Erotapokriseis X
EN:
Hello my dear readers, I’ve been reading your emails with great pleasure. Some of your questions were too thoughtful to disappear into private replies, so I decided to collect a few of them here. Thank you for your kindness, curiosity, and careful reading. :)
TR:
Merhaba sevgili okurlarım,
E-postalarınızı büyük bir keyifle okuyorum. Bazı sorularınız özel cevapların içinde kaybolamayacak kadar düşünceliydi; bu yüzden birkaçını burada bir araya getirmek istedim. Nezaketiniz, merakınız ve dikkatli okumanız için çok teşekkür ederim. Yakında doğum günüm geliyor, keşke orada olsaydım. Çok sevgiler. :)
1) Q: When did the line between knowledge and performance disappear? Question came specifically for this post: The System That Rewards Visibility Over Knowledge
A: When the evaluator changed!
The line between knowledge and performance did not disappear because people suddenly stopped caring about truth. It disappeared when visibility became the currency, and the audience replaced the expert as the judge. Once the reward became reach, the person who knows quietly began losing to the person who performs knowing beautifully. Certainty started to look like competence. Simplicity started to look like clarity. Confidence started to look like truth.
And perhaps the saddest part is that the genuine expert often looks less impressive: more hesitant, more careful, more limited, more willing to say “I don’t know.” But those are not failures of knowledge. Those are signs of it. So the line disappeared when we began rewarding the appearance of knowing more than the slow, private, unglamorous labor of actually knowing.
2) Q: Is Camus’s absurd a coldness toward life, or the final form of honesty?
A: This is totaly my perspective from my readings of Camus : The absurd is not coldness toward life. It is the refusal to comfort ourselves with meanings we did not actually earn. Camus is not asking us to feel less; he is asking us to stop lying about what the universe has promised us. In that sense, the absurd is not despair, but the final form of honesty.
3) Q: I have not read the Camus’s stranger yet. Does The Stranger tell us more about morality, or about society’s fear of authenticity?
A: Both, but more about society’s fear of authenticity.
The Stranger is not asking us to admire Meursault as a moral model; it is showing us how violently society reacts when someone refuses to perform the emotions it expects. He is punished not only for what he did, but for what he failed to pretend.
4) Q: In The System That Rewards Visibility Over Knowledge you describe a system that rewards visibility over knowledge. Have you ever felt the urge to play that game yourself, the pressure to be more visible than you’re comfortable with?
A: Honestly and proudly: never! Not once! Everything I’ve achieved in life, I achieved for myself; I never expected approval, applause, or appreciation from anyone. And the very moment I caught myself expecting it, I stopped myself. That is exactly what makes me Filiz: not bending, not breaking!
This question did not came in Turkish, but I liked to answer it. So here is the Turkish translation!
4) Q: The System That Rewards Visibility Over Knowledge yazınızda bilgi yerine görünürlüğü ödüllendiren bir sistemi anlatıyorsunuz. Hiç o oyunu kendiniz oynama dürtüsü hissettiniz mi, rahat olduğunuzdan daha görünür olma baskısı?
A: Durustce ve gururla, asla! Hic bir zaman! Ben hayatta basardigim her seyi kendim icin basardim kimseden de onay, alkis, appreciation beklemedim. bekledigim an da kendimi durdurdum! Beni Filiz yapan sey bu zaten, egilmemek ve bukulmemek. Gururla!
This question came in Turkish.
5) Q: Bir yıldan fazladır neredeyse her hafta yeni bir yazı çıkıyor, harika bir blog, üstüne okul, iş, go kariyeri, bu cevaplara zaman ayırmanız. Hiç uyuyor musunuz? :)
A: Çok tesekkür ederim, çok şekersiniz! Hakikaten uyuyamıyorum. Vücudum hiç dinlenemiyor. Kansızlığım baya kötü durumda ve Amerika’da sadece 8 kez Iron-IV verdiler ve gerisini sen kendin halletmelisin dediler takviye alarak. Halbuki çok iyi bir sağlık güvencem var! Bazen nefessiz kalıyorum. Bazen bir ayda aldığım tüm demir takviyesini bir adette kaybediyorum. Zor geçiyor biraz. Şu hayatta sağlığımdan başka sorunum yok diyebilirim ama maalesef o da çok büyük sorun!
Yani sorunuza cevabım, uyumak istesem bile uyuyamıyorum!
6) Q: What makes you lose interest in someone immediately?
A: Insincerity.
When the distance between what someone says and what they actually do becomes too wide, something in me quietly shuts down.
7) Q: Is decoherence only a physical problem, or can it also be seen as the universe’s resistance to preserving memory?
A: It is a physical problem, fully. But I like the second framing, as long as we do not take it mystically: the universe is not “resisting” anything. The environment is constantly entangling with the qubit, quietly carrying away information about it until the state is no longer privately itself. In that sense, yes, memory is not free; it has to be paid for, atom by atom. We are allowed to romanticize a little, right? :)
8) Q: Is Stoicism, for you, about disciplining the emotions, or about living without self-deception?
A: I am not a Stoic! But the part of Stoicism I actually value is not going cold, not disciplining emotion into silence. It’s living without self-deception: seeing clearly what is in your control and what is not, what you are actually feeling, and what story you are telling yourself to avoid admitting it. I don’t want to be without emotion. I just don’t want to be governed by illusions.
9) Q: When reading Seneca, what is more disturbing: that he speaks about death, or that he is right about life?
A: That he is right about life. Death is not the disturbing part of Seneca. The disturbing part is how calmly he notices the ways we waste our lives while pretending we’re still waiting for them to begin. He isn’t frightening because he talks about dying. He’s frightening because he makes procrastination look like a moral failure.
10) Q: If life has no inherent meaning, does our responsibility to live well decrease or increase?
A: I think it increases! If meaning isn’t handed to us from the outside, we are not relieved of the responsibility; we are left alone with it. We have to live well not because the universe is watching, but because no one else can do the living for us.
11) Q: Does placing the question of suicide at the center of philosophy make you more pessimistic, or more serious?
A: Hard to answer.
I understand why Camus places that question at the center of philosophy, but I do not personally like making suicide the organizing word for life, death, or meaning. For me, the deeper question is not whether life is worth ending, but whether we can live without lying to ourselves about what life is.
12) Q: Who is more dangerous: someone who uses knowledge as a weapon, or someone who uses it as decoration?
A: Someone who uses knowledge as a weapon! Decorative knowledge is irritating, but usually small. It harms taste, conversation, maybe a little community. Weaponized knowledge is different. It does not just want to be admired; it wants to corner, humiliate, and isolate. It turns intelligence into a room where the other person is left completely alone.
13) Q: Why do some people prefer appearing to understand over actually understanding?
A: I have thought about this a lot. It is a beautiful question.
I think the answer is partly psychological, and partly about survival. Some people learn very early that not knowing is dangerous: it makes you look weak, slow, unworthy, or easy to dismiss. So they begin to perform understanding before they ever feel safe enough to actually understand. And after a while, performance becomes a kind of armor. They are not always trying to deceive others. Sometimes they are trying to survive the shame of being seen as someone who does not know. But of course, the tragedy is that real understanding requires the exact thing they are afraid of: admitting confusion.
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