Intro
I skipped the last week partly because I’m still dealing with the problem on my back and leg. Hopefully I’ll get some clear answers about it in two days. It’s been a month since our adventure with our health system and even though it’s a bit slow, it’s nice to see my insurance payments to the state in action.
Greetings from Sangarius. Hope you’re all doing well.
Mission Control
Inbox: 77
RSS Reader: 1740
Upcoming Events/Travel in Next 30 Days: 2 (Maybe?)
- Had to delay bunch of writing because of the health stuff so I need to clean that backlog.
- Recording and publishing the new Tuhaf Gelecek podcast episode.
- Need to start preparing for couple of upcoming events.
- Also planning to put some time aside for personal admin and work system adjustments.
Check my Now page if you want to see what I’m up to in a more detailed way.
If you’d like to collaborate or need services, Tuhaf Studio is accepting new clients. For speaking or panelist opportunities, contact London Speaker Bureau Türkiye. To support my work regularly, you can contribute through my Patreon.
Dirty Philosophy
I was never an anti-AI type of person and actually quite impressed with its capabilities and played with them both to make things easier for me and also see its limits and potential. But I try to do my best to not talk about it on social media platforms because the discourse over there is unbearably dumb for my taste.
As a result of my personal experience with this technology and reading what smart people are saying about it instead of wasting my time on the microblogging platforms, my philosopher side got activated and I’ve been reading, taking notes, and thinking about what all of this means in a philosophical sense. That’s why I thought this is a good time to talk about my approach to philosophy.
Choosing what kind of professional life you want at the age of 18 is never a smart idea. But I’m glad that I chose to study philosophy because even though I’m not an academic (thankfully), I know I couldn’t do the many things I’ve done without that. From my approach to the problems I face or how I do certain things are all based on my study. That’s why I still actively study philosophy and make sure to keep up with the recent works.
So, why am I glad that I didn’t become an academic philosopher? Because I always felt like the way philosophy is done in an academic setting was too limited and stuck in the past. I’m not saying that you don’t need to learn the history of it but most of the departments prefer being history of philosophy departments than actually doing philosophy. Things I’ve seen in the academic world made me realize I have to find other ways to do philosophy, and that experience actually pushed me into the futures and foresight field. Thinking about the world itself and its futures, making philosophy while being an active participant in the world I’m thinking about seemed much more sensible and fun.
That’s one of the reasons why I keep coming back to Jay’s observation from a couple of months ago. It’s especially funny when you think about the constant STEM spam we’ve been seeing since the late 2000s. When you look at the kind of people Jay talks about, you’ll see that they’re interested in using that knowledge as a base to think about today’s problems — doing actual philosophy rather than doing history of philosophy.
And I think the same goes for all of the humanities. The majority of those fields are way too focused on historical figures and what they said, while missing out on the fact that we’re not living in their time period and someone needs to say new things. But being too reliant on these big names makes it hard to even consider this possibility. “How dare you think that you can say something new while we have all these dead people?”
Instead of being skeptical or critical, this academic bubble forces most of them to be extremely defensive. This ends up limiting their chances of having any impact on what’s happening around us too. When your only mode is being defensive and resisting any kind of interaction with the world other than just analyzing it with your theoretical filter, you shouldn’t be surprised about people not really taking your warnings seriously.
Being an academic puritan definitely makes you feel good about yourself — just like any other kind of puritanism — but it also creates a wall that’s really hard to breach for most people. But the problem is that the real world is a messy, dirty place that resists being clean and pure. When you insist on not acknowledging this fact, your theory doesn’t have any chance against the practice.
I know there are lots of people who will disagree with me, and this includes some of my good friends too, but that’s simply my experience. I’m on the side of getting your hands dirty and thinking while doing. Sure, I’ll probably get dirty as well, but that’s the cost of “thinking with the world” instead of “thinking about the world”. And I have no problem with getting a little dirty if it makes my work more grounded and gives it a chance to have an impact on the problems I care about.
Song of the Week
Wanted to go with something topical this week.
Reading Log
- Kalshi and Polymarket Create New Competition for Professional Economists – The New York Times
- “Bettors, he realized, have one advantage: They don’t have to make a prediction if they’re not highly confident that they’re right. Professional forecasters don’t have a choice; even if the data are confusing and they don’t have much conviction in the number, they guess.”
- The Innovation System as a Disruptive Battlespace | RAND
- “A recent NATO report defined cognitive warfare as the “manipulation of the enemy’s cognition,” involving “the use of all knowledge, strategies, and available tools to impact human behavior…. with the end goal of manipulating and altering decision-making.” Under this definition, the systems associated with technological innovation offer ripe pickings for cognitive-style warfare.”
- TfE: On Post-Searlean Critiques of LLMs – DEONTOLOGISTICS
- “The semantic content of mathematical statements is more or less purely inferential, lacking any direct connection to perception or action. Some (e.g., Derrida) have used this to argue that mathematics is an inherently meaningless game of symbol manipulation, but this is silly.”
- Or is it? 🧐
Outro
I think that’s all there is for this week. Take care of yourselves and your weird sides and I’ll see you around!
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