About
About this site and its author, Mert.
About This Site
Journey of a Distracted Mind is my personal website — a place to think out loud, take notes, and write about whatever I’m currently obsessed with. The subjects range widely: machine learning, statistics, healthcare AI, coding, self-experiments, sport, travel, mythology, music, mathematics, food. I make no apology for the breadth. Intellectual curiosity doesn’t respect disciplinary boundaries, and neither do I.
The site is heavily inspired by gwern.net, which I consider one of the best examples of long-form personal publishing on the internet. Gwern’s approach — treating a personal website as a living, versioned document; writing at varying levels of completion and confidence; annotating everything; caring about both content and presentation — resonated with how I already thought about writing. This site borrows several conventions from gwern.net: confidence tags, importance ratings, link annotations, and the general philosophy that a good essay should be updated rather than abandoned.
That said, this isn’t a gwern clone. The voice is mine, the interests are mine, and the mistakes are definitely mine.
About Me
I’m Mert. I’m hard to summarize in a sentence, but if I had to: I’m someone who thinks across domains and writes to understand.
Professionally, my work sits at the intersection of AI/ML and healthcare — building systems that matter for real people. I care about rigorous methodology, reproducibility, and being honest about what we know and don’t know. The field moves fast and overpromises constantly; I try to be a counterweight to that, at least in my own small corner.
Outside of work, I’m a generalist. I run, I travel, I cook. I read about mythology and history. I play and listen to music. I’m fascinated by self-experimentation in the QS tradition — tracking sleep, exercise, diet, and seeing what actually moves the needle versus what just feels like it should. I think mathematics is beautiful and underappreciated. I believe that understanding statistics is a civic duty.
I started this site because I kept accumulating notes, bookmarks, half-finished essays, and annotated papers across too many tools. A personal website felt like the right way to unify them — one place where I can write something rough, improve it over time, and have a permanent URL to point to when someone asks “what do you think about X?”
How to Read This Site
Articles have metadata in the header: status (draft, in progress, finished), confidence (how much I believe what I wrote), and importance (how much I think the topic matters). Use these to calibrate expectations. A “draft” with “unlikely” confidence is a rough sketch I’m not sure about; a “finished” article with “likely” confidence is something I’ve thought hard about and believe is mostly right.
I try to keep essays updated. If I change my mind, I’ll revise the article rather than writing a new one contradicting the old one. Version history is available through Git.
Colophon
Contact
You can reach me by email. If you’re reading this site, you probably know how to find me. If not, I’m working on making that easier.