or entrepreneurial, but because we are poorer. This downwards economic trend has been ongoing for a long time. A temporary solution became available only now, thanks to the rise of mobile computing and internet.

Two personal advices:

• Culture is adaptive, not progressive. It is also blinding. So never fight with your parents over values. Our values are not inherently any better than theirs, they are just better for us to cope with our current conditions. I remember arguing with my father over this ownership vs sharing issue. Now I regret it. The ideas I was defending were not actually mine. They belonged to the collective cultural intelligence.
• Cool is what young people invent to create an alternative for something they can no longer afford. That is essentially why new neighbourhoods get gentrified and new domain extensions get endorsed every few years.

rediscovery as a byproduct

Nietzsche understood something that I did not find explicitly stated in his work: that growth in knowledge - or in anything - cannot proceed without the Dionysian. It reveals matters that we can select at some point, given that we have optionality. In other words, it can be the source of stochastic tinkering, and the Apollonian can be part of the rationality in the selection process.

Antifragile - Nicholas Nassim Taleb (Page 256)

Freud understood much better than Münsterberg did the immense power of the unconscious, but he thought that repression, rather than a dynamic act of creation on the part of the unconscious, was the reason for the gaps and inaccuracies in our memory; while Münsterberg understood much better than Freud did the mechanics and the reasons for memory distortion and loss - but had no sense at all of the unconscious processes that created them.

Subliminal - Leonard Mlodinow (Page 62-63)

We kept rediscovering the same dichotomy throughout the history:

• Apollonian vs. Dionysian (Literature)
• Rational vs. Irrational (Philosophy)
• Conscious vs. Unconscious (Psychology)

Rediscovery is a byproduct of containerisation and can be avoided by greater multi-disciplinarianness.

genericity and artificiality

Now that we proved faces are generic with respect to genes, life feels even more like a computer game. 

Left Real, Right Predicted

Finite variations within genomes explain most of the differences between our faces. The rest of the differences seem to be due to wear and tear.

There is a correlation between the extent of observable variation and the feeling of naturalness. An object feels natural if the variation among the relevant population looks infinite. Otherwise it feels artificial.

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Despite all the apparent complexity and drama, variations among personalities too seem to be quiet contained. Big Five personality traits explain most of the variance. The output structure of IBM Watson's semantic take on personality analysis does not look too rich neither.

Watson Personality Insights takes your social media feed as an input and spits out a graph like above as an output.

Of course, personality is a relational concept. How one behaves changes with respect to who one is interacting with. But focusing solely on one's relationship with a common reference point should be good enough for comparative purposes.

This approach is similar to extracting a variant from a genome by comparing it to a reference genome constructed out of the set of all genomes of the relevant population. Everyone's social media feed reveals how they interact with "the public", which acts sort of like a "reference personality", an average entity representing one's social network.

On a related note, dialogues with humanoid robots feel unnatural today partly due to the non-relational aspects of their personalities. Someone behaving in exactly the same manner regardless of context is deemed to be abnormal.

Consistency shows character, but too much of it is inhuman, as so eloquently pointed out by Walt Whitman in his famous quote: "Do I contradict myself? Very well. Then I contradict myself. I am large. I contain multitudes."

politics and business

When the background does not change, we just ignore it. This general principle applies to politics as well.

Businessmen implicitly believe that they operate inside a political vacuum, minding their own economic calculations and playing their sophisticated strategic games. But once the political equilibrium gets destabilised they start complaining that politics is now giving direction to economics.

Of course, the truth is that politics is always giving direction to economics. It is the change itself that creates the pain. Once the new equilibrium is reached, politics gets again forgotten.