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.

linearity of podcasts

I can not stand podcasts. Linearity of the medium is intolerable.

• Talking is OK since it is at least a two-way interaction.
• Watching is OK since each time slice is enriched with an image. (Images allow fast and non-linear transfer of information.)
• Reading is best since one can scan a text in any direction and at any (varying) speed.

Of course, the reason behind my impatience is that most information is either trivia or noise.

recognition and memorisation

The downside of Shereshevsky's flawless memory was that the details often got in the way of understanding. For instance, Shereshevsky had great trouble recognising faces. Most of us store in memory the general features of the faces we remember, and when we see someone we know, we identify the person by matching the face we're looking at to a face in that limited catalog. But Shereshevsky's memory housed a great many versions of every face he had ever seen. To Shereshevsky, each time a face changed its expression or was seen in a different lighting, it was a new face, and he remembered them all. So any given person had not one face but dozens, and when Shereshevsky encountered someone he knew, matching that person's face to the faces stored in his memory meant performing a search of a vast inventory of images to try to find an exact equivalent to what he was seeing.

Shereshevsky has similar problems with language. If you spoke to him, though he could always play back your exact words, he had trouble understanding your point. The comparison with language is apt, because this is another trees-and-forest problem.

Subliminal - Leonard Mlodinow (Page 64)

Language acquisition involves grouping impressions under categories via selective forgetting. In other words, there is a trade off between recognition ability and memorisation capacity.

Conjecture: Late talker toddlers should in general exhibit greater memorisation capacity and less recognition ability as adolescents.

korku ve duyarsızlaşma

Kelimelere kıyasla imajlara karşı çok daha hızlı duyarsızlaşıyoruz. Mesela cehennem kelimesi herkeste kendine özgü bir korkunçluk yaratabiliyor, fakat herhangi bir görsel cehennem tasviri çok hızlı şekilde etkisini kaybedebiliyor. Hatta sadece bir jenerasyon sonra komik bile bulunabiliyor.

Bu sebepten dolayı dinler görsellikten uzaklaşıp metne ve soyutluğa sığınmışlardır. Dinlerin temeli korkuya dayanır, fakat insanoğlu süreklilik arz eden korkularını normalleştirerek yenebilme özelliğine sahiptir. Tek yenemediği korku dinamik, kendi kendine yarattığı korkulardır. Metin bu korkuları çekip çıkartabilen ve sürekli canlı tutabilen basit ama çok güçlü bir teknolojidir.

piyango ve matematik

Piyango oynayan yakınlarımı matematiksel argümanlarla caydırmayı çok denemişimdir. Hep de başarısız olmuşumdur.

Piyango biletlerinin satışından toplanan paranın sadece yarısı bilet alanlara geri dağıtılıyor. Böyle bir oyun oynanır mı yahu? Tabi ki hayır, ama gel de anlat! Olasılık hesapları, beklenen değer kavramı vs hiç bir işe yaramıyor. Karşı taraf bir türlü ikna olmuyor.

Neyse artık sonunda doğru yaklaşımı buldum. İnsanları kıllandıracak doğru cümle şu: "Bütün biletleri dahi alsan kaybediyorsun."

En efektif eğitim karşı tarafı kıllandırarak temel kavramların yeniden keşfini sağlamaktan geçer.