havadan sudan [blog, writing, travel, yoga]

Renowned playwright George Bernard Shaw once said “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world, the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” So what did the human beings do for ages? Were they reasonable? There are heaps of questions flying in my brain? Like Gauguin, I ask myself: Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?

The delusion of progress is like a pill for all of us today. We love to talk about it. It gives us self-confidence, it helps us to grow our egos more and more. As we get older, we like to put that in words as we get wiser. It is kind of a personal progress, isn’t it? How about the progress of the human being? Did it help anyone to change the world? I wanna change the world… Because I don’t want to change myself…Moreover I don’t want to pay any effort to live the game according to the rules of the nature…

Many of the beautiful things we don’t have today are lost thanks to our great(!) civilisation. Starting from Easter Island’s monolithic wilderness to Wilhelm Golding’s “the God of Flies” we never ever wanted to confess how wild and how destructive we were and still the same story is going on and affecting more people. There is a growing ozone hole, who cares? There is the drastic climate change, who cares? There are millions of people dying only due to unfair wealth distribution, who cares? Animals and plants extinct, who cares?

What do we; the human beings care of? First of all money… Secondly, an image of a paradise: so to say religion… We love to own things… We love to own money, material things, houses, cars, clothes, sometimes even animals and most of the time our wives, husbands, girlfriends, children… We love to control everything but can we control the nature? We can control many things: stock markets, money markets, any kind of markets…

I want to give up now… I don’t want any kind of progress if it deteriorates the nature, the world and the lives of unborn generations… I remind myself that the journey finishes exactly where it starts…

Bu yazı, ilk defa 30/1/2008 tarihinde havadansudan.azbuz.com’da yayınlandı.

New semester, therefore the academic stuff started.
During last days, I was feeling myself like a collector who looks at everything
whether it would be a nice piece in her collection. This habit of human beings is old as history. We love to identify ourselves with our
belongings. Probably, there is some deep psychological roots behind this habit.
Anyways, who cares? Today, we only care about experiments…

What makes an experiment is the manipulation in it. Although an
experiment is supposed to be under controlled conditions, it cannot be a real
experiment without manipulation. This very basic definition lets me think
whether I am an experiment conductor. Because I often love manipulation but not
by the means of bad intentions. Just to watch. You know, that’s fun.

Basically, there are two types of experiments: laboratory and field experiments.
Well, it is easier to imagine first group. You can think of Marie Curie in her
laboratory. On the other hand, field experiments are the ones which economists
are more interested in using in their studies like Colin Camerer etc. The major
difference between laboratory and field experiments is controlling. In
field experiments, there is a limited scope of control. Despite this, I
believe that the results of field experiments are reflecting the real life more
than laboratory stuff if they are conducted by experts of their specialization
areas.

Up to now, economists have used field experiments to analyze
discrimination, health care programs, education, information aggregation in
markets, and micro-finance programs. But filmmakers were not idle, they were
working as hard as economists. For example; the director; Oliver Hirschbiegel
and one of my favorite German actors; Moritz Bleibtreu. Here is the result of
this experiment, ladies and gentlemen: Das Experiment (2001) is a German movie
inspired by the events of the Stanford Prison Experiment conducted in 1971. 20
very different men participate in a prison-simulation experiment. The
candidates are selected by a computer to be either prisoner or guard. The
experiment begins smoothly, but quickly deteriorates as the guards start to
behave unexpectedly. Although it is an irritating but very interesting material
for a movie, it is not difficult to see the failure of the German director. I
couldn’t find any creativity in the movie when I was watching it. But it is
still interesting and worth to see because of the real story behind.

Bu yazı, ilk defa 19/10/2006 tarihinde havadansudan.azbuz.com’da yayınlandı.