Remarks below are ordered from new to old within each subject.

Last Update: 11 March 2024
Total Count: 901

INDEX
Design

Nicknames are brilliant. They are the perfect compromise between individuality and anonymity. You can still be uniquely identified by the mask you are wearing, but your true identity is never revealed.

Apps use your past decisions to customize your feed, search results etc. When you turn such personalization features off, algorithms still keep personalizing, but this time with respect to the population average, not you.

Bana mutsuz diyorlar, oysa benim mutsuzluğum dizayn süreçlerini uzun tutmamdan kaynaklanıyor. Çok daha fazla fikri teori aşamasında öldürmek zorunda kalıyorum, ama daha ilginç, ayakları yere basan işlerle uğraşıyorum.

Best designers create solutions to needs that you would otherwise never be aware of. Best marketers create needs for solutions that you would otherwise never be aware of.

The more complex a product, the more likely that its users will need further customization. The less complex a product, the more likely that its users will demand new features.

Good computer programmers make bad interaction designers, because people at the lower levels of a hierarchical structure are used to prioritize robustness over fitness to prevent costly revisions of everything above them.

Bir tasarımcı yaptığı tasarım tam hayal ettiği gibi kullanıldığında değil, hiç hayal etmediği gibi kullanıldığında büyük keyif alır.

A good design can only work if you can back it up with a solidly engineered product. Similarly, a good pitch can only work if you can back it up with a solidly built company.

Lüks markalar logoları dip dibe koyulunca lüks algılarını yitirirler.

Each contrived element in a design should be traceable back to a functional necessity or a physical constraint.

Spreading of good UX principles should make all designs look more like each other, while spreading of good UI principles should make them look less like each other.

Good design starts to deteriorate the minute it is handed over to a product manager who is not design sensitive. Hence the reason why working with good design agencies create an outside dependency for most organizations.

Good design should feel solid. I mean literally, physically solid. When I return, I should find things as I left them. Every piece of content should stay the same, even if it is an advertisement.

If the person buying your product is not the same person who will be using your product, then you will either face a design catastrophe or a marketing chaos.

Make space for random discoveries in your design. Award the users who dive into the deeper parts of your information architecture. Let the homo sapiens enjoy their hunter gatherer past.

Early innovators can not win because UX can not be perfected unless the underlying technology is perfected first. (Just recall the first clumsy attempts to build Uber-like services.)

Modernism adına ölçülebilir parametreleri en sofistike yollarla optimize ederken, daha önemli olan ama ölçülemeyen parametrelerin ebesini ağlatıyoruz. (e.g. açık dizayn ofisler, brutalist apartman yığınları)

Life does not have an universal undo button, only Android phones do.

Content, not the chrome, should get the attention. If you are constructing a place for worshipping, then you should not make the building itself so grandiose that it transforms the religious awe into an aesthetic one.

Evolution without a final goal produces more complex structures over time. Just as in biology. Controlled evolution with a goal in mind produces simpler structures over time. Just as in design.

AI

As they scale up, large language models will begin to resemble one another, converging on a singular, generic "Universal Mind" capable of simulating any "sub-mind" within itself.

For a rational, scientific connection, one large LLM may serve the entire world. For an emotional, personal bond, a diverse array of customized models with varied cultural and psychological nuances is essential.

AI's role is not to invent new styles and philosophies, but to integrate existing ones. Interpolating the gap between such complex structures is very hard. Human creations form a set of discrete points. AI will fill their convex hull.

The fact that I am not some sort of an abstract mind, but instead have this unique, weird, extremely specific embodiment is so strange.

Instead of overseeing data centralizers with top-down regulation, the West opts for bottom-up methods like federated learning, slowing AI's progress due to cultural bias. Client-side ad targeting similarly hinders efficiency.

İnsanların satranç oynaması neden hala izleniyor anlayamıyorum. İlginç hatalar yapılıyor, belki ondandır. Robotlar da elbet bir gün ilginç hatalar yapmasını öğrenecekler, sırf insanlar eğlensin diye.

Computer science is a formal language, not a science. It also has nothing to do with actual computers. Everything that has a tiny bit of smartness in it computes. (e.g. cells, brains, nervous systems)

Just as most of stock trading now takes place between machines, most of cyber warfare (measured again by sheer volume) also takes between the machines, without humans in the loop.

Robots will learn kung-fu the same way we do, not via some magical info transfer, but via practice under supervision. The only difference will be that they will do so a lot faster thanks to the virtuality of learning environments.

AI algorithms being unauditible is not the problem. The real issue is the lack of a healthy ecosystem where harmful algorithms can be weeded out via selection. After all, evolution always works with blackbox actors anyway.

Engineers routinely transform the coordinate space so that the data can be linearly represented. In a similar fashion, neural nets deform the coordinate space so that the data can be linearly separated.

- How can we trust AI?
- How do you trust each other? Over time, of course.

We evaluate students and AI models in the same way, based on accuracy alone. Achieving the same results with less effort (less energy) under worse circumstances (worse data, less supervision) should receive a higher mark.

AI can not learn to be moral on its own because moral learning can not take place without an apriori capacity to be dealt nonlethal damage. (You can not punch AI in the face, you can only turn it off.)

Our respect for human intelligence is decreasing with the rise of artificial intelligence. Even Nobel prizes do not have the same weight any more.

With enough data every algorithm eventually learns. The whole trick is to be able to learn with very few data and that is what education (hopefully) enables.

İki cümleyi bir araya getirip argüman yaratamayan çocuklara kod öğretiyoruz. Yeni moda oldu. Daha kendi beyinlerini kullanamayanlardan dijital beyinler kodlamalarını bekliyoruz. Çağ atlayacağız çağ, ileri mi geri mi bilmiyorum.

AI will be the poor man’s doctor and teacher. The most sophisticated technologies of the future will be primarily used by the poorest people of the world. (Rich will be served by other humans in the most personalized way.)

Today's children are not any smarter. They just reach their upper limit faster due to the better quality and the greater amount of data we feed to them. Just like broiler chicken! Body grows with food, mind grows with data.

The reason why ensemble methods work better in machine learning is the same reason why crowds make better predictions than experts.

Technology

Avoid startups where founders name the company after themselves. It suggests unoriginality or excessive ego. Associating your name to something that has not yet proved itself to be long-lasting is also poor decision-making.

Societies often scorn moonshot projects, yet the real value lies not in the lofty goals but in the tools developed en route. These tools can not be unearthed without setting up supremely-energizing, high-level noble goals.

Search engine ads will get increasingly better at serving our conscious desires. Social media ads will get increasingly better at serving our unconscious desires.

“Content” is right brain’s contribution to the digital revolution. “Platform” is left brain’s contribution to the digital revolution. Both are informatic in nature and therefore scale perfectly. (Think of a creative video on Youtube.)

What will be the best fitting application for neural networks? Understanding actual neural dynamics, of course. What will be the best fitting application for quantum computing? Understanding actual quantum dynamics.

Facebook owns the "identity layer" of Web 2.0 in the Western hemisphere. But every fundamentally important aspect of the digital world eventually sinks down to public infrastructure level. That is why Mark is so afraid of Web 3.0.

Who wins F1 races is increasingly determined by technological differences rather than the talents of the drivers. Technology democratizes not by equalizing people, but by rendering the differences between them irrelevant.

The relentless rise of the gaming industry will never stop, because the reality itself will continue to become more and more frustrating and boring.

Huzur için evdeki teknoloji kullanımınızı minimize edin. Başarı için işteki teknoloji kullanımınızı maximize edin. Ne teknoloji karşıtı, ne de fanı olun.

Serverless architectures will enable the transition from discrete to continuous computing. Blockchain architectures will enable the transition from centralized to decentralized computing.

All slow-changing universally-useful software eventually becomes free.

Early stages of technological adoption are highly culture-sensitive, but later stages are almost completely culture-independent.

İyi bir girişimci, zaten herkesin düşündüğü şeyi doğru bir şekilde hayata geçirendir. İyi bir sanatçı ise, zaten herkesin hissettiği şeyi güzel bir şekilde tercüme edendir.

Interest graph is superior to social graph. At the end of the day, evolution wants to remix ideas, not people. Thank to machine learning, we no longer need to find the right people to help us craft a stream of enjoyable content.

Stable patterns in services eventually turn into software. Stable patterns in software eventually turn into hardware. This is how humanity is slowly getting automated away. Eventually, we will be left with only the unstable patterns.

Every technology needs some early adopters to iterate itself to perfection before gaining traction. In other words, technology advances thanks to both entrepreneurs and early adopters, not just entrepreneurs.

People say time is money. I don’t think they believe it. Otherwise they would have already put in jail all the CEOs of casual gaming companies who are collectively responsible for the biggest time robbery in entire human history.

Neymiş efendim, teknoloji firmaları hepimizi ayrı ayrı yankı odalarına hapis ediyormuş, algoritmaları kimseye sevmeyeceği şeyi göstermiyormuş. Ne güzel işte kardeşim, herkes kendi bokunda boğuluyor. Daha ne istiyorsunuz?

Good investors know that timing is everything in technology. If so, who ends up financing the real pioneers who always get burnt for being too early? The new investors of course! Constant inflow of gullibility is ecologically essential.

You can remove all language barriers by either creating a universal language or a universal translator. Esperanto tried the former approach and failed. Google Translate tried the latter approach and succeeded.

The more understanding we have, the more complex our representations become, and the more difficult it gets to settle on a universal format and not bifurcate into different use cases.

Google’s phenomenal success is based on an exploitation of the relational nature of individual websites. Facebook’s phenomenal success is built on an exploitation of the relational nature of individual persons.

Quality of a tech company should be evaluated in spacetime, not in space. Software is a living organism. What is hard to replicate is the internal processes that evolved the product, not the product itself.

If you want to peek at the future of video, look at the current state of audio.

What is data? It is just a dead story. Studying it can be only as revealing as doing an autopsy.

If you can intuit 10 years ahead, you should join the science world. If you can intuit only 2 years ahead, you should join the technology world. If you can intuit only 2 months ahead, you should stay away from both worlds.

You can never beat the travel duration estimations of applications like Google Maps, because everyone else is basically trying to do the same thing. (We pull up the average by competing against it.)

There is no such thing as “deep” tech. Companies can innovate on all three fronts: Business model, design and technology. Focusing on a single dimension is generally not an indication of depth but single-mindedness.

There is no such thing as a “blue” ocean. You will always be competing with some force. If it is not external competitors, it will be internal processes. Every economically worthy need is already addressed in some form.

Futurists are people who bring the already existing trends to their logical conclusions. They embrace the exponential but their logic is still linear and their future is never surprising. Future on the other hand is always surprising.

İyi bir teknoloji yatırımı mı yapmak istiyorsunuz? Aramızda bedenleriyle bizle aynı zaman diliminde ama beyinleriyle bizden ileri zaman dilimlerinde yaşayan garip insanlar var. Onları tespit edebilmeniz yeterli.

The difference between being first-in-class and best-in-class is a much more popular notion in the biotech world since de-risking a target idea there is much harder and multi-dimensional than it is in the tech world.

It is hard to distinguish a good tech entrepreneur from an average one for the same reason why it is hard spot a good sales person: We are easily manipulated by stories even if they are told by an average storyteller.

Solving edge cases helps you build a moat. Hence take the long term view and address more complex problems with more edge cases. This way you will be better at absorbing the productification attacks coming from below.

It is amazing how ideas like lean startup methodology and permissionless entrepreneurship had to be reinvented in the developed world. Entrepreneurs in developing countries have no choice but to be lean and permissionless.

Her allahın günü kritik özellik eklenen ürün ürün değildir, en fazla servistir.

The entire search engine optimization industry works for free to make Google better. It is us, the users of the search engine, who pay the price in the form of worse user experience during the interim periods between new releases.

It is not a coincidence that my WeChat (dominant chat app in China) is full of profile photos with nature pictures, while my WhatsApp (dominant chat app in Turkey) is full of profile photos with faces staring directly at me.

Business strategy and product strategy are the same thing in the long run. They differ in the short run because accurately predicting how changes in the former will affect the latter is extremely difficult.

Centralization, abstraction, commodification, customization, aggregation, verticalization and their inverse processes are the primary factors shaping the strategy landscape of technology businesses.

Blockchain will increase the sales of fake luxury goods. (e.g. Imagine a world where you can actually verify quickly whether a bag is manufactured by the same factory that manufactures bags for Louis Vuitton.)

Shit will be the new data, just like data is regarded as the new oil today. Sounds ridiculous? Just wait for the microbiome revolution to unfold.

Technologists do not solve new problems. They can come up with vastly superior solutions to already addressed problems. (Blockchain, genomics and AI decreases respectively the prices of trusting, targeting and predicting.)

Ne ilginçtir ki üretim aşamasında insan faktörünün en önemli rol oynadığı sektör, insan faktörünü otomasyonlaştırarak üretim aşamasından çıkarmaya çalışan teknoloji sektörüdür.

QR code caught on in China but not in US, because Chinese alphabet is pictorial, not phonetic. Chinese find 2D visual representations of information more natural than 1D usernames and phone numbers.

Angel investment is the new status symbol. Instead of displaying modern artworks on their physical walls, the rich now display startup logos on their virtual walls.

Technology is like philosophy, a shape-shifting generative organism giving birth to new fields at unpredictable intervals.

Los Angeles says “Content is king.” San Francisco says “Platform is king.” Washington says “It is all about the market structure.”

Exponential growth does not happen by stealing customers from your opponents. It happens by faster land-grabbing. Dynamics behind such growth patterns are non-discriminative, like a rising tide lifting all boats.

Anything that gets standardized at software level eventually turns into hardware, just like how culturally-inherited voluntary actions eventually become genetically-inherited involuntary actions after constant repetition.

Every extremely popular product eventually matures into being an indispensable infrastructure and dissipates into the background. 

Software helps codify best practices. Every time your organization buys a software, it is molded by the collective wisdom.

Notion of customer lifetime value becomes meaningless among B2B startups catering to other startups since lifetime itself becomes a matter of question.

Entrepreneurship is addictive for the same reason why extreme sports are addictive.

The less conservative you are at spending money, the more conservative you have to be at raising it.

Çocuklarımız yaratıcı olsun diye yardırıyoruz, fakat sanat tüketmiyor, teknolojiye ve bilime yatırım yapmıyoruz. Neyin kafasındayız anlayabilmiş değilim gerçekten. Bu çocuklar yaratıcılıklarını nerede kullanacaklar?

Bilgi ekonomisinin en yüksek değer biçtiği karakter özelliği yaratıcılık. Fakat yaratıcılığın babası yokluk ve cahillik. En büyük zenginliklerin en derin yokluklardan filizleneceği ilginç bir çağa girdik.

Mal adamın malware'i bol olur.

Inovasyonu anti-muhafazakarlık zannettik. Yenilikçi olalım derken korunması gereken değerlere sahip çıkamadık. Karaktersizleştik, bireyselliğin dibine vurduk. Birlikte destansı romanlar yazacaktık, üçüncü sınıf hikayeler kustuk.

Belief that technology will solve all our pressing questions is absurd or very optimistic at best. Every solution creates new problems. Complex systems are minefields of unpredictable externalities and unintentional outcomes.

Investors bet on a product. As the product evolves and pilots, they fall back on the people. As people change, they fall back on the brand.

Internet unleashed an exponential expansion of knowledge. In the upcoming post-content era, it will no longer make a difference whether you curate or create content and our meaningless lives will get even more meaningless.

All social media platforms will merge in form. The only factor distinguishing them will be their respective communities. (Family members / Friends / Potential dates / Business contacts / Academic colleagues / Fellow fans etc.)

Data aggregation will take us to the theoretical limit of advertisement targeting. Then the effectiveness of advertisements will vary according to the good old parameters such as ad size, ad content, competition etc.

Successful high-growth companies often collapse with the same speed because their leaderships have no idea why they were successful in the first place.

Businesses prefer to use software as integrated as possible and want it delivered by as few parties as possible. This is the only reason why Microsoft is still alive today.

Şu elimdeki telefonu üretmek için kaç bin kişi seferber oluyor, kaç bin yıllık bilimsel birikim kullanılıyor. Oysa hamile eşim şu an oturduğu koltukta fıstık yerken bu telefonu üreten insanı üretiyor, hem de hiç bir efor göstermeden.

All practical technologies originate from either impractical theoretical musings or irrational military spending.

Economics

Is it simply chance that Israel and the Netherlands, once desert and swamp respectively, now host the world's most efficient agriculture? Adversity can indeed spur genius, provided there's a supportive cultural framework in place.

"Ekonomide suya sabuna dokunmadan felsefe yapmak" = "Politikaya hiç dokunmamak". "Fizikte suya sabuna dokunmadan felsefe yapmak" = "Metafiziğe hiç dokunmamak".

Throwing money at poverty never works. The idea of "universal income" will face the same fate as "international aid" if it is not complemented by real reforms that (unfortunately) take long time to fruition.

Piyasaların balonlaşıp balonlaşmadığını, yatırımcılar arasındaki "akıl verenler" vs "akıl alanlar" rasyosu belirler.

There is only one way to prevent highly unequal economies from falling apart: Becoming even more unequal by promoting innovation and sustaining high enough growth to create sufficient “wealth spillover” to public at large.

Ekonomilerin gelişimi emeğin ve paranın senkron şekilde sofistikeleşmesinden geçiyor. İstediğimiz kadar kaliteli genç yetiştirelim, sermaye sahiplerimiz primitif kaldıkça hep geride kalacağız.

In portfolio management, benefits from diversification taper off after 5-6 dimensions are explored. In a mysteriously similar fashion, to achieve satisfactory randomization, one needs to shuffle a deck at least 5-6 times.

There is no such thing as a nonzero game in nature. There may be one winner to a competition, but nature itself primarily benefits from the overall increase in fitness across the board. In other words, nature always wins.

Index funds ontologize the market average so that people can trade it rather than just refer to it.

As they say, gold is the bubble that never pops. I do not know any other thing that more tangibly demonstrates the power of faith, and how it can create value out of thin air and dynamize the entire world.

When markets are hit by a massive uncertainty, both synchrony and volatility increase.

A trauma followed by post-traumatic growth is called creative destruction in economics.

Crises slow down all the flows within an economy. That is why it is always the middle class that suffers a disproportionate amount of damage during times of crisis. Middle is always in movement. Top and bottom are mostly static.

Scientists can only study the repeating patterns. Economists can price only the generic goods. What is unique can neither be studied or priced. What is truly meaningful is open to only private, subjective appreciation.

Physical fiat currency allows governments to print new money. Digital fiat currency, based on the new blockchain technologies, will allow them to both create new money and decay old money in a programmatic manner.

Developed countries thrive on creative destruction. Developing countries on the other hand are stuck in what I would call as "accreditative" destruction. People destroy to rebuild the same exact things, just to get the credit for it.

Markets with very few players can be more competitive than markets with many players. Rivalry becomes stronger when the opponent is not something abstract (e.g. the market) but embodied as an entity with a face and a name.

Investors should enjoy exponential returns only if they are making an active contribution to the underlying positive feedback cycles. Otherwise they should be treated basically as real estate owners and get taxed heavily.

Governments deal with impending economic crises by postponing them and making them grow larger. Governments deal with unfolding economic crises by softening them and making them last longer.

İki tür taşaklı yatırımcı vardır. İlk seviyedekiler herkes durunca devam eder. İkinci seviyedekiler ise herkes durunca başlar.

Shocks propagate through supply chains in exactly the same fashion as traffic propagates through cars. Accumulation of tiny overreactions (breaking a little more than the car in front of you) can lead to phantom crises.

Is it a coincidence that the supply chains are shifting to continuous replenishment at the same time as software developers are shifting to continuous deployment? Nope. Economies evolve towards smoothness.

Cash is the instantaneous government bond and government bond is the promise of future cash. They are created simultaneously out of thin air by the central bank, and represent the asset and liability sides of the same illusion.

Monopolies arise either organically (as in a natural monopoly) or inorganically (as in a wanna-be monopoly), and disappear either naturally (due to disruptive technologies) or unnaturally (due to anti-trust proceedings).

Providing on-demand accessibility is costly because it makes optimization harder. That is why banks give higher interest rates for long-term deposits and cloud providers charge less for long-term storage.

Technology democratizes tools but centralizes wealth. That is why we are poorer than our parents despite being more productive than them.

In the long run, technology is the only factor that grows economies and education is the only factor that scales companies.

Alchemists tried to turn lead into gold and failed. Emperors were smarter. They installed fiat currency regimes and turned gold into paper instead.

Most of the trading in markets is now conducted by algorithms. It is interesting how they occasionally loop into flash crashes but never into flash bubbles. I guess they inherited a pessimism bias from their creators.

Cultures that undervalue the intangible assets tend to overvalue the tangible assets, and vice versa.

Ego trick in psychology serves the same purpose as invisible hand does in economics: A globally optimizing decision making mechanism gets framed as a locally optimizing one via an illusion of self-hood.

Zero transaction costs made us bad investors. Zero distribution costs made us bad consumers. Zero design frictions made us bad users. Zero moral consequences made us bad citizens. We are hopeless without constraints.

Investment is a social phenomenon. Just like the best parties, the best investment opportunities are the private ones.

Correlated liquidity crises in a specific segment can look like a market correction to outsiders. They present good opportunities to "buy and hold" since long-term value propositions are still there in tact.

Trend-following is a good strategy only if the market is efficient enough to exhaust the trends. Otherwise anachronic investing is better. While everyone is focused on the next new thing, you can collect the gems they left behind.

Whenever I run into beautiful white label products on supermarket shelves, I feel like the world should give another collective shot at communism.

Even the simplest trade can become a non-zero sum game if the parties have differing time horizons with respect to their investments.

Speculation does not require an active effort on the behalf of the investor. Doing nothing (i.e. keeping your status quo portfolio as it is) is also a form of speculation.

Relative valuation techniques can not detect an across-the-board over-valuation. No matter what metric is chosen, one company will always look relatively cheaper than the others.

Economics eradicates universal truths. That is why a healthy economy behaves chaotically. Markets instantly price all the universally predictive models in.

Here is the best argument in favor of taxation: Approximately 1/3 of your wealth comes from chance events and the government takes this lucky money away from you.

Perhaps the most important distinction between physics and economics is that stability endogenously breeds instability in economics.

Economics is chaotic, but not in a mechanical sense. Sensitivity to initial conditions gets swamped by massive waves of uncertainty and emotions.

Business

The true challenge isn't identifying hype cycles, as time naturally filters them out. Rather, it's uncovering valuable ideas discarded in the past. Investors often overlook these potential gems due to their forward-looking bias.

Only large companies can afford to create a strategy department. But the irony is that, by then, they grow too large and complex to steer the ship in any new strategic direction.

Too little competition among firms has a material impact on the consumer, in the form of more greedy sales practices. Too much competition has a mental impact on the consumer, in the form of more devious marketing practices.

A family business operates like a monarchy. A professionally-run business operates like a democracy. Just like the corresponding political regimes, they both have their advantages and disadvantages, depending on the context.

If your market is still nascent, a competitor raising a shit load of money is not necessarily bad news. Let them create the market. You can steal a portion of it later, with a far better product. Stealing is always cheaper than creating.

En ucuz ön finansman karizma üzerinden yaratılandır.

Most of operations management is just software implementation / customization. Wisdom increasingly lies in the software which evolves towards a full encapsulation of all of the best practices in the industry.

Exploiting potential synergies between two services companies is hard, between two software companies is even harder, between two hardware companies is the hardest.

Şirketler büyüdükçe üst seviyede benzeşmeye başlarlar. Eforlarınızın büyük bir kısmı sektör bağımsız problemlerle ve iç organizasyonel sorunlarla cebelleşmekle geçer.

Churches and businesses routinely borrow best practices from each other, since all churches are in the business of entertaining their believers and all businesses aspire to turn their customers into believers.

You understand that your business strategy is great when you feel as if it is making you submit to it, punishing for deviations and pulling you in like a strange attractor.

There is only one fundamental question in investing: "What do I see here that others do not?" This question needs to be complemented with a secondary question to prevent self-delusion: "What exactly is enabling me to do that?"

Greater the consensus around the risk profile of a business, lower the return.

Minute operational tasks require the highest, macro strategic matters require the lowest frequency of attention. Levels in the managerial hierarchy map inversely to the bands of frequency in the error-correction mechanism.

Zenginlik iki boyutlu bir meseledir, matematiksel formu “Varlık x Özgürlük” şeklindedir. Yani varlık içinde yüzmek yetmez. İç veya dış etkenlerden ötürü özgürce bu varlığı hareket ettiremiyorsanız fakir sayılırsınız.

Great businessmen can publish mediocre books and pass as great intellectuals, but great intellectuals can not launch mediocre businesses and pass as great businessmen. World is so unfair.

Smart non-strategic acquirers will pay the least for your company. Find a stupid strategic acquirer, preferably a conglomerate which is about to go supernova and suffer a total collapse under the weight of its own gravitas.

Warren Buffet kimin donsuz olduğu sular çekilince anlaşılır demiş. Benden de size bir özlü söz: Kimin taşaklı olduğu adalet bitince anlaşılır.

Strong entrepreneurs grab natural scarcities. Origin of their high margins is state-centric. Smart ones transform the ordinary into an unordinary, creating new scarcities from thin air. Origin of their high margins is process-centric.

There is no such thing as social entrepreneurship. It is ridiculous to expect a business to have both high margin and high impact. It is much more sensical to combine a successful pure for-profit with a successful pure non-profit.

You can only gain extreme power by either controlling the minds or controlling the mines. That is why the richest people on earth are owners of either B2C technology companies or natural resources businesses.

Internalize the positive feedback loops within your ecosystem by acquiring companies. Once internalized, you can accelerate these loops and thereby drive the evolution of your industry faster.

Vertical integration is a form of insurance, shielding one from the unanticipated changes in the distribution of profits across a supply chain.

Good investment does not enable, it accelerates. You can not enable the inevitable.

Tailored services are effective but expensive. (Network effects never lift off.) Uniform services are cheap but ineffective. (Network effects quickly taper off.) Greatest value is generated inside the sweet zone between these two ends.

The whole accounting system was invented for the purpose of systematic collection of taxes. Keep track of your cash flow while growing, not revenue. That is what will kill you. No one died for not being able to pay their taxes.

Exceptional entrepreneurs make bad investors for the same reason why exceptional sales people make bad sales managers.

Best entrepreneurs come either with split-personality disorders or in complementary pairs. Continuous conflict (either within a one individual or between two) is a necessity. Success depends on mastering resolution.

It is a waste not to complement a high-margin business catering to the elite with a low-margin business catering to the masses. You can prevent the brand dilution by dually operating in two completely different domains.

The space of sensible business models is larger than the space of reachable business models. Understanding the difference is exactly what differentiates the experienced smart investors and entrepreneurs from plain smart ones.

Experience results in better pattern recognition but less sensitivity to edge cases. Phenomenal success requires the meeting of inexperienced (but smart) minds on both sides (investor and entrepreneur) of the equation.

Do not look down on the real estate business. After all every business is a real estate business, defending a certain territory in the business model space and benefitting from the associated network effects.

There are essentially four ways to turn off customers. Either your product is too expensive or risky to try out, or your value proposal is too hard to verify due to vagueness or long feedback cycles.

Do not over-optimize your time. What makes one productive in structured environments is partially the unproductive time spent in unstructured environments.

Always trade-off volatility for a decreased income. Give discounts to clients who can commit to a constant usage of resources. Focus on streamlining your operations. Juggling volatility should be the job of the financial markets.

To create extreme value, you can either solve cheap but uniform problems in a scalable way or expensive but unique problems in a non-scalable way.

It takes one brilliant entrepreneur to create a behemoth, but tens of brilliant consultants to keep one behemoth alive.

A healthy business should be near-sighted during war time and far-sighted during peace time. This flexibility can only be achieved by a healthy organizational structure that can flex at will, just like the muscles of the eye.

Non-profits exist because value can sometimes be in a form (e.g. too diffused, too non-monetary or too far ahead in time) that businesses can not capture.

Every businessman worth his salt actually enjoys being forced to make predictions about the future based on very little information.

Beware of large brokerage houses in any industry, be it real estate or securities. They are more likely to suffer from conflict of interest problems and prioritize other clients over you in their global optimization efforts.

Transition-type businesses exploit non-equilibrium phenomena and come with an expiration date. Equilibrium-type ones do not last forever neither, since no equilibrium lasts forever. Investors irrationally prefer the latter type.

Every investment model enables certain business models. But there are always legitimate business models out there that fall outside the mandates of existing investors. Those can be financed only via unprofessional means.

Stop reading stuff before an important meeting. You need some time to switch out of the detailed, analytical mind frame and the squashed, loser body language.

Business dinners involve more alcohol consumption in low trust societies. This is not surprising. People always desire to see each other’s true selves before entering a deep relationship.

Para sanallaştı, zenginliğin tadı kaçtı. Şimdi de insan sanallaşıyor, on kişilik şirketle milyar dolarlık değer yaratılabiliyor. Yakında gücün de tadı kaçacak.

Freelancing gives you control over when you choose to work at the cost of losing control over whom you choose to work.

Projeler büyüdükçe karışıklaşır, öngörülemezlerin sayısı artar ve kar marjını tahminlemek güçleşir. Bir yandan da proje sahibinin pazarlık gücü artar. Yani ek risk primi almanız gerekirken kendinizi ek indirim verirken bulabilirsiniz.

Insurance against inexperience is called consultancy.

There are two critical milestones in any kind of sales pitch. Making the other side feel genuine interest and ask non-trivial questions is Level 1. Making the other side pitch to you instead is Level 2.

Create two-in-one business models where each part feeds on the other, forming a positive feedback loop and accelerating growth. (e.g. the more data you have, the better you can underwrite insurance, and vice versa.)

Empire building reflex is triggered not only by the desire for being dominant but also by the desire for being invulnerable. Dependency on the outside world diminishes along with increased robustness and self-sufficiency.

Şirketler çalışanlarını motive etmek için para verir, hisse verir, sürekli verir. Kar amaçsız örgütler ise tam tersine çalışanlarından para ister, emek ister, sürekli ister. Dar kafalı iş adamları bunu manipülasyon olarak nitelendirir.

People who do not know your domain will think in relative terms and seek inconsistencies in your narrative across both time and space. They will never be able to see the living creature behind the cold tables and figures.

In any deal, you need to balance hard expectations against hard expectations (via contractual promises) and soft expectations against soft expectations (via non-contractual promises). They do not mix well.

Managers in big organizations fight each other behind closed doors. Entrepreneurs fight each other out in the open. That is why top entrepreneurs are practically more competent and top managers are politically more savvy.

If you are underpaying for a service, someone else is definitely overpaying. All subscription-based business models rely on the fool (not necessarily rich) funding the smart (not necessarily poor).

Capturing value is an entirely different matter than creating value.

When dealing with financially unsophisticated partners, split profits equally in order to evoke a sense of fairness. To increase your share, represent yourself as a sum of several different entities.

Longer sales cycles are great if you can manage to charge the client for the incurred extra costs. Harder the sale, harder the switching costs for the client.

Non-zero-sum games help accelerate growth, while zero-sum ones help build defensibility.

The art of marketing gets more psychology-driven as what is marketed gets more abstract and less unique.

Marketing is all about looking for new sources of authenticity and exhausting them. That is why it is so carnivorous and dynamic. New formats and celebrities are constantly used and discarded.

Read what others read if you are in the business of predicting what others will think in the future. Read what others do not read if you are in the business of doing what others did not think of in the past.

El sıkışma seremonisi esnasında gruptaki en kıdemli kişiyi yanlışlıkla es geçerseniz, o kişiyi en sona bırakın. İlk ve son özel hissettirir. Bekletilmek kötü, fakat araya konmak daha da kötüdür.

Ideal corporations are expected to display the exact opposites of the traits that are expected from ideal humans. That is essentially why celebrities (as human embodiments of corporations) are such confused paradoxical entities.

Toplumun büyük bir kesimi zenginliğe giden yolun çok çalışmaktan, erdemliliğe giden yolun ise çok okumaktan geçtiğini zannediyor. Bırakın devam etsinler. Milleti uyandırıp rekabeti artırmanın anlamı yok.

Competitive people may have large networks, but their relationships rest on shallow cost-benefit calculations. Make sure that you will not be asking from the person you are about to meet something that requires a leap of faith.

We understand the mature industries less than the new ones. Familiarity of the former breeds a false feeling of understanding and the need to mentally simulate the future evolution of the latter necessitates deeper understanding.

In any business sector, there is an inverse correlation between the level of information transparency and the level of conference attendance.

Büyük sektörlerin hepsi (en sofistikeler bile) primitif şeyler üzerine kuruludur. Mesela bankacılık zaman satar, sigortacılık da korku. Eğitim gibi üst akla oynayanlar ise ancak devlet dayatması veya desteğiyle ayakta durabilir.

Büyük değer kayıpları fırsat maliyetlerinde gizlidir ve karşıolgusal düşünce tarzı gerektirir. Küçük değer kayıpları ise gözle görünürdür, dolayısıyla hissedilmeleri ve hesaplanmaları kolaydır.

"Haydan gelen huya gider." sözü şu şekilde genellenebilir: "Servetler nasıl kazanıldıysa o şekilde harcanır." 

Employees enjoy seeing their leaders on cover pages, but crave for credit in exchange for their contributions as well. In other words, they want credit to be completely-centralized externally and completely-decentralized internally.

Riskli girişimler başarıya ulaşınca başarı öncesi yaşanan zayıflıklar ve korkular toplumsal hafızadan silinir, olağanüstünün varlığına aç, acıma ile tapınma arasındaki spektrumun genişliğinden bihaber gözlemciler tarafından.

Decision Making

What was under our control, but we failed to manage well? What was not under our control, but we failed to anticipate well? These are the two essential questions that must be asked after an organization collapses.

All our decisions are laden with history. Biased either due to personal history, or due to structural reasons which can always be traced back to some evolutionary history.

The larger the mood swings, the more creative becomes the search for a way out of the stressful situation.

Being able to tell under which circumstances one is better off deploying analytic thinking (as opposed to intuitive feeling) is more important than strengthening of the analytical skills themselves.

Neden karmaşık duygusal kararlar aniden alınır? Çünkü organik uzantınız gibidirler. Kangren kolunuzu testereyle mi, yoksa lazerle mi kestirmeyi tercih ederdiniz? “Tamam tamam bir an evvel kes gitsin!” derdiniz elbet.

Great leaders display consistency only at the highest level. They stick to their principles no matter what, but tactically speaking, they improvise all the time. They project a sense of moral security and a sense of unlimited dynamism.

Just like there is a thin line between genius and insanity, there is a thin line between audacious vision and a grandiose delusion.

You can not pick up every penny you find on the street and monetize every god damn opportunity you see. Do what you are uniquely capable of doing, and let others handle the rest.

Idealism amounts to being anal about defining your goals. Perfectionism amounts to being anal about reaching your goals. People often confuse the two.

Stronger the parties involved, more open-ended the discussions can and should be. Faced with vast probability spaces, the best you can do is to cultivate the right mindset and style. All other forms of preparations are futile.

We focus too much on what we choose and explore too little what we forgo. What is forgone is in reality always much larger than we think since we are under the constant influence of the momentum of our past trajectories.

Stres geçmişle bağlantınızı zayıflatarak yenilik yapmanızı kolaylaştırır. Bu yüzden etrafınızdakiler stres altındayken karar almamanızı isterler. Uzun dönemde ayakta kalmak adına onlara zarar vereceğinizden korkarlar.

Use noise to cancel noise. Use non-noise to cancel non-noise. Do not try to mix the two categories.

We consistently overestimate the likelihood of lethal catastrophic events (e.g. plane accidents) and underestimate the likelihood of non-lethal catastrophic events (e.g. financial crises).

Rational thinking is iterative and can only help you climb up the local maxima of the decision landscape. Landing near the global maximum requires a level of stochasticity that can only be achieved by emotional thinking.

Either learn how to forecast correctly or find someone who systematically forecasts correctly or wrongly. Both are easier said than done. (Note that one can not learn how to forecast wrongly. That is a natural born gift.)

When creating, you need the unconscious for its generative capacity, allowing you to see the possible. When deleting, you need the unconscious for its low resolution, allowing you to see the essence.

When it comes to people, whenever you find yourself trying to solve ten different problems, give yourself a break and step back. No single person can have ten different problems. Find the underlying root problem.

Time pressure decreases the quality of a decision when applied at the most specific level (in the form of a deadline) and increases the quality of a decision when applied at the most general level (in the form of a life threat).

I have not seen a good decision maker who is not comfortable eating alone in public. (i.e. comfortable being alone with his own thoughts and resisting the social stigma associated with the act of eating alone)

Karar vermekte zorlanıyorsanız, en yakınınızdaki kişiden kafanıza hayali bir silah doğrultmasını ve geri saymasını isteyin.

If you are not the one making the decision, try shaping the context so that the probability distribution of all possible outcomes is flexed in your favor. 

Common sense is about knowing when exactly you should turn off your critical thinking skills. It is not about the critical skills themselves. That is why it is conspicuously absent in so many educated people.

When it comes to decision making, give some time to the book-smarts and do not give any to the street-smarts.

People Management

The problem with those who have a fighting spirit is that their tenacity often leads them to concede much too late.

Do not expect people who can not manage their own time well to manage other people’s time well. In other words, such folks can not be good managers.

One can recognize a great expert, not only by depth of knowledge, but also by uniqueness of style.

An action person reveals his art in how well he operates at the micro level. A thought person reveals his art in how well he operates at the macro level.

Analitik tipleri ikna etmek zordur, ama bir tanesini ikna etmeyi başarırsan diğerlerini ikna etmen kopyala-yapıştır kadar kolaydır. İçgüdüsel tiplerin ikna süreci ise basmakalıplaştırılamaz, fakat çok daha hızlıdır.

Why do we call soft skills soft? They are so much harder to teach.

Harder and longer the work, greater the need for more motivational push. But such outside interventions eventually lose their effect. That is why the most difficult tasks can only be achieved by fanatics running on self-excitation.

İyi şeylere destek çıkanlar alkışlanır, kötü şeylere engel olanların ise pek kıymeti bilinmez. Halk gerçekleşenleri, gözle görülebilenleri haksızca önceliklendirir. Oysa birine destek olmayarak da destek olunabilir.

The more powerful you become, the less you will be able to objectify your social world while analyzing it and the more often you will need to ask yourself “Am I partially the cause of this behavior?”.

A bad leader likes to succeed as an individual and fail as a team. A good leader desires the opposite. An average leader on the other hand, depending on gender, likes to either both succeed and fail as an individual, or as a team.

As you go up a hierarchy, you will gain more authority but become subject to more uncertainty. In other words, you will have more control over your time, but less control over your output. (Your stress type will change accordingly.)

In every sufficiently large organization, you need people who can act as weak links and weave all the departments together by being loosely associated with each. (Such people will have inherently ambiguous job descriptions.)

Herkes sırtını birilerine dayar. En arkadakiler en büyük belirsizlikleri yönetir. En öndekilerin ise dünyadan haberi yoktur, her şeyi tahmin edilebilir sanarlar. Bu yüzden önden giden lider imajı gariptir. Liderlik hep arkadan yapılır.

Higher the aim, greater the volatility. Same principle holds for both high potential companies and high potential people. Only mediocracy proceeds in a linear fashion with no moments of euphoria or depression.

Best people are exponentially different from average ones, just like the best companies are exponentially different from average ones. When you are sure that you have found one, invest into that person until the very end.

Generally speaking, never invest in static things (e.g. real estate, art, jewellery) that can not evolve, learn and grow. Invest only in people and businesses (i.e. groups of people).

As you go up in a managerial hierarchy the importance of your knowledge of soft sciences exponentially increases. Teaching finance rather than psychology to a future leader should be classified as criminal activity.

An interviewer’s job is to understand how and why the candidate did what he says he did. “How” can not be faked during the interview but can easily be taught later on the job. “Why” can easily be faked and can not be taught.

Do not waste your power-to-override on trivial matters. Treat it as a finite resource and use it sparsely. Moreover, when you use it, use it explicitly.

“I don’t understand you but I trust you to do the right thing.” is the single most important sentence underlying the greatest achievements of humankind

Manipulative people will try to drown you in details and focus you on trivial matters. Retain control of the discussion. Keep the big picture in mind at all times. Do not let them satisfy you with small victories over trivial matters.

Vertically intense people are intensely involved in one thing to fulfill a single goal. Horizontally intense people are mildly involved in intensely many things to fulfill a single emotion. Latter type are more easily exhausted.

Doygun adamlarla çalışın. Artık-ölsem-de-gam-yemem sınıfında deneyimler yaşamamış kişiler gerçek anlamda risk alamazlar. Şahsen beni en çok cesaretlendiren anların hepsi bundan-sonrası-yokuş-aşağı-artık sınıfındandı.

It is harder for an action person to stay loyal. Give more weight to such situations in your evaluations of loyalty.

In an organizational hierarchy, if you lost the trust of the whole level just below you, then (in order to not lose control) you need to start establishing direct channels of communication with the people two levels below you.

Slaying important people (and processes) in the presence of others based on right reasons is exactly how you build authority. Just doing positive actions based on right reasons is not sufficient. There needs to be blood.

If you are recruiting people reactively rather than proactively, do not be surprised when one day you wonder how come all these people (except for those whom you met randomly) are so dependent on you.

Any activity that becomes selective enough gets eventually hijacked by CV builders who do not care about the actual content. These smart-asses can outmaneuver all automated ways of sniffing them out. Use manuel filters.

People do not hire those whom they can not control. That is why weak people end up hiring even weaker people to work under themselves.

Businesses execute models. The task of upper management is to intuitionally evaluate the assumptions of the models and the task of lower management is to analytically evaluate the models themselves.

The less credit you distribute to those below you, the more desire those people will have to become you. This is a recipe for dysfunction since you need good people at every level of the organization.

You can always rely on the big mouths in the organization to spread your message and fight rumor with rumor. To increase the speed of delivery, just tell the big mouths to keep the message a secret.

Organizations are good at running processes and bad stopping them. People have a tendency to articulate what is being done rather than what should be done. Encourage your peers to see the negative spaces.

Disregarding size issues, complexity of an organizational structure is an indication of the messiness of the real-world problem that the organization is trying to solve.

Altındaki kişiye gölge yapma. Doğru dürüst güneş almayanlar yavaş büyür.

Alakasız bir kültüre sahip bir şirketle derin bir ilişkiye girecekseniz şirket içerisinde ara kültüre sahip bir tampon grup oluşturun ve o şirketle ilişkinizi bu grup üzerinden yönetin.

It is tragic when a person making you aware of a deep problem in the organization turns out to be also part of the problem.

You want each manager to be motivated enough to own up their territory, but not so much that the people below them are left no territory.

There is an inverse correlation between the length of reports you are expected to produce and the actual power you have within your corporation's hierarchy.

Inability to delegate properly is not due to lack of trust. It is due to lack of mastery. An amateur micro manages because he lacks the knowledge and fluidity to know which parameters to watch for and when to step in.

Be hard on yourself so that you can be hard on others in good conscience.

When it comes to people, whenever you cut off your losing bets, double down on the winning ones.

When you give a deadline, add some elasticity to it. Be open to extensions, but snap harder in case of nondelivery.

There are two groups of employees I totally can not stand. 1) Well educated but corrupt ones. They are a waste of social capital. 2) Incompetent but entitled ones, defending their territories. They are wasters of social capital. 

Groups amplify their leaders' character traits. Hence the reason why companies may have trouble outgrowing the personalities founding it.

Relationships

When rational people can't agree, it's often due to an underlying duality; both sides are right within their contexts. But without defining this duality, debates escalate to conflict and result in either silence or domination.

Good liars scare me. They can de-stabilize your sense of reality as much as waking up from a very vivid dream.

Yardım tek bir kişiden gelse de, toplumdan geliyor gibi gösterilmeli, anonimleştirilmeli. Bireyin bireye yaptığı yardım hep gurur kırar.

Why are people in long marriages absolutely convinced that they are married to the best person? Because they successfully managed a long equilibration process to achieve convergence (or complementation) on all vital topics.

Kadın aklıyla ilerler, duygularıyla ilerliyormuş gibi gösterir. Erkek duygularıyla ilerler, aklıyla ilerliyormuş gibi gösterir.

Kadının seksüel cazibe kazanması ancak içindeki erkeği keşfetmesiyle, erkeğin ise ancak içindeki kadını keşfetmesiyle mümkündür.

Kendi emeğinin geçtiği insanlarla gurur duymak tehlikeli bir histir. Sağlıklı olan başka başka insanların seninle, senin de başka başka insanlarla gurur duymandır.

"Bir daha böyle birini nasıl bulacağım?" diye kafasını duvarlara vuran büyük bir yanılsama içindedir. Aslında kimse sanıldığı kadar emsalsiz değildir. Her ilişki yaşlandıkça özgünleşir. Yani emsalsizlik hissi ortak hatıralardan doğar.

Kadınlar, hem feminen hem de maskülen taraflarıyla barışık olan erkeklere bayılırlar, çünkü hepsinin arada bir ters köşeye yatırılmaya ihtiyacı vardır.

Kadınlar üzülüp çaktırmama, erkekler ise sevip çaktırmama konusunda iyidir.

Work with the rationally passionate, socialize with the irrationally passionate. Avoid the dispassionate altogether.

İlişkilerin çok basit bir aritmetiği var, hangi ortak paydalarla başladılarsa o ortak paydalar ortadan kalkınca bitiyorlar. Dolayısıyla karşı tarafla aranızda ya uzun ömürlü, ya da yüksek sayıda ortak payda aramalı / yaratmalısınız.

You can not expect an entire network to trust you from the beginning. Instead try to establish a trust chain that starts with someone who trusts you and ends with someone who is trusted by the target person you want to reach.

If someone manipulates you once, you are a fool. If the same person manages to manipulate you again, he is smart.

Before you marry a girl, get to know her father and mother very closely. Her father will help you gauge what she will expect from you in the future and her mother will help you gauge what you can expect from her in the future.

İlk ortaklık ve ilk evlilik zordur, ortağınızı veya eşinizi iyi tanımadığınızdan değil, henüz ortaklığın ve evliliğin ne demek olduğunu bilmediğinizden.

Aşırı sevgi ve aşırı nefret tehlikelidir. Dengesiz şekilde birbirlerine kolayca evrilip insana akla gelmeyecekler şeyler yaptırabilirler.

Sophistication is a matching mechanism. (It increases the number of dimensions of the matching space and thereby results in better matches.) That is why people give up on it after marriage.

Yalan dolan ya da düpedüz dolandırıcı olduğunu bildiğiniz insanlardan kendinizi uzak tutmayın. Tanışın, kafaları nasıl çalışıyor izleyin. Bu tip kişileri ayrıştırmak yakındayken daha zordur. Yakın temas deneyimlerinizi artırın.

Charisma can only be achieved via a simultaneous mastery and combination of physical smoothness and mental suddenness.

You can make it to the billboards if you are either extremely unique or extremely average, allowing you to be famous either non-anonymously or anonymously. (Celebrity figures vs. Stock photo figures)

If you suspect that you are being manipulated by someone, make a completely unexpected move and carefully observe the response. Apply the same technique to yourself if you suspect that you are fooling yourself.

We expect unanticipatability only from complex phenomena. That is why we tolerate the quirkiness of genius people but react violently when the same sort of volatile and inconsistent behavior is exhibited by simple folks.

Kadınlar anlaşılmamaktan ve kavramsal karmaşıklıktan ilginç bir haz duyarlar. Erkeklerden sorunların etrafında dans etmeklerini beklerler. Çözüm değil, özünde ilgi ararlar. Çözümler kendilerinde saklıdır zaten hep.

İleri yaşlarda saçlarına dikkat eden erkeklere dikkat ediniz. Benim tanıdıklarımın büyük bir çoğunluğu falso çıktı.

The greatest kind of uncertainty is the uncertainty we create for each other. Hence the reason why “hell is other people”.

“Pardon gerçekten istemeden oldu. Seni kırmak istememiştim.” ne saçma sapan bir özürdür. Zaten birbirimizi hep istemeden kırmıyor muyuz? Yoksa hepimizin içinde bir sadist mi var?

Micromanaging relationships to perfection leads to fewer but also more catastrophic mistakes. Make small mistakes. Do not let fragility build up. Attempts to prevent small forest fires always result in much worse fires.

The more powerful you get, the harder it becomes for you to meet people more powerful than you. Power opens more doors, true, but it also elevates the ego and thereby makes it emotionally harder to knock those same doors.

Strong people appearing strong are called jerk. Weak people appearing weak are called loser. Strong people appearing weak are called charismatic. Weak people appearing strong are called confident. Be charismatic or confident.

Sohbet esnasında konular ya tamamen tüketilir ve sessizlikle bölünür, ya da tadında bırakılır ve karizmayla bölünür.

Charisma is a temporal phenomenon while beauty is a spatial one. That is why former is best captured in movies, while latter is best captured in photos.

Quintessential male is one who is not afraid of dying. Quintessential female is one who is not afraid of living. These two are not the same things.

Those who enjoy unpredictable working lives desire predictable family lives. Those who desire predictable working lives enjoy unpredictable family lives.

Why do you need good friends who can tell you the brutal truth about yourself? Simple. It is much much harder for you to know yourself than to know others. This is by design. Do not try to hack it.

Talking in person is more self-revealing than speaking over the phone which in turn is more self-revealing than text messaging. That is why relationships progress better when the medium of communication moves in this direction.

Bencilliği yenmenin en kolay yolu benliğini genişletmektir. Artık senin bir parçan haline gelmiş kişiye karşı bencil davranamazsın.

Relationships built on ideals are free of stupid reciprocity calculations. 

Adam olmak tutarlılık gerektirir. Zenginlikle birlikte sonradan-gelen zibidilik çirkindir. Hayatı boyunca çıtırların peşinden koşmuş biri ise tutarlıdır, en kötü "hep böyleydi orospu çocuğu" der geçeriz.

Incrementally executed plans are fiendishly more difficult to decipher. Best manipulations are conducted under a cloak of friendship.

Don't be surprised when people advising you to not trust anyone try to hedge themselves against you as well.

Men can be divided into two categories. Those who marry women who look like their moms and those who do not. Expect greater objectivity from the latter kind.

Kişinin kendisinin maruz kaldığı geçmiş travmaların farkına varması ve bunlardan ders çıkarması başkalarına yaşatacağı travmaların sayını azaltmaz, sadece formlarını değiştirir. Duyarsızlık sabittir.

Non-friends expect to be paid back in the same format at a predetermined time. Friends are flexible with both format and time, but they nevertheless expect some payback. Family members do not expect a payback at all.

Gerebildiğimiz ilişkileri daha çok geriyoruz. Aradaki bağ ne kadar kuvvetliyse biz de o kadar yükleniyoruz. Kendimizi frenlemediğimiz takdirde en çok zararı en değer verdiğimiz kişilere veriyoruz.

Powerful people lack deep relationships because such relationships require a mutual display of vulnerabilities while maintaining power rests on a perception of invulnerability.

Eşitlikçi şekilde herkese kısa vakit ayıracağına, ulaşılması zor biri ol ve sana ulaşabilenlere uzun vakit ayır, onları gerçekten anlamaya çalış. Bu yaklaşım kısa dönemde itibar kaybettirir, ama uzun dönemde müthiş itibar kazandırır.

Acı gerçeği suratına vurunca delirip sana saldıranı değil, üzülüp içine kapananı tercih et. O kişilerin de seni ağlatacağı zamanı kolla.

Tanımadığın insanlara karşı önyargılı olmana gerek yok. İki dakikada kimin ne mal olduğu anlaşılıyor zaten.

Hafif dozda utanç çekicidir. Aşırı rahat şekilde sergilenen çıplaklıklar karşı cinste aynı derecede iştah kabartmaz. Azıcık bir çıplaklık doğru vücut diliyle müthiş etkiler yaratabilir.

İki tarafın rahatça küfrettiği diyaloglar dostluğu ve eşitliği işaret eder. Düşük statülü kişinin küfretmesi o kişinin eğitimsizliğini ya da çaresizliğini gösterir. Yüksek statülü kişinin küfretmesi ise statüsünü belirtme isteğindendir.

Karşı cins konusunda bir toprak çeker, bir de ters köşe, çünkü kültürel evrim homojenlikten, genetik evrim ise heterojenlikten yanadır.

İleride unutmak isteyebileceğin bir kişiyi bugün herhangi bir kokuyla özdeştirme.

Understanding a person with exactly the opposite characteristics amounts to the same thing as understanding the person himself.

Utanan kadın gözlerini başka bir yere kaçırarak karşısındaki erkeğe onu özgürce inceleyebilme iznini verir. İlk defans mekanizması olan gözler gardını indirmiştir.

Bir duyguyu veya düşünceyi herkesle paylaşmak ile kimseyle paylaşmamak arasında bir fark yoktur. Her iki durumda da ilişkileriniz homojenleşir. Ancak özel paylaşımlar özel hissettirir.

Psychology

Psychologists and sex workers both engage in entirely transactional relationships—one mental, the other physical. Neither is genuine; both offer brief but intense satisfaction. Junk food compared to true spiritual fulfillment.

Individuals with a dominant left-brain are deemed autistic, while right-brain dominance isn't pathologized. This is because psychologists, typically right-brained, set these definitions and do not see their own traits as disorders.

The rapid desensitization to nudity when moving from a cold city to a warm beach town is striking. It prompts reflection on how many of our pleasures are shaped by similar societal constructs.

In psychology, our depths are shaped by repressed elements that solidify with time and blend into our subconscious. Depth reflects the distance of what we've avoided facing in ourselves.

All great ambitions are inspirations towards God-like qualities. Some chase absolute truth, some absolute power, some absolute beauty, some absolute goodness. None is achievable, yet the common underlying drive is essential.

Negatif duyguları derinlemesine yaşayabiliyorsan hala hayattasın demektir. Depresyon duyarsızdır, dümdüz bir çizgi gibidir. Bir aşağı bir yukarı çıkmak ise hayatın doğasında vardır. Negatif derinlikler de üretken enerji doludur.

In psychology, everything makes so much more sense when you start to think of humanity as a work in progress, not as some sort of a final product.

Pain is accumulation of excess stimulation. Laughter is discharge of excess stimulation.

Babasız büyüyenler hemen farkedilir. Annesiz büyüyenlerin yaraları ise daha derinlerdedir.

Yüksek egolular ikiye ayrılır. 1) Materyalist Egoistler. Bunlar ölmeden önce takdir edilmek ister, tarihe saygıları yoktur. 2) Idealist Egoistler. Bunlar öldükten sonra takdir edilmek ister, tarihe saygıları çoktur.

They say we should not discriminate against people with mental issues. Cool. But what if their problem is being unable to treat others as human beings? We let them wreak havoc on the society?

Köreldikçe, duyarsızlaştıkça güçlendiğini sanan gerizekalılar var. Oysa esas güç herkesten daha çok hissedip, herkesten daha çabuk toparlanabilmekte.

Everyone climbs the mountain of insanity little by little, and at the end of the climb, nobody knows how they really got there.

İstisnasız herkes kendini birilerine beğendirmeye çalışır. İyi manipülasyon karşındakinin kendini kime beğendirmeye çalıştığının hızlı tespitiyle başlar.

Every action is taken under a certain psychological context. While the actions stay in the memory, the contexts do not. Feeling of regret arises when an action taken in the past is incompatible with the psychology of the present.

In order to become truly goal-oriented, you first need to acknowledge death. If you keep believing that you have infinite time in your hands, you will feel no sense of urgency and therefore no need to set any true goals.

Saygı duyduklarından saygı duyulmayı ummak sağlıklı bir beklentidir. Daha geniş bir kümeden saygı duyulmayı beklemek ise patolojiktir.

Subways are as metaphysical as deserts. Somehow, moving along with a crowd of strangers in the same direction inside a claustrophobic space has the same chilling effect as standing still by myself in a wide open landscape.

You can not psychologically heal yourself without first spiritually healing yourself. You can not address societal problems without first addressing personal problems. Self-realization is an orderly hierarchical process.

Real self is revealed only under either extreme distress or extreme comfort.

Olay egoyu küçük tutabilmekte değil, ultra esnek tutabilmektedir. Yani esas marifet egoyu duruma göre küçültüp duruma göre büyültebilmektedir.

People want to feel unique at all times and they achieve this by dynamically modifying the circumference of the reference population. That is why greater social connectivity (induced by technology or marketing) can feel intrusive.

Ölmeden önce gözünüzün önünden ne geçer biliyor musunuz? Yarım kalan güzel süreçler. (Oysa hayatımız boyunca bitmiş kötü süreçlerle boğuşuruz.)

Crises can help clarify the big picture, and make you try new things and reshuffle priorities. It is in this sense that stress can accelerate the journey to find your real passion and purpose, at the cost of shortening your lifetime.

Bir her başarısını kendine yoran bir de her başarısını çevresel faktörlere yoran kişi hiç durmaz, çünkü ya hiç doymaz ya da hep açtır. Olağanüstü başarılar hep bu iki uçtan çıkar. Aradakiler ise ortalama performans gösterir.

Yaşlandıkça daha küçük detaylarda mutlululuğu arayıp bulmayı öğreniriz, çünkü başka bir çaremiz kalmaz. Büyük mutluluklar ya artık tüketilmiş ya da erişilebilirliğini yitirmiştir.

Disiplin aynı şeyi yılmadan devam ettirebilme gücü değildir. Disiplin her an yeni alışkanlık oluşturabilme gücüdür. Alışkanlıklar zamanla erir ve tekrar yeşertilmeleri gerekir, ve tekrar yeşertmekle sıfırdan yeşertmek aynı şeydir.

Arada bir tüm çaresizliklerinizi bir dürtün. Hangisinin öğrenilmiş olduğu belli olmaz!

Etrafını yüksek duvarlarla çevrelemiş birinin gardını indirtmek alçak duvarlarla çevrelemiş birinin gardını indirtmekten daha kolaydır. Ne de olsa yüksek duvarlar daha kırılgandır.

At the moment of a life threatening event you can either run away, feign death or stay to fight. After surviving such an event, you can either become permanently down, go back to life as usual or become permanently stronger.

To conduct good psychoanalysis you do not need any deep analytical skills if you know the person. Deep observation skills suffice. People always give themselves away in spoken or body language in rare but recognizable forms.

Deeper the trauma, deeper it gets submerged into the subconscious. You can actively recall less but you get affected more. This is necessary for survival, so that you can continue to function but not forget the “valuable” experience.

You discover your deficiencies only when you stretch yourself to your limits.

Sometimes I wonder what is dragging me down is the same thing as what is propelling me forward.

There is nothing more pathetic than a person who tries everything to live longer but does not know anything about how to live.

Optimism is forward looking and pessimism backward looking. You need solid reasons to be non-optimistic about the future and non-pessimistic about the past. That is why dystopian and nostalgic literature always feel deviant.

There is no such thing as art of manliness just like there is no such thing as science of happiness. The minute you approach these subjects as things that can be learned, you can no longer satisfy the necessary conditions.

We need more near-death experiences to wake up and set our priorities straight. Our modern lives are too (physically) safe for our own (psychological) good.

Genelde kimse itiraf etmek istemez ama özgürlük çoğu insan için mutsuzluk kaynağıdır. İnsanoğlu tarihinde hiç bu kadar özgür olmamıştır, dolayısıyla henüz tür olarak evrimsel adaptasyon sürecini tamamlayamamıştır.

Highly successful narcissists tend to actually know that they are narcissists. You can not reach that level of success without knowing your weaknesses.

Bushido philosophy of the Samurai and Vanitas movement in art, they both ask you to keep death in mind at all times, because once you really grasp the value of your time, all prioritization problems become trivially easy to solve.

We all live for other people. Some try to satisfy the average expectations of their social periphery and are called “socially conscious”. Others look independent but are actually slaves of some baked-in parental expectations.

We start off life as unwillingly inconsistent, then learn to be consistent and then learn how to be inconsistent at will.

Depression is what happens when your brain malfunctions and can no longer fool itself.

Extreme negative emotions are not accessible by continuously sliding across the negative domain. They emerge discretely from sudden flipping of extreme positive emotions.

Behind both perversion and genius lies the same force, namely the desire to master a subject fully and not sufficing with eighty percent competency.

Fantasy involves the subjugation of a familiar subject to an unfamiliar environment, and therefore becomes more interesting as the subject gets more familiar and the environment gets more unfamiliar.

Algı açıldıkça zaman yavaşlar, daraldıkça zaman hızlanır. Yani toplamda işlenen bilgi miktarı değişmez.

Past and Future are mental simulations and therefore lack the radical sensual richness of Now. Do not base your happiness on Past or Future. Use Now. Its much richer data set will offer you with more sources of joy.

We seek novelty (new learnings) when time scares us off and sophistication once novelty wears off. This never ending desire for being in the flow state is a symptom of our pathological relationship with the flow of time.

A real egoist likes other's children because biological and developmental constraints do not allow him to faithfully replicate himself. The chances of someone else's child being exactly like him is greater than those of his. 

Delilere ve alfalara karşı pozitif önyargım var. Herhalde bilmediğim bazı şeyleri biliyorlar ya da sahip olmadığım bazı şeylere sahipler diye. Delirmiş alfalara karşı ise negatif önyargım var, herhalde inandırıcı değiller diye.

Walls are mediums for displaying things that we either have or pretend to have. Next time you see a motivational poster on an office wall, just look around to see the obvious discrepancy.

Slow people are better at time management because they need that extra time to catch up with the fast ones. People with weak memories are better at analysis because they always strive to minimize mental baggage.

Ayılar eğitilirken Pavlov'un köpeği gibi koşullandırılırlar. Dolayısıyla "aç ayı oynamaz" atasözü yanlıştır. Tam tersine, ayılar sadece açken oynar. 

Sociology

To see suppressed racism, observe the young children in that society; which races do they look at with fascination? True transcendence of racism is achieved only through complete visual familiarization with all racial types.

You can't blame individuals for their lack of education; that's a societal failing. What about immorality? Typically, immorality stems from a mix of ambition and adverse circumstances, and latter is often a societal issue as well.

Fakirler ve zenginler her yerde az çok birbirlerine benzerler. Kültürleri farklı kılan sınıf orta sınıftır.

Okuduğunu pratiğe dökememiş, hayallerini gerçekleştirememiş, kabiliyetleri yönünde işler yapamamış, şartlar gereği bir yerlere yoğrulmak zorunda kalmış insanların çocuklarıyız biz.

Yes, we are moving towards a single global governance. Nevertheless we will always feel a sense of duty to give back to the smaller social circles that have enabled our personal growth. After all, it is the local that sustains the global.

In biology and sociology, unlawfulness never scales well. When a cancerous tissue becomes large enough, it too starts to develop cancer. When a crime organization becomes large enough, it too starts to suffer (internal) crime.

At the bottom of a social hierarchy, the challenge is to divide people. (Masses tend to unify by default.) At the top, the challenge is to unify people. (Elites tend to break up by default.)

Unlike aristocratic elites, modern meritocratic elites believe they truly deserve all their privileges and feel no obligation to give back. They also spend way too much time with each other and suffer from constant inferiority complex.

İnsan, bir kendine dikey açıdan uzak olanı (yani aynı hiyerarşide ama aşağıda kalanları), bir de kendine yatay açıdan uzak olanı (yani başka hiyerarşilere ait oldukları için ötekileştirebildiklerini) rahatça ezebilir.

Humans lost their mobility with agricultural revolution. (Stuck in farms.) They gained it back with industrial revolution. (Drove and flew everywhere.) Now they are losing it again with digital revolution. (Stuck to computer screens.)

Toplumsal bilincim arttıkça insanlara karşı tahammülüm azaldı. Ne tezat, değil mi? Topluma katkıda bulunabilmek için toplumun çoğunluğunu karşınıza almanız, ego seviyesinde takılıp kalmış binbir insanla uğraşmanız gerekiyor.

Turkish is the most bastardized language in the world. Even the alphabet changed twice, resulting in complete cultural lobotomy. Americans have no cultural history, Turks have no cultural memory. That is why we go along well.

Cults, when they become big enough, start being referred to as cultures.

Obsolete businesses survive thanks to their obsolete client bases. Obsolescence is a sociological process that is as slow and difficult as adoption. Both are hard on the elderly and involve change of habits.

Hiç bir şeyi olmamasına rağmen kaybetmekten korkanlar geleceğin hayalinde, her şeye sahip olduğu için kaybetmekten korkanlar ise geçmişin gölgesinde yaşarlar.

Her şeye sahip olmasına rağmen kaybetmekten korkmayanlar ekonomik devrimlerin, hiç bir şeyi olmadığı için kaybetmekten korkmayanlar ise sosyal devrimlerin öncüleridir.

Popular social constructions are targeted for the masses and break apart at the edges. Extraordinary minds and circumstances will naturally necessitate localization and customization of notions such as religion, marriage etc.

Progress can only happen stealthily and naturally. It morphs into regress the moment we become aware of it and try to direct it. That is why progressive ideologies often end up being anti-progressive in practice.

Multicultural hubs remix past versions of different cultures. The whole may look cutting edge, but the components are always outdated.

Türkiye'de insanlar birbirlerinden değil sadece allahtan korktuklarını iddia ederler. Fakat gerçek tam tersidir. O yüzden herkes arabasına kasko yaptırır ama kimse evini sigortalatmaz.

As the social fabric weakens, the social gaze strengthens. That is why the average speed of social trends correlates well with the prevalence of individualism.

Bir konsept ne kadar kısa şekilde isimlendirilmişse o kültürde o kadar çok önemseniyor demektir.

Batı kadını soyup tamamen nesneleştirdi. Doğu kadını tamamen kapatarak susturdu. Kadın her yerde aynı muameleyi görüyor. Batıda özgür olduğunu zannediyor ama orada da erkeğin bakışları her şeye yön veriyor.

Toplumun her alan için biçtiği, o alana gösterdiği ilgiyle doğru orantılı bir ünlü kontenjanı vardır. Her alanda faaliyet gösteren toplam kişi sayısı da toplumun ilgisiyle doğru orantılıdır. Dolayısıyla ünlü olmak her alan için eşit zorluktadır.

The right way to deal with anomaly is not to redefine normality, but to comprehend the normality of anomaly in its myriad manifestations.

West is more open to admitting vulnerability in the rational domain, while East is more open to admitting vulnerability in the emotional domain. That is why ideas mature faster in the West and people mature faster in the East.

Sosyal statünüz düştükçe sesiniz incelir, vücut diliniz içe kapanır, yazılarınız ve konuşmalarınız uzar.

Extremism contains a deep desire for attention. Ostracizing it leads to even more extremism. In more symmetric situations, the same phenomenon manifests itself in the form of polarization leading to even more polarization.

Iconoclastic movements never destroy icons altogether, they just replace old icons with more abstract ones. (Images get replaced by text etc.)

You can not fight the dominant culture head on. That is why successful social movements always start underground. Disclose your subculture only when the size of your community is big enough to not be engulfed.

Absurd and strongly-held beliefs are always built slowly and socially. Those that appear suddenly out of nowhere in a single person’s mind do not stick.

Cultural differences are nothing but differing sets of ground-zero biases people have against each other.

Rationalism makes discrimination less visible by turning it into a second-order phenomena. For instance, in business, otherwise liberal people will still discriminate against you if they think that others will discriminate against you.

Western civilizations are wiser about birth while Eastern civilizations are wiser about death, because birth and death are respectively the quintessential individualization and de-individualization processes.

Gösteriş kültürlerinde senin ne düşündüğün değil, diğerlerinin senin ne düşündüğünü düşündüğü önemlidir.

Best kinds of social engineering start off by accelerating positive feedback cycles to the point of breakdown. Paradoxically, the sense of optionlessness unleashed by the subsequent crises leads to greater malleability.

In a community one adheres to the mission, in a cult one obeys the leader. In a democracy one adheres to the law, in a monarchy one obeys the king. All these systems are centralized around either some idea or some person.

Democracies and monarchies are respectively just larger-scale, coercive versions of communities and cults.

Most nonprofits deal with symptoms rather than causes. They should be bolder and aim for long-term intangible goals like cultural change. (Problems eventually resurface unless the environment is altered against them.)

En bitmek bilmez savaşlar kimlik problemlerinden doğar. Hak iddia edilen değerler kümesi ne kadar benzeşse, ayrışma o kadar zayıf olur. Minik farklılıklar ölümcüldür.

Cahil toplumlar hassastır, duygularıyla hareket ederler, kolayca sürüklenirler. Eğitimli toplumlar ise daha yavaş ve ağırbaşlıdır, fakat sürüklenince tam sürüklenirler ve kötüye gidişatı hissedip toparlanmaları daha uzun sürer.

Coolness has a transitionary developmental purpose. As infants we expect to be successful without any effort. As adolescents we learn to strive but act as if we did not strive. As adults we strive and display how much we strived.

Just like religion, entertainment goes underground during times of war and oppression. In fact, as the circumstances deteriorate, people feel a greater desire to be together and a greater need to have fun.

Politics

Apartheid enforces racial segregation locally; visas enact economic segregation globally. Movement is always controlled for those deemed lower-ranking, though the definition of 'lower-ranking' shifts.

All mature democracies polarize into two opposite and equally powerful camps, plus a small minority of "swing votes". The manipulation of swing votes eventually reaches a peak, and thereby public loses control entirely.

Bilgiye erişim kolaylaştıkça ve diller arası bariyerler kalktıkça, algıyı yönetmek zorlaşıyor ve “tarihi güçlüler yazar” kaidesi sona eriyor.

Akademide din ile bilim buluşabilmiş mi ki, politikada dindarlarla laiklerin buluşmasını bekliyoruz? Henüz zihinler bütünleşmemişken vücutlar nasıl bütünleşsin?

Germany and Japan are renowned to be the most industrious nations, but they also happen to have committed the most atrocious war crimes in history. There seems to be something darkly inhuman about superhuman efficiency.

Sol ve sağ partiler iç tutarlılıkları olan (ama birbirlerine zıt) doktrinler üzerine kuruludur. Merkez partilerin ise tutarlı doktrinleri yoktur. Tahmin edilebilirlikleri düşüktür. En derin kararsızlıklar (doktrine değil) lidere danışılarak çözülür.

Political leaders are massively under-compensated. Thanks to technologies like blockchain, we will soon be able to trace diffused value creation and measure the success of even the most infrastructure-level decision making.

Be careful of leaders coming from disadvantaged backgrounds that have suffered chronic systemic discrimination. Both the kindest and the meanest leaders arise from this group.

Progress has nothing to do with democracy. Inside even the most totalitarian regime, one can easily create the right pockets of freedom zones to enable science and technology. So democracy should never be taken for granted.

Tarihe bakarsanız empati faktörünün hep sonradan geldiğini görürsünüz. Önce mağdurun hep çok ciddi bir savaş vermesi gerekmiştir, empatiyi hakkettiğine dair.

Brain drain is how a nation loses its sovereignty in a slow fashion. After all, a nation is not constituted of the soil on top of which the people live, but of the very people themselves.

All superpowers exhibit a deep relation between the state and the big enterprise. In China, it is explicit, in the form of state-owned enterprises. In US, it is implicit, in the form of enormous lobbying by big corporations.

A visionary leader who can see the big waves is always awarded with riches. This is why strong countries do all they can to ensure that the weak ones have no choice but to focus on the short waves and worry about minute shit.

Justice can fail when either the generation of laws are subject to outside influence as in behind-the-door lobbying efforts, or the application of laws are subject to outside influence as in in-your-face governmental interventions.

Batı'yı yakalayabilseydik eğer, Atatürk'ü öğretmenini geçen öğrenci misali aşacaktık. Gene onu saygıyla anıyor olurduk tabi, ama bu kadar gölgesinde yaşıyor olmazdık.

Olimpiyatlar eski tadını vermiyor çünkü ulus devlet kavramı gittikçe anlamsızlaşıyor. Milli takımlar devşirme sporcularla dolup taşıyor, dünya tek bir bütün olma yolunda emin adımlarla ilerlemeye devam ediyor.

The guy who runs the entire country is paid order of magnitude less than the guy who runs an average sized company. Take a moment to contemplate the absurdity of this fact. Your whole mindset about politics will change.

As the number of social problems dwindles, elections in democracies become more and more absurd, forcing candidates to resort to minute stupidities to distinguish themselves.

İnsanların artık fikirleri yok. Neden? Çünkü felsefeleri, pusulaları yok. Sürekli bir data toplama halindeler, ama modelleri yok.

There is something seriously wrong about selling medicine at deep discounts to developing countries while continuing to charge them full price for medical textbooks.

Today Turkey is paying for Ataturk's failed revolutionary attempt to quickly catch up with the West and is regressing back in time to go through the same exact evolutionary steps that West has gone through. Short-cuts never work.

There are two orthogonal ways of ensuring that others do not harm you. Seal yourself off and point your nuclear warheads at everybody, or open yourself up and integrate with everybody to the point of becoming a systemic risk.

Political leaders (in democracies) are often willing to do crazy things abroad to increase the probability of winning elections at home. They also routinely sacrifice the long-run for the short-run since the election cycles are so short.

How do you become a land of opportunity? By destroying opportunities elsewhere of course! Nature, left to its own devices, creates opportunities everywhere all the time.

It is ironic how the post-modern intellectuals of the liberal world have become post-truth fans. They had declared truth was relative and non-sensical, but now that they lost power, they want it to come back. So Machiavellian indeed.

War is all about inflicting more damage than the opponent does. Everyone ends up worse-off, but some end up more worse-off than others. That is why bystanders are not tolerated in all-out wars.

Running a democratic country is like running a public company. You are under constant scrutiny which results in severe short-termism.

Do not prematurely open your economy to external competition. (You will be locked into a low-value specialization.) Do not prematurely open your politics to internal competition. (You will be locked into a bad form of populism.)

Political incumbents become harder to displace over time. Our election rules should be more dynamic, allowing challengers to win by less votes than incumbents in proportion with the length of time incumbents stay in power.

Wars arise due to hard structural reasons but are almost always fought for soft spiritual reasons. (Only psychopaths can kill others solely based on structural grounds.)

No political hegemony lasted forever. But as economies get more information driven and positive feedback cycles become more powerful, asymmetric equilibria will be harder to disrupt and “peace” times will last longer.

Democracy is a state of relaxation and decentralization. You can not bring democracy by applying pressure. What US wants is puppet dictatorships around the world. Stability is established through control, not freedom.

Why do we study conflict resolution but not conflict escalation? Strategically speaking, the space of possible transitions from cooperation to competition is as rich as the space of possible transitions from competition to cooperation.

US government routinely hands over natural monopolies to lobbying private businesses. Similarly, when USSR collapsed, ex-bureaucrats became the new capitalists. It was basically the same thing, but done more openly.

Capitalism wastes money via excess competition. Communism wastes money via excess corruption.

Global economy is driven by network effects whereby (in relative terms) the rich keeps getting richer. That is why US tries to keep all markets open. When you are so behind, you can only compete on your behind-ness.

Brain drain is bad for everyone involved. Supplier country feels the damage immediately. Receiving country feels the damage in the long run as it gets addicted to the inflow of intellectual capital and stops nurturing its own.

You want to see how well a president did? Look at his successor.

Devlet görevlerini ne kadar düzgün yerine getiriyorsa, kar amacı gütmeyen kurumların sayısı o kadar az olur.

Political equilibriums rest on preservation of large asymmetries. Entities (e.g. governments, parties) are often willing to inflict damage onto themselves if they project that the other side will be inflicted even more damage.

As a democratic country spirals into a deep economic recession, normally the incumbent party gets replaced by a populist party. But if there are no real alternatives for the electorate, the incumbent party gets even stronger.

Democracy systematically eliminates smart people from leadership positions. All other forms of government possess at least some chances of such people ending up in leadership positions, either due to luck or despotism.

Kitleleri yapısal (e.g. ekonomik, rasyonel) sebeplerle ikna edip sürüklemek politik açıdan güçtür. O yüzden düşmanlar hep hali hazırda ötekileştirilmişler arasından seçilir ve kültürler homojenleştikçe savaşlar soyutlaşır.

You realize that your country has just made it to the list of permanently-fucked-up countries, when your normally-would-be-considered-very-fucked-up news no longer make it to the international press.

There are only two ways to increase your prediction capabilities: You can either acquire knowledge and disclose the system or acquire power and become the system. That is why knowledge is often equated with power.

Pseudo-regulated competition among micro-dictatorships (political parties, large corporations) is a defining feature of liberal democracies. Without these micro-dictatorships democracies can not scale without losing functionality.

Demokrasi gösterip de vermeyen bir kıza benzer: Her tür ideolojinin tartışılmasına izin verir ama yürürlüğe koyma zamanı gelince kaybolur.

Demokrasiye geçiş süreci diye bir şey yoktur. Demokrasinin kendisi bir geçiş sürecinden ibarettir. Herkesin söz hakkı olduğu tek an seçim anıdır. Bir başka deyişle, demokrasi sandıktan çıkan değil, sandığın ta kendisidir.

Here is a law that every democratic government should pass: All newspapers should me mashed with other newspapers. Every other page in a newspaper should come from another random newspaper with possibly opposing views.

Parti sayısı azaldıkça partiler arası farklılıklar daha belirginleşir ve fikir değiştirmeye açık seçmen sayısı azalır. Dolayısıyla partilerin bu kişilere ulaşması zorlaşır. Yani parti sayısı azaldıkça seçim masrafları azalmaz.

Parenting

We desire our children to set their own goals, but initially, they act on pure impulse. They need practice with small, artificial targets to learn goal-setting. Parents should assist this process, but gradually withdraw involvement.

Why can't children sit still? Because they do not yet have a well-developed inner self to retreat to.

"Do as I say, not as I do!" is a disastrous advice, especially in early ages when learning is entirely mimetic.

Children play basic games to prepare themselves for more sophisticated games, the most sophisticated of which is life itself.

Ağaç yaşken eğilir, doğru. Ama anne babanın görevi ağacın potansiyelini realize edebilmesi için gereken mikro koşulları sağlamaktır. Ağacın nereye doğru eğileceğine ise kontrolleri dışındaki makro koşullar karar vermelidir.

”Pat diye de olmuyor tabii bu işler” diyen, ilk çocuklarını yapmadan önce kılı kırk yaran çiftleri çok şeker buluyorum açıkçası. Cahillik ne güzel bir şey. Gelecek olan şoka hazırlanabileceklerini sanmaları ne kadar da tatlı!

Çocuklara iyiyi dikte etmektense, kötüyü örnekleyip iyinin ucunu açık bırakmak daha mantıklı. Bu sayede çocuklara daha fazla manevra alanı tanınıyor, ve “iyi”, bir mirastan çok keşfedilmesi gereken bir şeye dönüşüyor.

Çocuklar sürekli anne babalarını kopyalarlar. Aynı taklitçi davranış yuvada da devam eder ve birbirlerini kopyalarlar. Dolayısıyla yuvalarda çocuklar aslında birbirlerinin ebeveynlerini kopyalarlar.

"Know thyself" is a bad advice to a young person whose personality is changing and maturing at a very high speed. A future-looking dynamic advice like "Try to understand what you seem to be evolving into" is more suitable.

Degree of parental protectiveness correlates with toughness of social conditions. Tougher conditions lead to faster maturation and necessitate longer protection periods to keep the total-time-to-maturity constant.

Çocukları annelerin büyüttüğü toplumlarda erkekler kadınları daha iyi anlar.

Sustainable marriages (modern or traditional) are characterized by symmetry breaking. Either they have no division of labor but an overall greater authority or they have a division of labor and a greater authority in each division.

Ebeveynler, başta, çocukları yalnız kalacak diye ölümden korkarlar, sonra da çocukları onları yalnız bırakacak diye hayattan korkarlar. İlk korku ani anlam yüklemesinden kaynaklanır, ikinci korku ise ani anlam boşalmasıyla ilintilidir.

Çocuklar bizden X kat daha fazla uyur çünkü bizden X kat daha hızlı yaşarlar.

Çocuklarda şımarıklık az sayıda büyük zafer ya da çok sayıda küçük zafer sonucu belirir. Eğitimli ebeveynler büyük zaferlerden kaçınırken farkında olmadan çocuklarına verdikleri küçük zaferlerin sayısını artırırlar.

Çocuk yapmak çocuksuz evlilikleri kurtaramaz. En fazla var olan problemlerin yerine daha beter başka problemler yaratır. Çocuk yapmak çocuklu evlilikleri de kurtaramaz. Önceki çocukların varlığı kurtarabilseydi kurtarırdı zaten.

Parents want their sons have a shot at becoming the future Elon Musks of the world. What they do not understand is that superhuman drive is achievable only through bad parenting, as in the case of Elon Musk.

Young children are very plastic and impressionable. They constantly remix and reflect the manners and moods of the people they interact with. That is why successful parenting requires extreme self-awareness.

Our babies are born highly immature but also highly plastic. This premature birth is what makes parenting so difficult but it is also what makes humanity so outstanding within the animal kingdom.

Problems you face as your child gets older should grow linearly over time. If they are growing exponentially or not growing at all, you have not been doing your job as a parent properly.

Hepimiz zeki çocuklar doğurmak istiyor ama zekanın aynı zamanda aşırı talepkarlık doğurduğunu unutuyoruz. 

Bir çocuk ne kadar zorsa o kadar tatlıdır çünkü o kadar tatlı olmak zorundadır.

When you exercise, you feel more energetic afterwards. When you have a new born baby, you learn to become more efficient with time. Body adapts to losses of both energy and time by creating more of them out of thin air.

Only after you have a child, you can truly understand the conservative values, including the importance of the physical proximity of the extended family and the classical division of labor between women and men.

Instead of trying to solve the nth degree social consequences of bad parenting, we should focus on improving the status and self-worth of mothers who are tackling the most challenging and important task in the world.

Desire for predictability is feminine, appetite for risk-taking is masculine. This is optimal in a sense: Mother nurtures the baby in a stable local environment while father navigates the family through an unstable global environment.

Bebeklerin azimleri, yaratıcılıkları ve enerjileri hayranlık verici. Zamanla nasıl bu kadar sıkıcı bireylere dönüşebiliyoruz hayretlik verici.

Çocukları anlamak güçtür, basit bireylerken onlar konuşmayı bilmedikleri için, kompleks bireylere dönüştüklerinde ise bizler konuşmayı bilmediğimiz için.

Çocuklar kullanıcılar gibidir. Bir şeyler isterler ama gerçek ihtiyaçları hep başka bir şeydir. Dolayısıyla iyi bir anne-baba ister istemez iyi bir kullanıcı deneyimi tasarımcısı olmak zorundadır.

Her çocuk bir mucizedir. Doğdukları an net olan bu gerçek zaman içerisinde unutulur. İnsanoğlu iğrenç bir yaratıktır. Mucizelere dahi zamanla alışır.

Çocukların büyüyüp ayakları üstünde durmaya başladığı vakit tekrar başlama vakti değildir. Vakit sona hazırlık, meyveleri toplama vaktidir. Hala kendini genç hissetmekle evreleri anlayamamak arasında devasa bir fark vardır.

Education

The success of a highly autistic child in the school system, often excelling academically, highlights the deficiencies of our education system. In a more balanced system, such children would struggle in at least half the subjects.

Set clear goals for your child. Like all learning processes, they require thresholds to gauge signal strength, ensuring focus on the few significant desires over the many fleeting impulses.

Ideas should be learned in the language of their originators, just a crime scene consists of (and therefore should be understood as) the totality of both the dead body (i.e. theory) and the murder weapon (i.e. language).

No pain, no gain. Right. But learning involves pain for both the learner and the learned. Learner damages what is being learned in a slight way to disturb it out of its natural equilibrium state. All such perturbations are "painful".

Why do we keep trying to communicate the truth in a form that is accessible to greater public? Truth is very abstract and sophisticated. Every attempt to publicize it amounts to degradation. We should elevate the masses instead.

Never underestimate how much one can learn by simply talking to himself, armed with good logic and good books. This is the essence of generative deep learning: Internal dialogues based on good rules and good data.

Intergenerational learning is what happens when the new generation grows up being accustomed to what the old generation finds surprising. Teach your kids what you find the most surprising, and do it as early as possible.

Eğitim kendi kendini eğitemeyen için gereklidir sadece, ve amacı da kendi kendini eğitebilen bireyler yetiştirmektir.

All learning eventually sinks down to unconscious upon mastery. In the case of building muscle memory, this process is super fast and visible. But it is no different in learning mathematics, just glacially slower and therefore invisible.

Ders süreleri yaş arttıkça uzamalı. İlkokul 1'de 20 dakika ile başlayıp, öğrencilerin konsantrasyon kabiliyetleri ilerledikçe, lise sonda 60 dakikaya kadar çıkmalı. Biyoloji hep göz önünde bulundurulmalı.

Centralized university entrance examinations are very similar to the Mayan sacrificial rituals. We offer our kids' minds to the fatherly God of technology, just like they offered their kids' bodies to the motherly God of ecology.

Philosophy should be taught alive, in bits and pieces, while facing real life challenges. It dries up when it is delivered in large chunks, in an acontextual manner, inside artificial environments like classrooms.

Open a lot of parentheses in your expositions, at the danger of interrupting the flow. Education is as much about building relations across different subjects, as it is about digging into a single subject. Use every opportunity.

Truth is always complex, inconvenient and two-sided. That is why it can be delivered in an explicit form only in an educational environment. Popular media, on the other hand, can deliver it only in an implicit, manipulative form.

Order of how you learn two subjects matters a lot, because education is not just about where you end up, it is also about how you end up there. The path you trace determines how the new gets linked with what is already known.

Biases are like the mental analogue of bacterial flora in the gut, influencing what you crave for and can digest. Good biases can drive out the bad, just like good bacteria can drive out the bad, but you can never be without any.

Education should be oriented towards the idea of freedom. We need to make our kids free and that means two things: 1) Facilitating the discovery of their unique character 2) Enabling them to be truly at ease with this uniqueness

The only difference between a teacher and a parent is that a teacher has a curriculum and a parent has none.

Bir öğretmenin kalitesi, ne kadar küçük dokunuşla ne kadar büyük etki yarattığından belli olur.

Regardless of domain, before you become a great creator, you need to learn how to be a great consumer. Remember, the voice can generate only the frequencies that the ear can differentiate. (This is called the Tomatis effect.)

Eğitim hayatında başarısız olanlar öğretmenlik okuyor ve öğretmenlik okumadan öğretmen olunamıyor. Sonra da eğitim sistemimiz neden kötü diye şaşırıyoruz. Hiç bir politikacı da 1 milyon mevcut öğretmene kafa tutamıyor.

In education, technology increases the demand by automating more and more sophisticated jobs away, and increases the supply by stripping the purely informatic component of education away.

A moron is a person who loses touch with the reality by reducing it to overly-simplistic narratives. A dual type, common in academia, does the opposite by departing from reality via constant immersion in overly-complex narratives.

You can not articulate something well unless you have thoroughly understood it. In other words, being able to articulate something well to others requires you to be able to articulate it to yourself first.

Doğru eğitim bireyi özgürleştirir, kendini keşfetmesini sağlar. Araçları jenerik ve geleneksel, ama sonuçları özgün ve sıradışıdır. Teknolojiyle araçları özgünleştirerek sonuçları özgünleştirebileceğini zannedenler hep yanılmıştır.

Oral traditions suffer less from semantic entropy, but more from bandwidth and scalability issues. Oral works evolve along with the language, but so few can carry the message faithfully and so few can be stored in a single mind.

You are taught by a teacher who is in turn taught by another. Where does this stop? Who is the master teacher? All knowledge trickles down from the same source: Society. Masters learn from each other, building upon the dead ones.

Günümüz akademisyenlerinin üretme ve birileri-beni-dinlesin telaşı komiktir. Gerçek anlamda derine inme ancak ulvi amaçlarla ya da lüks bir ortamda gerçekleşebilir.

Emeklemeden yürüyen çocukların yıllar sonra diz ağrısı yaşama olasılıkları çok daha yüksektir. Genel olarak öğrenme süreçlerinin doğal bir sırası vardır. Ara adımları atlamak, hızlı hızlı ilerlemek kadar kötüdür.

Where there is learning, there is play. All things that learn display playful behavior, including lower level life forms like plants, cells etc.

Health (although as conservative) progresses faster than education thanks to desperate people willing to try new risky treatments. (Educational analogue of facing death is facing irrelevance, but we “wisely” protect everyone from it.)

An ideal school curriculum does not break any dualities. It is equally rational & intuitive / goal-oriented & problem-oriented / quantitative & qualitative / competitive & cooperative / cognitive & physical / theoretical & practical.

A good teacher not only expects, but also desires that his students will surpass him. He synthesizes and condenses his lifetime learnings so that his students do not need to spend a lifetime themselves to reach the same level.

Students should be encouraged to explore more before they specialize. Too often they hit the gas before finding their real passion. In the long run, those who are more passionate always win over those who start earlier.

Stories take cross-sections from our lives and therefore are inherently multi-disciplinary in nature. That is why it is so hard to teach mono-disciplinary subjects in a fun way. They are not story-friendly.

Yes, we should teach our kids how they can learn by themselves, but even more importantly, we should teach them how they can guide own their learnings and distinguish what is important from what is not.

Learning involves imprinting and imprinting leaves traces that can bias future learning. It is important to relax your mind between study sessions, reset your taste buds between tastings, stretch your body between workouts etc.

Instrumental advice is long-to-articulate but easy-to-apply. Transformative advice is short-to-articulate but hard-to-apply.

Who is a teacher? It is basically the first imprinter. In other words, we are all part-time teachers and therefore should not forget the fact that it takes a lot of responsibility to shape someone's first encounter with a subject or a situation.

Good educational technologies enhance the environment. Bad ones stand in between the student and the teacher. Even language itself is a technological barrier and should be deployed as minimally as possible.

Cahillerden basit şeyleri basit bir dille, eğitimlilerden zor şeyleri zor bir dille anlatmaları beklenir. Eğitimliliğini farkeden cahiller basit şeyleri zor bir dille, cahilliğini farkeden eğitimliler zor şeyleri basit bir dille anlatmaya kasar.

Universities are severely confused. Content-wise they seem to treat each new student as a potential future academic, but method-wise they behave like companies, killing all unstructured playgrounds with their goal-orientism.

Simplified Chinese is actually harder to learn since the characters are harder to differentiate. You can not eliminate complexity without losing expressive power. You can only hide it by pushing it up to higher (relational) levels.

Productivity requires focusing and creativity requires defocusing. Productive creativity requires an ability to switch between the two without losing depth. We should teach such skills rather than dumping content on our children.

Smartness and being experienced are usually thought of as two different traits, but they are deeply interrelated. Smartness is exactly the ability to catch up with the experienced with much less experience.

Check the background of the people who are considered wildly successful in the field that you want to enter into. If they have fancy academic degrees, then go get fancy academic degrees. If they do not, then don’t worry.

Eğitim kadar yarattığı katma değeri yakalayamayan bir sektör yoktur.

Sadece eğitim sektöründe para verip acı çekmek normal karşılanır.

Assert subtle small mistakes into your narratives. This is not only an effective method of teaching but also an easy way of gaining sympathy. The trick is to be vulnerable, but not too much that you lose your credibility.

The right format for wild generalizations is aphorism (not book), and the right way of supporting them is through charisma (not hundreds of pages of arguments).

Fanatiklerin fiziksel olarak birbirine girmesi izlemeye değer bir kavga, entellektüel olarak birbirine girmesi ise dinlemeye değmez bir tartışma yaratır.

There is an inverse relationship between trainability and self-drivenness. That is why best students are the hardest to put on track. They either find their calling on their own and achieve incredible feats, or be completely wasted.

Academicians hate intuitive forms of smartness and confuse lack of codifiability with luck. That is why they frequently claim that investors, politicians and military leaders do not know what they are doing etc.

Reading

I used to worry about my inability to recall details from the books I'd studied. Then, I realized they were just other people's thoughts. Reading is like a conversation; we give written words undue reverence, but they're not sacred.

Western writers overshare. They literally live their confusion out in the open. For the sake of being able to claim originality, they sacrifice synthetic clarity, which requires long periods of incubation to arise.

Bir kitap ancak savunduğu tezin tersini savunan bir kitap daha varsa iyi olabilir. Yalnız başına kalan iddiaların hepsi yüzeyseldir. Tüm derin tezler anti-tezlerinden yalnızca birazcık daha doğrudurlar.

Book donation suffers from an adverse selection problem. People donate what they like the least. In other words, the poor folks, who can read so few books anyway, end up reading the worst ones!

There is something unusual about authors who have an “earlier” and a “later” period. (e.g. Wittgenstein, Foucault) It is impossible for one person to be genuinely original twice, for the Zeitgeist to make two stops in one person.

Gerçekten işe yarayan cümlelerin kitaplarda uzun süre saklı kalabileceğini mi sanıyorsunuz? Onlar kitaplardan adeta fışkırıverir dışarı, hızlıca anonimleşip genel kültüre, genel fikir akışına dahil olurlar.

Understanding something new involves making connections with what is already known. Since making connections requires effort, meaningfulness of a text is highly dependent on the strength of your motivation to understand it.

You can sharpen your mind only on books you disagree with.

Scientists are actually trained to learn how to write from the point of view of nobody. That is why even their books which are supposedly addressed to the general public have no voice, personality or vitality.

The proper evolution of a great authorship starts off with a very original book and ends with a very succinct one.

People ask me whether I read a lot. Yes, I do, but that does not really matter. What matters is what one reads and how one reads, not how much one reads.

It is immoral to charge students for any kind of knowledge, period. Since morality stands above legality, you can refer every young learner to Library Genesis in good conscience.

Mutluluk veya başarı vaat eden, isminin başına PhD koyan, tek bir fikrin ebesini ağlatıp lafı uzatan, deneyim gerektiren bir alanda hiç bir deneyimi olmamasına rağmen yüzlerce sayfa zırvalayabilen yazarlardan uzak durun.

The only thing I hate more than badly written books are badly written books with great theses. Such books usual sell well and prevent great writers from exploring the same domain which is now owned by a fast-moving asshole.

Stare at a statement long enough, it will first feel true and then inevitable.

Longer forms of text (basically anything beyond a remark) are all generated via interactions of the author with himself, and the more a text loops around itself in such a way the more it deviates from reality.

Default mindset of the reader should be to throw away the book. It is the duty of the author to convince the reader to keep reading.

Texts are frozen in time and therefore subject to semantic entropy. That is why keeping highly fluid oral traditions and intergenerational communication channels alive is so important, especially for the slow-progressing subjects.

Anyone can sound smart in a specific subject by reading what smart people wrote about that subject. There is no universally effective way of detecting smartness in one-way conversations.

For maximum expression power, the number of dimensions of a language should match the number of dimensions of the medium. All current written languages are sub-optimal due to their one-dimensional auditory origins.

There are two types of texts. Ones that are frozen in time and desire to be referred to, and ones that keep evolving and are in constant pursuit of truth. Latter derive their authority from their authors, not from their actual content.

There are two types of good literature writers. Ones who live boring lives but remix vast amounts of texts, and ones who live interesting lives and let the reality remix things for them. Former depends ultimately on the latter.

Deep writers like to talk to themselves. Why? Because that is what deep writing is all about.

Did you just run into a fantastic line or a deeply illuminating paragraph? Stop. Reread it. Put your book or computer aside. Look far into a distance. Don’t do anything. Silence your consciousness and let your unconscious synthesize.

”Read important things slowly.” is an empty advice. People do not read fast what they deem to be important anyways. The real problem is that most people can not distinguish what is important from what is not.

Distinguishing good nonfiction from bad is easy. Just read a couple of pages from each. Distinguishing good fiction from bad on the other hand is difficult. That is why it is very time consuming to discover new talented fiction writers.

Yazarların kendileriyle tanışmak hep hüsran verir. Oysa eserlerin derinliği yazarların kendileriyle olan diyaloglarından doğar, başkalarıyla olanlardan değil. (Aynı yanılgıdan ötürü şahsen tanıdığımız yazarları okumak istemeyiz.)

Correlation between understanding and reading gets weaker as the subject matter gets deeper. Deeper the observation, much longer the digestion period. (Some of the simplest statements took me years to synthesize.)

Her kitabın bir vakti vardır. Zorla sayfa çevirmek okuldan kalma kötü bir alışkanlıktır.

Great books should be information-theoretically incompressible. That is why long great books are so rare.

Before you begin reading, ask yourself whether you are looking for a quick solution to a problem whose actual unique solution is buried deep within you and can only be extracted via an active non-intellectual effort.

Reading is generally a waste of time because 99% of what is published is junk, and even if you stumble into something decent, within a year you will forget 99% of what you read.

I do not understand why people speed-read books. There are so few of them worth reading anyway, and those should be enjoyed slowly and thoroughly. 

Gaining wisdom and losing weight are similar in the sense that they both require sustained application of a few basic principles. But people hope to quickly achieve the former by reading books and the latter by taking pills. 

Unless you are reading an instruction manual, the expected reading time should not be correlated with the text length.

Read many textbooks simultaneously. Jumping around frequently will allow you to thoroughly test your memory. Books that are read in one sitting will be forgotten in the next alcoholic setting.

Doing Research

When you are at the frontier, you must temporarily abandon the familiar. Understanding how the new relates to the old comes only after discovery. Do not cling to the past while seeking the new; anchoring to the old occurs later.

Art of discovery is about learning how to stumble into the right ideas, inducing lucky events in your favor by immersing yourself in rightly sculpted environments.

All creative processes involve expansions followed by contractions, budding followed by pruning. There is no creativity without exhaust waste.

Too targeted a literature reading leads to a dull thesis. It is the peripheral reading that makes one cultured and worth reading.

Keep two versions of your research. One for others, written in long-form prose, with lots of explanations. One for yourself, extremely compactified into a graphical form, making it easier to spot connections and inconsistencies.

The sheer willingness to clearly articulate oneself can get one surprisingly close to the truth.

The closer you are to the cutting edge in a subject, the more noise you will encounter. Do not unnecessarily expose yourself to this noise. It will wear you out eventually. Let the test of time work its magic whenever possible.

Write at night, when your critical faculties are tired. Polish in the morning, when your critical faculties are fresh.

Achieving a breakthrough without the utilization of a new language or a new technology is as unlikely as finding a hundred dollar bill on a sidewalk.

Just as you need to suspend disbelief while watching a fantastic movie, you need to briefly stop paying homage to the past while creating something new.

After you learn a subject, it is already too late to think freely. It is better to pre-maturely spill out your crazy speculations in private, and then filter them afterwards. This is how all "genius" ideas are born.

A good researcher knows when to take a step back and let the ideas he generated to interact on their own. In other words, there is an appropriate time for being a generator, and an appropriate time for being an orchestrator.

If you run into a book you feel that you will agree with, push it to the end of your reading list. Otherwise, your thesis will quickly gravitate towards already existing ideas. To preserve your originality, read the most relevant the last.

When you have a thesis, a particular angle of attack on the whole body of knowledge, you will effortlessly devour books. It is reading without a purpose that drags you down and makes your mind wander around.

When people ask me why I do not share my writings with the greater public, I tell them that I am a romantic idealist, believing that being discovered after death creates more impact in the long run.

Ideas can survive by either being frozen into a sacred form by their worshippers or being updated and adapted to the zeitgeist by their fans.

The more you need to read, the less you will be able to synthesize at the end of your research. So you should synthesize along the way. Take copious amounts of notes, dump them somewhere and return to them at the end.

Give a break, and go dance, exercise, walk, whatever. Stimulating your body is an exceptionally cheap way of stimulating your mind. Why not use it?

Diğerlerinin yazdıklarını çizdiklerini beğenmemen güzel bir işaret, demek ki içinde orijinal bir şeyler var, dışarı çıkmak isteyen.

Every argument eventually gets decoupled from its author and integrated into the public domain. Authorship is a trick (leveraging the universal acquisition desire) society uses to lure people into taking risks in creating new ideas.

Modeller ölür ama o modelleri üreten yaklaşımlar yaşamlarına devam eder. İşin ilginci, zaten çok az sayıda olan bu yaklaşımlar arasında gidip gelinerek bir şekilde modellerin kalitesinde artış sağlanabilmesidir.

Kimin dahi olduğu ancak 100 sene sonra anlaşılabiliyor. Fikirlerin yüzde 99'u zaman aşımına uğruyor ve kimin gerçekten geleceği görebildiği ancak gelecekte anlaşılabiliyor.

Bana arkadaşını söyle, sana kim olduğunu söyleyeyim. Bana kaynakçanı göster, sana ne düşündüğünü söyleyeyim.

Exceptions hint at deeper patterns which can only be discovered via patterns among patterns.

Whenever you casually spot a pattern, try to find the underlying deeper pattern. Immediate appearances are almost always special instances.

Even if only one percent of what you say is original, you are achieving a great feat. Pat yourself on the back and keep going.

There is always a trade-off between false positives and false negatives. That is why the edge cases, where one type of error matters way more than the other, are way easier to deal with.

When you discover a new phenomenon that is worth naming, you can either coin a new word or extend the usage of an already existing word. Since words are never semantically stable anyway, we tend to choose the former.

Marketing and researching are dual notions. Either ideas come to you or you go to ideas. Ideas that come to you will have a greater likelihood of being contaminated with hidden agendas and egotistical origins.

Truth transcends time. That is why it is important to be able to communicate with the dead through the works they left behind. (What you consider a virgin territory has probably been already explored by some great mind.)

What differentiates great researchers is not their originality. Original ideas are like siren calls. A lot of smart people can hear them, but few are courageous and passionate enough to follow through and risk getting completely lost.

Each innovation wave is preceded by the emergence of a technology giving rise to new forms of serendipities and cross-fertilizations. Our decade’s will be shaped by Amazon’s recommendation and Google’s search engines.

Be pragmatic in social domains like politics. Intellectual precision is not worth turning your back to a community. Be a perfectionist in other domains and go alone. You should not be satisfying your social needs in such places anyway.

Classify your knowledge (including your classifications) into two dimensional matrices. You will notice that some quadrants are empty. The most profound research questions lie in such emptinesses.

İsimlendirme süreci önemsizmiş gibi algılanır. Oysa buluşunu doğru şekilde isimlendirememiş bir buluşçu ne bulduğunu henüz tam anlamıyla kavrayamadığını direk ele verir. Belli ki buluş onu bulmuştur, o buluşu değil.

”Ezberi kuvvetli” derler ama “unutması kuvvetli” demezler. Oysa hatırlanmaması gereken şeyleri unutmak da önemli bir marifettir. Her şeyi hatırlamak ise marifet değil, öze inmenizi yavaşlatan bir patolojidir.

Start by reading around a subject rather than inside a subject. First see how the subject looks from outside in and then slowly spiral inwards. (Subject’s knowledge of itself is often very poor, as in the case of human beings.)

Temellerde gezinenlere bak, çoğu intihar ediyor ya da deliriyor. Ödül alanlara bak, çoğu yukarılarda geziniyor. Boğulacaksan derin sularda boğul. Karmaşıklıkla derinliği karıştırma. Herkes unutulacak zaten, unutma.

Best problems are those that have chosen you, rather than the other way around.

Truth is never that far away from you. Whenever you have a well-defined proposition that smells wrong, just negate it. Principle of excluded middle guarantees that one of the propositions is right!

There are 3 levels in innovation. 1. You can discover a new thing. 2. You can discover a new method, leading to discovery of many new things. 3. You can discover a new way of thinking, leading to discovery of many new methods.

Aydınlanma yavaş yavaş değil, bir anda gelir. Belirli bir kritik eşik geçildikten sonra tüm sorular kendini ele verir. Dolayısıyla aydınlanma yolunda sabır en önemli faktördür.

You can either develop deep domain expertise and push your model towards the problem, or develop deep learning expertise and pull the problem towards your model.

Seeking analyticity in generative domains is the most fundamental mistake of academia. Complex subjects are accessible only via intuition, or black box machine learning models which basically mimic intuition.

Deneyimlendikçe yazma temponuz yavaşlar çünkü yazdığınız çoğu şeyin yanlış ve gereksiz derecede uzun olduğunu farkedersiniz, ve fikirsel bağlantıları daha net gördüğünüz için düşüncelerinizi ayrıştırmanız zorlaşır.

If you are young, you should not venture into the literature on your own. Otherwise you will easily fall prey to the class of writers who produce deep-sounding pieces of shit based on cheap second-hand experiences.

As a researcher you can either collaborate with others (synchronously or asynchronously) or with yourself (asynchronously). Choose the latter only if you are a good forgetter. Otherwise force yourself to choose the former.

Without exception, all the best thinkers I have met and read are those who reverse engineered their own brains before reverse engineering others'.

When I read works combining two disciplines X and Y, I myself get worse at synthesising X and Y. "Being exposed to more examples of something makes you better at that thing" does not seem to apply to synthetic subjects.

Artık sabrım kalmadı. Eleştirilen eleştireni cebinden çıkaracak deneyime ve zekaya sahipse, eleştiriyi çöpe atıyorum ve zaman kaybından kurtuluyorum. Aradan üç beş tane güzel gözlem çıkacak diye tonlarca şeyi taramıyorum.

You need to remember in order to not run into the previously discovered dead ends. You need to forget in order to look at things in a new light. Hence, after a certain threshold, strength of memory may be detrimental to creativity.

Science

The language you use defines the contours of your philosophy. It is ridiculous to claim one should not anthropomorphise the world, while your language assigns a pronoun even to inanimate objects like a chair.

Philosophy's language strengthens through science. An epistemologist not using contemporary terminology like "backpropagation" is self-limiting himself. Without rich language, explanations become convoluted.

Back in antiquity philosophers used to be at the cutting edge of science. Today, they are trying to do metaphysics without any knowledge of cutting edge physics, and engage in philosophy of mind without any exposure to AI.

Stable equilibriums reveal themselves only when they are perturbed. Likely, scientific "laws" are discovered via the anomalies that defy them. What is rare does not need revealing, since all concealment is due to mental habituation.

Geometry was invented to prevent land dispute. Alphabet was invented to prevent money dispute. We owe the most sacred inventions of humanity to the most (seemingly) mundane motivations.

Communicating science effectively is not a simple matter at all. It is precisely equivalent to being able to cut through the details and see the big picture.

I bet the ratio of science fiction ideas that turned out to be wrong is similar to the ratio of scientific conjectures that turned out to be wrong. They are the right and the left brain versions of the same speculative indulgence.

What prediction stands for in science, prophecy stands for in philosophy.

Humanity progresses by learning how to formalize the notion of "nothing" in various contexts. Inventions of algebraic zero, cartesian space and fiat money revolutionized respectively mathematics, physics and economics.

Institutional science idolizes its method of acquiring knowledge. Institutional religion idolizes its body of acquired knowledge.

Most of our DNA is considered as “junk”. Most of the energy in our universe is labeled away as “dark”. Almost all of the number strings are deemed to be “random”. I say we don’t know “shit”.

As long as we continue to couple dualism with an implicit solipsism, we will not be able to prevent an environmental collapse. We are not the only consciousness in town, entertaining built-in dualist thoughts.

Each scientific discipline was borne out of philosophy and generally scientists are fond of denying the importance of philosophy. Is this contradictory? No. Philosophy’s job is done right after giving birth to a new scientific discipline.

Synchronization happens in three subsequent steps. You can not equalize amplitude without aligning phase first and align phase without equalizing frequency first. There is an order to how differences get erased in nature.

Pragmatists freely inflate the number of axioms to decrease the length of derivations. They leverage the consistency of the reality itself to protect themselves against the possibility of an inconsistency among their axioms.

Analytical understanding is achieved by isolating systems and observing them. That is why science progresses via improvements in refrigerators and microscopes.

Among all sciences only complexity theory truly and openly appreciates the importance of history. All others aspire for universality.

Qualitative knowledge is quantitative knowledge looking at itself. Quantitative knowledge is one qualitative knowledge looking at another.

Ambiguity and redundancy are dual to each other. Former involves one thing serving two purposes, latter involves two things serving one purpose.

Applying game theory to physics and mathematics is like doing science in reverse, importing an experimentational framework into theory rather than subjecting a theoretical framework to experiment.

Artistic communities are much harder to sustain than scientific communities because artists have a common "friend" while scientists have a common "enemy".

Generally speaking, comprehensibility in group dynamics is either due to a large number of same type of actors (as in chemistry and physics) or a small number of different type of actors (as in economics and biology).

If the science around an intervention method is currently unsettled, always side with evolution and remember that it is exceptionally difficult to improve upon billions of years of tinkering. So reject the method, listen your instincts.

Our mathematical bias for limits over colimits mirrors our scientific bias for deduction over induction.

The default mode of the mind is planning while the default mode of the mindless is tinkering. That is why cognitive specializations occur out of necessity while non-cognitive specializations occur out of luxury.

Given long periods of time even the most improbable is achievable by blind tinkering. What cognition does is to increase the frequency of miraculous events by rendering blind tinkering partially unnecessary.

Unlike facts, mysteries have a wholesomeness. They can be morphed to explain each other. All facts were once mysteries, but now are stale and static, like the calcified bodies of once majestic ocean creatures.

Writing good literature is tough for the scientifically trained. Is it because these guys are more "quantitatively" oriented? No. It is because these guys actually know how difficult it is to penetrate life without analytical butchery.

There can be no explanation without an assumption (and therefore no education without some brainwashing.) Science is the art of making the right assumptions and studying their consequences.

Philosophy has not made any progress because hundreds of years of experiments have not given us a single extra metaphor. This will change only if we can alter our physiology so that we can experience truly novel things.

Religion

For the left-brained, solitude is natural. For the right-brained, comfortable solitude is achieved only via peak spiritual maturity, which enables one to feel the ever-present greater invisible mind.

Greatest spiritual heights are often attained in the most malevolent settings, driven by strong, enduring reasons. Rapid maturation stems from reactive rather than imitative forces, albeit with lower survival rates.

You can not have wisdom without knowledge, and knowledge without information. You can not jump straight from information to wisdom, which is often what religious education tries to do.

Spirituality of a person increases in accordance with the number of events, where what was once thought to be under one’s control was not, and where what was once thought to be not under one’s control was.

Complete elimination of evil is tough, and leads to a sterile stability. Containment of evil within virtual environments is much easier, and preserves the psychic vitality of humanity, whose one side always resides in the dark.

Jews believe they are special by descent. Christians believe they are special since only their prophet is God almighty himself. Muslims believe they are special since their doctrine is the most current of all Abrahamic religions.

Every ambitious attempt to build a systematic metaphysics has been founded upon a covert desire to found a new religion.

A program needs to be frozen to a single version before being distributed. Same goes for doctrines. Synchronisation increases speed of propagation, and this was exactly what Roman Catholic Church did for Christianity.

Over time, you have to either revise your doctrine or continue stretching its interpretation, and at some point, the interpretation game becomes so unsustainable that the creed splits and versions itself under new branches.

A world where everybody evaluates themselves in a relative fashion is a world that is on a slippery slope to vulgarity. At the end of the day, what pulls us a society up is a metaphysical belief in the attainability of the Absolute.

Ayahuasca is the junk food equivalent of spirituality. A quick and (literally) dirty route to short-lived enlightenment. Proper spiritual training on the other hand requires tens of years of disciplined practice.

Once the illusion of control wears off, the agnostic becomes a believer. Later, hit by a massive misfortune, he immediately turns into an ill-tempered atheist, as he has not yet grasped that the ultimate truth lies beyond good and evil.

Hakikat nerede saklı? Bazıları diyor geride, yani ona erişmek için unutmalı. Bazıları diyor ileride, yani ona erişmek için öğrenmeli. Bazıları diyor şu anda, yani ona erişmek için farketmeli. Bence herkes haklı. İnsan sadece takılmalı.

Din ve spor bireyin ruhsal ve bedensel sağlığı için özgürleştirici ihtiyaçlardır. Organize din ve organize spor ise toplumun birey üzerindeki kontrolünü artıran araçlardır. Organize dinin dinle, organize sporun sporla alakası yoktur.

Each time you make some progress in knowing thyself, you undo thyself a little more. Enlightenment is a homogenous state. What makes you you are precisely the idiosyncratic absurdities that are preventing you to see the truth.

Religious indoctrination is like gene therapy. The core message (i.e. DNA) fails to win the minds (i.e. enter the nucleuses of cells) and go viral unless it is coated with the right emotional wrapping (i.e. viral gene delivery vehicle).

Religious people act non-selfishly for a better after-life. Non-religious people act selfishly for a better life.

Autistics think everything is devoid of life. Mystics think everything is full of life. Schizophrenics think everything is meaningful in a personal way. Mystics think everything is meaningful in an impersonal way.

Birth is as absurd and mysterious as death, but we treat them asymmetrically and celebrate birth and mourn death. For some reason, mysteries left behind us do not create the same psychological effect as mysteries lying ahead.

- Do I have free will?
- You obviously have enough of it to ask this question. If you want more of it, you will need to fight your way and take it away from the rest of the cosmos.

Anything big eventually turns evil. I mean anything. Egos, companies, countries... Big is literally the embodiment of evil itself.

Ruhsal gelişim süreci insanın kendini tanrı zannetmesiyle başlar, sonra tanrının onu özellikle kolladığı düşüncesiyle devam eder, en sonunda ise tanrının aslında kendi kendine takıldığının farkına varılmasıyla sona erer.

Language can fail either due to inadequate span or inadequate depth. We find the unique and the complex to be ineffable because the languages we have at our disposal can only deal with what is commonplace and simple.

Ruhani doygunluk en üst seviye doygunluktur. Bu konuda artizlenen çoğu tip diğer alanlardaki başarısızlıklarından kaçan, aşağı seviyelerdeki ezikliklerini üç dört seviye zıplayarak örtbas edebileceğini düşünen saftiriklerdir.

Küçük çocuklara din eğitimi vermek kadar saçma bir şey yok. İnsan ancak en son evrelerinde ruhani konuların derinliğini anlayabilir kıvama geliyor. Gerçi bizde her şey şov olduğu için problem yok. Anlıyor gibi görünmek yeterli.

Sufficiently advanced intuition is indistinguishable from revelation.

Super-determinism restores the symmetry between teleology and causality. It no longer makes a difference whether you are uniquely pulled towards a final condition and uniquely pushed away from an initial condition.

If anything can turn you on sexually, you will be declared a freak. If anything can turn you on spiritually, you will be declared a saint.

Planck size is the virtual boundary providing the ultimate stability to our physical universe. God is the virtual boundary providing the ultimate stability to our spiritual universe.

Jung: One of the main functions of organized religion is to protect people against a direct experience of God. Me: Main function of organized religion is to shield people away from their innate desire to become Gods themselves.

At some point in life you realize that everything is already optimal. It is a very weird super-deterministic feeling. Things look suboptimal only because you are either taking yourself too seriously or not zooming out enough.

There is such a big difference between the man who learned his religion and the man who discovered his religion, equal to the size of the difference between the man who inherited his wealth and the man who built his wealth.

Religion peaks either after technology disappoints and turns evil (e.g. rise of anti-materialism after World War I), or technology succeeds and frees people (e.g. birth of new religions after the agricultural revolution).

Both religion and science seek mystery, the only difference is that religion finds it in the causes while science finds in the effects. In other words, they are time-flipped versions of the same primal need.

"There is a reason why you came here." "Perhaps his / her real intention is something else." These two lines can be so powerful if pronounced in the right context with the right gusto. Go add some mystery to people’s lives.

All scientific ideas will be replaced or improved upon. In other words there is ample space for religion.

Judaism, Christianity and Islam. They are just versions one, two and three of basically the same monotheistic and hierarchical belief system that was borne out of the harsh and unforgiving living conditions of a desert.

Mathematics

Focus on reading proofs that build on established results. These provide the connections essential for developing deep conceptual understanding, while most proofs are merely technical exercises.

The most challenging part of a mathematician's education is discerning when to delve into the minute details of a proof and when to step back to grasp the broader connections between definitions and theorems.

Emergence of a circadian clock in neural networks is analogical to presence of a natural number object in toposes. They are both used to order phenomena from within.

How does mathematics progress? Simple. Through revisions of old definitions so that the theorems that were deemed as fundamental in the old framework become trivial consequences of the new definitions.

Both Category Theory and Quantum Field Theory ignore "size problems" with a pragmatic attitude, and believe that the extreme usefulness of the results of their deductions prove the consistency of their initial foundational schemes.

We use the linear to approximate the smooth, the smooth to approximate the discrete. Our analyses are always two-steps away from reality. Dealing with the discrete without sacrificing depth of comprehension is impossibly hard.

In mathematics, disputes end with new definitions while expositions begin with them.

Category Theory becomes truly a two dimensional language only when you restrict to Monoidal categories where arrows can get tangled up. (Relations, normally considered as epistemological, become partially ontological.)

Unfair advantage of physicists over mathematicians is the physical intuition their minds inherently possess. Unfair advantage of mathematicians over physicists is the aesthetic structure their subject inherently possesses.

Physics is saved from Russell’s paradox by existence of time. Mathematics can be saved from it only by the introduction of a discrete size-hierarchy (open-ended in one direction) that acts basically like a frozen version of time.

Mathematics is only meant to be for conceptual understanding. If it is still useful for a practical problem, it is because computer science can not tackle it due to current engineering limits or some waiting-to-be-discovered ideas.

If you generalize the standard basis of Euclidean space as (local) operators on curves, you end up discovering differential geometry. If you generalize them as (global) generators of points, you end up discovering linear algebra.

An enemy of my enemy may not be a friend under intuitionistic logic.

Strangely, mathematics became truly human only when it was finally put on inhumanly precise foundations. Proof of why a set of axioms can not imply its own consistency revealed the deep all-too-human nature of mathematics.

Only cash and proofs are not open to debate and criticism. Cash is either there or not and a proof is either true or not. That is why only entrepreneurs and mathematicians feel absolutely no insecurity when they are good.

Reversal of a process that involves loss of information will involve loss of uniqueness. (e.g. differentiation vs integration) In other words, as symptoms, loss of information and loss of uniqueness are inverses of each other.

Prevalence of embedding theorems in mathematics is basically a manifestation of physics’ ability to absorb even our wildest abstractions.

Topology and geometry are distinguished by how they treat the intuitive notion of a singularity. One says it is a hole, the other says it is a kink. What is important is the notion of singularity, neither of these answers.

A mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems, Erdös said. My strategy is caffeine-free. I turn grand architectures into tidbit philosophy.

Mathematics helps you distinguish what is trivial from what is not. Experience helps you distinguish what is noise from what is not. As you get smarter more stuff starts to look trivial. As you get wiser more stuff starts to look like noise.

Mathematics is error prone in the most extreme sense. You are not allowed to make even a single mistake anywhere. Compare this to software. Most programs contain bugs but they nevertheless do the job and work fine.

Physics

Quantum Supremacy in Informatic Terms: Entire visible universe is needed to simulate just a set of 400 qubits. Quantum Supremacy in Energetic Terms: One teaspoon of vacuum contains as much energy as the visible universe.

Glass is not a solid. It is arrested motion. An infinitely slow fluid that is still in motion, but is too slow for us to observe. Glass allows you to take infinity in your palm.

Perfect elasticity is equivalent to having a single dynamical equilibrium point in the form space. Perfect plasticity is equivalent to every point in the form space being a dynamical equilibrium.

Yes, earthquakes happen due to plate tectonics. But plate tectonics themselves happen to let earth relax into a more uniform shape. In other words, people are dying so that earth can spin faster. How poetic is that?

Only after witnessing the exponential growth of my child did I truly realize the non-linear character of time.

Physics wins in the short run. Metaphysics wins in the long run.

Squeeze Earth to 3 cm once, then it will start to squeeze itself automatically via its own gravity and eventually become a singularity. Newton gave us free directional movement (inertia) and Einstein gave us free contraction.

Physicists switch between equivalent dual frameworks, thinking sometimes in terms of fields, sometimes in terms of strings. There is nothing inherently real about neither strings nor fields. We always confuse the map with the territory.

Don't be afraid of particles accelerators or genetic engineers. Nature itself has been even naughtier than us, with its cosmic rays carrying more energy than accelerators and UV rays causing random mutation events all the time.

We feel as if it is mass which is conserved, not energy, which always leaks and disappears. Conservation of energy becomes apparent only at very large scales, disappearance of mass becomes possible only at very high energies.

Color of an object depends on how fast and in which direction the object is moving relative to you. In other words, the only reason why we can agree on colors is because we are moving so slow relative to each other.

Metaphysics is all about pondering things that in principle can not be pondered about, and that is precisely why it is so important.

Physicists abandoning the notion of particles in favor of the more general notion of disturbances is the counterpart of mathematicians abandoning the notion of functions in favor of the more general notion of distributions.

Physicist: Quantum particles are indistinguishable. You can not specify which one you picked! Mathematician: I wish you applied the same level of sensitivity to your mathematical tools and stopped using Axiom of Choice.

For some reason we are appalled by the notion of perpetual motion, but not at all disturbed by the notion of inertia which basically grants constant motion for free.

Conservation of energy implies that all states are fluid. (Liouville's Theorem) Elimination of double-negation implies that all processes are continuous. (Brouwer's Theorem) Physics is all about continuously transforming fluidities.

All Physics 101 books look like each other because many other fields have built courses on top of Physics 101. In other words, physics education has become a victim of its own success, locked into a form unable to reform itself.

Solid has fixed volume, fixed shape. Liquid has fixed volume, flexible shape. Gas has flexible volume, flexible shape. What is inside the missing quadrant? What has flexible volume, fixed shape? Space itself?

Nature maintains consistency against each spacetime point, not across all spacetime points. Same thing can look different to one observer at two different times, or to two observers who will not be able to talk about it later.

Every chance event can be uncompressed into series of non-chance events and every non-chance event can be traced back to a chance event. In other words, life is not that dramatic, it just ”speeds” up and down constantly.

Disorder is just imperceivable order. Cooling (decreasing disorder) makes the imperceivable perceivable. Similarly, mass is just imperceivable velocity and conservation of momentum (mass times velocity) allows you to reveal it.

Thermodynamics as a theory never dies because it is essentially a theory about all theories. It adapts to advances in our understanding of physics simply by modifying the configuration space it acts on accordingly.

Thermo dynamical disorder has an epistemological origin but an ontological effect, and quantum mechanical disorder has an ontological origin but an epistemological effect. Former “burns” while latter “collapses”.

Time eventually turns every possible into an actual, thereby solving all computable problems whatsoever. What is improbable is in fact inevitable.

Admitting that universe is higher dimensional makes the theory automatically non-local, just like admitting that fundamental constituents of matter are strings rather than points makes the theory automatically relativistic.

Unification within mathematics happens because there is only one human mind. Unification within physics happens because there is only one physical reality. Now guess why unification of mathematics and physics happens.

Ascribing information theory a physically fundamental status is akin to solipsism in disguise.

Physical existence and emergence of life are the two greatest mysteries. Former is much more fundamental, but it is so intractable that there is very little to sensibly talk about. (No wonder why latter receives more attention.)

Theoretical economists and experimental physicists are similar in the sense that they both operate on the poorer side of the equation. Theory has failed miserably in economics and succeeded astonishingly in physics.

Biology

What can not be grasped by our brains is deemed mysterious and thereby arises intellectual respect. I believe something similar happens within our bodies with respect to what can not be processed by our guts.

Astronomik referanslar görünürden kaybolunca dümdüz yürüyebilme yetimizi kaybediyor, dev bir spiral çizmeye başlıyoruz. Benzer şekilde, gün ışığından mahrum bırakıldığımızda, bir günü 24 saatten daha kısaymış gibi algılıyoruz.

In nature every being is eaten alive by some other being. Who is eating humans then? Humans are devouring each other.

I do not want to live in a world where all major organic chemical cycles are named after some man. Krebs cycle, Hodgkin cycle. Life does not belong to anyone. Name something else to satisfy your childish claim to immortality.

Guess what happen if you eat a low alkaline, low gluten, low histamine diet? You starve. Every food is an intrusion into the body, and challenges it in one way or another. We are evolving along with what goes through our stomachs.

The real reason why wearing heels is so sexy is because the back of the wearer bends into a lordosis position, opening up the vagina for penetration. All that modernity can do is to build a thin veil over eons of primitivity.

You truly understand a species only if you can tell apart all its "play" moments. (Every mind plays, not matter how small, because playing is an integral part of learning.)

It is thanks to plate tectonics that the earth surface never completely solidified nor completely liquified. Life is built upon (and arises from) layers and layers of dynamical flux, all the way down.

99% of the genes within our body belong to foreign bacterial cells. 99% of the molecules in our body is water.

Recombination of memes is called collaboration. Recombination of genes is called fornication.

Combine sodium and chlorine, both of which are reactive and toxic, you get table salt. Take the mirror reflection of (+)-limonene, the compound which gives the smell of oranges, you get (-)-limonene, the smell of pine needles.

Kişiselleştirilmiş tıp ve milyon dolarlık ilaçlar dönemine girdik. Artık fakir toplumlarda yaşamak, kafana roket düşerek ölme riski değil, kurtarılabilecekken göz göre göre ölüme terkedilmek anlamına gelecek.

Epilepsies, spasms and heart attacks. What do they have in common? They all arise due to too much synchrony.

A single drop of seawater contains more than 5 million viruses and 5 sextillion atoms.

You should always trust your gut-feelings, especially when the subject matter is your gut.

To understand evolution, it suffices to take a simple look at the evolution of ideas about evolution.

As Hermann Vöchting said back in 1878, “the function of a cell is determined by its morphological position.” Similarly, the destiny of a human is determined by its geographical position. In short, as they say, geography is destiny.

Species tend to de-sync from their predators by communicating in a different frequency and replicating at a co-prime frequency.

Suda görüş açısı çok dar. Hele bir de hızlı ilerliyorsan, düşünmeye hiç vaktin yok, her şeye anlık tepki verebilmen gerekiyor. Yaşam ancak karaya çıkınca, uzağı görebilince düşünmeyi öğrenebiliyor. Peki uzaya çıkınca ne olacak?

Apparently one can last roughly three minutes without oxygen, three days without water and three weeks without food. How poetic.

You can engineer only human artifacts, not nature. Using the word “biological engineering” is OK in the context of synthetic biology, but not OK in the context of medical intervention where you can only hope for the best.

Genes are silenced temporarily in a continuous way by histone modification, permanently in a discrete way by methylation. They are backed up internally in DNA form via redundancy, externally in RNA form via retro transcription.

People say geography is destiny, but the actual situation is a little more abstract than that. It is the fitness landscape that is destiny, not the physical geography.

Both mind and matter have found a creative way to achieve persistence among constant environmental change. They are called respectively as DNA and Ego Trick.

World looks bright and colorful, but our brains reside in complete darkness within our skulls. Space looks empty and dark, but it is full of virtual light particles. Darkness is imperceivably bright, brightness is imperceivably dark.

Evrim genel olarak kusurlara uzak, farklılıkları ise yakın durmamızı ister. Kusurların farklılık olarak görüldüğü açık toplumlarda ve farklılıkların kusur olarak görüldüğü kapalı toplumlarda ise daha deneysel takılır.

All naturally emerging competitions are actually instances of cooperations in disguise. This is how evolution works. We think that we are competing, but we are actually striving to collectively achieve a single global goal.

There is no “the” reference genome for a population due to healthy variations among different individuals, and no “the” sequenced genome for an individual due to irreconcilable variations among different algorithm-sequencer pairs.

Sensitivity to initial conditions and suddenness of phase transitions are basically the same phenomena. In complex systems, small perturbations can lead to drastic changes in either a lagged or an immediate manner.

Evolution proceeds at the lowest level via slow deterministic waves (e.g. genetics) and at the highest level via fast statistical waves (e.g. cognition), and keeps pushing in both directions by generating more levels in between.

Stress increases number of errors directly by creating new ones and indirectly by preventing the correction of old ones.

Nerve impulses travel at around 300 km/s and light waves travel at around 300 000 km/s. Fastest speed of biological information transfer is thousand times slower than fastest speed of physical information transfer. How poetic.

Storing uncompressed genomic information is expensive, but uncompressing it before each analysis is also expensive. If you will not touch the data for a long time, just keep the DNA itself. It is much more durable than hard disks.

PCR machines could stabilize in design because they turn biology into biology. Sequencers could not because they turn biology into computer science. (Representations change as our understanding and capabilities do.)

Personalized prosthetics reduces pain in a continuous way, personalized medicine saves lives in a binary way. Because of this difference, although personalization is expensive in both, it only becomes economic in the latter.

Common diseases are due to common mutations in many low penetration genes. Rare diseases are due to rare mutations in a few high penetration genes. They are duals and both require a lot of genomic data to identify.

The most extreme genetic variance is between males and females. In other words, objectively speaking, sex is the most discriminative factor in defining who you are. It is ridiculous to ignore this fact due to historical sensitivities.

New diseases pop up mostly in warm, humid places which we find disgusting and stay away from. Ironically life itself was born in such places. Diseases are ecological disturbances caused by the introduction of new life forms.

Evolution is so sophisticated that even evolvability itself is within its subject matter. For instance, evolvability of a species changes in direct correlation with the number of complete sets of chromosomes within its genome.

Our lives start off with 3 billion DNA letters and end by 3 billion heart beats. How poetic.

Recurrence is more easily understood when it is confined to a single dimension. That is why the ear is better at picking it up than the eye.

Göbek yağıyla yakınlık algısı ters orantılıdır.

Art

Fiction serves as a conduit for conveying empathy from the highly sensitive elites, such as artists and writers, to the less attuned ones. It is how the elite class (as a whole) can comprehend the struggles of the less privileged.

In photography, my love for fashion and nature stems from a singular source: the veneration of feminine energy—fashion photography captures it via the human form, and nature photography, via the divine form of the goddess.

The art world's reliance on uniqueness and limited editions has made it an early adopter of blockchain technology, which at its core, ensures uniqueness by creating a distinct history for each object.

Modifikasyon çirkini güzel yapmak için değil, güzeli daha da güzel yapmak için yapılır. Arabalar için de, insanlar için de aynısı geçerlidir. Çirkin için o kadar çok modifikasyon gerekir ki, topyekün sıfırdan başlamak daha kolaydır.

Both art and play are of preparatory nature. They expose you in a safe manner to what you have not yet experienced out in the wild.

Geleceğin estetiği ışıksal oyunlar üzerinden dönecek. Neon ışıklar, sonsuz aynalar, ultra siyah boyalar… Çünkü gelecek ışığı daha iyi kontrol edebilme üzerine inşaa edilecek.

Masterpieces in fiction are precisely the works that do not sound fictional at all.

Bir şeye illustrasyon yapabilirsin, ya da bir şeyi resmedebilirsin. İki konsept arasındaki tek fark budur. Yani, illustrasyon kendi ayakları üzerinde duramayan / durmak istemeyen resimdir.

A song should be appreciated as a whole, and understood via dissection. Same holds for the entire reality itself, as well.

Just as art gradually became more conceptual over time, marketing too is going through a similar transition. Today, social media is so competitive that attaining virality requires serious conceptual innovation.

Poetry exists because of our inability to name every emotion. It captures the long tail of emotions, so to speak.

Art is beautiful when it destructs and propagates pessimism. Science is beautiful when it constructs and propagates optimism.

Nasıl sorunlu insanlar psikolojiye ilgi duyuyorsa, kendini çirkin hissedenler de görsel sanatlara eğilir. Hep sahip olamadığımızı, uzanamadığımızı arzularız. Ölümle barışamayanlar da bilgiye doyamazlar, hep bir cevap arayışındalardır.

Why do we want our contemporary artists to be good thinkers? Art is supposed to explore emotions, not concepts. Artists are supposed to be selected for their sensitivities, not their wits.

Çok iyi fotoğrafçılar film çekemezler, çünkü her sahnenin fotoğraf kalitesinde olmasını beklerler.

Hikayeleştirme soyutlaştırma, senaryolaştırma ise somutlaştırma süreçleridir. Dolayısıyla hikayeyi senaryolaştırmak bir nevi somuta dönüştür.

Artists mesmerizing people with technological wizardry are sophisticated populists whose works will be forgotten along with the trends they are riding. Real artists aim for timelessness and do not treat art as a show business.

Kötü şarkılar kendilerini ortalarda ele verir. Orta kısımlar hep gerçek kalite seviyesini gösterir. Yaratıcılar genelde başa ve sona kasarlar, ortada ise sanatsal kimliklerini çıplak bırakırlar.

İyi füzyon yapmak çok zor genel olarak. Mutfakta da, modada da, müzikte de.

Yaşlandıkça mızıka gibi titrek çalgıları daha bir sevmeye başladım.

Basit müzik sesi yükseldikçe, kompleks müzik ise sesi alçaldıkça güzelleşir.

Martial Arts

Can one be both violent and virtuous? Certainly, if today's violence averts greater harm tomorrow, it is justifiable. It's the narrow-minded, unable to consider hypothetical scenarios, who reject all violence on principle.

Impersonality of the means of a killing correlates with the impersonality of the reason behind the killing. A personal vendetta is best conducted with bare hands. An ideological warfare is best done by clicking buttons.

Why does a nation need only one commander, but many soldiers? Because information scales, but energy does not.

Basic moves in martial arts are like definitions that have been vetted and optimized by generations of mathematicians. They are the fundamental building blocks that should be thoroughly internalized by every beginner.

Exercise all the degrees of freedom within your body. In other words, break all possible symmetries in all possible directions.

Bruce Lee's principle of "longest weapon - nearest target" is essentially the formulation of least action principle for martial arts.

There is a trade-off between power and unpredictability. The more powerful the move you try to make, the more predictable your move will become. So stop showing off, start splitting your moves into smaller more optimal pieces.

The one who anticipates does not need to fight. He just waits.

You win a fight by de-syncing yourself from your opponent. A fight where opponents can completely anticipate each other exhibits essentially the same characteristics as a dance.

Delivering a good punch requires you to throw your body out of equilibrium as much as possible without sacrificing reversibility.

Neden sağdan yürüyoruz? Sağlak biri kılıcını çekip, defans şansı tanımadan bizi doğrayamasın diye. Neden selamlaşırken avucumuzu açıp sallıyoruz? Elimizde silah olmadığı gözüksün diye. Gündelik hayat şiddet tarihiyle bezeli.

Life Advice

One's surname roots an individual in their ancestral heritage, reflecting the past. In contrast, a first name should look forward, serving as a source of inspiration for the future.

Dogmalarını güncel tut ama dogmasız kalma. Hep bir pusulan olmalı hayatta.

There are only two ways of breaking chicken-or-egg problems in life. Trust (right brain way) and money (left brain way).

There are levels in intellectual and spiritual maturity, and it is impossible for someone at level N to reach all the way down to mentor level N-4 efficiently. Instead everyone should just pull upwards those immediately below himself.

Too much control leads to sterility. The trick is to let stochasticity into your life in a controlled manner. Opportunities do not present themselves to you in a random fashion. You always have a degree of control over what type to let in.

“Do not discriminate” is such a naive and stupid advice. On the contrary, one should discriminate ever more refinedly. Only then one can be just.

Some choose to accumulate wisdom, some money. But whether one is selfish or not is determined by how one shares such accumulations, and wisdom is indisputably harder to share, compared to money.

Being goal-oriented towards useless goals is practically no different than being process-oriented and enjoying the journey itself.

With respect to what you have already created, you should ask yourself “Why should it stay in existence?” With respect to what you can create anew you should ask yourself “Why should I bring it into existence?”

İçe kapanarak bulunan her tür huzur istikrarsız olmak zorunda. Bunu termodinamiğin yasaları söylüyor. Dışa açılarak bulunan huzur ise öğrenim gerektirmekte. Yani, ya hata yapmayı göze alacaksın, ya da çürüyeceksin.

Choose your enemy wisely. Once you lock-in on each other, you will start to co-evolve, and either become like each other or become like negations of each other. In other words, at the end, you will be defining each other.

Hayranlık verici her şey (insanlar, kitaplar, manzaralar) basit bir prensibin çok ama çok uzun süre boyunca tutarlı bir şekilde uygulanmasından doğar. Yani perdenin arkasındaki esas mimar zamandır. Gizem hep zamanda saklıdır.

To be creative, you need to exert some control over the pre-processing of new experiences, by either pulling less from or retaining less in memory.

İnsanlar şikayet ettikleri şeyleri aştıkça olgunlaşır ve özgünleşirler. Hiç zorluk çekmemişler ise gittikçe saftirikleşir ve şımarıklaşırlar.

İyi tavsiye alabilmek zordur, çünkü en önemli adım kimden tavsiye alacağını doğru seçmektir ve bunu da gerçekten tavsiyeye ihtiyacı olanlar bir türlü beceremez.

People with whom you have minimal shared history are in the best position to give you rational advice. People with whom you have maximal shared history are in the best position to give you intuitional advice. You need them both.

Be attentive both when otherwise-crazy people say smart things and when otherwise-smart people say crazy things. They will help you reduce the number of your false-positive and false-negative beliefs.

Set up frameworks that can learn and improve over time. Trying to nail down everything right at the beginning is a futile exercise. That is why French law is doomed whereas American law improves through new cases.

As your tastes become refined, you get more and more turned on by fewer and fewer experiences. Your appreciation capacity stays the same but your attention evolves away from a uniform shallow form to an uneven spiky one.

Every extraordinary achievement can be traced back to a combination of extraordinary sacrifices (i.e. controllable factors) and extraordinary circumstances (i.e. uncontrollable factors).

Walk slowly in life. Do not get distracted by the noise created by those walking fast. Speed and cacophony make it harder to stay on the right course. What matters in the long run is only the direction of the course.

You can give the middle finger to the rest of the world only when you are a world onto yourself. (e.g. China being able to isolate itself economically / Porn sites being able survive by advertising each other.)

Next time you look at a random photograph, try imagining that all the people in it have passed away. Your senses will open up, presenting you details that you had not previously noticed.

Other Subjects

Yükselişleri de düşüşleri de izlemeyi sever halk, çünkü insanlar genelde ikisini de yapamazlar. Dipte stabil şekilde seyredeler. Yükseklere hiç tırmanmadıkları için doğru düzgün düşemezler de.

Yükselenler tepelerden iletişimleşirler. Onların diyaloglarını duyamazsınız bile.

Hayvansever diye geçinenlerin çoğu sokakta köpek sevip, evde et yiyor. Müthiş gerçekten.

The ultimate criterion for evaluating any piece of philosophy is whether it sheds any new light on the mind-body duality.

Gelecek, aksiyon insanı icin öndedir çünkü o görünene doğru ilerler, düşünce insanı içinse arkadadır çünkü o görünmeyene doğru ilerler.

Akıl oyunu oynayanlar genelde ya işi gücü olmayanlar, ya da işlerinde akıllarını kullanmayanlardır.

History does not repeat itself because of the nitty gritty details studied in history courses, it does so because of high level structural reasons that actually fall outside the domain of history courses.

Ne kadar çok para çaldırırsanız o kadar paranızı bulma olasılığınız artar.

Sigara yasağı yüksek tavanlı geniş mekanlara uygulanmamalı. Eskiden havalimanlarında millet en azından içeride dağınık bir şekilde içiyordu, bir araya gelip pofurdata pofurdata herkesi kapı ağzında karşılamıyordu.

Eskiden fakirler futbol oynar zenginler izlermiş, zenginler beyaz fakirler kepekli ekmek yermiş. Şimdi ise durum tam tersi. Eskiden beyaz tenli olmak çalışmama, yani zenginlik göstergesiymiş. Şimdi herkes solaryuma gidiyor.

"En iyi aşçı açlıktır." diye bir Rus atasözü vardır. Aslında esas aşçı ölüm tehlikesidir. Dışarıda insanların rastgele vurulduğunu öğrenmek sadece yemeğin değil, her şeyin tadını artırır çünkü her şeyi daha bir anlamlandırır.

Pregnant women place their hands over their bellies when they are at rest. This action is a desire to signal that they are not fat, they are just pregnant. Fat women, on the other hand, pretend that the protrusion does not exist.

If you suspect that a person you are dealing with is a scam artist, do not try to justify to the person your sudden desire to cut him off. Otherwise knowing how he gave himself away will allow him to perfect his craft even further.

Cep telefonuyla fotoğraf çekme alışkanlığı hafızamı iyice işlevsiz hale getirdi. Eskiden rastgele kareler hatırlarken şimdi sadece çektiğim fotoğraf karelerini hatırlıyorum. Zaten kaydedilmiş parçaları yani!

What do housemaids and mp3 technology have in common? mp3 is a type of compression that results in great data loss but little perceptible change in quality. Housemaids clean only areas that are likely to be checked.

Traveling light for short-term visits is a privilege of the internationally mobile. Traveling light for long-term visits is an even higher privilege, enjoyable only by the ultra-rich or the ultra-connected.