ikinci ligden üçüncü lige düşüyoruz

Abidik gubudik meselelerle uğraşmaktan dev bir devrimi kaçırıyoruz. Bu uyuşukluğun bedeli çok ama çok ağır olacak.

Dünya ekonomik tarihi üçüncü geçiş evresini yaşıyor. Tarım devrimi çoktan bitti. Sanayi devrimi ise sonlara geldi. Ülkeler arası ekonomik farklılıklar iyice açıldı. Şimdi ise sıra dijital devrimde.

Dijital devrim öncesi dünya dört lige ayrılmıştı:

1. Sanayi devriminin liderleri (Gelişmiş ülkeler)

2. Sanayi devrimini geriden takip edenler (Gelişmekte olan ülkeler)

3. Tarım devriminde takılıp kalanlar (Üçüncü dünya ülkeleri)

4. İlkel diye nitelendirilen tarım öncesi toplumlar

Türkiye, Atatürk’ün devrimsel politikaları sayesinde 3. ligden 2. lige çıkmayı başardı, fakat 1. lige hiç bir zaman çıkamadı ve Batı’ya bir türlü yetişemedi.

Dijital devrimle birlikte yeni bir lig doğuyor ve bu sefer dünya beşe ayrılıyor:

1. Dijital devrimin liderleri (Amerika, Çin)

2. Dijital devrimi geriden takip edenler (Avrupa)

3. Sanayi devriminde takılıp kalanlar (Türkiye)

4. Tarım devriminde takılıp kalanlar

5. İlkel diye nitelendirilen tarım öncesi toplumlar

Rekor sürelerde inanılmaz zenginlikler yaratılıyor. Çeşitli dikeyler hızlıca domine ediliyor. Devasa bir yer kapmaca oyunu oynanıyor ve biz maalesef sahnede bile değiliz.

TikTok adlı Çinli bir sosyal medya şirketi 2-3 sene içerisinde 100 milyar dolar değerlemeyi geçerken, bizim borsamızdaki bütün şirketlerin toplam (öz sermaye) değeri 150 milyar dolar bile etmiyor. TikTok sadece bir örnek tabi. Onun gibi milyar dolar üstü (unicorn) değerlemeye sahip yüzlerce yeni teknoloji girişimi var.

Bizden henüz sadece bir tane unicorn çıkabildi, o da bir kaç hafta önce Amerikan oyun şirketi Zynga’ya 1.8 milyar dolara satılan Peak Games. Fakat bugün hala Koç Holding gibi aile şirketleri konuşuluyor, örnek gösteriliyor.

Not: Karşılaştırılan değer öz sermaye değeridir.

Aradaki farka bakar mısınız? Resim net. Her yeni devrim bir öncekinden

• çok daha kısa sürede,

• çok daha az insanla,

• çok daha fazla değer

yaratıyor. Böylece, sadece dünyada değil, ülkelerin kendi içlerinde de eşitsizlik artıyor. (Dijital devrim, sanayi devrimi gibi bir çok sosyal travmayla birlikte geliyor.)

Atatürk gibi büyük düşünüp reformist bir düşünce yapısına geçmemiz gerekiyor. Yoksa dijital devrimi de kaçıracağız ve 2. ligden 3. lige düşeceğiz. Ve bu düşüşün bedeli, yazının başında dediğim gibi, çok ağır olacak. Nasıl Çin sanayi devrimini kaçırdığı için ezildiyse, biz de farklı formlarda ezileceğiz.

China used to be a world economic power. However, it missed its chance in the wake of the Industrial Revolution and the consequent dramatic changes, and thus was left behind and suffered humiliation under foreign invasion. Things got worse especially after the Opium war, when the nation was plagued by poverty and weakness, allowing others to trample upon and manipulate us. We must not let this tragic history repeat itself.

Xi Jinping - Governance of China (Page 189)

Peki ne yapmalıyız?

Öncelikle, artık geçerliliğini yitirmiş metriklere bakmamalıyız:

• Gayri Safi Milli Hasıla. Bu metrik sadece bugünkü nakit akışlarını algılayabiliyor. Oysa teknoloji şirketlerinin değeri gelecekteki nakit akışlarıyla belirleniyor. TikTok gibi bir şirketin sıfırdan 100 milyar dolar değere erişmesi GSMH’de çok minimal bir etki yaratıyor.

• Dünya Sıralamaları. Sıralamaların artık bir önemi kalmadı. Teknoloji üssel hızda ilerlediği için ekonomik dağılımlara etkisi doğrusal olmuyor. Ardışık ülkeler arasındaki makas hızla açılıyor ve yukarıdakilere yetişmek gittikçe zorlaşıyor. (Artık güçlülerin güçsüzlere karşı savaş açmasına gerek kalmadı. Güçlüler o kadar yüksek hızda ilerliyorlar ki, diğerlerini saçma meselelerle oyalamaları yetiyor.)

Sosyal ve finansal sermayemizi doğru yönetmeliyiz:

• Sosyal Sermaye. Dijital devrime katılabilmemiz için kaliteli gençlere ihtiyacımız var. Parayı basıp teknoloji satın alabiliyorsunuz, ama parayı basıp teknoloji üretemiyorsunuz. Teknolojiyi ancak çok kaliteli insanlarla üretebiliyorsunuz. Bizim gençler ne durumda diye bakarsak, tablo hiç iç açıcı değil. 25-34 yaş aralığındaki gençlerimizin yarısına yakını lise mezunu bile değil. Eğitim sistemimizin genel kalitesi de yerlerde sürünüyor. PISA skorlarımız hala OECD ortalamasının altında seyrediyor.

  Teknoloji çok hızlı evrilen, ucu açık bir sektör. Dolayısıyla öğrenmekten keyif alan, sürekli kendini geliştirebilen, hayal kurabilen, ufku geniş, yaratıcı insanlar gerektiriyor. Bizimki gibi, ezbere dayalı, basma kalıp öğrenci yetiştiren, sanayi devrimi için optimize edilmiş eski eğitim sistemleri yetersiz kalıyor.

• Finansal Sermaye. Türkiye’de eski teknoloji zenginlerinden oluşan bir sermaye sınıfı yok. Sermayenin büyük çoğunluğu sanayi devrimi içinde faaliyet gösteren, klasikleşmiş işlerle uğraşan aile şirketlerinin elinde. Doğal olarak onlar da anlamadıkları işlere yatırım yapmak istemiyorlar. Sürekli ekonomik krizlerle boğuşmak zorunda kaldıkları için de, risk algıları zaman içerisinde (gene doğal olarak) aşırı muhafazakarlaşmış durumda. Tabi bu mentaliteyle teknoloji yatırımı yapamıyorsunuz. Başarısızlığa tahammül edebilmeniz, deneme yanılmalardan korkmamanız gerekiyor.

  Kısa vadede en mantıklı çözüm devletin mevcut teknoloji yatırımcılarına sahip çıkması, yatırım kararlarını bu kişilere bırakıp onların da ellerini taşın altına koymasını bekleyerek finansman sağlaması.

Her iki konuda da dışarı sızıntıları mümkün mertebe azaltmalıyız:

• Sosyal Sermaye. Türkiye’de iyi liseler, üniversiteler yok mu? Var tabii ki, ama yetiştirdiğimiz en iyi beyinleri maalesef devamlı yurtdışına kaybediyoruz, özellikle de kodcularımızı. Hatta dijital dünyada yurtdışına çalışmanız için artık yurtdışına taşınmanıza gerek yok. Gençler tatil beldelerine taşınıp, keyifli hayatlar sürüp, bir yandan da oturdukları yerden Amerika’ya, Avrupa’ya çalışıp dolar üzerinden maaşlar alıyorlar. Kurlar da çok kötü olduğu için yurtiçindeki şirketler bu maaşlarla rekabet edemiyorlar.

  Ülkemizin genel anlamda cazibesini yitirdiği de bir gerçek. İfade özgürlüğü ve adalet konularındaki sıkıntılar, bitmek bilmeyen politik gerginlikler ve ekonomik çalkantılar en vatansever çocukları bile hayattan bezdirdi. (Anketlere göre gençlerimizin yarısı yurtdışına kapak atmak istiyor.) Bunlar hemencecik düzelecek meseleler değil tabii ki, ama beyin göçünü durduramazsak havanda su dövmekten ileri gidemeyiz. Zehir gibi çocuklarımız var. Bir sürü emek verip, masraf yapıp onları tespit ediyor ve eğitiyoruz, sonra da başka ülkelere kaptırıyoruz. Bir yandan Batı’ya yetişmeye çalışıyoruz, bir yandan da Batı’ya bedava kaliteli insan kaynağı sağlıyoruz. Çılgınlık gerçekten…

  Bu arada Orta Doğu’da hala biraz karizmamız var. En azından savaştan kaçan çocuklar için iyi bir destinasyon sayılırız. Bu bölgelerden iyi yetenekleri kapmalı, onları ülkemizde tutmak için elimizden geleni yapmalıyız.

• Finansal Sermaye. Sadece genç yetenekleri değil, teknolojide başarı sağlayan girişimcilerimizi de sürekli yurtdışına kaybediyoruz. Bir kısmı, burada işlerini biraz büyüttükten sonra daha büyük finansal sermayelere erişebilmek için gidiyor. Bir kısmı da şirketlerini satıp (“exit edip”) köşeyi döndükten sonra daha kaliteli yaşam koşulları için gidiyor. Oysa ekosistemimizin gelişebilmesi için bu başarılı kişilerin hem deneyimsel anlamda, hem de finansal anlamda yeni girişimcilere destek olması gerekiyor. Silikon Vadisi’ni Silikon Vadisi yapan faktör bu geribesleme döngüsüdür.

  Tabi ülkemizi yurtdışındaki yabancı yatırımcılar için de cazibeli hale getirmemiz şart. Esas deneyim ve sermaye onlarda. Bizi çok hızlandırabilirler, fakat şu an ülkemize dokunmak dahi istemiyorlar.

Bir yandan dünya dijitalleşiyor, dijitalleştikçe soyutlaşıyor ve elle dokunulabilen (toprak gibi) faktörlerin önemi azalıyor. Bir yandan da bizim gibi ülkeler hala vatanı toprakla özdeşleştiriyor, beton ekonomisinden medet umuyor, yer altından çıkacak süprizleri bekliyor. (Bor? Petrol?) Turizm sevdamızı bile doğal kaynakların pazarlaması olarak yorumlayabilirsiniz.

İnanması güç ama, üzerinde bulunduğumuz toprakların boş değeri hala bu topraklar üzerinde gerçekleşen ekonomik aktivitenin toplam değerinden kat ve kat daha fazla. Bugün dünya politikasında birazcık sözümüz geçiyorsa, o da gene coğrafyamızdan, fiziki konumumuzun bize sağladığı stratejik önemden kaynaklanıyor. Özetle hala Atatürk’ün ekmeğini yiyoruz, bize bıraktığı mirası sağmaya devam ediyoruz.

Aslında biz hala Atatürk’ün yaşadığı dönemlerde, yani 20. yüzyılın başlarında yaşıyoruz. Siz bakmayın takvimin 2020 yılını gösterdiğine. Toplumların esasta hangi tarihte yaşadığı takvimin ne gösterdiğinden değil, insanların ne ürettiğinden belli olur. Elinde iPhone ile gezen bir çok vatandaşımız aslında zihnen hala 20. yüzyıl, hatta 19. yüzyılda dolanıyor.

Üçüncü lige düşmek istemiyorsak artık insana yatırım yapmamız, insana değer vermemiz, onu yüceltmemiz gerekiyor.

Bu sonuca ekonomik paradigma değişiklikleriyle varıyor olmamız da üzücü gerçekten. Yunus Emre gibilerinin yeşerdiği bu topraklarda hala insana gereken değerin verilmiyor olması şaşkınlık verici. Kültürel anlamda özümüze dönsek zaten her şey yoluna girecek herhalde, ne dersiniz?

rigidity due to momentum and age

Did World War 1 start off because of the assassination of Archduke Franz in Sarajevo? Did Arap Spring start off because of the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi in Sidi Bouzid? What about the current chaos in US? Did it start off because of the death of George Lloyd in Minneapolis?

Yes and no. In all of these cases, the underlying reasons were all structural and went far beyond the trigger events themselves.

What is strange in the case of US is the chronicity of the problems. True, without Covid-19 building up frustration among various fault lines and unleashing an acute unemployment shockwave among the low-skilled workers, the death of George Lloyd would not have escalated to this level. However, the underlying issues like racism and inequality have always been there, and have repeatedly caused similar social tensions before.

So why can not US solve these issues and get over with it? The real problem is neither racism nor inequality, it is the rigidity of a system that is refusing to evolve. There are several structural reasons behind this problem.

1. Momentum. Social systems have memories. Whatever changes you implement can get quickly washed away by the massive currents traveling from the past. As in physics, the momentum of these waves is a function of both size and speed.

   1. Size. Larger systems are harder to change.

   2. Speed. Faster systems are harder to change.

2. Age. Social systems become more complex and robust as they age and mature. In a sense, they become too adapted for whatever purposes they have served, and this advantage suddenly turns into a disadvantage when the time comes for a significant change.

   1. Complexity. Complex systems are harder to change. (They exhibit so many interdependencies that fixing something often entails messing something else. Systems growing at “unnatural” speeds tend to exhibit more fragilities due to building up various kinds of “debts” as in “technical debt” of software development.)

   2. Robustness. Robust systems are harder to change. (They try maintain their integrity and refuse to morph into new forms. You push in, they flex back.)

Notice that all these factors - great size and speed, high complexity and robustness - happen to be exactly the things that US is proud of. But now they also happen to be the factors that are stunting the country. This dichotomy is not surprising. In fact, it is a structural feature of evolution that has repeatedly manifested itself in history.

The social history of mankind exhibits great organizations in their alternating functions of conditions for progress, and of contrivances for stunting humanity. The history of the Mediterranean lands, and of western Europe, is the history of the blessing and the curse of political organizations, of religious organizations, of schemes of thought, of social agencies for large purposes. The moment of dominance, prayed for, worked for, sacrificed for, by generations of the noblest spirits, marks the turning point where the blessing passes into the curse. Some new principle of refreshment is required. The art of progress is to preserve order amid change, and to preserve change amid order. Life refuses to be embalmed alive. The more prolonged the halt in some unrelieved system of order, the greater the crash of the dead society.

Alfred North Whitehead - Process and Reality (Page 339)

Can organizations willingly cut the fat and slow down for the sake of increased longevity? Can they rejuvenate themselves and undo some of their existing adaptations to restore a youthful plasticity? These are possible, but heroically hard tasks to pull off, for the following two reasons.

• Hard Reason. Competition never stops. The moment you stop growing, you risk losing your leadership position and being bullied into even further contraction.

• Soft Reason. Power tends to blind and bring a false sense of immortality. This in turn leads to sudden and disorderly failures, rather than orderly and extended periods of dissolution.

Is there no hope? Of course there is. But first and foremost, you need solidarity and perseverance.

• Solidarity. Look how little Obama has achieved. Tone down your belief in heroic individualism. Even if you become the president, it is extremely hard to change the system. Cooperate and act as a whole.

• Perseverance. Look how little Occupy Wall Street has achieved. It could not reform itself into a more structured form and the energy eventually petered out. Expect no quick fixes and do not give up.

Below are two suggestions. I realize that they are both very hard to implement, and that has precisely been the point of my argument so far. (In fact, the second suggestion kind of contradicts with the first one!)

Increase Social Fluidity by Creating More Trust and Less Rules

It may sound ridiculously naive, but you need to fight the downward spiral of distrust and skepticism, and restore love and trust. A cop may have abused the responsibility given to him, but robbing all decision makers of freedom and creating more rules only exacerbates the problem in the long run, by increasing the size and complexity of the system and thereby decreasing its adaptability.

Ethics and codes of conduct are brilliant mechanisms that societies have come up with for implementing decentralized, low-touch forms of governance through self-regulation. Of course, ethics can only work in a high-trust environment. That is why when no one trusts each other, the system starts to bloat. Bureaucracy becomes increasing inflexible. (Remember how patients in New York could not be moved to a Navy medical ship.) Culture becomes increasingly litigious. (US is famous for this. No need for any examples.)

Generally speaking, the less autonomy the individuals have, the more autonomy the system exerts. (Autonomy in total remains fixed.) Remember, institutions and corporations have their own vested interests. These abstract entities are literally alive. They display a will to survive and fulfill a purpose. We like to personalize oppression, but most cases of it are actually conducted by the abstract system via its servants, which include all CEOs, governors and even the president. That is why being a protestor can feel so frustrating. The actual enemy is faceless, and literally everywhere. (It makes less and less of a difference who is running an organization as the organization matures and scales over time. Same principle applies to both companies and countries.)

Meritocracy too is a form of outsourcing judgment to the system. Rather than letting individuals make free calls about who gets promoted to where, the system radically constrains the decision space. This in turn causes the promoted people running the system to become more conservative. They stick to the book even in crisis situations because they know that the system is watching and evaluating them against its standards, which by the way change very slowly, often with significant lag periods. This is how leaders like the openly LGBTQ and Black female mayor of Chicago end up doing exactly what the system expects from them, by taking some of the most draconian actions against the protestors. (Imagine how much she strived to reach that position. Of course she will not take any risks. You would not neither.) So, extreme meritocracy too is actually a bad thing in the long run. It increases the system’s growth potential but also decreases its adaptability.

Interestingly, “backward” societies with little to no institutions tend to cope better with acute crises. They adapt amazingly fast since decision makers have so much more autonomy and the system itself remains so weak. Such societies can not become very prosperous, but they tend to stick around for much longer, before being gobbled up by high-growth “progressive” societies. And while the big and the prosperous die eventually of similar structural causes, the small and the poor die because of unique non-structural causes.

Reverse the Effects of Discrimination with Positive Discrimination

You can not undo the accumulated damage of years of discrimination by simply eliminating the sources of discrimination, and expect the system to cure itself on its own. Remember, there is so much built-in momentum and memory. You need to apply massive doses of positive discrimination and sacrifice efficiency in the short run for the sake of establishing equality (and prosperity) in the long run.

Without such radical action you can not close the income gap, which did not change for decades, despite so many neutralizing social reforms.

Family Net Worth (2016 Dollars) - The Economist

For instance, meritocracy just propagates the status quo and amplifies the existing biases in the lower echelons to the upper echelons. In order to close the skills gap, governments should subsidize private schools, universities and companies for significantly lowering their hiring and admission criteria.

covid-19 as an agent of progress

Crises are periods of acceleration. The reason why all of us feel so overwhelmed today is simply because time is progressing at a much faster rate than it used to.

It may seem improper for me to use the word “progress” here. After all we are going through a massive health crisis with equally massive economic, social and psychological consequences. What is so progressive about this?

Well. If we leave our anthropomorphic framework and for a moment stop thinking about ourselves and instead focus on the evolution of life in general, what looks like a regression is indeed a progression. In other words, we as humans may be regressing, but nature itself is progressing. In fact, nature never ever regresses. What seems like a step backwards always eventually turns out to be a precursor to a bigger step forwards. To see this, all we need to do is zoom out in time.

So what happens when we zoom out? We see that the entire evolutionary history is characterized by a series of dialectic progressions through differentiation and integration, an alternating sequence of creation and synthesis of dualities.

Here, the word “synthesis” is very important. Nature does not break and asymmetrically choose one side of the dualities it creates, it transcends them instead, and this transcendence step requires the dualities to stay unbroken and functioning. In other words, nature stands on the shoulders of old dualities to build entirely new, higher-level ones.

What has all this got to do with SARS-CoV-2?

Long story short, SARS-CoV-2 came out of nowhere, dealt a heavy blow to many fault lines and is now responsible for directly (or indirectly) restoring (or accelerating the formation of) the following six dualities. (Dominant sides are placed on the left. We will delve into each topic later on in the post.)

But how come a small virus do all these? It is not even alive, right? Besides, why should we care about such metaphysical interpretations?

First of all, SARS-CoV-2 too is a life form and deserves the respect that every other life form commands. True, in its inert form, it looks like a simple encapsulation of 30,000 letters, but in action, its complexity is utterly mind-boggling. (Thousands of research papers are published to date.) Remember, a tree is a seed-in-action. Life is all about information, but information itself can only be recognized when it is in action. (Same thing can be said for computer programs.) A virus is no different than a seed. It just grows within you rather than out in the open.

Secondly, SARS-CoV-2 is not sadistically killing for fun. (As far as I know, only humans do that.) Like every other living being, it just wants to replicate. Death is a collateral damage. It is currently mutating and trying to adapt itself to its new host after crossing to a new species. (Such viruses are called zoonotic viruses.) Over time, it will increase in virality and decrease in lethality, and eventually join the harmless community of human coronaviruses that have been co-evolving with us for thousands of years. (Yes, there are lots of viruses that have been co-evolving with us. In fact, some of the technologies in our bodies have direct viral origins, the most dramatic example being the placenta.)

Thirdly, SARS-CoV-2 is of course just minding its own business. The duality restorations themselves are happening because the virus is stressing our systems (biological, sociological, political, economic) to their limits and exposing all the underlying weaknesses. (Generally speaking, malfunctioning of a duality becomes immediately apparent upon a test of robustness.) To think of this crisis solely in terms of its health effects is dangerously naive, and not deriving the right lessons from a crisis of this magnitude is a massive waste. What is at stake is the survival of humanity. We need to stop being so myopic and start thinking about far future rather than the next electoral cycle.

You may say that it is still too early to think in big-picture terms. (As the Chinese premier Zhou Enlai famously remarked, it is still too early to draw final conclusions from the French Revolution.) But in matters of life and death it is always better to be early than late.

Before we delve into the dualities, since there is a lot of misinformation in circulation, I want to first make sure that we are on the same page with respect to a few important background items.

We will inevitably be touching some controversial topics. So now is a great time to drop the legal disclaimer:

All postings on this site, including this one, are my own and do not necessarily represent the strategies or opinions of the organizations I am affiliated with.

We Could Have Been a Lot More Prepared

In Turkey, we say earthquakes do not kill people, bad buildings do. There is a lot of wisdom in this.

Was SARS-CoV-2 an entirely unique, unanticipatable event? Did it catch everyone by surprise? Of course not. Even Bill Gates has been shouting for years that it is only a matter of time that we get hit by another big pandemic and that we are utterly unprepared for it.

Currently, we are suffering from three major bottlenecks:

1. Hospital Beds. This is particularly easy to solve. China built a 1,000 bed-capacity pre-fabric hospital in a month. May be you can not do it today in such a short period of time, but you definitely could have if you had thought about it well in advance.

2. Medical Ventilators. These machines do not require rocket science to build. We could have easily stocked hundreds of thousands in a decentralized fashion.

3. Trained Critical-Care Personelle. We could have pre-trained people beforehand just in case the need arises, focusing on the processes for handling severe pneumonia and assuming that such trainees will always be supervised by doctors who will manage the tricky cases.

If this is indeed a “war”, then why are we so ill-prepared for it? We routinely allocate trillions of dollars to military defense budgets. Why did we not channel a minuscule amount of that against the risk of a pandemic?

What we have is a case of bad leadership, not some kind of bad misfortune. We even had an opportunity to lay the scientific foundations for the current frantic vaccine development efforts well in advance, but missed it due to bad risk management practices. (Remember, technology can be developed in a frantic fashion, as we do during wartime, but science can not be rushed.)

The best-case scenario, as Schwartz sees it, is the one in which this vaccine development happens far too late to make a difference for the current outbreak. The real problem is that preparedness for this outbreak should have been happening for the past decade, ever since SARS. “Had we not set the SARS-vaccine-research program aside, we would have had a lot more of this foundational work that we could apply to this new, closely related virus, ” he said. But, as with Ebola, government funding and pharmaceutical-industry development evaporated once the sense of emergency lifted.

James Hamblin - You’re Likely to Get the Coronavirus

We Will Probably Be Unable to Stop This Pandemic

Now that the genie is out of the bottle and the outbreak has reached a pandemic status, we are very unlikely to be able to fully contain this virus. (Asymptomatic "silent spreaders" have made the job particularly hard.)

Since COVID-19 is now so widespread, within countries and around the world, the Imperial model suggests that epidemics would return within a few weeks of the restrictions being lifted. To avoid this, countries must suppress the disease each time it resurfaces, spending at least half their time in lockdown. This on-off cycle must be repeated until either the disease has worked through the population or there is a vaccine which could be months away, if one works at all.

The Economist - Paying to Stop the Pandemic

It seems like, unless the highly speculative mRNA technologies with very fast development cycles miraculously pay off, there will not be a vaccine around for at least another year or two. Remember, even if something works in the lab, the chances are it will very likely fail in the real world and not pass the necessary efficacy and toxicity tests. (The average success rate of new infectious disease medicines starting clinical trials is just 20 percent.)

If we are lucky, the virus will mutate into a more infectious but less lethal form. (It has already branched into several strains, but the mutations so far seem to be trivial.) However the structural mutations of the sort needed for such a change may render any herd immunity built up against the old version of the virus meaningless and unleash brand new waves of contagion.

There are also question marks about duration of immunity. In other words, even if we manage to develop a vaccine, it may not be a permanent solution.

OK. Now that we are in sync we can go back to the dualities.

Duality 1: Old vs Young

SARS-CoV-2 miraculously does not kill any children, except in very rare cases. We should be grateful for this. Although we do not currently have a full grasp of the underlying causal mechanisms, the general patterns of lethality are clear. One obvious correlation is between lethality and age. Risk of death increases exponentially with age.

On the other hand, if you look at who is getting most screwed by the measures taken by governments, it is disproportionally the young people.

• Universities and schools got closed the first.

• Many low-paying entry-level jobs (populated mostly by the young) were eliminated the first.

• In times of uncertainty, people fall back on existing connections and trust networks. (In other words, those who have not had any time to build up social capital have nothing to fall back on.)

• “All generations suffer during an economic crisis. But the consequences last longer for the young. Economic misery has a tendency to compound. Low wages now beget low wages later, and meagre pensions after that.” (Source)

• Governments may be freely dispensing money today in order to ease the economic pain, but it will be the young who will need to pay off the accumulated government debt in the future.

So, the damage caused by the threat is mostly absorbed by the old, while the damage caused by the reaction against the threat is mostly absorbed by the young. This is clearly not sustainable, but also not that surprising since the decision makers themselves are mostly old people as well.

Prestige, wealth and power have always been concentrated in the hands of the old, but the recycling frequency of this concentration has significantly slowed down thanks to the advances in life expectancy. As our leaders are getting increasingly older, in literally all spheres of life, including academics, politics and business, our society is losing its evolutionary dynamism. This is a dangerous situation since, as technology advances and accelerates the pace of progress, we will need even more cognitive plasticity, not less.

Remember, what stands in the way of progress eventually gets wiped out. Humanity itself owes its own existence to a series of mass extinctions. Evolution is a cold-hearted ruthless bastard.

Will we be able to deal with the catastrophes waiting for us? The answer hinges on how fast we can develop the right (hard and soft) technologies.

Duality 2: Men vs Women

Countries who handled the first wave of infections in the best fashion are mostly led by women. And who are putting their lives at stake, fighting on the front lines of this outbreak? The health workers of course, the substantial majority of whom are again women. And who bears more of the burden when preschools and schools stay closed, and nannies and maids can no longer show up to work? Women of course.

SARS-CoV-2 on the other hand has a clear preference for men. (Same was true for SARS-CoV-1.) At first, everyone thought that this was due to the greater prevalence of smoking among males, but now it looks like smoking actually decreases the risk of infection. (Apparently nicotine also binds to ACE2, the same cell-membrane protein that the virus binds to in the lungs.) Some say that the gender difference could be related to differences in estrogen levels. (We are now injecting estrogen into male patients.) Others say that it could be related to the differences in ACE2 expression levels. Science is still unsettled.

In any case, what is clear is that this virus hits old men the hardest. This is a particularly interesting group since it happens to contain the substantial majority of the most powerful people on earth. Look around you. Who is running your country? Who is currently competing to run US, the most powerful country in the world? (Hint: Males over 70.) Have you ever wondered who sits on the boards of the S&P 500 companies? (80 percent male. Average age over 60.)

Modern women have some breathing room, yes. But there are glass ceilings everywhere. We have nowhere near enough feminine (empathy-driven, “mother nature” focused) thinking in our power nodes. Our world is still very much a masculine world and we are clearly suffering from this imbalance.

Duality 3: Humanity vs (Rest of the) Environment

Historically speaking we used to die a lot more often from viruses. Over time we learned how to develop vaccines and keep the outbreaks at bay, but recently, largely due to the emergence of zoonotic viruses, the frequency of outbreaks started to pick up again.

Remember, avian influenza jumped to us from birds, HIV from chimpanzees, Ebola from bats, MERS (which is also a coronavirus) from camels and SARS-CoV-2 (to the best of our knowledge) from pangolins. There are many new, potentially a lot more severe zoonotic events waiting for us in the future.

Deforestation is bringing us more in contact with wild animals. Giant industrial poultry farms are triggering avian influenza outbreaks on an annual basis. Are these really necessary in this age of quantum computers? Do we really need to systematically massacre tens of billions of animals in slaughter houses while there are so many other dietary options open to us? (I personally prefer pescatarianism which is basically vegetarianism plus seafood, dairy products and eggs. It is very easy to transition to.)

And what about the exotic animal markets around the world catering to the rich folks who want to spice up their boring lives? Remember, pangolin is an endangered animal, in fact the most illegally traded mammal in the world.

It is almost as if we brought this crisis onto ourselves. Left unchecked, our disregard for the environment and boundless appetite for indulgence is going to destroy us. In order to prevent another outbreak, we need to restrain ourselves and reduce what is called the attack surface in cyber security. In other words, we should just stay away from living beings with whom we share so much of our DNA, and therefore so much of our diseases. Thankfully, this has already started happening in the form of closures of animal markets and meat processing plants, most of whom suffer from extremely unhygienic working conditions. (Yes, meat prices are going up and there will be shortages, but meat should have never been cheap anyway.)

Duality 4: West vs East

It is easy to forget the fact that we shape our world largely after our ideas. Something as tangible as the maltreatment of environment can be directly traced back to the sharp object-subject separation promoted by the currently dominant Western worldview. We treat nature as if it is meant to serve our needs, as if it is an object, not a subject. This attitude is actually encouraged in an explicit form by all Abrahamic religions like Christianity, as in the biblical instruction “Subdue the earth and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing.” (Meanwhile, on the contrary, almost all Eastern philosophies are infused with panpsychic ideas, ascribing consciousness to the entirety of universe.)

Recent world history can basically be characterized as the rise of the West in all its aspects. This has generally played out well for a while. Technology increased both our productive (and destructive) capabilities, and we have become rich beyond belief. However, this exponential rise in living standards have come at the cost of massive externalities in the form of environmental disasters and social inequalities. Overall, our societies have become overly individualist and distrusting, our economies have become overly competitive and efficiency-oriented, and (perhaps most importantly) our worldview has become overly analytical and reductionist.

Clearly, our lopsided philosophy is not sustainable. (This will become even more evident in the next section when we discuss the global nature of the challenges waiting for us.) But how can you balance the mainstream culture? After all, cultural evolution occurs at a very high level and is not independent of the more fundamental, tangible levels of social dynamics lying underneath it. (This was one of the most important observations of Karl Marx.) Long story short, cultural influence requires political and economic influence. In other words, a major cultural shift necessitates a major power shift first.

A magnificent (and potentially very dangerous) power shift has been taking place in front of our eyes for a while. It acquired its most legible form in Donald Trump’s popular campaign slogan “Make America Great Again” and his dramatic fight against the Chinese technology company Huawei. Then SARS-CoV-2 came out of nowhere and accelerated this power shift further.

People are blaming China for all sorts of things today, most of them being quite unjust. Yes, it made some big mistakes during the first few weeks of the outbreak. But look at the situation in US today. Do you think that the world would have been better off if the outbreak had started off in US instead?

China’s centralized government (once realizing the gravity of the situation) swiftly sealed itself off from the world and took draconian social measures (that would be unimaginable in the Western world) in a very short period of time. As a result it managed to significantly slow down the virus at its source and earn the world at least 2-3 months to prepare. What did the rest of the world do during this time? Nothing. More importantly, thanks to the data shared about the structure, virality and lethality of the virus, the rest of the world never had to operate in complete darkness. This data played a vital role in the formation of initial policy decisions in the Western world.

People are angry at China today, essentially because they feel that they are bearing a disproportionate amount of the suffering. But is it really China’s fault that it has managed to bounce back in such a short period of time, that it is enjoying significant structural advantages in handling a crisis of this sort?

• Cultural differences matter. It is not a coincidence that Eastern countries (China, South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan) have all handled the crisis well, while Western countries where people have low trust in each other and their governments are all having a hard time containing the panic and mobilizing a harmonious front against the virus.

• Generally speaking, under stressful conditions centralized systems always perform better, and under relaxed conditions decentralized systems always perform better. I do not know if you have realized but the world have turned completely communist in a matter of weeks. Big corporations are begging for help, governments are postponing taxes, indiscriminately extending credit-lines to everybody, guaranteeing bank loans and even helicoptering money around. While the federal government in US is failing to establish coordination across states, China’s centralized government can at any time instantly mobilize even its tiniest capillaries.

• Privacy is a huge issue in individualist Western countries. Meanwhile China is reaping the rewards of its years of investment in surveillance technologies, tracking everyone and collecting all relevant data in one place where it becomes actionable. It can instantly detect and isolate any new local outbreaks. I know, China is bad, in the sense that there is no freedom of speech there. But US is bad too. Nearly 1 out of every 100 American is in prison or jail, an incredibly high ratio by world standards. Being a superpower seems to correlate with tyrannical internal control, either in a “preventive” form (as in China) or in a “therapeutic” form (as in US).

• China has become a world onto itself with its giant interconnected population and diminishing reliance on external demand to prop up its economy. Remember, US emerged as the world leader after World War II primarily because it has managed to stay away from the mayhem that ravaged everyone else. China seems to be in the same exact position today with its ability to seal itself off from the pandemic. At some point, it will no doubt think of deploying something similar to the Marshall Plan. In fact this has already started happening in some form with the high-profile deliveries of medical equipment.

The most important thing that China has demonstrated to the world is that there is an alternative way of becoming a superpower based on a radically different philosophy of governance. This is exactly what is scaring the shit out of Western leaders and what has shocked me on a personal level as well. When someone shatters your worldview and wakes you up to the dual nature of truth, it really hurts. You feel enlightened, but also duped and angry.

“The opposite of a fact is falsehood, but the opposite of one profound truth may very well be another profound truth.”
- Niels Bohr

China has lifted a billion people out of poverty in a spectacular growth story, and is today making colossal bets on revolutionary technologies like AI and blockchain, while US is pathetically cutting back its R&D spending. China’s super-efficient bureaucracy run by the top brains in the country in a meritocratic tradition is exhibiting a long-term planning of the kind that we desperately need, while US can no longer think beyond the next election cycle and has proven itself to be utterly incapable of leading us in global challenges like climate change.

Duality 5: Local vs Global

Thanks to the unstoppable march of globalization, the world has now become interconnected in so many different ways. Ideas quickly spread thanks to the vast social media platforms with billions of users. Viruses quickly spread thanks to vast number of flights between hundreds of cities. I mean, think about it. One person eating an exotic animal in China eventually causes the stock market in US to collapse. How amazing is that? (It is also interesting how social media is playing a non-trivial role in this drama.)

So, in some sense, globalization reinforces itself by quickly amplifying local problems to a scale that requires a global approach which in turn requires better global governance. Today we have a pandemic in our hands, but the world has completely failed to act in unison. This means that we have a lot more work to do, which of course is not a surprise to anybody. We have already seen a slow version of the same film. It was called the Climate Change Fiasco.

Remember, the West did not even move a finger while China was crumbling for two months. No pharmaceutical company was willing to develop a vaccine back then. Look how many are racing today. World’s novel drug development capacity is almost entirely concentrated in US and Europe, and vaccine manufacturing know-how is concentrated in just four companies. Should we feel lucky that Americans and Europeans are dying along with the rest of us?

Even developed countries among themselves can not agree on what actions need to be taken. Not only do the responses of each country differ, but their timings do so as well, causing the virus to slow down here and accelerate there. This lack of uniformity and synchrony implies that even China’s own declaration of victory was premature. As long as the virus is still circulating around the globe, it will eventually find its way back into every single country.

I hope wealthy nations include poorer ones in these preparations, especially by devoting more foreign aid to building up their primary health-care systems. Even the most self-interested person—or isolationist government—should agree with this by now. This pandemic has shown us that viruses don’t obey border laws and that we are all connected biologically by a network of microscopic germs, whether we like it or not. If a novel virus appears in a poor country, we want its doctors to have the ability to spot it and contain it as soon as possible.

The Economist - Bill Gates on How to Fight Future Pandemics

Of course, it is ridiculously naive to expect a global coordination in an unequal world. Developing countries with barely functional health systems and already fragile economies can not afford to take the radical actions taken by developed countries. The inequality is drastic. For instance, Italy has 41 doctors per 10,000 people while Africa has only 2. (Source) Millions will die in Africa and get probably less global media coverage than Italy alone received.

Similar coordination issues had popped up during the climate change debate. A substantial portion of the carbon dioxide stock that is causing global warming today is due to the past economic activities of the developed countries. Putting a cap on this stock literally amounts to asking the developing countries to stop developing simply because they are late in the game. Of course they can not comply, what do we expect?

Lesson is simple: If you ignore inequality, it will eventually bite you back, because everything is interconnected. We are living on the same goddamn globe, breathing the same goddamn air, drinking the same goddamn water.

Of course, there is inequality not just among the countries, but also within the countries. Poor people everywhere are a lot more likely to suffer from obesity, malnutrition, poor hygiene, air pollution and high population density, all of which increase the risk of death by Covid-19. They are also affected the most by the drastic measures taken by the governments, since they often have no savings, no safety nets, no access to proper healthcare, no private cars, no spaces to self-isolate and no jobs that can be done remotely.

Duality 6: Physical vs Digital

Do you know what is truly global, by birth? Digital businesses. (That is why they find it difficult to localize themselves and why governments find it difficult to regulate them.)

Do you know which businesses are completely unaffected by and even benefiting from the current crisis? Again, digital businesses. They effortlessly adjusted to work-from-home conditions and consumption of all things digital has skyrocketed. Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Alphabet and Facebook alone now account for more than 20 percent of the market capitalization of S&P 500.

We have been witnessing the rise of the digital for a while now. (A topic very dear to my heart!) This trend was best articulated by Marc Andreessen who presciently observed that software is eating the world. We are infusing information into everything we use and using more bits less atoms. Matter is getting smarter and products are getting lighter. Our entire economy is slowly being virtualized and ephemeralized.

A higher level of complexity is emerging above us, a higher level of life forms so to speak, based on silicon + light rather than carbon + water. (Silicon is the new abundant element facilitating construction and light is the new fluid environment facilitating communication.) This is the next step in the grand narrative of life which is evolving towards an enigmatic singularity. We are collectively giving birth to something whose complexity will be categorically beyond our comprehension, and just like every other birth, the process itself will be full of trauma and pain. In this particular case, it will require a social reform and a restoration of all the dualities we have been talking about.

Again, as we pointed out at the very beginning of this post, nature does not create dualities for no reason. The newly emerging one between digital businesses and physical businesses is no exception. (Think of it as the society-level version of the mind-body duality where the mind is maturing late in the game just as it matured late in the evolution of biology.) Time unfolds through the dynamisms unleashed by such dualities and nature progresses to higher level complexities by synthesizing these dualities in a dialectical fashion. (You are the synthesis of your mind and body.)

So what exactly is SARS-CoV-2?

• If you really zoom in, it is a simple string of 30,000 letters wrapped inside a spiky sphere less than 100 nanometers in diameter.

• If you really zoom out, it is a dialectical agent, speeding up a traumatic birth process, inflicting pain but also pushing in the right direction.

In other words, the answer depends on how you want to look at the question.

waves of decentralizations

Evolutionary dynamics always start off well-defined and centralized, but overtime (without any exception) mature and decentralize. Our own history is full of beautiful exemplifications of this fact. In historical order, we went through the following decentralization waves:

• Science decentralized Truth away from the hegemony of Church.

• Democracy decentralized Power.

• Capitalism decentralized Wealth.

• Social Media decentralized Fame away from the media barons.

Today, if you are not powerful, wealthy or famous, there is no one but to blame yourself. If you do not know the truth, there is not one but to blame yourself. Everything is accessible, at least in theory. This of course inflicts an immense amount of stress on the modern citizen. In a sense, life was a lot easier when there was not so much decentralization.

Note how important social media revolution really was. Most people do not recognize the magnitude of change that has taken place in such a short period of time. In terms of structural importance, it is on the same scale as the emergence of democracy. We no longer distinguish a sophisticated judgment from an unsophisticated one. Along with “Every Vote Counts”, now we also have “Every Like Counts”.

Of course, the social media wave was built on another, even more fundamental decentralization wave, which is the internet itself. Together with the rise of internet, communication became completely decentralized. Today, in a similar fashion, we are witnessing the emergence of blockchain technology which is trying to decentralize trust by creating neutral trust nodes with no centralized authority behind them. For instance, you no longer need to be a central bank with a stamp of approval from the government to a launch a currency. (Both internet and blockchain undermine political authority and in particular render national boundaries increasingly more irrelevant.)

Internet itself is an example of a design, where robustness to communication problems was a primary consideration (for those who don't remember, Arpanet was designed by DARPA to be a communication network resistant to nuclear attack). In that sense the Internet is extremely robust. But today we are being introduced to many other instances of that technology, many of which do not follow the decentralized principles that guided the early Internet, but are rather highly concentrated and centralized. Centralized solutions are almost by definition fragile, since they depend on the health of a single concentrated entity. No matter how well protected such central entity is, there are always ways for it to be hacked or destroyed.

Filip Piekniewski - Optimality, Technology and Fragility

As pointed out by Filip, evolution favors progression from centralization to decentralization because it functionally corresponds to a progression from fragility to robustness.

Also, notice that all of these decentralization waves initially overshoot due to the excitement caused by their novelty. That is why they are always criticized at first for good reasons. Eventually they all shed off their lawlessness, structurally stabilize, go completely mainstream and institutionalize themselves.

dire need for social reform

Look at the history of all mass social traumas. (Rise and fall of feudalism etc.) You will see that they are all preceded by transformative technological and economic disruptions and followed by transformative social and spiritual reforms.

We are going through a similar trauma at the moment. These structural changes can be hard to see while you are inside them since they manifest themselves in myriad of details. However when you go back to evaluate what happened, the picture is always crystal clear. (This evaluation can not be conducted right after the dust settles. You literally need some distance to see what really happened.)

Today we have entered into a new phase in the development of the next layer of complexity within the grand narrative of life. (To understand what I mean, read Emergence of Life post.) This new technological wave is slowly unfolding, but it is probably on par with the industrial revolution, perhaps even a couple of magnitudes more powerful. Long story short, our centralized digital brain has finally emerged. (i.e. The multi-cloud layer linking up all cloud-based computation and storage resources.) This development has already started to have massive effects on our psyches via the infiltration of social media and the penetration of artificial intelligence into our everyday lives. Artists and writers have felt the zeitgeist and are responding to it by writing books and shooting movies to raise social awareness about the oncoming possible consequences of the new technologies.

Clearly, the emergence of the next life forms is a vastly complicated, non-linear process. Nature is giving birth to something new through us and naturally we are the ones who are most affected by this traumatic unfolding.

Today, society as we know it is literally falling apart:

• Friendship has evolved into an unrecognizable form.

• Our lives have become so complex (a natural side effect of the emergence) and we expect so much from our life partners that the notion of marriage has morphed into an all-or-nothing form. Divorce rates are skyrocketing, and the whole institution is crumbling under immense weight.

• Our schools are extremely out-of-date and nobody seems to have the balls, persistence and the vision to reform them. (Hint: Handing out more screens will not solve the problem.) We are not preparing our kids for the challenges they will be facing when they grow up. In fact, we are not even preparing them for today’s challenges. The situation is so ridiculous that I sincerely believe that we would be better off by turning the entire thing off.

• Our economic and social safety nets are insufficient to cope with the oncoming technological wave. People are feeling left-behind and depressed, especially since our current macro structures are implicitly asking them to derive the meaning of life from their jobs. (Hint: Handing out more money will not solve the problem.) Only after the epic rise of China (with its top-down, long-term-thinking, centralized, globally-optimized decision making mechanisms) have the business elites in United States recognized that they actually have social obligations, beyond maximizing shareholder value.

And the list goes on…

We need to speed up, otherwise our social reforms will not be able catch up with the increasing speed and magnitude of technological changes. Make no mistake, technology will not slow down for us. Emergence of the next level of life forms is an unstoppable process. If this process collapses, we, as humanity, will collapse along with it. In other words, if we can not give rise to these new life forms, evolution will promptly get rid of us and try again. (Human-level minds will re-emerge somehow, somewhen, somewhere.)

So what are we doing now? Are we reforming?

No.

What type of leaders do you need for preaching social progress and propagating social reform? You need liberal leaders. What have our liberal leader done? They fucked up badly, really really badly. Now conservatism is coming back with full force everywhere. People are fleeing back to safety, falling back onto old notions, closing down on themselves, against each other and towards new ideas. And they have every right to do so, because they feel betrayed. They can not pinpoint exactly what went wrong, but they feel that the elites have not done their jobs. And they are absolutely right. Elites chose to mind their own business and think of their own pockets. Most still feel no sense of duty towards the society. If they felt any, we would not be in this shit situation today, regressing back in time while technology is marching ahead with no stop in sight.

It will probably take another 20 years before the society gives another chance to liberal progressives and opens up to new social reforms. Again, make no mistake, liberals have done this to themselves. They can not cry it out. They need to change. In a world where a substantial majority of the graduates of the most revered university (Harvard College) chooses to pursue careers in investment banking and consulting, in a world where the most revered technology leader (Elon Musk) sees salvation of humanity through a fantasy colonization of Mars, common people will obviously feel betrayed. Our best brains need to be socially conscious. Our best leaders need to be morally sensible. If they will not do the job, society will look elsewhere, just as they are doing now.

There is an immense psychological distress at the moment. People who are supposed to save us are clueless. They do not have any spiritual strength to deal with this new (self-induced) massive attack on our social infrastructures and well-beings.

• Most define their lives through their work, which will soon mostly be rendered irrelevant by artificial intelligence. These ones are hopeless.

• Some define their lives through their children. These ones will be sacrificing the spiritual health of the children to salvage their own, by making the children serve their own psychological needs.

• Some, as expected, seek help from science. But the psychologists are clueless about questions of meaning. They have even less of an idea about the deep structural evolutionary causative factors that have led to this mess.

As I said at the beginning, all technological shocks have to be followed by spiritual transformations. We literally need to ask again to ourselves what it means to be a human being. To do this at scale, we need a new set of spiritual leaders who can guide us through this new mess we created. Religion should evolve to stay relevant. Our educated elite is no longer governed by any higher values simply because they can not find any religious doctrines they can resonate with. (Doctrines meant to be addressed to uneducated masses living two thousand years ago will not do the job.)

What may be salvaging us today is a few glitters of basic humanistic instincts, here and there, a few good people with good common sense in some high level offices. But this is clearly not enough. You can not solve the greater social challenges we are facing today simply by throwing more love at them. Of course, empathy is necessary for revising and building the superstructures we need, but it is not enough by itself. (It is not even enough in quantity at the moment.)

Salvation will not happen by going to Mars. It will happen through a deep understanding of how evolution works, and through a guided progressive social reform that is not out-of-touch with the new challenges of our times.

My biggest worry is that we are slowing down too much today. Do you know what happens when spiritual guidance and principles of social self-governance fail to keep up with technological progress? Bad decisions and eventually wars! Darkness takes over, and humanity gets hammered until it realigns its values and understands its real priorities.

“The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.”

- Isaac Asimov

Why do we always have to go through the hard way? We need to understand that this game is getting exponentially more dangerous. We are not playing with swords any more. After the next world war, there may not be another “phoenix rising from its ashes” story. Of course, as I said before, nature will always rise from its ashes and keep constructing greater complexities and autonomies, but that does not necessarily have to involve us.

connectivity and cultural diversity

Intergenerational cultural meme transfer mechanisms have all broken down. Instead of asking our own grand parents about their child rearing practices, we all go to the same search engine and click on the same links. We all watch the same movies, read the same books. Greater connectivity has brought us lesser diversity. We seem to be heading towards a single monoculture as social trends propagate at the speed of light through the fiber optic cables.

Why should we worry? Just scroll back in time and look at the rise and fall of civilizations. Why have certain cultures prevailed during certain periods? When brute force worked, the brute won. When ideas became important, the cerebral won. There are of course many reasons why developing countries have hard time catching up, but one important aspect is cultural. Some cultures are just not meant to be successful in today’s environment and this is normal. (Inspect those countries that did indeed catch up, you will find cultural discontinuity, widespread debasement and confusion of values.)

Tomorrow conditions will change. We need to maintain diversity to be able to cope with those upcoming changes which we can not fathom today.

Postmodernists are right in the sense that no culture is superior to another in an absolute sense. However, this does not mean that all cultures are equal. Relative to a certain context or problem, we can objectively talk about some cultures being fitter than others. (Remove the context, any comparison becomes impossible.)

Note that, when one culture assimilates another, it selfishly hedges itself against the future possibility of losing the evolutionary upper hand. In other words, it prolongs its own survival at the expense of decreasing the adaptivity of the whole.

truth as status quo

We now have the science that argues how you're supposed to go about building something that doesn't have these echo chamber problems, these fads and madnesses. We're beginning to experiment with that as a way of curing some of the ills that we see in society today. Open data from all sources, and this notion of having a fair representation of the things that people are actually choosing, in this curated mathematical framework that we know stamps out echoes and fake news.

The Human Strategy

Fads and echo chambers provide the means to break positive feedback loops (by helping us counter them with virtual positive feedback loops) and get out of bad equilibriums (by helping us cross the critical thresholds necessary to initiate change). Preventing illusion is akin to preventing progress. Every new truth starts with untruth. Future will be in conflict with today. Today’s new reality is yesterday’s false belief.

It is startling to realize how much unbelief is necessary to make belief possible.

Eric Hoffer - The True Believer (Page 79)

We are constructors of our social world as well as receivers.That is why companies like Facebook should never be involved in this war against “fake news”. Truth is inherently political. Algorithms for sniffing it out will inevitably end up defending the status quo.

politics, economics and naturality

Combination of liberalism and capitalism forms a nice balance. Former fights against nature in the political domain and destroys outliers by eliminating actual differences in a discrete fashion. Latter fights for nature in the economic domain and creates outliers by amplifying potential differences in a continuous fashion. (Fighting against nature results in discrete as opposed to continuous change.)

Similarly, combination of conservatism (fighting for nature in the political domain) and communism (fighting against nature in the economic domain) forms a nice balance as well. But both combinations are hard to maintain due to their conflictual nature.

necessity of dualities

All truths lie between two opposite positions. All dramas unfold between two opposing forces. Dualities are both ubiquitous and fundamental. They shape both our mental and physical worlds.

Here are some examples:

Mental

objective | subjective
rational | emotional
conscious | unconscious
reductive | inductive
absolute | relative
positive | negative
good | evil
beautiful | ugly
masculine | feminine

Physical

deterministic | indeterministic
continuous | discrete
actual | potential
necessary | contingent
inside | outside
infinite | finite
global | local
stable | unstable
reversible | irreversible

Notice that even the above split between the two groups itself is an example of duality.

These dualities arise as an epistemological byproduct of the method of analytical inquiry. That is why they are so thoroughly infused into the languages we use to describe the world around us.

Each relatum constitutive of dipolar conceptual pairs is always contextualized by both the other relatum and the relation as a whole, such that neither the relata (the parts) nor the relation (the whole) can be adequately or meaningfully defined apart from their mutual reference. It is impossible, therefore, to conceptualize one principle in a dipolar pair in abstraction from its counterpart principle. Neither principle can be conceived as "more fundamental than," or "wholly derivative of" the other.

Mutually implicative fundamental principles always find their exemplification in both the conceptual and physical features of experience. One cannot, for example, define either positive or negative numbers apart from their mutual implication; nor can one characterize either pole of a magnet without necessary reference to both its counterpart and the two poles in relation - i.e. the magnet itself. Without this double reference, neither the definiendum nor the definiens relative to the definition of either pole can adequately signify its meaning; neither pole can be understood in complete abstraction from the other.

- Epperson & Zafiris - Foundations of Relational Realism (Page 4)

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Various lines of Eastern religious and philosophical thinkers intuited how languages can hide underlying unity by artificially superimposing conceptual dualities (the primary of which is the almighty object-subject duality) and posited the nondual wholesomeness of nature several thousand years before the advent of quantum mechanics. (The analytical route to enlightenment is always longer than the intuitive route.)

Western philosophy on the other hand

• ignored the mutually implicative nature of all dualities and denied the inaccessibility of wholesomeness of nature to analytical inquiry.

• got fooled by the precision of mathematics which is after all just another language invented by human beings.

• confused partial control with understanding and engineering success with ontological precision. (Understanding is a binary parameter, meaning that either you understand something or you do not. Control on the other hand is a continuous parameter, meaning that you can have partial control over something.)

As a result Western philosophers mistook representation as reality and tried to confine truth to one end of each dualism in order to create a unity of representation matching the unity of reality.

Side Note: Hegel was an exception. Like Buddha, he too saw dualities as artificial byproducts of analysis, but unlike him, he suggested that one should transcend them via synthesis. In other words, for Buddha unity resided below and for Hegel unity resided above. (Buddha wanted to peel away complexity to its simplest core, while Hegel wanted to embrace complexity in its entirety.) While Buddha stopped theorizing and started meditating instead, Hegel saw the salvation through higher levels of abstraction via alternating chains of analyses and syntheses. (Buddha wanted to turn off cognition altogether, while Hegel wanted to turn up cognition full-blast.) Perhaps at the end of the day they were both preaching the same thing. After all, at the highest level of abstraction, thinking probably halts and emptiness reigns.

It was first the social thinkers who woke up and revolted against the grand narratives built on such discriminative pursuits of unity. There was just way too much politically and ethically at stake for them. The result was an overreaction, replacing unity with multiplicity and considering all points of views as valid. In other words, the pendulum swung the other way and Western philosophy jumped from one state of deep confusion into another. In fact, this time around the situation was even worse since there was an accompanying deep sense of insecurity as well.

The cacophony spread into hard sciences like physics too. Grand narrations got abandoned in favor of instrumental pragmatism. Generations of new physicists got raised as technicians who basically had no clue about the foundations of their disciplines. The most prominent of them could even publicly make an incredibly naive claim such as “something can spontaneously arise from nothing through a quantum fluctuation” and position it as a non-philosophical and non-religious alternative to existing creation myths.

Just to be clear, I am not trying to argue here in favor of Eastern holistic philosophies over Western analytic philosophies. I am just saying that the analytic approach necessitates us to embrace dualities as two-sided entities, including the duality between holistic and analytic approaches.

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Politics experienced a similar swing from conservatism (which hailed unity) towards liberalism (which hailed multiplicity). During this transition, all dualities and boundaries got dissolved in the name of more inclusion and equality. The everlasting dynamism (and the subsequent wisdom) of dipolar conceptual pairs (think of magnetic poles) got killed off in favor of an unsustainable burst in the number of ontologies.

Ironically, liberalism resulted in more sameness in the long run. For instance, the traditional assignment of roles and division of tasks between father and mother got replaced by equal parenting principles applied by genderless parents. Of course, upon the dissolution of the gender dipolarity, the number of parents one can have became flexible as well. Having one parent became as natural as having two, three or four. In other words, parenting became a community affair in its truest sense.

The even greater irony was that liberalism itself forgot that it represented one extreme end of another duality. It was in a sense a self-defeating doctrine that aimed to destroy all discriminative pursuits of unity except for that of itself. (The only way to “resolve” this paradox is to introduce a conceptual hierarchy among dualities where the higher ones can be used to destroy the lower ones, in a fashion that is similar to how mathematicians deal with Russell’s paradox in set theory.)

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Of course, at some point the pendulum will swing back to pursuit of unity again. But while we swing back and forth between unity and multiplicity, we keep skipping the only sources of representational truths, namely the dualities themselves. For some reason we are extremely uncomfortable with the fact that the world can only be represented via mutually implicative principles. We find “one” and “infinity” tolerable but “two” arbitrary and therefore abhorring. (Prevalence of “two” in mathematics and “three” in physics was mentioned in a previous blog post.)

I am personally obsessed with “two”. I look out for dualities everywhere and share the interesting finds here on my blog. In fact, I go even further and try to build my entire life on dualities whose two ends mutually enhance each other every time I visit them.

We should not collapse dualities into unities for the sake of satisfying our sense of belonging. We need to counteract this dangerous sociological tendency using our common sense at the individual level. Choosing one side and joining the groupthink is the easy way out. We should instead strive to carve out our identities by consciously sampling from both sides. In other words, when it comes to complex matters, we should embrace the dualities as a whole and not let them split us apart. (Remember, if something works very well, its dual should also work very well. However, if something is true, its dual has to be wrong. This is exactly what separates theory from reality.)

Of course, it is easy to talk about these matters, but who said that pursuit of truth would be easy?

Perhaps there is no pursuit to speak of unless one is pre-committed to choose a side, and swinging back and forth between the two ends of a dualism is the only way nature can maintain its neutrality without sacrificing its dynamicity? (After all, there is no current without a polarity in the first place.)

Perhaps we should just model our logic after reality (like Hegel wanted to) and rather than expect reality to conform to our logic? (In this way we can have our cake and eat it too!)

monopolistic tendencies

Achilles' heel of capitalism has always been its tendency to concentrate wealth into the hands of a few entities. As software is eating the world, this tendency is increasing.

As opposed to their traditional counterparts, software companies are born international and can scale at a much faster pace. Moreover, due to the winner-takes-all dynamics of information economics, it is not easy for new software companies to challenge the incumbents. The result has been a concentration of wealth unseen in history.


Problem 1: Lack of Regulation

Our regulatory frameworks are stuck in a bygone era in which monopoly was defined as charging unjustifiably high prices to consumers while technology giants do the opposite by either charging lower prices (Amazon) or not charging at all (Facebook).


Problem 2: Lack of VCs with Balls

Investors are afraid of funding ambitious startups that want to compete against the giants head on. Instead, they prefer pure blue ocean strategies that can be executed with relatively small budgets. There are much bigger battles waiting to be fought, but the masters are afraid of facing the monsters of their own creation.

In fact, the situation is even worse. Anything within the periphery of the giants scares the shit out of investors. (What if Amazon enters that space? What if Facebook incorporates that as a feature? Lesson: The theoretical real estate around a product can actually be more valuable than the product itself, if you are big enough scare off all the potential intruders.)

Of course, no ocean can stay red forever. Blood eventually diffuses and the ocean returns back to its original color. (i.e. New startups are born once a monopoly dies.) This is a fact all venture capitalists implicitly acknowledge but (due to their nature) they are too selfish to tackle the associated collective action problem.


Solution 1: Death by Gluttony

One solution is keep the status quo dynamics and accelerate them even further. Giants want to feed on new startups? Alright, let’s feed them even more startups! Let’s feed them so fast that they collapse under the weight of their own organizational complexities.

Two troubles with this approach:

• Complexity is like an overhead that requires an extra rent to upkeep. A big entity can use its monopoly rents to pay off its complexity rents, like a rich old man refusing to die.

• Unlike traditional companies, software giants are quiet capable of managing their own complexities. (After all, most organizational problems are of information theoretic nature.) Some have even managed to essentially transform themselves into healthy closed ecosystems, upholding the law of the survival of the fittest while also enforcing cooperation against the outside world.

Solution 2: Death Match

Let the giants attack each other’s turf. They have sufficient human and financial capital, and ego to deploy the sort of attacks that VCs do not have the balls to enable. (Microsoft attacking Amazon AWS with Azure, Facebook attacking Amazon with Instagram Business, Amazon attacking Google Adwords with Amazon Advertising etc.)

Two troubles with this approach:

• It is not difficult for a few giants to implicitly agree on not stepping on each other’s toes that much.

• It may take forever for them to launch these attacks since they have so many other opportunities.

Solution 3: Programmed Death

Any entity that becomes big enough sooner or later turns evil. (Remember Google’s “Don’t be evil!” motto?) This is a universal law that holds across many different domains.

Planned obsolescence puts an upper bound on how far an entity can expand in the time dimension. We need something similar in the spatial dimensions. Biology already solved this problem by programming death into cells in such a way that they die before they turn evil and become cancerous. Why not insert similar constraints into the legal foundations of companies?

Two troubles with this approach:

• Companies often honestly can not control their growth.

• Consumers left out due to growth controls may complain.