doğru zamanda bırakabilmek

Doğadaki her üssel hızda yükselme er ya da geç hız kesip düşüşe geçer. Bu yüzden efsane olmak zordur. Ancak tepedeyken bırakırsanız, grafiğinizi doğru yerde keserseniz efsane olabilirsiniz. Böylece insanlar hayallerinde grafiğinizi (doğal olmayan bir şekilde) üssel hızda uzatmaya eder ve “kim bilir daha neler yapacaktı “ gibi laflar ederler.

Fakat hiç bir babayiğit kariyerini en üst noktasında bırakıp emekliye ayrılmayı, başka bir işle filan uğraşmayı göze alamaz. Bu yüzden efsaneler hep zamansız ölümlerden doğar.

İntihar etmek de çözüm değildir bu arada, çünkü Ciroan’ın da dediği gibi zamanlamasını hiç bir zaman doğru beceremeyiz.

It is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.
- Emil M. Ciroan

weaknesses and biases

All weaknesses arise from certain extremities and all successes are traceable to certain extremities. So defend your extremities, and in order to not suffer from the accompanying weaknesses, choose the environments you walk into carefully. All weaknesses manifest themselves contextually. Learn how to manage the context, not the weakness.

Similarly, your biases are your strengths. Defend them fiercely. They are what differentiates you from others. Thinking is methodological. Creativity is overrated. (Both can be learned.) What matters is the input and input is shaped by biases.

where extremes meet

Here are five examples where extremes meet and result in sameness despite the diametrically opposed states of mind.

Happiness

Pathologically happy ones do not worry because they do not realize that there is anything worth worrying about. Severely depressed ones do not give a shit about anything neither, but theirs is a wise apathy that knows itself.

Knowledge

Knowledge has two extremes which meet; one is the pure natural ignorance of every man at birth, the other is the extreme reached by great minds who run through the whole range of human knowledge, only to find that they know nothing and come back to the same ignorance from which they set out, but it is a wise ignorance which knows itself.

- Blaise Pascal

Reality

That Nirvana and Samsara are one is a fact about the nature of the universe; but it is a fact which cannot be fully realized or directly experienced, except by souls far advanced in spirituality.

Aldous Huxley - The Perennial Philosophy (Page 70)

Empathy

One study found that the most empathetic nurses were most likely to avoid dying patients early in their training, before they had learned to deal with the distress caused by empathizing too much. Overempathy can look from the outside like selfishness - and even produce selfish behavior.

Bruce D. Perry - Born for Love (Page 44)

Sense of Heat

The human sense of hot or cold exhibits the queer feature of ‘les extremes se touchent’: if we inadvertently touch a very cold object, we may for a moment believe that it is hot and has burnt our fingers.

Erwin Schrödinger - Mind and Matter (Page 158)

charisma and meaning as rapid expansions

Charisma is geometric phenomenon, generated via a rapid spatiotemporal expansion of the self within the physical space.

Next time you enter that Japanese restaurant enter the place as if you own it and eat that edamame like you have been eating it for the last one hundred years.

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Meaning is a topological phenomenon, generated via a rapid spatiotemporal expansion of the self within the social graph.

The crusader's life gains purpose by suborning his heart and soul to a cause greater than himself; the traditionalist finds the transcendent by linking her life to traditions whose reach extend far past herself.

Tanner Greer - Questing for Transcendence

genius vs wisdom

Genius maxes out upon birth and gradually diminishes. Wisdom displays the opposite dynamics. It is nonexistent at birth and gradually builds up until death. That is why genius is often seen as a potentiality and wisdom as an actuality. (Youth have potentiality, not the old.)

Midlife crises tend to occur around the time when wisdom surpasses genius. That is why earlier maturation correlates with earlier “mid” life crisis. (On the other hand, greater innate genius does not result in a delayed crisis since it entails faster accumulation of wisdom.)

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"Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up."
- Pablo Picasso

Here Picasso is actually asking you to maintain your genius at the expense of gaining less wisdom. That is why creative folks tend to be quite unwise folks (and require the assistance of experienced talent managers to succeed in the real world). They methodologically wrap themselves inside protective environments that allow them to pause or postpone their maturation.

Generally speaking, the greater control you have over your environment, the less wisdom you need to survive. That is why wisest people originate from low survival-rate tough conditions, and rich families have hard time raising unspoiled kids without simulating artificial scarcities. (Poor folks have the opposite problem and therefore simulate artificial abundances by displaying more love, empathy etc.)

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"Young man knows the rules and the old man knows the exceptions."
- Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

Genius is hypothesis-driven and wisdom is data-driven. That is why mature people tend to prefer experimental (and historical) disciplines, young people tend to dominate theoretical (and ahistorical) disciplines etc.

The old man can be rigid but he can also display tremendous cognitive fluidity because he can transcend the rules, improvise and dance around the set of exceptions. In fact, he no longer thinks of the exceptions as "exceptions" since an exception can only be defined with respect to a certain collection of rules. He directly intuits them as unique data points and thus is not subject to the false positives generated by operational definitions. (The young man on the other hand has not explored the full territory of possibilities yet and thus needs a practical guide no matter how crude.)

Notice that the old man can not transfer his knowledge of exceptions to the young man because that knowledge is in the form of an ineffable complex neural network that has been trained on tons of data. (Apprentice-master relationships are based on mimetic learning.) Rules on the other hand are much more transferable since they are of linguistic nature. (They are not only transferable but also a lot more compact in size, compared to the set of exceptions.) Of course, the fact that rules are transferable does not mean that the transfers actually occur! (Trivial things are deemed unworthy by the old man and important things get ignored by the young man. It is only the stuff in the middle that gets successfully transferred.)

Why is it much harder for old people to change their minds? Because wisdom is data-driven, and in a data-driven world, bugs (and biases) are buried inside large data sets and therefore much harder to find and fix. (In a hypothesis driven world, all you need to do is to go through the much shorter list of rules, hypotheses etc.)

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The Hypothesis-Data duality highlighted in the previous section can be recast as young people being driven more by rational thinking vs. old people being driven more by intuitional thinking. (In an older blog post, we had discussed how education should focus on cultivating intuition, which leads to a superior form of thinking.)

We all start out life with a purely intuitive mindset. As we learn we come up with certain heuristics and rules, resulting in an adulthood that is dominated by rationality. Once we accumulate enough experience (i.e. data), we get rid of these rules and revert back to an intuitive mindset, although at a higher level than before. (That is why the old get along very well with kids.)

Artistic types (e.g. Picasso) tend to associate genius with the tabula-rasa intuitive fluidity of the newborn. Scientific types tend to associate it with the rationalistic peak of adulthood. (That is why they start to display insecurities after they themselves pass through this peak.)

As mentioned in the previous section, rules are easily transferable across individuals. Results of intuitive thinking on the other hand are non-transferable. From a societal point of view, this is a serious operational problem and the way it is overcome is through a mechanism called “trust”. Since intuition is a black box (like all machine learning models are), the only way you can transfer it is through a wholesome imitation of the observed input-outputs. (i.e. mimetic learning) In other words, you can not understand black box models, you can only have faith in them.

As we age and become more intuition-driven, our trust in trust increases. (Of course, children are dangerously trustworthy to begin with.) Adulthood on the other hand is dominated by rational thinking and therefore corresponds to the period when we are most distrustful of each other. (No wonder why economists are such distrustful folks. They always model humans as ultra-rationalistic machines.)

Today we vastly overvalue the individual over the society, and the rational over the intuitional. (Just look at how we structure school curriculums.) We decentralized society and trivialized the social fabric by centralizing trust. (Read the older blogpost Blockchain and Decentralization) We no longer trust each other because we simply do not have to. Instead we trust the institutions that we collectively created. Our analytical frameworks have reached an individualist zenith in Physics which is currently incapable of guaranteeing the reality of other peoples’ points of view. (Read the older blogpost Reality and Analytical Inquiry) We banished faith completely from public discourse and have even demanded God to be verifiable.

In short, we seem to be heading to the peak adulthood phase of humanity, facing a massive mid-life crisis. Our collective genius has become too great for our own good.

In this context, the current rise of data-driven technological paradigms is not surprising. Humanity is entering a new intuitive post-midlife-crisis phase. Our collective wisdom is now being encoded in the form of disembodied black-box machine-learning models which will keep getting more and more sophisticated over time. (At some point, we may dispense with our analytical models altogether.) Social fabric on the other hand will keep being stretched as more types of universally-trusted centralized nodes emerge and enable new forms of indirect intuition transfer.

Marx was too early. He viewed socialism in a human way as a rationalistic inevitability, but it will probably arrive in an inhuman fashion via intuitionistic technologies. (Calling such a system still as socialism will be vastly ironic since it will be resting on complete absence of trust among individuals.) Of course, not every decision making will be centralized. Remember that the human mind itself emerged for addressing non-local problems. (There is still a lot of local decision making going on within our cells etc.) The “hive” mind will be no different, and as usual, deciding whether a problem in the gray zone is local or non-local will be determined through a tug-of-war.

The central problem of ruler-ship, as Scott sees it, is what he calls legibility. To extract resources from a population the state must be able to understand that population. The state needs to make the people and things it rules legible to agents of the government. Legibility means uniformity. States dream up uniform weights and measures, impress national languages and ID numbers on their people, and divvy the country up into land plots and administrative districts, all to make the realm legible to the powers that be. The problem is that not all important things can be made legible. Much of what makes a society successful is knowledge of the tacit sort: rarely articulated, messy, and from the outside looking in, purposeless. These are the first things lost in the quest for legibility. Traditions, small cultural differences, odd and distinctive lifeways … are all swept aside by a rationalizing state that preserves (or in many cases, imposes) only what it can be understood and manipulated from the 2,000 foot view. The result, as Scott chronicles with example after example, are many of the greatest catastrophes of human history.

Tanner Greer - Tradition is Smarter Than You

formalism, consciousness and understanding

In a formal (deductive) subject, the level of competency correlates with the depth of non-formalism one can display around the subject. (For instance, the mastery of a mathematician can only be gauged when he stops scribbling down mathematical notation, dives into conceptual vagueness and starts using real words.) In a non-formal (intuitive) subject, the level of competency correlates with the depth of formalism one can display around the subject.

Similarly, one can only understand the unconscious things using the consciousness and the conscious things using the unconsciousness. Due to the architecture of our brains we typically find the latter much easier to do. Our education system does not balance the scale neither. (Practicing lucid dreaming, meditation and improvisation can help.) We generally do not know how to open up and let our non-verbal intuitive brain reign, and do not care about the unconscious until it breaks down.

normalization for positioning, coping and filtering

Normalization is a statistical term used for adjusting your position with respect to the relevant population norm which can change across time or space. (For instance, curved grading used in academia employs this technique.)

Here I will use normalization as a unifying theme to make sense of some social, psychological and cognitive phenomena.

Spatial Normalization as a Social Positioning Mechanism

We generally think in relative terms when we compare ourselves to others. All status based social dynamics take place in this way. We are happy when we are richer than the person next door. It does not matter if we all get richer. Of course, this leads to absurd situations where people are constantly unhappy although everything is improving.

What is mathematically happening here is that we keep updating the norm (average) against which we make all comparisons. In social domains, this process takes place across space, not time. (i.e. You do not see people comparing themselves to historical norms. We all live more comfortable lives than the kings of the past, but no one gives a shit.)

Spatial normalization in sociology exhibits two interesting properties:

• Two Dimensionality. People are curious about others’ lives for both vertical and horizontal reasons. They look (up and down) at the other castes and (around) at other individuals in their own caste. Precise social positioning requires both.

• Locality. In both dimensions, practically unreachable positions get disregarded. (That is why greater social mobility actually brings unhappiness. Knowing that everything is possible but you are stuck with your current position hurts more.) In other words, social status is determined locally. This makes it actually easier for the poor to climb up in status. After all, due to the severely nonlinear nature of the wealth distribution, it is easier to reach the top of the bottom ten percent than to reach the top of the top ten percent. (That is why the rich is a miserable bunch.)

Temporal Normalization as a Psychological Coping Mechanism

Normalization occurs across time as well, in the form of adaptivity. After all, in order to survive, we have no choice but to adapt to new norms. It is pointless not to adapt to a change that you can not change. (This is usually given as an advice for achieving inner peace. Most of our frustrations come from our inability to discern what can not be changed and should therefore be adapted to.)

Due to one dimensionality of time, we do not have the first bullet point mentioned above for the temporal version of normalization. However, locality holds and is even more pronounced.

Example of Locality

[Cult leaders] deliberately induce distress - so that when they relieve it, they will also be the source of your pleasure. This leads to a powerful and, to outside observers, puzzling connection between cult leader and cult member. The same thing can be seen in abusive relationships and in ”Stockholm syndrome,” where crime victims fall in love with or become supportive of their captors.

Born for Love - Bruce D. Perry & Maia Szalavitz (Page 237)

Temporal locality of adaptation is actually what gets us stuck in abusive relations. We slowly get used to the bad treatment and normalize it. We forget that the world used to be much better before the relationship began. We become quite happy just because we are treated less badly.

Temporal Normalization as a Cognitive Filtering Mechanism

We focus on deviations from the norm while the norm itself gets pushed down to and tracked at an unconscious level. The effects of this focus become particularly stark when deviations become very small and we are essentially left with only the norm itself. Such constancy gets completely filtered away from our consciousness. (For interesting examples of this phenomena, check out this older blog post.)

Remember from our previous discussion that we do not compare ourselves to people who are too far away from us in social distance. (Thanks to the marketing people this is actually becoming increasingly more difficult.) Similarly, when we are cognitively keeping track of deviations, we do not go too far back in time. Our brains calculate the norm in a temporally local fashion, using only recent samplings. In other words, slow change is disregarded even if its accumulative effect may be quite large over time. (Think of the fable of the frog being slowly boiled alive.)

Example of Locality

We must forgive our memory for yet another reason. It finds it easier to determine what has changed than to tell what has stayed the same. The people we have around us every day change as quickly or slowly as everyone else, but thanks to our daily contacts with them their changes are played out on a scale that makes them seem to stand still. It is unfair to blame our memory for throwing away editions when, on the face of it, the latest imprint differs in no way from the preceding one.

Why Life Speeds Up As You Get Older - Draaisma (Page 131)

In some sense, we are wired to ignore the slow passage of time. In fact, this tendency gets worse as our brain ages and accumulates more patterns against which new norms can be defined, explaining why time seems to flow faster as we grow older.

clarity and death

I have never been able to achieve clarity on demand. It happens to me every once in a while when things suddenly fall apart.

When things really fall apart, you do not feel a sense of emergency. On the contrary, the very notion of emergency disappears. Priorities do not get reshuffled. Something less destabilizing but more drastic happens: They lose their order structure altogether, aimlessly drifting in mid-air, like specks of dust. You become a passive spectator of your own life, stupidly gazing back at your own gaze.

Clarity clears. It makes you so empty inside that the sheer pressure differential physically bends your body into a withdrawal position. You feel hunger pangs, but weirdly start enjoying them. You start forgetting things, but feel no discomfort for doing so. 

It is amazing how effectively body and mind can let go in the absence of the will to live. We as a society focus heavily on our positive adaptive capabilities which give rise to all the heroic content that we shovel into our popular narratives. Our equally remarkable negative adaptive capabilities remain largely ignored. 

In short, clarity kills, but it does so only fractionally, not in a wholesome way. Of course, when you die one third, no one even notices...

hubris as high mutational burden

Checkpoint inhibitors seem to work best against tumor types and cancers with lots of genetic mutations. Because it is unusual in the body, this heavy mutational load seems to be easier for the immune system to identify as not belonging to ‘self’. Lung cancers triggered by smoking are generally loaded with mutations, and smokers respond to the checkpoint-inhibition therapies better than those who have never smoked. One strategy is to use combination therapies — such as chemotherapy plus a checkpoint inhibitor — to trigger mutations that will make it easier for the immune system to recognize tumor cells.

The Quest to Extend the Reach of Checkpoint Inhibitors in Lung Cancer (Weintraub)

Stronger cancers are easier to defeat. (Who would have thought that smoking can increase the odds of survival?) Strategically speaking, this outrageously counter-intuitive conclusion is actually quiet generalizable.

Making your enemy stronger makes sense in many different contexts. Once the ego inflates and hubris kicks in, your enemy inevitably starts making mistakes, just like a highly mutated cancer cell giving itself away to the immune system. The trick is to reach this state as quickly as possible so that you still have enough energy to act with fury when your enemy makes the fatal mistake. (Remember that you do not need to win every battle to become the final victor.)

Complex systems exhibit phase transitions. Making your enemy stronger can tilt the equilibrium, helping you initiate a favorable phase transition. For instance, as a young adult growing up, you need to rebel against your parents and friendly parents make this maturation process harder. Similarly, as you dump plastic into it, nature needs to learn how to turn this waste into food and eco-friendly policies make the adaptation process harder. As you can not expect to grow up via trivial adversities, you can not expect nature to come up with plastic eating bacteria via occasional exposures.

PS: On a similar note, see the post Against Small Doses which argues in favor of (low frequency) high doses within the (positive) pleasure domain, whereas the current post is focused on (negative) pain domain.

parenting as signal processing

• Good parenting is about signal filtering: Let the moderate, regular stressors pass through for the purpose of developing your kid's stress response muscles and absorb the high level, irregular stressors yourself.
• Having a kid is a traumatic experience for every young couple. Amplitude, frequency and irregularity of the sinusoidal rhythms of life dramatically increase. You get subject to previously inaccessible levels of happiness and despair via emotional swings that are much faster than the speeds you are accustomed to.

These two points are intimately related. Absorbing the high level, irregular stressors will bring upon you previously unimaginable levels of misery. In return for this favor, your kid will shower you with gratefulness-inducing moments and take you to emotional heights that you will be completely at a loss for words to describe.