ABOUT.

I write stuff to clarify my thoughts. That’s just something I do for myself. But then I put it all on this website to make it easy to share with others. Not that I have much call to do that ever!

The main problem I have is that what I write doesn’t always clearly express what I think. Or not as clearly as I would like it to do. So, despite being ‘published’, in some sense it is all just draft material. A lot of it doesn’t even make sense to me when I read it back after a couple of months or years. And then I have to re-write it.

Because it is all draft material then I am frequently amending it. So a reader might read a post one day and then find it different the next day. To avoid confusion I try to annotate posts to say something like “last amended”.

Many times the posts here aren’t really about the subjects stated. For example the post about money isn’t there to inform the reader about money. It is there to inform the reader about the details of my efforts to understand money.

The URL of this website (or should I say ‘sub-website’?) is:

https://sites.google.com/view/mesut3

I haven’t used a custom domain name because that’s just hiding the actual URL. With the full URL users know exactly where the website is. And they will trust Google more than some random domain name which might be the source of malware.

Not all of the content on this website is listed on the contents page yet. There are pages numbered from n301. These numbers continue past the ones listed on the Contents page.

And then there are also other pages numbered d0, d1, d2 etc.

It’s like a book where some of the chapters aren’t listed on the Contents page.

In general I don’t like the website format. My ideal would be for the website to be a catalogue of posts. Which posts could then be sorted and filtered the way you can sort and filter items on a shopping website. The sorting and filtering would be on the basis of tags that are applied to each post. There would be a lot of tags, like date and length as well as subject matter.

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LONGER EXPLANATION.

What and why.

What is this blog and why do I write it?

I hear you ask this in an exasperated tone. “Why oh why!” Why am I cluttering up the internet with this dreadful verbiage. Have I no shame?!

I write things down and this is me clarifying what I think about something. Where “what I think about something” includes what my understand of something is. And what my opinion about some issue is. I will already have some half-baked thoughts but that’s not what I really think. Writing it down forces me to put those thoughts into order and only then do I find out what I really think.

Often my writing is me trying to get to an understanding of something. And you might think: other people have got to an understanding of this already, so why not just read what they have written? But I don’t understand what they have written! So I have to do it for myself. (It’s like that saying “those who do not know what happened in the past are doomed to repeat it”.)

Writing it down is also good because then I can re-read it a few times over a period of time. So that then I remember what it is that I have decided that I think.

Writing down thoughts is also something like “getting it off your chest”. But this latter is normally applied to feelings.

Me writing is also an exercise in expression. Like I am practicing at getting good at saying something well. WHAT I am saying doesn’t really matter that much. The thing that matters is HOW well I say it.

But then why does what I write have to be on the internet?

First, so that then it is easily shareable with other people. So I can easily give them an idea of who I am through what I write and think about. It started out as just a way to have an online presence (everybody should be on the internet somewhere!). This would then be a quick and easy way to introduce myself to new people. So I would say to somebody I just met: if you want to know more about me then read my website. And I could hand them some kind of business card with my website address on it. From reading what I have written people should come to know what sort of person I am. And readers should figure this out as much from how I think/write as from what I think/write about. (When I read stuff I try to pay attention to the way in which the writer is reasoning, ie the way ideas fit together in their mind, as much as to the conclusions they arrive at.)

Second, if I make public what I write, by putting it on the internet, then this forces me to be even more clear about what I think than I would have to be if I was writing it for myself. In general, trying to explain something to someone else improves your understanding of it too.

Third, if it’s on the internet I can easily access what I have written and it is just another way of putting things in “the cloud” the way people do.