I have been blogging to clarify and preserve my thoughts, fully endorsing

  • Socrates' dictum that an unexamined life is not worth living, and

  • Feynman’s technique of mastering a subject through explaining.

Sharing part is of course an exercise in vanity. After all, blogs are like Instagram accounts, the only difference being that they showcase the adventures of the mind rather than the body.

Since I have never had any particular audience in mind, you will see me jump from subject to subject, sometimes digging deep into advanced topics, other times reflecting on mundane aspects of life.

As my interests matured and diversified, the blog eventually became very difficult to navigate and I decided to bring some order to this mess. Below I will take you through the resulting structure which will hopefully make your job easier as it has made mine.

REMARKS

Firstly, I moved all the ultra short posts to a separate page which I called "remarks" and grouped them according to subject. The individual meta data got lost, but the total number of outstanding posts decreased substantially.

Today you would call such ultra short posts "tweets". I resisted opening a Twitter (now X) account because I did not want

  • my intellectual property to be owned by an ad-supported network,

  • my content to be decentralized across the web and

  • my writing to be influenced by others' presence and reactions.

You can view this as an effort to preserve the unity and sanctity of a multi-faceted self against the increasing pressure of interaction and fragmentation.

TAGS

Secondly, I added tags to each post. Even I had no idea about the relative frequency of each subject. So the tags helped a lot to clarify the big picture.

APHORISMS

Thirdly, I went through all the posts, extracted the most eloquent insights and reframed them as aphorisms on a separate page. Some remarks ended up being moved there as well.

BEST OF

Last problem was the (classical) chronological ordering of the blog posts. It is a very bad way of providing an introduction to someone who neither has the patience or the time to go through everything to spot the gems. So I made the following "best of" list which I will keep updating every once in a while.


MODELLING
analogies vs metaphors (2020)
hypothesis vs data driven science (2019)
physics as study of ignorance (2019)
reality and analytical inquiry (2019)
necessity of dualities (2019)
states vs processes (2018)
thoughts on abstraction (2018)
structured randomness (2010)

TECH
illusion of individuality (2020)
digital vs physical businesses (2020)
waves of decentralizations (2019)
science vs technology (2019)
innovative vs classical businesses (2019)
future of pharmaceutical industry (2018)
machine learning revolution (2017)
eğitim sektöründe girişimcilik (2016)

DESIGN
anonymity and masks (2016)
strategic importance of ugly design (2015)
evolutionary aspects of interface design (2015)

BIOLOGY
emergence of life (2019)
evolution as a physical theory (2019)
biology as computation (2018)

COGNITIVE SCIENCE
genius vs wisdom (2019)
normalization for positioning, coping and filtering (2019)
order out of noise (2018)

EDUCATION
public intellectual vs academic intellectual (2020)
satori as a phase transition (2020)
education and thinking (2017)

POLITICS
ikinci ligden üçüncü lige düşüyoruz (2020)
rigidity due to momentum and age (2020)
covid-19 as an agent of progress (2020)

ARCHIVE

In case you would like to stick to the good old chronological ordering but be able to jump around more easily, here is a list of all posts.

Total Count: 391