order out of noise

Firehose of falsehoods and diverse contradicting statements distributed through many different channels create completely noise environment. Through this noise everyone weaves their own story. That of course happens to be the one that they want to believe in the most. Since most of these facts are pro government. The end result is a diverse array of personalised strongly held pro government stories!

- Networked Propaganda and Counter Propaganda (Jonathan Stray)

Noise contains all possible structures as subsets of itself. Since we are naturally predisposed to recognizing patterns (i.e. compressing information), it can act as a "mirror" reflecting our complex web of pre-existing cognitive short-cuts and biases back to ourselves.

For instance, we can not help but hallucinate ordered structures out of visual and auditory noise. (e.g. pareidolia) I myself experienced a few such bizarre moments, involuntarily scalping out complex musical pieces out of random environmental noise. These episodes were inspiring but also quite intimidating. (I felt as if my unconsciousness accidentally leaked into my consciousness. Is this why some people enjoy listening to noise music?)

If you are willing to experiment with drugs like LSD, you can simulate such experiences using the brain’s own background noise:

Sometimes patterns can arise spontaneously from the random firing of neurons in the cortex — internal background noise, as opposed to external stimuli — or when a psychoactive drug or other influencing factor disrupts normal brain function and boosts the random firing of neurons. This is believed to be what happens when we hallucinate.

- A Math Theory for Why People Hallucinate (Jennifer Ouellette)

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Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture.

- Amusing Ourselves to Death (Neil Postman)

Jonathan's observation above is enlightening in the sense that it situates Orwell and Huxley as two ends of a single spectrum for controlling public opinion.

• Orwell: Dictate people by spoon feeding them your point of view

• Huxley: Incapacitate people by drowning them in complete noise

Both strategies backfire in the long run:

• Orwellian regimes can quickly unfold when information from the outside world starts leaking in.

• Huxleyan regimes shut people completely away from serious matters and this can set in motion a cultural backlash.

The best strategy is a mixed one: Drown people in variations of your point of view so that

• the information environment stays rich enough to make people feel as if there is an open public discourse

• the proportion of trivia among the narrations in circulation stays below the critical threshold that can set in motion a cultural backlash.

This way, all the stories people weave out of the pseudo random environment you created will stay close to your point of view.

Note that, as technology progresses and information flows at greater speeds, it becomes harder and harder to maintain an Orwellian regime as opposed to a Huxleyan one.

privacy and public identity

Privacy advocates have started wearing dark glasses to protect themselves from face recognition algorithms. Good for now, but sooner or later algorithms will get better and become able to identify you from some ineffable combinations of subtle static and dynamic physical features like your hairline and the way you walk. At the end, we will all have to wear burkas and voice distortion masks, obliterating our public identities in the name of preserving our private identities. (This will be the physical analogue of the current mass migration away from public social media spaces to private messaging platforms.)

manipulations and regulations

New deception and manipulation techniques enabled by machine learning technologies are massively more effective and covert than the old-school psychological tricks that consumers eventually grow out of. As we collectively regress back to a state of childhood-level naiveness, governments should to step in to protect everyone with the sensitivity they exhibit while protecting innocent children.

empowerment, equality and truth

Several excellent recent studies show that, paradoxically, as a society becomes more egalitarian, the gender gap in occupational choice becomes wider, not narrower. A case in point: A study published last month in Psychological Science, by the psychologists David Geary and Gijsbert Stoet, looked at the academic performance of nearly half a million adolescents from 67 countries. What they found was that the more gender equal a country was, as determined by the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report, the fewer women ultimately took up STEM paths in college. Countries with the most robust legal and cultural protections for gender equality - along with the strongest social safety nets - such as Sweden, Switzerland, Norway, and Finland, have the fewest female STEM graduates, weighing in at about 20 percent of the total (the U.S. has 24 percent). In contrast, countries with almost no protections, with few guarantees for women and where life satisfaction is low - such as Algeria, Tunisia, the United Arab Emirates, Turkey, and Albania - had by far the highest representation of women in STEM, approaching the researchers’ estimates of 41 percent, based on how well girls do in math and science in high school, without considering their other skills. Another study showing this paradoxical effect, from 2008, was led by David Schmitt. He and his colleagues found that gender differences in personality are way larger in cultures that offer more egalitarian gender roles and opportunities. This is not what one would predict if men’s and women’s preferences were exclusively constrained by cultural forces.

Brian Gallagher - Why Women Choose Differently At Work

Power exposes your true character. It releases inhibitions and sets your inner self free. If you’re a jerk when you gain power, you’ll become more of one. If you’re a mensch, you’ll get nicer.

Matthew Hutson - Why Power Brings Out Your True Self

Empowerment does not lead to equality. On the contrary, the freedom it unleashes removes all (population-level and individual-level) artificial constraints and surfaces the true inequalities of nature. Populations break out of unnatural distributions and individuals break free of societal expectations.

PS: For more on the true inequalities of nature read myth of equality and ethics as linearization.

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.

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.

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?

regülasyon, inovasyon, saçmalasyon

Devletler toplumsal önemi olan sektörlerin hepsini ağır regulasyona tabi tutuyorlar. Amaç bizi korumak tabi, fakat sonuç tam bir saçmalasyon.

Eğitim, sağlık, finans, sigorta... Bu sektörlerin hepsi taş çağında yaşıyor. Her hafta en az bir tanesi beni kısa devreye sokuyor. Allah kimseyi banka müşteri temsilcisiyle muhattap olmak zorunda bırakmasın, devlet hastanesine düşürmesin... Ne zaman eğitim sistemiyle ilgili bir gelişme duysam, çocukların hepsinden geçmiş tüm jenerasyonlar adına özür dileyesim geliyor.

"Sen de gereksiz yere şikayet etmeden duramıyorsun... Görmüyor musun her yerimiz start-up oldu ayol, kollektiflere teknokentlere sığamıyoruz!"

Her yerimiz start-up oldu da hayat kalitemiz mi arttı allah aşkına? Eskiden en azından cahildim, bir şeylerin inovasyonla değişebileceğini, her tür sürecin kullanıcı deneyimi açısından mükemmelleştirilebileceğini bilmiyordum. Şu an bildiğiniz işkence çekiyorum. 

"Ama öyle deme ya... Ne güzel kedi, bebe fotoları paylaşabiliyoruz. T-shirt, ayakkabı, diş macunu, hamburger desen hop kapımızda."

Allah belamızı versin gerçekten.

politics and evil

Politics is messed up, not because we are a messed up species, but because we have created messed up incentive structures. I sincerely believe that no one is born evil, it is the systems that make people behave in evil ways.

When the economy is doing well and increased prosperity is felt by everyone, it is very challenging for young and ambitious leaders to enter into politics. Even Adolph Hitler would not have made it if it were not for the Great Depression. 

Opposition parties are incentivised to look out for problems and causes around which to mobilise people. Good ones make up imaginary, outside enemies from scratch. Bad ones hit the already existing, domestic societal fault lines by playing with religious, ethnic and cultural heterogeneities. Ugly ones create entirely new, domestic social fault lines through provocative activities.

bureaucracy and initiatives

Bureaucracy can be painful for the same reason why legal disputes exist: Logical if-then statements can exhaust only so many possibilities. Reality will always surprise you with more possibilities than you can write down.

The reason why bureaucracies work smoother in advanced economies is not because developed countries are better at building systems. They just have a better work ethic, that is all.

You can give people with a better work ethic more space to manoeuvre. In other words, you can comfortably cut the number of if-then statements, underdetermine your system and give initiative to your bureaucrats. Less number of rules translate into less possibility of generating absurd contradictions and ping-pong processes. Common sense prevails.

There is a strong correlation between work ethic and economic development, but the road up the graph is laden with chicken-and-egg problems for developing countries. Governments can not trust their own bureaucrats and therefore increase the number of if-then statements, which in turn leads to dysfunctionalities and more bribe offers by citizens to get things done, which in turn corrupts the bureaucrats and attracts more corrupt people into bureaucracy...