The JAŸ-Z GQ interview has set camp in my mind.

In no rush, the hip-hop legend took deep dives to respond to the questions he was being asked. I silently wish the current crop of hip-hop artists would grow in wisdom as he did, rather than float in the miasma of attention we see in popular entertainment.

The YouTube comments section, however, was another wild side, where a couple of people concurred that it was JAŸ-Z interviewing himself, and how the entire idea was preset. Whether that was true or not, some replies had me rewinding and pausing to reflect on the depth of his words.

Regarding morality, he said:

Your morality defines you.

It’s not difficult to imagine how morality can define you. It’s a higher standard we set for ourselves. We don’t believe other animals have morals. With a higher standard than the rest, we can imagine what it would mean if it were anything lower.

Social animals can have implicit rules. Among mole rats, the queen’s stand is final. She secretes pheromones to control anyone who may think of overthrowing her. There are hardly any morals there. The caste system divides these rats into various cadres, with its members working without question or mutiny. Same goes for bees, termites, and any known eusocial system.

Morals, however, guide much more than a highly efficient system. Morals and professionalism go hand in hand. A professional holds themselves to a higher standard than a mere job description. For a worker bee, to work is the job description. They will even give up their lives to stick to the job. This is a capitalistic attitude to work and living. In another world, a professional will stand up to the queen and question their rules and actions. Morality does the same.

I don’t like to think a single quality should define a complex organism, but it can be a guiding yardstick.

Dedicating most of his life to understanding decision-making, Gerd Gigerenzer underscored that when many variables are involved, sticking to heuristics is the best option. Morality can be one of those guiding principles. So when JAŸ-Z commented that morality should define you, he was indirectly hinting at what Gerd had mentioned. Scientists can do well to remember these words.

Not money

Living in the shadow
Can you imagine what kind of life it is to live?
In the shadows people see you as happy and free
Because that’s what you want them to see
Living two lives, happy, but not free

— Gloria Carter

It’s not always about the money.

Money has defined goals today so much that anyone who isn’t thinking of a way to make money is not making sense. Songs have been written about it. Poems. Books. Even quotes.

Scientists have fallen prey to the same societal ideal. Grants are helpful for conducting scientific research. To be taken by a research institution, a serious scientist, so it goes, will mention the number of grants they have secured and how much each was. Others will even take the sum of all of them, for a refined impact for anyone who may question their money-attracting capabilities.

Labs are run on grants. Absent the inflow of money, scientific discovery may not happen. May.

This metric assumes that science is not possible with affordable means. I believe we have not been pushed to come up with cheaper ways of poking at nature. Take the adaptationist paradigm of evolutionary theory. Although criticised by the Panglossian paper, adaptation shows that species can find an efficient way of surviving that aligns with the surroundings and the locally available resources. Humans then use money to discover what these innovations are.

Richard O. Prum and his team were at some point criticised for seeking taxpayer money to discover the sex lives of ducks. But let’s see what that means from the standard we have already established.

A professional holds themselves to a higher standard than what is expected of them. Pushing the boundaries. To push the boundaries of science may be simple, but at times it demands money. How else would scientists at the frontier of a field pay their bills?

Chasing science for science’s sake is a noble cause. What I don’t agree with is how funding takes the front seat in defining a scientist. A researcher will be held in high esteem if he has secured several lofty grants, while one who is extremely interested in the science, not the paperwork, is dismissed in important circles.

It is science that makes a scientist. Seeking grants makes you a solicitor. In the past, science could be conducted without money. Scientists were artists. Professionalism makes you highly moral, knowing that you’re not in the field of science to make money but to make discoveries.

Most researchers look to secure their tenures first. Discovery comes second. It makes practical sense because without funding, you may not have a department or a lab to run. Seeking money has been pushed to a first- priority role, with science taking a hit. This gels with the other yardstick that scientists need to reconsider — papers.

Not papers or h-index

Here’s your friendly announcer

— Stevie Wonder

After completing my internship, I reached out to a colleague who was well recognized in the scientific space internationally. He gave me a schema for how I should model my CV. It followed the guidelines outlined by the African Academy of Sciences.

Several sections captured the number of papers one had published and the conferences one had presented at. The more papers, the better you were as a scientist. Even better is having a high h-index.

Should a scientist be defined by an index?

It’s rational to imagine that your work is only as relevant as the number of times it is cited by other works, but it also means you can hack such a system. You only need to publish many papers citing your work, and your h-index goes up.

Firstly, that is not moral. Secondly, it is not professional. Thirdly, it shows that other principles guide the scientist who defines themselves by the body of work they have produced.

The current wave of AI shows how easy it is to navigate such a highly porous system. Paired up with AI, a scientist can write several papers in a day from a single prompt. If it’s a question of papers, you can publish more than your college professor in a month, and that is stretching the timeline.

Those who work to hack such a system are likely not being guided by a moral standard. Qua JAŸ-Z, it defines who they are as a character. They will do anything to get ahead, including working through and around the system set in place to gauge scientific work.

Additionally, having such a system in the first place creates perverse incentives to hack it. Once it becomes the measure, it ceases to become a good measure. Curiosity no longer takes the lead, but an opportunity to publish as many papers as possible.

I witnessed this first hand after completing my first degree, an intercalated course. The moment we were done, the supervisors were pushing us to publish. I recognized it was a perverse case of pride operating, where they could brag about their students while adding an extra publication to their name. Hitting two birds with one stone.

Collaborations are an easy way to hack the h-index. Create a group of ten scientists, have each one of you work on a different idea, then include everyone in every paper. That’s ten papers for everyone, despite a single person working on a single project. In this system, it is not morals that guide, but verifiable evidence that you’re working. Something like a h-index.

That shouldn’t be the case, but it’s what is being used everywhere I look.

Not a p-value

A loss ain’t a loss, it’s a lesson
Appreciate the pain, it’s a blessin’

— JAŸ-Z

When you go looking for a statistically significant p-value, you will get it. That’s what my short-term paper supervisor told me. It made sense. I have never forgotten it.

Regardless, researchers will torture numbers to formulate a p-value that justifies their work, even if it has little application in real life. Teasing out a difference, any difference, is not healthy for science and for the scientist.

Differences can always be there, but are they meaningful?

In a world teeming with information, too much of it can be pointless if there is no framework for it to rest upon. Charlie Munger used to call such a framework his latticework of mental models. He could take a book, digest it, get the important lessons, and mentally hang them on his lattice. Blindly chasing a difference using the p-value as a guide reverses this ideal.

What’s more, negative results (results with nonsignificant p-values) are results as well. It is, however, difficult to get journals that will readily publish non-significant studies, despite science moving through the mechanism of via negativa.

The scientific method hinges on falsification. Torturing data to find any difference is akin to using the statistical tools to justify our armchair analyses.

In most cases, science starts with armchair ideas. The analysis can push a scientist to create an experimental model, which can be justified by the tools used to find a difference. As we have been forced to understand, numbers don’t lie.

Nevertheless, a scientist ought to remember two crucial things: that they should never be fooled by their ideas, and that they are the easiest people to fool. Statistical tools make it easy to believe in your ideas, especially when you desperately seek a p-value. Moreover, it corrupts the process of seeking nature’s answers.

Centuries ago, people believed that ether surrounded our world and the universe. An experiment was set to test its existence. It came back negative. This was perhaps one of the most important negative studies that needs to be circulated and used to remind not just scientists but journals that we need not always seek positive results consistent with our expectations. It is also historic evidence against the ills of the p-value.

What I’m trying to say is…

Morality may not fit into the scientific processes, but it can remind the scientist about the scientific ethos.

The sad thing is that this guide comes from a hip-hop artist.

Scientists can learn a lot from other fields. Usually from the most unexpected ones. JAŸ-Z’s response cut across various fields, not just science. In particular, science is held at several levels above the other domains. It makes logical sense to elevate the standard for its scientists’ conduct.

Professionalism is one such standard, nearly as valuable as morality. But if there are no precedents in professionalism, morality should be the guide, especially at an individual level.

This song inspired some of the lines used in this article. Source — YouTube

The work of a critic is not to approve of the artist’s work. Neither is it to disprove it.

As I rewatched The Greatest Showman, it hit me that a critic’s core goal is to make the world notice their critique.

On their priority list, the artist comes second. Their work comes first.

Critics will move from one form of creation to the next, making sure the world notices their opinion, while banking on the creativity of the artist to retain the world’s attention.

As an artist, remembering what the critic does scatters the clouds of doubt. The fact that they wrote or gave comments about you means they noticed you. That is enough. Forge ahead.

The famous have always had reasons why it may not be a good thing to get famous.

It’s a drug. It’s addictive. It will put your people at risk. They always have responses.

Then again, it is because they are famous that they answer these questions, and they want to be remembered for the answers they give. A contradiction. To which we sing along to Justin Timberlake and say:

Thanks for warning me.

Anyway, here’s a simple reason why you should try to get famous:

You can get used to being famous, but you cannot get used to being ignored.

Nobody in this world loves being ignored. The moment you step out of that birth canal or get whisked from the abdomen via a CS, you begin to cry. You don’t want to be ignored. The more you get ignored, the louder you wail. Babies have that famous pause that builds to a crescendo, before releasing a torrent that will make sure you pay attention.

It’s built into every component of our system. The more you ignore corruption, the more it continues until it gets acknowledged, usually as a scandal.

You identify as male? Well, those bumps or lesions on your penis will ask for your attention.

You identify as female? Well, that unusual breast lump will require your attention.

You can get used to being famous. You can’t get used to being ignored. It hurts.

Our opportunity structures are formulated in a way that leaves many people ignored. It’s why it is easy to remember anyone who never forgets your name because you were not ignored. Or anyone who remembers a special feature about you.

Whether our brains were wired to remember a maximum of 150 people or not, as the numbers increase, attention becomes priceless. Anyone who remembers you or something about you is immediately valuable. You will be bent to keep or treasure them however you can.

Influencers will fall victim to audience capture because they don’t want to be ignored. Politicians will continue fanning the fire of “doing something” because they don’t want to be ignored. Tyrant kings will slay anyone who is dismissive of the royal hand. Cue the song:

And we’re all just entertainers,
And we’re stupid and contagious

Here’s the funniest version: We have extremely intelligent individuals who will do anything to get known. We call them scientists. Here’s what they do:

In their younger years, they work hard to get noticed by a member of the faculty they are interested in joining. They then try to convince this member that they are smart enough to be worth the company. Soon, they publish a paper together. The young one isn’t ignored. For all we care, the mature, seasoned researcher could still have published their work with or without the budding scientist. Then comes the most alarming part.

To continue being acknowledged, you need to trace your citation metrics. Citations are a measure of your acknowledgement by members in your field. How often and well do people know you by your work? One-hit wonders are forgotten in the fast-paced world of science. So you have to continue nudging your presence into the constrained attention space. An easy way? Continue citing your work. But that’s not even the strangest thing.

Contribution in a field is best seen by publishing in reputable journals. To have the world read your work, you need to pay hefty amounts. These fees are known as Article Processing Charges, or APCs in short. Scientists part with large amounts of money to get published in paywalled journals, reducing the chances of the public ever seeing their work. These hidden papers are used to rubber-stamp their authority. Isn’t that absurd?

It’s kind of like a country club. You pay to continue receiving the status, services, and connections.

Soon enough, you get used to it. What you cannot stomach is being ignored.

Artists are getting the short end of the stick, with AI slop catching up with them. But even if you were to completely do away with AI work, the world’s population continues to increase. Past artists inspire new ones, not on a 1:1 ratio. One artist can inspire hundreds. Power laws predict that several artists will emerge from the millions who were inspired. The number will continue to rise. By equal measure, competition for attention and fans will continue.

In the last couple of months, several artists have released albums and songs at a rate that is difficult to catch up. In Kenya, Mejja released his. In the world, J. Cole on the same day as Ella Mae. T.I, the king of the south, released his. Jack Harlow did the same. Nas released another. Kanye jumped on the train, as did Snoop Dogg. This is just the hip-hop scene. These are the OGs of any game. Artists can get used to fame, but the moment they start getting ignored, they resurface.

After publishing my book, my editor, now a professor at the University of Nairobi, told me how difficult it would be for his colleagues to endorse my work because it might take away the limelight from them. The best way to navigate it is by including them in the book. They cannot take being ignored.

The problem gets blown out of proportion when it is pounded into us that we only have a few ways to get famous. We don’t. We have many. Spun from the example I have already shared with you about my publishing journey, some would rather you not pursue your endeavours, but keep mentioning them and their work. Think of someone like Melon Husk. How often are his tweets (I find it hard to call them Xs) informative? Because he doesn’t like to be ignored.

When you’re at the forefront of a game-changing idea, and several people are competing to get to the pot at the end of the rainbow, efforts will be made to avoid being ignored. Dario will write essays. Altman will make announcements. Musk will file a lawsuit.

Platform owners — Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, TikTok, Medium, Substack, YouTube, Google, Telegram, X, PayPal, LinkedIn. Name them. All of them have the emails of users. When they roll out something new, they will ensure it lands in your inbox. They don’t want to be ignored for reasons over and above being famous. Legal, for instance.

As for social media, they would rather you occupy your time, creeping into your rest and sleep, by developing smart psychological techniques to respond to their notification pings. The email, the SMS, the inbox, the milestone achievement, the number of likes, the comments, the reshares, the new subscription, the follower, the one who’s live streaming. They don’t want you to ignore their progress because it signals they are losing relevance and power. They can get used to being known, but they cannot get used to being ignored.

When the world tries to ignore some of the potential pitfalls of AI or its conscious-seeming needs, the leading authorities in the subject will toot their horns even louder. Anil Seth will enter a competition to increase his already wide reach about the moot efforts to consider AI as conscious. The ones with good intentions will continue to inform the world of the hazards, and if possible, leave these humanity-numbed workspaces. Why? Because they don’t appreciate being ignored.

Kevin Kelly wrote a famous essay about 1000 fans. Loyal fans. That is all you need to live comfortably. You won’t necessarily need to get famous, but you can continue doing what you love without caving to societal ideals. A perfect balance between attention and fame.

You may not want to get famous, because you’ve heard it all from the famous. But you want to continue getting lucky, which eventually leads to fame. Aside from what has and continues to get circulated about the ills of fame, it remains, as Jay-Z and Justin Timberlake call, the Holy Grail.

Your life will change. You might even become known for reasons that you may forever want to write off from your history, as David Beckham once confessed. What remains factual is that you will get used to it. But nobody on this planet likes being ignored.

Social media, with all its ills, capitalized on this demand. When Facebook introduced the newsfeed, everyone was catapulted to the front stage. You then needed to improve your chances of being liked, reshared, or getting comments. The status game got harder. Attention was now what everyone competed for.

The feed was an ingenious method to break away from the need to always go to everyone’s page to see what they had done. Now, everyone could see it all in a single infinite scroll. Once you get a little recognition, you’re on the treadmill. It’s different for the young relative to the elderly.

The young have little capital to show the world. Their biggest leverage over the elderly is social media. Building their social capital through this medium ranks high on their priority list. The elderly have a job, a family, probably a house, or a car. They can build upward from there. They can no longer be ignored in several spheres.

The young have nothing much to their name. Social media is their stage. Predictably, they would shift from a space teeming with oldies to one where they can actively compete, hence the migration from Facebook to Instagram and TikTok. On these platforms, they have unmatched leverage.

The elderly would scoff at the young for spending plenty of their time on social media, but it can be argued that social capital is their biggest and easiest means of avoiding being ignored. The elderly have already established some form of capital, not necessarily social, which makes it harder for them to be ignored. Their battle is often fought in emails, “ As the last email outlined…” and other stories.

Social media forms easy channels of noticing that you are indeed being ignored. Just as it can amplify the connection and reach, it can magnify the feeling of loneliness and the idea that one is being ignored. Your picture got only a single like, after hours, despite the effort you took to take and edit it. You can get used to being famous, but you cannot get used to being ignored.

What I’m trying to say is…

Across all ages, we don’t want to be ignored. It’s usually much more painful if you’re used to getting the fame and attention, then it all plummets.

Consider the powerful nations. Among the global polar powers, none of them wants to be ignored. It would be an admittance of weakness if your name doesn’t get brought up in a meeting about nuclear arsenal when you have been building them for decades. I’ll let you guess the country I’m referring to.

It all boils down to a single question whose answer is potent because of its alternative. Why get famous? Well, not because of the perks that come with it. These are difficult to predict ex ante. You wish to get famous to avoid being ignored.

You can get famous. Many problems await your ingenious solution. However, to avoid being ignored, what will you do?

This song inspired some of the lines used in this article. Source — YouTube

Sherlock Holmes has been an inspiration ever since I picked up Arthur Conan Doyle’s book in primary school.

It was my first interaction with a detective series. From then on, I have sought detective books, series, and movies. I have watched all the Guy Ritchie films on Sherlock, Elementary, and even the series by Benedict Cumberbatch. The latter two were so riveting, my final campus exams could not stop me from watching them.

As the high school entertainment captain, I once brought the Sherlock Holmes movie, starring Robert Downey Jr. I was met with harsh censure, mostly centered on why the film is in black and white. I thought they would love the plot and that the grayscale added to the lustre of the motion picture, but I couldn’t make that argument to people who wanted to be entertained. I had to serve them. So I switched it for another.

And that is what we have to do when chasing the truth. Luckily, the alternative movie was well-received. Similarly, when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, that is the truth. Nassim Taleb calls the process via negativa. Sherlock taught me this principle before I discovered Taleb. I borrowed this guiding principle to break apart all the current theories of evolution, and I was left with one.

The theories of evolution

Let’s start with the first three theories.

The creation theory needs evidence of a supreme being. Science does not have evidence of His existence. As the Bible remarks, it has to be bent on faith, of matters unseen, before they are seen. You can hardly make a testable experiment with such a premise. Science, too, depends on matters unseen, but one can formulate hypotheses and experimental setups, which eventually corroborate or invalidate theories. The creation theory is out.

We’re left with Darwinian Selection and Lamarckian Selection. The latter was eliminated because it was difficult to establish that acquired traits could be transmitted to future generations. Current evidence points otherwise. Bacteria were not factored into this argument. A bacterial cell can change its genotype such that the cell survives longer than its original genome. In that sense, every new trait becomes acquired and passed down through generations. Through bacteria, Lamarckian type of selection resurfaces, despite its prior elimination in favour of Darwin’s Natural Selection. We’ll come back to it, because it has not been completely eliminated.

Darwinian theory is the most robust. It made the claim that we don’t need a supreme being to arrive at nature’s complexity. A simple process of descent with modification, to match the changing environment, could explain a broad swath of traits.

Inherent in Darwin’s theory is statistical and mathematical backing. Numbers. To make a strong claim about the verity of an idea, you need numbers. Natural selection works with populations, many items or members of a species. It also needs time, as natural selection works over several generations. Numbers is its strongest element, but also its weakness.

Before getting large numbers, you start small. You start with one organism. Thus, Natural Selection does not work in small populations. Naturally, large numbers don’t pop out of nowhere. Natural Selection lacks explanatory power at the very beginning of life or shortly after it began. Thus, at this point, it is eliminated.

What works in small populations is genetic drift. The theory operates through randomness. Some traits can be fixed in populations for the same reason. Numbers, too, are the problem. More specifically, a single number. Genetic drift cannot apply to a single organism.

Numbers are the reason natural selection operates as it does. For that reason, interpreting evolution is done among species or gene pools. Why this arbitrary selection? Mostly from a statistical point of view — numbers and time. The law of large numbers and the weaning power of time give Darwin credence. As for small populations and short periods of time, there is hardly a strong mainstream theory. We merely summon the powers of Natural Selection out of convenience.

Natural Selection is not the only bigwig. Other theories have to be eliminated. Group selection is one such example. Instead of selecting individuals, group selection considers multiple groups. The issue with this theory, however, is that at a group level, cooperation is needed. At an individual level, one benefits more by being selfish.

If every individual is rational, each one should be selfish. Evolution should identify the most efficient strategy and run with it. In this case, selfish behaviour. Eventually, it should eliminate all groups. That is hardly the case. Many species are social. Group selection, therefore, is also out. As Martin Nowak has argued, there needs to be other mechanisms that push for cooperative behaviour.

We’re left with punctuated equilibrium, sexual selection, and symbiosis. Also, let’s not forget that the fate of the Lamarckian theory still hangs in the balance.

Punctuated equilibrium, formulated by Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge, uses paleontological evidence to counter the gradualist mechanism Darwin had advocated for. According to this theory, speciation is a rapid event, spaced out by evolutionary periods of stasis. Punctuations in between equilibria. It matches the fossil evidence. However, since it relies on the mechanism of Natural Selection, it also suffers from the same shortfalls. For that reason, it too is eliminated.

Sexual selection has been a fringe idea, but extremely powerful in explaining the organismal features that lack adaptationist explanations. In a single body of work, Richard Prum poked holes at Zahavi’s handicap principle and reinforced the power of sexual selection. He used birds. Sexual selection is another blow to Natural Selection, where selection depends on preference. The forces are antagonistic, as Natural Selection undermines agency.

The biggest blow to sexual selection is that it needs two individuals of separate sexes. Sexual selection came later into the evolutionary scene. It cannot apply to an asexual species. Asexual organisms were the initial species in life. Thus, sexual selection, at this point, is eliminated.

The same bullet hits symbiosis. It persists where sexual selection fails because it does not need two heterosexual individuals. It can happen in asexual individuals. But it needs at least two individuals. So it cannot work where there is only one individual. It, too, gets eliminated.

What we’re left with is Lamarckian theory, which needs a second generation for it to have validity. So it can have credence at the early stages of evolution, though it has to wait until the first generation for it to be acceptable as a theory.

The problem with this step is no different from computers, where an action is registered after moving from 0 to 1, from the initial generation to the next. The interphase between this change can be millions of years. Within that period, there is no theory that suits the organism. Thus, Lamarckian theory is eliminated.

That leaves one theory. I haven’t described it, but it’s a theory I formulated after eliminating all the others. Following Sherlock’s rule, whatever remains, however improbable, should be the truth. It should, but it’s more complicated than that.

Organismal Selection

I have never shared anywhere how this theory began. Here’s the scoop.

At first, I called it instructionism, since the DNA held instructions used by a cell. I had to drop the idea because I didn’t like that everything was being attributed to the nuclear material. It’s a false premise. Furthermore, we were assuming that nuclear material was present in the first organism. This is a short distance from assuming that an organism is incomplete without nuclear material.

An organism, I argued, is any physical entity that tends to avoid annihilation. It has features consistent with those described by Huberto Maturana and Francisco Varela of autopoiesis. An organism, I concluded, has to be thermodynamically open but organizationally closed. A cell, the basic structural and functional unit of an organism, has a cell membrane housing all its internal structures — it’s organizationally closed. It also has to convert the energy within its environment to continue persisting — it is thermodynamically open.

By eliminating all the theories known in evolution, I found that we had traversed time to that moment when the first organism emerged in the universe. Like in physics, this was akin to tracing that singularity moment. That formed the hypothesis that I recently published as a preprint, arguing how life can emerge consistent with the laws of physics, but most importantly, while preserving organismal agency. The only other theory that, to my knowledge, tries to develop a physical theory of evolution is the one by Jeremy England on adaptive dissipative structures.

Organismal Selection argues that the organism selects itself to persist throughout its life. Since organisms exist even in large populations, it can still apply whether the numbers are large or not. The strategies that organisms resort to, to help them persist, such as selfish and cooperative behaviour, account for what group selection failed to explain, and underscore the incentives leading to symbiogenesis.

The definition of an organism can stretch across multiple levels of complexity. The guiding principle is thermodynamic openness and organizational closedness. Think of species as an example. Biological species can be considered a high-level organism, because they are organizationally closed — no entity outside the species can naturally breed with a member of the species to produce viable offspring. As for thermodynamic openness, they occupy unique niches, converting energy from their habitat to persist.

One core argument of Organismal Selection is that organisms don’t exist to reproduce. That is merely one of the goals of persisting. An organism’s main goal is to persist. This explains the infertile examples that continue to live or the asexual species that exist for thousands of years without reproducing. But to survive, you have to be coherent. You have to keep yourself intact.

Through Organismal Selection, we drop the idea of survival of the fittest. However, as Nietzsche claimed, it’s not a problem to remove God; the problem is how to replace Him. By dropping the phrase, I had to find a new one, which became: persistence of the coherent.

The theory extends to possible beings outside Earth, because they have to contain the same qualities as those of the cell. Not that they should have nuclear material, but that they should be organizationally closed and thermodynamically open.

An offshoot of this guiding criteria is that it exists in various systems outside what we classically consider to be living. I use that as evidence that there are indeed systems that have the same features, and persistence is yet another quality. Living organisms, therefore, are not that special.

Especially important is how to identify an organism. Notably, my quandary is not with identifying an organism, but that we don’t have to summon the difficult-to-define word we use all too often — life. Thus, an organism, according to the theory of Organismal Selection, is any physical entity that has a tendency to avoid annihilation.

The best test to identify the existence of an organism is not just a membrane or heritable nuclear material. These still fit into the larger set of physical systems, thermodynamically open and organizationally closed. The best test, I argue, is to subject the system to an imminent, credible threat. It stems from the organism’s tendency to avoid annihilation.

When subjected to a credible, imminent threat, an organism will resist in order for it to persist. It will try as much as it can to keep itself intact. Hence, persistence of the coherent.

Since it can apply to individuals, we don’t need to use the same mechanism as Natural Selection. In its place, I use probability. I have broken down these steps into a three-part article series detailing how a single organism can be considered to evolve, consistent with the second law of thermodynamics.

The theory, therefore, covers the bases of the theories we have eliminated and expands to include other physical features. It does not dismiss their explanatory powers, but it shows how the domain can be expanded. Organismal Selection nests the other theories and, indeed, requires them for granular details. By focusing on the first organism, Organismal Selection honours the other theories, but shows how they are inadequate.

What I’m trying to say is…

If we’re to reverse engineer the process that began this article, we find that by first showing the invalidity of the previous theories, we are left with one. But after understanding it, the others can fit inside it.

Think of it like a magnet with its magnetic domains. Organismal Selection is the bar magnet, macroscopically viewed, and the other theories are the magnetic domains, microscopically viewed.

Once the world opens itself to these possibilities, our understanding of life, systems, and evolution will be forever changed, as mine was. What I can say about this kaleidoscope is that the view is captivating.

That is why I share it with the world.

This song inspired some of the lines used in this article. Source — YouTube

The gist of things is not enough to attain mastery.

Feynman further added that unless you create it, you don’t understand it. The gist of things is not enough to create anything, not even a summary.

To summarize, you need to understand the different levels of a topic. LLMs give summaries after scouring mountains of data. Today’s search engines give AI summaries for search queries. The offshoot? We get the gist, while the details continually get further from our grasp and interest.

Rusticus told Marcus Aurelius, “Don’t be satisfied just getting the gist of it.” His point was for Marcus to have an in-depth understanding of things.

One way to diagnose oneself of this “gist-syndrome” is to ask how many questions one can ask you before you get stuck. For instance, you’ve heard about AI. How many questions can you ask yourself before being stumped?

The fewer the questions, the higher the likelihood that you only know the gist, the surface, and the details elude you. The more questions you are ready to answer, even by giving an opinion, the more layered your understanding.

So, what kind of person are you? Are you a one-question person?

Where I work, we tend to have regular online meetings to discuss the difficult cases we encounter.

Tuesdays are for antimicrobial stewardship. Fridays are for regular patient conditions. In all these discussions, a case is presented, and a brief session is held about what has always been known and updates in the management of the particular case in question. In between the weeks, a couple of other arbitrary meetings are held. Collectively, they build onto what we call continuous medical education, or CMEs.

In all these meetings, a pair of physicians hardly misses. They are in the elderly age bracket. One of them is pushing 90, but you cannot tell from his engagement throughout the conversations, nor will his walking stance betray his nonagenarian knees. Usually, the meetings can last longer because of these two.

There are moments when we surmise it can be unnecessary, but there are times that the questions penetrate, as sharp as any lance, revealing assumptions we may have overlooked. From what I have recently encountered, these individuals have remained curious throughout their lives. Unlike the younger doctors who frequent these online meetings, these two ask more questions than most.

Questions are a proxy for curiousity. In contrast, old age has always been associated with a decline in curiousity. These two are outliers. They betray the features of cognitive decline associated with the elderly. Now I understand why. They have preserved their curiousity.

Curiousity

As a fan of Big Think, several of their videos pull me in. One of them was by Tal Ben-Shahar.

The title was Don’t Chase Happiness. Become Antifragile. I immediately agreed. What surprised me was that the talk lasted for over an hour.

I previously wrote a short-form piece on the fleetingness of happiness. Later, I wrote a long-form version, where we’re supposed to find some problem that we desperately want to solve. This group may say they love their job, even though it requires significant troubleshooting. So I wondered what this hour-plus talk was about. I’m happy I clicked the link.

Tal affirms that curiosity is positively associated with happiness, more success, and a longer life. Curious, I thought. I made a mental note to do the research. It seemed too good to be true. Turns out, he wasn’t lying. Coming back to our two elderly physicians, I noted they had a unique form of curiosity — trait curiousity.

These two were always curious. Asking questions gave that away. From their daily interactions, you can note that it is a key trait among them. Sometimes, they turn to us, asking if there is an alternative thought process to a peculiar case. Trait curiousity has kept their mental faculties functioning for decades.

It contrasts with state curiousity, where one only becomes curious in particular states. I wager that state curiousity can evolve into trait curiousity if you always plunge yourself into states that make you curious. Sherlock, for instance, would always seek new cases, making him more curious than most.

I cannot tell how these two physicians were in the past, when they were my age, but after practising longer than I have been alive, it is nearly certain that they plunged themselves into situations that prompted asking more questions than finding answers.

The phrase “Curiousity killed the cat” is a truncated version. The fuller expression has another missing phrase, “but satisfaction brought it back.”

Curiousity without answers can keep you engaged. The satisfaction accompanying the solutions to your questions can be priceless. Take it from someone who has always questioned evolution and found some solutions. How, then, can curiousity lead to longevity?

The best way to make such a conclusion is to test it. Those best suited to this test must be the elderly, whose curiousity differs from that of the young. A team of researchers examined over 1000 elderly men and women. Those who expressed the two versions of curiousity lived longer, adjusted for several potential confounders such as wealth. It turned out that state curiousity also helped, but it was not superior to trait curiousity.

The more I thought about it, the more I wondered how curiousity could lead to a longer life and why the elderly had, in general, declining levels of curiousity. Another team of researchers has a possible answer — future time.

Curiousity is a hunger. It needs to be fed. Sometimes, the hunger can ask a lot from us. Without the fortitude to feed this hunger, it may be pointless to begin the hunt in the first place.

The elderly may get to a point where they estimate they have little future time, so they don’t bother chasing the questions that would have injected young synovial fluid into their joints. The young imagine they have the world before them. They can chase a question wherever it may lead them.

Those with trait curiousity may not care much about how much future time they have left. They continue feeding this hunger. It is perhaps for this reason that they last longer.

Even more than feeding such a hunger is noticing the nuanced relationship between curiousity and seeking out the answers. Future time may be needed to chase questions without ready solutions. It means that the more one feeds their curiousity, the more deeply engaged one becomes. This, I would argue, would be another reason the curious live longer than those who merely let life pass them by.

Deeply engaging material

Don’t threaten me with a good time, we’re here to stay

— Nas

Deeply engaging material lets you invest deeply in the relationship.

It could be an individual, like a spouse, or an idea, like the prospect of creating a space to preserve all the known species on Earth.

One place you can find this deeply engaging material is in questions. The most important questions in life have no clear answers. The persistent struggle to find solutions. This can keep one’s mental faculties alert and open to ideas and infuse the necessary energy to test them.

Geoffrey West is one of the co-founders of the metabolic theory of ecology. He sought to find out the hidden secrets of systems that scale. He discovered the ¼ law, where most systems that scale display a quarter law-like feature that extends in different organic and inorganic systems. He enshrined these findings in his book, Scale (a fantastic book, an absolute recommendation).

Besides leading a team of complexity scientists at the Santa Fe Institute, what most may not know about Geoffrey West is that he came from a family of people who died in their fifties or sixties. At the time, he was in his fifties. With the clock ticking closer to his perceived doom, he did not care so much about the little time he had left. He wanted to tackle the problems that interested him.

He pivoted from physics to biology and took painstaking hours to understand biology from well-known experts. They, in turn, learned a great deal about physics from him. Together, they discovered the perversive ¼ power law in most systems, which stemmed from a fractal-like scaling pattern at different levels of complex systems.

By the time he was sharing his findings, he had long passed the age he was “supposed” to have died. It is possible that curiousity kept this cat longer than otherwise expected. What’s more, satisfaction not only brought him back, but it has kept him going. He is currently invested in the science of cities, a previously unscaled human innovation. He’s 85.

Deeply engaging material can keep you alive for longer than anticipated. It therefore makes sense to cultivate environments that keep this habit. Asking questions feeds the first half of this amorphous entity, that is, curiousity, and trusting that you will get some form of satisfaction along the way can keep you strapped for the ride.

That brings us to books. Books are as engaging as they can get. I recall reading Charlotte’s Web, the book spread atop my thighs, but below my locker, barely noticing the teacher droning on during the English lesson. It helped that I sat in the row just ahead of the backbencher. That, plus the teacher never anticipated I would ever be the type to perform such misdeeds.

A book asks you to get into a trance and a world separate from ours. Fiction work has that effect. Well-written non-fiction can have a similar effect. And the different parts of the brain get serially and simultaneously preserved to understand the plot of the entire book. It’s an effort to keep pace with the characters in a world you have never stepped into. We become deeply immersed in the work, curious to see where it will lead.

Books offer a combination of these two elixirs of life — curiousity and a chance to be deeply engaged. A good recipe for longevity. And yes, this too was tested.

In analyzing cognitive decline, some researchers compared the impact of reading books to doing puzzles. Those who read books had a significantly reduced decline compared to the other group. Even more, the book readers fared better than those who only read newspapers and magazines. Books are deeply engaging. Newspapers report fleeting work.

How this shapes up with our current world could preach doomerism. Presently, book reading is downward trending, although not catastrophically low. Attention, which is necessary to follow throughout a book, is persistently being fried through doomscrolling. At one point, you encounter a funny meme, and in the next scroll, an inspirational quote, and right after that, something that angers you. There is no plot. The material is not deeply engaging. That spells bad outcomes as far as longevity goes and worse ones for rapid cognitive decline.

Efficiency is touted as a key feature in modern systems. AI offers this pretty well. In a recent post by Noah Smith, AI does the opposite of what most influencers have been doing — shouting. Humans, too, can be biased in their opinions. Sometimes, asking experts can be difficult because they may not take kindly to the questions you ask them or might feel that it is a complete waste of their time. LLMs have no such weaknesses. They are open to answering all our questions without coming off as condescending. They browse an insanely huge amount of information and distil it down to the ones relevant to your question, with minimal bias. They don’t shout. In a word, LLMs are efficient. As far as they serve this role, I would side with them.

However, it slashes one half of what it takes to feed our minds and improve our cognitive functions — deeply engaging material. All it takes is to ask Grok, and it gives you a response immediately. WhatsApp has a feature similar to this by asking Meta AI. People would rather not get embroiled in material that they feel could waste their time. But what, pray tell, are you wasting if you’re already on social media, scrolling?

While efficiency may improve accuracy, it does not nurture a habit of engaging deeply with material.

For this reason, I will continue to advocate for books. They are the flame Prometheus shared with us, to keep us alive, burning with questions and a hunger. Feeding this fire without sacrificing the deep engagement should be the sweet spot.

We can all do it. We did it in the past. It also helps that, by reading books, we will be deplatforming, a healthy exercise to reduce the insane powers online platforms have over our agency and time.

What I’m trying to say is…

Curiousity saves and prolongs lives and cats.

Suppose we take the other idea, that a cat has nine lives. Why should it have 9 when we only have one? Could the answer be that it is curious? From the evidence I have shared, it is not far from a likely fictitious truth.

I don’t think that’s all we need, though. We have to furnish our curiousity with deeply engaging material. A question can be an anchor we turn to that keeps us engaged. It’s different from merely collecting pieces of facts without a question to guide you.

Books remain, in my opinion, the best way to get the most out of these two solutions.

You can start any time and nurture the habit. It saves and prolongs lives, regardless of age.

For free.

Without ads!

You can’t get a better deal.

References

1. Chang YH, Wu IC, Hsiung CA. Reading activity prevents long-term decline in cognitive function in older people: evidence from a 14-year longitudinal study. Int Psychogeriatr. 2021 Jan;33(1):63–74. doi: 10.1017/S1041610220000812. Epub 2020 Jun 5. PMID: 32498728; PMCID: PMC8482376.

2. Bavishi A, Slade MD, Levy BR. A chapter a day: Association of book reading with longevity. Soc Sci Med. 2016 Sep;164:44–48. doi: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2016.07.014. Epub 2016 Jul 18. PMID: 27471129; PMCID: PMC5105607.

3. Whatley MC, Murayama K, Sakaki M, Castel AD. Curiosity across the adult lifespan: Age-related differences in state and trait curiosity. PLoS One. 2025 May 7;20(5):e0320600. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0320600. PMID: 40333682; PMCID: PMC12057985.

4. Chu L, Tsai JL, Fung HH. Association between age and intellectual curiosity: the mediating roles of future time perspective and importance of curiosity. Eur J Ageing. 2020 Apr 27;18(1):45–53. doi: 10.1007/s10433–020–00567–6. PMID: 33746680; PMCID: PMC7925741.

This song inspired some of the lines used in this article. Source — YouTube

J. Cole was, to my knowledge, the first person to make sense of the relationship between time and money by going against popular opinion. He rapped:

They say time is money, but really it’s not
If we ever go broke girl, then time is all we got

And I took that seriously.

Time is all we have when we have nothing. The question, then, that we should all be asking ourselves is — who has nothing?

After World War II, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by the United Nations, stipulating the rights and freedoms of every human being. Education, food, shelter, clothes. These are basic needs. So who has nothing?

We’ll have to push back the hand of time way further than the post-World War II era, and even further than 1791, when the Bill of Rights was ratified. We have to go back to a time when organisms (plural) hardly existed. The time I’m referring to is the moment when the very first organism stepped onto the scene.

Presently, the mainstream theories of evolution cannot aptly explain how the first organism came into being, nor are they well equipped to describe its core features. To my knowledge, two individuals have tried to reconcile the theories of physics and the emergence of the first organism. The first is Jeremy England, who developed the hypothesis of adaptive dissipation. The other is myself, a hypothesis I call the evolutionary singularity hypothesis.

What led me to consider an alternative explanation for the first organism was a simple question: Was reproduction present when the first organism emerged?

Reproduction is taken as a given in all living organisms, and yet, before it emerges as an option, the first organism needs to have persisted long enough before it can conjure up such a strategy. For this reason, I unsubscribed from the maxim of “survival of the fittest” and ascribed to a new one, the “persistence of the coherent.” That was how I began developing the alternative theory of evolution, which I call Organismal Selection, or OS in short.

I had to trace it back to the very first organism, because it didn’t have reproduction, nor did it have the Bill of Rights. It only had itself and time. You can cue J. Cole’s words at this point.

Time

Time is what happens when nothing else happens

— Richard Feynman

When nothing happens, reproduction is thrown out of the window. Even while it is being thrown out, time continues to evolve. When you have nothing, completely, you have time. The first organism had itself and time.

According to complexity theories, an organism exists in a non-equilibrium state, at the edge of chaos. It defies the universal decay into disorder. While the universe expands, organisms keep themselves intact. Reproduction is not a goal at this time; persistence is.

The question then becomes — how does one persist? How does one get more time to continue persisting? How does one successfully defy the universal gradient? It starts by working on oneself and making the most of the time you have. What you have when you have nothing is, first and foremost, time.

Organisms have developed smart ways to persist. The first and perhaps most neglected feature is the existence of a boundary. All cells have membranes. Membranes selectively allow material inside and excrete waste outside once it has accumulated to intolerable levels. That last bit is important because it is normally dismissed that we continue to accumulate waste, but it only becomes an emergency after crossing certain thresholds. Your bladder, for instance, continues to fill with urine until it gets full, then its muscles stretch, and your sphincters alert you about the urge to let go.

Bacteria can survive thousands of years without food, because reproduction is not the main goal. Persistence is. How to optimise for time when that is all you have becomes the central project of all living organisms.

Consider a mule. They cannot reproduce. From the main theories of evolution, they are dead ends. Pointless. And yet, we do not quip that mules are stubborn without good reason. They persist, even when evolutionists don’t think about them. They have time. They stubbornly cling to the little time they have and live it. The theory of Organismal Selection can explain the stubbornness of mules; the other theories of evolution cannot.

Alternatively, think about a critically ill patient. Doctors can do all they can to save them. Past a certain point, when they can no longer intervene, they simply have to wait and see how the outcome will be. When clinicians have washed their hands, all that a patient has is time.

Suppose you’re female, in your seventies. You cannot give birth anymore. What you have left is time. Humans have persisted beyond their biological age because they developed technology and health care to push these boundaries. For women, it marked the time when the body needed to balance the risks of giving birth and staying alive. After all the ovarian reserves are depleted, the body has to adapt. Hello menopause.

Menopause is a mystery among evolutionists. It signifies a transition from reproduction to its inability. Why did humans chase longevity if evolution states that, in the absence of reproduction, one’s role is moot?

The grandmother hypothesis doesn’t check out, because among humans, women leave their original homes and go to live with their husbands, a new crop of genes and genomes. The closest relatives are her children. It makes more evolutionary sense to have more children than to take care of other people’s. Furthermore, why should a grandmother help someone who only contains a quarter of your genome when you can produce children who will get 50% of yours?

I argue that persistence takes precedence. What do you have when you have nothing, not even reproduction? Time. How do you make the most of it? By persisting.

Menopause is also seen among chimpanzees, pilot whales, and killer whales. Interesting theories have been formulated. The one I continue to advocate for follows from Organismal Selection, because persistence precedes the existence of menopause, and explains its dogged appearance in several species. This takes us to another feature of organisms that have nothing. I’m talking about…

Agency

The existence of a boundary reveals a quality about organisms that is also lacking in most mainstream evolutionary theories.

Natural selection takes it that evolution happens to organisms and genes, not that organisms evolve. The two core principles of evolution are reproduction and death rates. Whoever reproduces more stands a chance to survive more than those who don’t. Those who evade death better survive. These features call for adaptation. And yet, natural selection takes on the passive stance where organismal effort comes secondary to the forces of evolution.

Philosophers have argued in the past that natural selection has a passive taste about it. Karl Popper further advocated for a change in Darwinism. He developed the concept of Active Darwinism to counter the passivity of natural selection.

Philip Ball further pointed out that there is presently no evolutionary model that factors agency. It’s hard to include whim into a model and still preserve objectivity.

Ball likely never read my preprint, published late last year. However, by starting with the organism, agency can factor into the evolutionary story. This is the basis of Organismal Selection.

Boundaries were the first physical feature that distinguished an organism from its universe. When it had nothing, it had itself. So it could move as it wished, harnessing energy from its environment to persist.

I have argued in the past that boundaries are the first condition necessary to form any feature of consciousness as we understand it. AI does not have such a boundary, and so it will never have consciousness. A boundary is necessary to know what one feels in contrast with everything surrounding it.

With a boundary, consciousness can evolve, and agency can be preserved. Effectively, it means when you have nothing, you have yourself — your conscious self. You may not be aware that you have nothing, but you have yourself and time.

What I’m trying to say is…

I doubt evolutionists ask themselves such a question. They are more concerned with fitting their phenomena into the schema of natural selection. But when we ask ourselves the question that forms the title of this article, we get in tune with reality, that reproduction, or even replication, is never the primary goal.

Fitting in was hardly the primary goal of the first organism, since it was the only one existing at the time. It had to develop its rules and means to survive. It had agency. And for as long as it lived, it had time.

Maybe the universe obliterated the first organism and then created another one. We cannot tell. But for as long as it existed, we can be certain of two things that it possessed — time and agency, the two qualities lacking in most mainstream theories.

This song inspired some of the lines used in this article. Source — YouTube

Usually, when we think of summiting a mountain, we don’t envision a 3D physical feature. It’s often in 2D.

When you picture yourself climbing a mountain, you only see one side of it. The climb tends to follow a path. And when at the peak, we tend to believe we have conquered the mountain.

Far from the truth.

Getting to the top does not mean you have conquered the mountain. You have only used a particular path to get to the top. The mountain is a 3D physical feature with parts that a summiter does not know, nor knows exist.

When one thinks of a mountain in totality, a summit is only a string. There are vegetations, animals, unpredictable weather. The effort it takes to summit a mountain should be a lesson in humility. A single string of a path is difficult enough. The entire mountain is nearly impossible. Thus, anyone who summits a mountain is witness to the obstacle a single path offers.

But no, we have never conquered any mountain.

J. W. Marriott built the foundation of the world’s largest hotel company after opening his first hotel at 55 years old.

Shane Parish continues:

Everything started with a nine-seat root beer stand in Washington, DC, and a simple goal: serve people well and build something that lasts. And of course, he didn’t just go from restaurants to hotels; along the way, he started the airline catering industry.

If this were the story of a medical doctor in my country, they would have been considered crazy.

It takes roughly 8 years to earn your undergraduate degree and finally get that much-coveted title of doctor. You then lumber through a year of internship, and if you’re keen on becoming a consultant as quickly as possible, enrol for a masters programme that typically runs for around four or five years. After graduation, you have to serve for an extra two years as a senior registrar before a benevolent hospital can call you a consultant.

Imagine going through all these years of learning and suffering only to drop it all and start a hotel company. Sounds bonkers. It shouldn’t be.

The structure of success has long been upheld by society, that anyone striving to achieve something different may get rejection or worse, an intervention. It is a node away from being considered crazy. Crazy is the word, because normal is a statistic.

Enrolling in a highly demanding college, such as medical school or a top-tier programme, such as training for the Olympics, screens out any normal person. You have to be an extreme outlier or at least believe yourself to be one.

Michael Phelps, the most decorated Olympian, has Marfan’s syndrome. Some have attributed his wins to the condition, but that’s taking the easy route. They forget the countless times he has lived inside water than outside it. You have to be far from normal to get that many accolades.

And yet, when the same person tries to do something completely different from what defined their lives, they are considered mad. News flash: they were mad in the first place. As Kendrick raps:

Everybody lookin’ at you crazy
What you gon’ do?
Lift up your head and keep moving
Or let the paranoia haunt you?

Too often, success is defined by a society. The smallest unit of any society is a family. Willingly, or without their knowledge, your family prepares you for whatever role you will take. Your success begins to be shaped by your kin.

Deviating from the path they paved for you seems odd. Before that happens, they panel-beat you into the path they have planned for you based on the abilities they notice from an early age. Career autonomy, when you’re young, exists in abstraction.

When we trace life to its very beginning, the first organism never had a society. It never had a family. It was it against the world. No prior idea of what success is. It lived. Because it lived, we live.

The lesson it may never have had a chance to share with us, but which should be implicit in its survival, is that success is a standard we set for ourselves.

The paradox of success

To appreciate the paradox of success, we must acknowledge how success is multifaceted even among those in the same profession.

At the time of this writing, an ongoing debate continued in a WhatsApp group I was in, where a new breed of leaders challenged a previous regime and how they felt the medical landscape should be.

The incoming team wanted to phase out the MO title, shorthand for a general practitioner medical doctor. They insist that graduate training should be automatic for anyone who finishes an internship in all public and teaching hospitals. The question I have not seen anyone ask is: Why does this team think every doctor wants to specialize?

I know of doctors who love working as MOs. Why should specialization be the path for every doctor? This school of thought assumes general practitioners are miserable. It is further assumed that because the MOs are not leaving their positions, the incoming wave of freshly minted doctors will not have space to fit into the system. As naively as this interpretation may be, it quickly forgets that all interns were absorbed into health institutions after graduation. It’s not that hospitals cannot take in more doctors; it’s that they don’t want to. Forcing general practitioners down a path that should be their choice is not the definition of success. It is forcing your hand.

When an authority head forces you to take the road they have laid for you, they implicitly confess the existence of another way. They undermine autonomy and may even insist that it is for your own good. This directive defies what the first organism learned the hard way — success is defined by your chosen standard. You can take it as society structures it, or you can choose another path. Heck, you can create a new one.

Within the hospital, there are different specialists. This rich variety could not have existed without freedom of choice. As a team of doctors, some of us would wish that we continue to keep patients in the hospital. They are mostly in the administrative role. Some would wish patients to get well faster and get back home. They are the foot soldiers in what we may call the operations role. Two different goals, same hospital. One’s own standard defines success. And indeed, a viable, ethical middle ground is possible between these two sides.

Success for the mule is different from success for the bacterium. For the mule, it is to avoid annihilation, a standard I insist we should never dismiss, unlike mainstream evolutionary theories. For the bacterium, so the same theories portend, it is to reproduce. Each goal has facets of autonomy, but the latter one appears to be forced on organisms because it is a fairly universal trait. Humans have been doing that for centuries now. That is, laying out the roles of other living creatures.

For women, it has been to take care of the children. That persisted even after getting universal suffrage. For blacks, it was to serve the whites. That persisted long after slavery was abolished. It is not surprising that the structure of success follows what society deems appropriate. We are, after all, a social species. We are inclined to align ourselves with societal demands.

But can’t we choose our goals without defying societal demands? It is surely possible. It does not defy the laws of physics. Mad is, nevertheless, the label we give those who are crazy enough to follow through with their ideas. Strangely enough, I once wrote a manuscript that I think is now long overdue for publication about the paradox of success.

Daniel Kahneman had hinted at it in his book, Thinking, Fast and Slow. It talks about the highly gifted. Once you have qualified for the final 8 in the 100m dash in the Olympics, there is very little that your skill can contribute. What will dominate is luck. I made the calculations, not from previous winners, but a simple mathematical illustration. The example I used was from a six-sided die.

Suppose the slots for the 100m dash final were six instead of eight, then every athlete would have a different lane, from 1 to 6. If every one of them had similar abilities, they would be no different from the six faces of a die. Knowing which side will come up then is a function of randomness rather than ability. That is the paradox of success.

However, history will remember the winner. The winner will tell a story. The audience will believe the story because it is a historical fact. But that is not the path towards success. That is one path. There are several.

J. W. Marriott showed us that you can begin a hotel business at 55 and still become wildly successful. It only takes a little bit of madness and an idea. Even then, that is not the only way to deem oneself successful.

The belief that success should be defined by what society tells us is related to several concepts of what individuals may believe are tied to success. For instance, when I get good grades in high school, I will be admitted to medical school, after which I will earn a respectable title and earn an above-average salary. The more money I get, the more I will be respected. Success, in this regard, is bundled up with several independent features that become difficult to separate when woven into a story.

When you think of your heroes, dead or alive, their stories are woven into something palatable, something you enjoyed consuming. It would hardly be as interesting if it weren’t sewn in that narrative style.

Each of these components can be separated. I can get good grades in high school and decide to start a festival. That’s how Summer Tides Festival began. I can go to medical school and choose not to practice. That’s the story of the author of the Jurassic Park series and ’s Juve Notes. I can earn an above-average salary without the previous two requirements. Indeed, they are not requirements. I can inherit my parents’ money and structure it so that I get a salary every month until I die. Would you call that success? Someone would. Why? Because success should be by your own standard.

This unbundling reduces the pressure to conform to what society shapes for you. Today’s stories offer good examples. Current ideas of success did not exist in the past. Going to campus and graduating with a PhD was a rare form of success that few people chased. When we go even further, the idea of success was having your daughter married to a king or prince. It is hardly the goal of most women or parents today. Who would have thought that a hip-hop artist could be a billionaire? Nobody before Jay-Z. Dr. Dre has recently joined the club. Now, we have this metric of success that Forbes reminds us of on every occasion. I don’t have such bankloads of money, so I can comfortably say that it’s never usually about the money.

Before owning a home became a success metric, having a family was highly desired. Finding a spouse who would come home and help you raise your children was a gift from heaven. At some point, a father would wish their son could get circumcised without flinching. Today, single-parent families are common, as are divorces. And most circumcisions are performed in hospitals.

While we’re in the same building, a general practitioner (an MO) may love their work and would prefer not to specialize. One may take on an admin role, while another continues inserting CVCs in patients, while another changes the batteries of a pacemaker. Success is multidimensional.

I could say the same about writing. I never thought I could be writing daily. I merely wanted the world to read my ideas on evolution, which I persistently argue are superior to Darwin’s. However, while learning the ropes of online writing, I encountered a crop of writers who shared their returns as their measure of success.

They would share in their articles that they are six-figure writers, and the naïve mind, as mine was at the time, would think these were their earnings. The truth is, a six-figure writer could just be talking about the number of clicks to their page, or the number of people who read their work in, say, a month. Newbie writers will take this as the measuring rod of success and toil without understanding the network effects at play.

I may never have as many readers as J. K. Rowling, even if I were to write for the rest of my life (as I plan to do). Regardless, getting to the billionaires club with multiple copies to her name was not J. K. Rowling’s idea of success when she got to writing the Harry Potter series. My guess is that getting a publisher to accept her manuscript, after 12 rejections, should be a reason for celebration. That is success from some view.

In contrast, my first peer-reviewed manuscript was accepted without rejection or revisions. I celebrated, in my own small way, as my mother will recall (I know she doesn’t, but I love her regardless).

At first, I wanted the world to immediately accept my ideas on evolution, but then I was kowtowing to the world’s definition of success. Suppose Darwin wrote On the Origin of Species, and it never saw the light of day, would we have labelled that successful? You may say not quite. Another may say that Alfred Wallace could have replaced him, and Natural Selection could still be a worthy theory.

Wallace, however, never spent as much time advocating for Natural Selection as Darwin did. So is Wallace less successful as a co-founder of Natural Selection? What about Gregor Mendel, who died before the world celebrated his findings?

Now, picture these three individuals developing their own metric of success and chasing it. I wouldn’t bother asking you if you thought they were successful. I would ask them. That, in my books, is what success should be like.

What I’m trying to say is…

Blow steam in the face of the beast
The sky could fall down, the wind could cry now
The strong in me, I still smile

Why? Because success should be by your own standard.

A plurality of ideas means there are multiple success metrics. The more they are, the richer the community, and the more fulfilled individuals can become. Success is, to some inescapable extent, shaped by one’s outstretched arms; the willingness to pursue the goal. In that regard, my standard will be different from yours.

It need not be the same.

For a long time, I’ve wondered why each of us has a distinct face, even identical twins. Evolution carved a unique path for everyone. Success need not be shaped to match a societal ideal.

Regardless of your age or point in your adult life, success should be defined by you.

This song inspired some of the lines used in this article. Source — YouTube

Think of all the platforms you know.

LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, WhatsApp, Medium, Substack, Patreon, X, TikTok. Material on these platforms has been monetized. Now think of all the people making the most money off these platforms. Influencers come to mind. A majority optimise for money, even if it’s not a primary interest.

Take the example of someone like Ted Gioia. He is a Jazz lover, but occasionally writes about culture. His articles are pregnant with wisdom, and scattered throughout his pieces is an urge for subscribers to support his work by subscribing for a fee. Substack takes a fraction of the subscription fees and leaves the rest to Ted. It’s a small fee for the freedom of one’s thoughts to reach my inbox. And yet, the content has been monetized.

Instagram and TikTok are the modern versions of distribution. Boys no longer cycle throughout the neighbourhood distributing hard copies of newspapers. Today, subscribing to a newspaper delivers key stories to your email instantly, with a single push of a button. To receive exclusives, you have to pay up. This may be harmless because the newspapers, too, needed one to pay before getting a copy.

Trade-offs of these kinds may be necessary for sustainability. Value needs accreditation. But when you consider the people who own these platforms, value is not their primary consideration. It’s staying in the game. To continue playing. To avoid being benched, one has to find ways to stay on the court, even if they have more money than they could ever need in several lifetimes. Thus, the kryptonite to these platforms, the kind of weapon that will joust them out of the tourney, is content that cannot be monetized.

The continuous humming of this engine is made possible in a couple of ways. Make sure everything posted has a single name — content. I hate that word. You may be a dancer, but to anyone consuming your work, it has the label “content.” The same goes for comedians, artists, singers, writers. The list is longer than this. Armed with such a label, they can make metrics to monetize your “content” and earn a justifiable claim to the money they have given you.

Most of the people who earn this money are not keen on questioning why they earned a certain figure “x” in month “y”, but are intent on doubling “x” in the next month. Who’s to say the numbers are not arbitrary? In some cases, such as Patreon and Substack, the amount is clear based on the number of subscribers and the fees charged. In others, whatever they give you is what you have to take home. No questions asked. And when you ask the question, it is likely that a manufactured response is always ready, meant to pacify further prodding.

By labelling every work of creation as “content,” we can establish something more about the likely evolution of the material we consume. Gresham’s law can be a helpful guide.

Gresham’s Law

Truth, it resides in the fire
The need of it’s dire
Deceiving the lies, I know

— Kendrick Lamar

Although named after Sir Thomas Gresham, an English financier, this law talks about how low-value coins can penetrate into the market and dominate if given a chance.

Consider two coins, one made of pure silver and another made of impure silver. Ideally, the pure coin should be in circulation, but in the absence of quality checks and laws, the impure version percolates throughout the market. Anyone can make the impure versions. A powerful incentive to keep the pure versions to oneself develops, while in the long run, the impure ones remain the only ones visibly in circulation. It all started with coins.

Gresham’s law is an example of how slips can turn into rot in the absence of quality checks enforced by the responsible authority. It was noticed among coins, but it’s applicable in several other domains. Now, let us replace coins with content.

By converting every form of creation into a single label, content, we can begin to appreciate the likely outcomes. The only online police we have are individual reports of nefarious or not-safe-for-work material. Besides that, anything can go. But what happens when the platform only wants content that can be monetized?

Two things. First, anyone who does not monetize their content becomes the product for advertising. The platform owners would have the data to back any company or individual that wishes to circulate their products or services by strategically dangling it to the consumers. In this way, platform owners found a way to bypass anyone who does not make monetizable content.

The second thing is that we get a Gresham law taking effect. The impure and devalued content remains much more in circulation, while the pure ones get hoarded. A writer, for instance, will keep their most prized material private and only available to paid subscribers. The ones that are not so much of value will be circulated freely.

In a way, it may be argued that in the past, value could be sought from books. One had to part with coin to get an invaluable book. Today, you part with a few dollars in subscription fees to access material you and the creator value. It converts our online world into ancient Athens. Excrement at every corner, with nobody keen on improving the sanitary conditions.

As a rule of thumb, over 90% of online users are consumers. The remaining 10% are creators. The majority of users take in the excrement. They are none the wiser about its mental metabolic effects. Switching costs can be cognitively costly. Imagine a situation where everyone labels you ancient, analog, backward, or old because you don’t have an IG account. You are arm-twisted to join, and the Gresham-like law effects feed you junk. In a word, enshittification.

Some corners are not full of crap. Subscription to some of the material can empower you, but with little cost on your side. Veritasium and Kurzgesagt, for instance, try to be heavy on value and little on optimizing for money. Not everyone has the money to pay subscription fees, and so they have to throw in a couple of ads to keep their work and the people creating it afloat.

This incentive space generates a single outcome that creators would tend to use to measure their value. It’s not in the material they share, but how much it earns them. When most lives are online, and everyone gauges themselves based on money, creative material loses timeless value. Money stays around for a while; value defies the constraints of one’s lifetime.

Consider Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s David. It will forever be preserved. That is someone who valued art even though it took a few coins to bring it to “life”. Creativity is often inefficient, but it is the inefficiency that is needed for creativity to bloom. Efficiency, on the other hand, tends to collapse the creative wave into a single one. In this case, the need is to make more money.

The Medici financed Leonardo da Vinci. The current crop of billionaires has more than enough to live on comfortably. Their mission statements falsely give the impression that they aim to increase the authentic creativity of individuals when money and staying in the game are their main goals.

Creative individuals have to sell something to continue making a living. But there are genuine fans who would willingly offer a few dollars to give these creative brains a raft to keep floating. We don’t need to arm-twist a creative genius to produce their work. The drive to create it is usually enough. We merely have to tell them that they will have their basics sorted.

However, when platforms are heavy on monetizing content, what we’re continuously flooded with will be ads. I imagine a scenario where Spider-Man has to rescue a guy falling from the top floor. As he runs, he has to have someone record his movements, which will be converted into reels that will be posted online. Amid the run, he pauses to advertise the kind of cologne he uses to keep himself smelling good throughout his escapades. By the time he gets to the victim, the poor guy is already in a body bag.

What gets shared, therefore, turns into a massive and continuous case of theatrical performances. Without it, you don’t get paid. Performances are usually far from reality. Certain sounds or intonations don’t feature in our regular conversations. You don’t meet someone new, and they immediately tell you, “Heeeeey! Welcome to my chaneeeelll” I trust you have said it in that tone we all know.

Prioritizing money by generating monetizable content can lead to such a world. An extreme example like this one may be necessary for the fish scales to fall from our eyes to notice the bland excrement we may be forced to consume daily because of platforms.

What it also reveals is the kryptonite — deplatforming.

Choosing not to have an X or TikTok account need not be shunned as an old-generation kind of thing. Slur of this kind can only be endorsed by the platform owners who benefit from more accounts. Closing one’s account or even not getting one may be a reliable maker of one who avoids endless consumption of crap.

This does not mean we completely leave them, but if the goals are to restructure value systems, then abandoning them might be the best way to hit back. As it stands, my words are my strongest punches because they point back at me. I have to use Instagram and TikTok to advertise the festival that brings people together, far from their online cocoons. The eventual goal is to have a signature festival that is well known, so that we don’t need to resort to various platforms to drive our agenda, which is to unite different cultures in reminiscing about their favourite high school moments.

It is also a conflict, because a platform such as Medium is an oasis in ad-dense websites. It is a small fee to pay to get ad-free articles. Since it pays its writers, there will be writers whose main goal is to make a killing from their work. And there will be others who would wish to have a clean interface to share their material, knowing ads will never feature. The money that comes, if it comes at all, is a small token of appreciation, but not the main goal.

Without such small individual contributions, we may not get to share our ideas with the world. With a high domain authority, Medium’s and Substack’s articles can find more readers throughout the world. Indeed, alternative options may have been more expensive. But as long as their goal is to monetize, for the creative and the platform, Gresham’s law tells us how it will all unfold.

Deplatforming can take different routes. For instance, intermittent fasting from social media could be a means to take oneself away from the curvilinear aisles lined with junk. A long walk may also rewire your brain to reality and give it time to breathe. We didn’t evolve to be constantly experiencing our lives across a rectangular, brightly lit interface. It means deplatforming is a strategy that aligns with our evolutionary origins and strengths. Submitting our time to scrolling disarms; taking time to be familiar with one’s physical environment arms.

Another good way to deplatform is to read a book. A book engages some of the most pivotal traits in our evolutionary history as humans while aiming to improve the individual. However, reading a book to deconstruct it does not create room to let it touch you. A lesson from non-fiction work and poetry is that a literary piece of work ought to move the reader.

From a book, then, one can arm oneself with the words to improve one’s emotional intelligence, and thus properly understand those they regularly interact with. I cannot begin to explain the importance of books, as many have already done so. I can only stress that they are a powerful way to deplatform.

Since books have been in circulation, they too are subject to Gresham’s laws. There are more shitty than unshitty books. One can use the Lindy filter to pick the valuable ones. Deplatforming in this way may indeed bring back value to our lives.

To appreciate the power you have from deplatforming, imagine asking the owners how they feel after you have deleted your account. You can use Kendrick’s words if you lack your own:

Are you happy for me?
Really, are you happy for me?
You smile in my face, but are you happy for me?
Yeah, I’m out the way, are you happy for me?

What I’m trying to say is…

The cat is out the bag, I am not your savior.

Our lives cannot be collapsed into a single value — money.

Life is too rich for that. We need to rediscover the values we have grown to neglect and recultivate the habits that generate new ones.

Kryptonite did not kill Superman. It weakened him. We may not need to kill some platforms. We merely need to release ourselves from their hypnotic effects and effectively reduce their power over our lives.

It is not so much about what the government can do for you, or what you can do for the government. It’s about how we can get the government off our backs. You can replace government with platforms. That is how we expose the kryptonite to weaken their grip on us.

This song inspired some of the lines used in this article. Source — YouTube

As much as I may be a strong proponent, thinking is not always good.

Workouts are good for the body. But when you’re feeling sore or tired, thinking can stop you from doing what you know will be beneficial.

Amid one of my workouts, I would push myself to achieve the target without thinking.

Your arguments can be pretty convincing. You are the easiest person to fool.

Nowadays, I do the workouts without thinking. I have to chant it to myself to numb that philosopher who may stick its head out to convince me otherwise.

I use it as a forced function, without thinking. I know the outcomes are good, so I have to silence anything that stops me from achieving them.

It’s an investment of sorts. One first thinks about events where thinking can stop you from making steps towards your goal. Then you silence yourself from thinking ourselves out of it.

You never have to think about it again. A one-time, guaranteed return on investment.

In Chris Voss’s work, Never Split the Difference, he gives specific examples of why labelling helps in negotiations. The idea is to separate the objective individual from the emotion. To name is to conquer, and labelling has a way of retracting emotions from our limbic centres in the brain and tackling them objectively.

Controlling the emotional, evolutionary traps is helpful for tactfully approaching negotiations from a more solid ground. This is what happens when psychologists or psychiatrists talk with their clients. Designing the environment to offer a calm ambience and using a soothing voice to show collectedness aids the patient in sharing their story. Here’s where labelling comes in handy.

In this scenario, a shrink tries to negotiate with the patient to pin down the troubles they have and the emotions surrounding them. Labelling it gives a clear path to the solution. It seems pretty straightforward.

Conditions are therefore named to aid in their management. Bipolar disease will have a clear treatment option. Schizoaffective disorder will be managed differently. Despite our emotions having the inchoate structure of similarity, labelling shows how each is different. These can have positive outcomes. The first and largely underappreciated value is knowing such a name exists in the first place.

Say you have noticed someone close to you having mood swings of late. You don’t know how best to describe it. When you share it with your psychiatrist, they spit out a name. They then describe the symptoms that match the scenes you had to put up with. That’s the first and perhaps the most important feature of labelling — acknowledging existence paves the way for a management strategy.

This is all good, except for the fact that it can be exploited.

Psychiatry and concept creep

Psychology has been a notorious topic because of a replication crisis that seems difficult to resolve. Psychiatry, a different field altogether, faces more difficult problems.

For instance, the brain disease model of mental illness posits that patients have a problem with their brains, which can be solved with certain medication.

The model asserts that certain parts of the brain are irremediable, and a cocktail of pills offers the solution. This alleged chemical imbalance needs nudging to bring it back to its proper equilibrium. The poster child for this mental disease, as an imbalance, is the serotonin depression theory. It has failed to stand the scientific test of validity.

A 2022 umbrella review showed that the brain is not broken. There is no imbalance. However, Christina Buttons remarks that one in five individuals in the USA reports having been diagnosed with a mental illness. The idea behind an imbalance reeks of the humorism theory.

Before our understanding of the body improved, it was believed that a healthy body was one in balance with the four known liquids (humors) — blood, yellow bile, phlegm, and black bile. Galen, the historically famous physician, believed cancer was caused by black bile. Anatomists and surgeons pored through bodies in a futile search for the source of this bile. They didn’t find it. They never have. However, for centuries thereafter, this did not kill the theoretical framework.

In hospitals, cans would hang outside wards and stick adjacent to patients because bloodletting was believed to be a proper intervention to return the body’s humors into balance. This historic period in healthcare should be repeated for its lessons. There are several.

For starters, the false humorism theory eventually gets debunked. Science has a self-correction mechanism to weed out the chaff from the bran.

The other is that a theory supported by authority figures does not go down without a fight. Although later “purified” by Galen, it took years for the medical field to abandon Hippocrates’ theory of humors. To date, the brain model of disease is still upheld because it was once endorsed by professional associations such as the American Psychiatric Association (APA) and the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). We were taught the same in medical school.

One of the biggest problems with the labelling is that it lacks a scientific medical test. Say you are schizophrenic. The diagnosis is made from a set criteria that is regularly updated. The bible of psychiatric diagnosis is known as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) for mental disorders.

The name is telling. Diagnostic is a given. Statistical means collected from several cases before the diagnoses are pruned to a helpful cluster for clinicians to use. A manual because it’s a reference book. It gets updated regularly, with the most recent one including new conditions such as prolonged grief disorder.

While the mode of labelling these diseases is statistical, the interventions may be difficult to standardize. A physician will notice that your thyroid hormones are imbalanced using a specific thyroid profile test. Three hormones — TSH, T3, and T4 — are enough to know from a baseline point of view where the condition lies. They then offer their solution. From knowing the normal, we can diagnose the abnormal with a valid and replicable test. These tests are largely lacking in psychiatry.

What we have, however, are labels.

Arguably, diseases and the interventions gain validity through rigourous statistical testing, but it borrows from clear medical tests. In its absence, the DSM risks throwing a couple of names to the public, which can be exploited. Indeed, they have been.

Today, a single sad episode during the day, which affects so much of your work, will be labelled “depression.” Happiness after working out or the joy of getting a promotion could risk getting the label of “mania.” Since our distraction economy has fried our attention spans, not for the worse, though, most label their issues as “ADHD.” You could like things in a certain order, but your friends will be quick to ask if you have “OCD.” These words get exchanged and overused online like an open market.

A single concept then begins to creep across domains previously untouched. In the absence of clear tests of demarcation, taking the offensive position against them can label you as either ableist or elitist. These are some of the worst labels. I dislike them because, as Chris Voss has shown, once you have attached a label to a problem, you can now attack it with seeming objectivity.

Bullying, for instance, was a physical thing. Its effects could turn mental. Now, cyberbullying is a thing. Social media and the Internet have allowed people to be mean to each other without getting punched in the face. I am open to correction, but as much as words can be hurtful, I doubt there can be two individuals who can objectively define cyberbullying and have their definitions match. They will likely give an example of what it is and then agree with each other.

The WHO defines cyberbullying as bullying with the use of digital technologies. A concept that was once physically defined is now digital.

Bullying, as we have always known it, is appreciated by an imbalance of power and ability. The bigger or stronger guy could pick on the smaller or weaker one. The victim could then report being hurt. No scientific test. We have to rely on one’s interpretation of the act.

Therein lies a problem. We cannot know how genuine someone is regarding someone’s acts. Did the words shared in the group hurt you? Were they direct or general? Does that account for cyberbullying? How can that be established? What is the reliable feature of genuine cyberbullying? I doubt we have a solid definition.

Enter another label — passive-aggressive. Its use hardly comes with objections.

Where and when I grew up, certain words didn’t exist. A rich vocabulary that includes words such as cyberbullying and passive-aggressive is indirect evidence of one’s education and possibly background. A well-off background. I doubt there are people in the slum who know what passive-aggressive means. The reason is that, in their lives, one is either aggressive or isn’t. There is nothing passive about aggression. And yet, the oxymoronic juxtaposition of the words continues to be used to label behaviours.

Concept creep is the idea of a concept creeping into domains they previously never existed. It is defined as a semantic expansion, mostly of harmful behaviours into less severe actions. For instance, in the past, bullying could leave a physical scar. Besides a digital footprint, cyberbullying does not leave any such physical evidence.

The author who coined the idea of concept creep adds:

Although conceptual change is inevitable and often well motivated, concept creep runs the risk of pathologizing everyday experience and encouraging a sense of virtuous but impotent victimhood.

Labels, as soon as they are known, can get exploited. Most times, unintentionally. A malicious individual will use them to make themselves appear the victim.

Massive exchange of these labels, without proper tests, leads billions of people to cultivate a victim mentality. Awareness of labels has this negative side effect. Just as well, it has its upsides.

PTSD vs PTG

So in God’s Son we trust
’Cause they know I’ma give ’em what they want
They lookin’ for a hero
I guess that makes me a hero

— Nas and Keri Hilson

We practically know what PTSD stands for. A new one I recently encountered was PTG — Post-traumatic growth. Let’s dive further into these two examples.

Post-traumatic stress disorder is a simple label that demands a deeper analysis than the surface-level one we’re used to. Post means after; traumatic, to mean trauma-induced; stress shows multiple levels of uneasiness and collectively presents as a disorder.

What level of harm does one have to be exposed to to be labelled as trauma? This is a highly subjective question with an even more subjective answer.

These murky grounds deny the chance of ever creating a solid definition of trauma to warrant the objective labelling of PTSD. What we can tentatively agree on is injury. At some point in one’s life, they were injured, and the recollection of the event evokes uneasiness and stress. And yet, stress is the reason heroes emerge from the hero’s journey.

Crucial in this journey is a traumatic event that could have shaped an individual to take a victim mentality or one that repurposes their direction towards growth. Post-traumatic growth.

I can safely say that all heroes in movies have gone through PTG. They know they can survive other harsh conditions because they survived certain similar conditions. But we need to clarify the difference between trauma and stress.

Trauma and stress are distinguishable from a time dimension. Trauma is a post-hoc label. It is given after an event. Stress is a present label. It is an ongoing event. Traumatic events are highly memorable. They can leave scars, physical or, metaphorically speaking, mental. Stressful events have a high evaporation rate. You could have gone hiking over the weekend. Certain paths proved more stressful than others, but by the time you summit a mountain, the exact points are largely a blur.

Stress tends to evolve into trauma if unchecked. If the weight you’re lifting at the gym results in an abdominal hernia, that is a traumatic event. A painful and permanent reminder. It resulted in injury. Injurious events leave marks. And yet, even then, traumatic moments can prove highly instructive in one’s life.

Epictetus lived a great part of his life as a slave. He also had a limp, a permanent mark we are made to believe was caused by his master. He did not let these events define him. He used them to establish a life that was admired by the most powerful man decades later, Marcus Aurelius. A slave shaped the life of an emperor.

The same emperor used the stoic lessons to survive multiple plagues, an attempted coup, burying several of his children, and accusations of an unfaithful spouse. These are vicissitudes that could leave anyone traumatized.

Marcus Aurelius was able to overcome these events largely because he was aware of them. From his daily meditations, he attempted to label them. He may not have known there was something such as PTG, but he knew there was someone who survived hardships and never let them define them. Awareness of certain labels can uplift as much as downgrade.

From a probabilistic point of view, heroes are outliers. Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus are remembered because they overcame their difficult obstacles. A leg up in overcoming challenges is the awareness that some stresses need not turn into traumas that leave us victims. They can be harnessed into fuel, preferably for the better.

Mean people will continue to lurk. So we cannot always claim that some labels need to be expunged. Hurtful words can be exchanged between two individuals. Awareness of these mean people is also an advantage. When someone is known to sadistically enjoy seeing others suffer, how we react to them is also upon us.

What I’m trying to say is…

Nas’ 9th studio album is untitled. Intentionally so. We don’t need a label to conquer an idea, because a label can be used for or against someone. We should not use them flagrantly. Without a name for the album, Nas still conveys a message: not all labels are necessary.

It may be important at this time in our lives to be responsible for the words we exchange with others. Brushing over one’s actions and using psychiatric labels as shields is not the best way to develop genuine, meaningful relationships.

We can take the example of medication stored on shelves or chemicals stored in a lab to label appropriately, for each and every one’s sake. It takes work. It’s necessary work. So let’s work before assigning that label.

This song inspired some of the lines used in this article. Source — YouTube

Organisms have survived for billions of years because they self-correct.

Consider one of my biggest obsessions — the first organism. It had no reference point other than itself. It needed to make its way around the universe and learn as fast and efficiently as possible. Growth was not the primary goal. It wasn’t even to reproduce. Survival was. To persist. Perhaps the most important feat it needed to achieve is to understand and recognize itself. From there, it could distinguish self from non-self. In the event of any damage, it could then work toward self-correction.

These traits have followed us and all other living creatures to the point where we have extended them into our systems. A phone needs a recharge. A computer needs rest. Markets close for the weekend. A year has leave days. These are cycles we have incorporated into our work-life for self-correction. Hardware reboots like sleep to self-correct. Meeting with friends on a Friday evening after a crazy week. Going home to the embrace of your partner. Calling your plug to indulge in something for the evening.

Self-correction is a sustaining mechanism. In systems dynamics, it is the balancing feedback. Since systems can grow, if left unchecked, they can grow past the point of equilibrium and into eventual collapse. In the AI age, this is a likelihood.

Self-correction is warranted, especially when its absence can be catastrophic. Consider reproduction and death rates, the engine of evolution according to natural selection. In the absence of death rates, organisms would reproduce exponentially, depleting the resources. The collapse of the entire ecosystem, the organisms, and the resources follows. In-built mechanisms such as child mortalities, competition, adaptation, and natural calamities — all these contribute toward preventing ecosystem collapse.

Our planet has self-corrective mechanisms. After winter comes summer. During the equinox, when the sun is smack above our heads, that’s when we have heavy rainfall. With extreme heat, we need extreme downpour. Heat without cooling would have turned our planet into a dead one, like our neighbours in the solar system.

So the question is…

Does AI self-correct?

Yes. It does.

Then why am I concerned?

Because it is not the self-correction we are used to.

Usually, when the systems we are used to are overwhelmed, they crash. When you have 50 tabs open in your browser, it hangs. Information overload precedes filter failure. Staying awake for over 24 hours can lead to information overload and eventual system failure. You collapse. To function like a normal human being, you need to balance working with resting hours. You need to self-correct.

In contrast, AI can work overtime. More than that, it encourages information. The more you feed it, the better it becomes. That is the self-correction it does. It checks what it has learned compared to what it is getting, and adjusts accordingly. This kind of self-correction is different from what we have always known.

Living systems know the stakes when they don’t self-correct. It’s death. Since AI is not living, it does not recognize death. The self-correction that matters to AI is the kind that involves ruthless improvement by consuming oceanic-like information. Therein lies the problem.

Not all information is credible. Practically, it is easier to make than to validate information. The balance weighs heavily on reliable information and discarding or dismissing the false ones. Most of this information is online.

We don’t need to imagine a world where most of the online contributors are bots. It’s already happening. Authors are publishing over 200 books in a year using AI. Ghost artists are writing AI-written songs at a faster rate. The wave of AI slop continues to rise, but the self-correction does not rise to match it.

Poetically, you can see the same trend with its biggest proponents. At some point, Oracle and Nvidia contributed large sums of money to fund OpenAI. Economists, however, didn’t foresee ways in which LLMs can sustainably reap profits any time soon. ChatGPT will have to start including ads. Asking for more money without a corrective mechanism to prevent the bubble from popping results in the collapse of the bubble.

Also, human beings bullshit themselves. We are born into the world. A couple, sometimes the mother without the father, gives a child a name. It doesn’t even know it has been baptized with this name until later. The recognition begins through induction when everyone around it continues to use the name. Perhaps that is its name, it might think. We have no way of knowing how it recognizes that the name it was given is its name.

That’s bullshitting oneself.

Granting an alien form of intelligence the capacity to speak our language and deductive logic could never objectively defend any of our names. We bullshit ourselves into believing our name is ours. I guess the same applies to pets, such as dogs, which respond to the names we give them. There is no self-correction needed.

AI can bullshit itself. It does so many times. We call it hallucination. It confabulates information and presents it to the world as “fact.” Efforts have been made to reduce these issues. But up to what point?

Today, searches begin with AI summaries. Summaries are usually welcome because they can grant each of us the power to bullshit our way around arguments. A quick search can arm you with a defence against your boss or a panel of interviewers. There is no self-correction mechanism. The stakes do not include death. AI becomes the law. AI becomes God.

Now, think of the bible. We have advanced our understanding of the universe, science, logic, and philosophy, but the holy book has not changed one bit. The book has no self-corrective mechanism. Does it collapse? Yes and no.

Yes, because it collapses in terms of validity. More and more people begin to see it for what it is — a tool to control and establish order, as the Durants have aptly pieced it in their summary of human history. No, because it does not grow like other systems.

As for AI, it grows. It continues to produce more and more of its work with fractions of hallucination that accumulate over time. A validation crisis mounts as more information and unchecked hallucinations are produced than validated. It will likely result in a worse case of replication crisis because there is no solid foundation to defend previous hallucinations besides references from previous AI outputs. Self-correction becomes nearly impossible.

When too much information is produced, the burden of truth becomes too heavy to bear. Self-correction is forgotten. No, abandoned. AI now becomes like the bible, but different. Unlike the bible, AI grows and self-validates. It does not self-correct.

Feeding itself, AI injects sterility into its output. This introduces what Picasso called sterility in the work. Previous researchers have given a name to this kind of collapse: model collapse. IBM describes it succinctly:

Model collapse refers to the declining performance of generative AI models that are trained on AI-generated content.

Once AI has consumed all the data it has been fed, it does not think outside of it. Creativity decays. Model collapse then leads to mode collapse. That is, reduced diversity.

Think of mode collapse like a child who has never had enough input from the world to prune its creativity. It can create monsters and imaginary friends as it so wishes. As it grows and consumes more information, this creativity reduces. Easter bunnies die. Fairy tales lose their lustre. God does not have that long beard we think of. Our imagination is now reduced to our current understanding. Humans cannot fly, unless in fan fiction. That is mode collapse — the collapse of a whole distribution into a few points.

And when you think we’re done, another problem appears — overfitting. The problem with overfitting is that a model becomes poor at other data sets outside the particular data set that was used to train it. Unfortunately for AI, it continues to change itself based on its regurgitation and consumption of its output. To create a disturbing image from the wise words of King Solomon, it’s like a dog going back to eat its vomit.

Now let’s bring the pieces of the puzzle together to see the picture. AI makes more online contributions, more information gets produced, but validation hardly happens. AI platforms result in model collapse, which eventually turns into mode collapse, and then with it comes overfitting, to make sense of the reduced diversity. Anyone who questions these supposed oceans of data is considered a charlatan or stupid. I mean, how dare you question all the data scoured by AI?

But what kind of data did it consume in the first place? Vomit. Misinformation thus floods our continuous online experience. In a word, noise. Noise is sensory input that harmfully preoccupies our senses.

Noise usually doesn’t make sense. We are so averse to noise that we would rather cling to anything that seems familiar. What is familiar readily gains our trust in contrast to the noise one tries to escape. When you don’t know who to trust, anything — literally anything — that resembles trust, even by a sliver, becomes trustworthy.

“Anything” includes the idea that AI has gone through mountains of data to produce a concise output just for me. And you. How kind of it. However, without self-correction mechanisms, the downstream effect of senseless AI use creates the perfect market for manipulation. I wouldn’t want to live in that kind of world.

The most famous portrait is that of Jesus.

New Christian churches are started all over the world. Numerous couples start families. New converts renovate their surroundings. Then they hang the portrait of Jesus.

Nowhere in history do we have an idea of what Jesus looked like. But we have narrowed down our concept of what we think he might look like by the countless portraits. A Caucasian with amazing hair and a dazzling, gentle smile, in white, sometimes raising his second and third fingers, has convinced scientists, professors, and thinkers all over the world. Surely, it must be Jesus.

The world has bullshitted its way into convincing itself that Jesus can only look like that.

Botched versions of the same exist on matatus throughout Kenya and graffiti paintings in Nairobi’s streets. They are a far cry from the immaculate versions hanging in many homes and offices. Yet, we recognize it as it is. There is no self-correction mechanism. And yet it continues to grow. Without the self-correction, it is acknowledged as the truth. Without question, so much so that nobody bothers to raise any objection. It’s like the air we breathe or water to the fish. It has managed to convince us of the bullshit.

Now, assume AI advances beyond our current understanding. Mathematicians who employ its help to solve decades-old problems are finding the solutions, at first, difficult to decipher, but as they proceed, elegant every step of the way. Mathematicians are some of the smartest people alive.

An alien intelligence (which, by the way, if abbreviated, becomes AI) that is difficult for some of the smartest people to crack should alarm us.

We cannot step in to correct what we do not understand. However, the evidence of elegance in previous efforts to break apart the meaning of the solutions offered by AI may convince those responsible for AI’s output that they are consistent. And what we cannot understand or change is likely to remain as law if, and especially if, it’s supported by the world’s brilliant minds.

The funny side of this story is you don’t need to have it supported by bright minds; you just have to convert most of the world into dumb ones. And if unchecked, then AI will replace God, the bible, law, and most importantly, the need to correct.

J. Cole has already echoed his concerns and posed a question:

I seen babies turn fiends, addicted to the screen
That dad shares, cashiers replaced by machines
Don’t buy, subscribe so you can just stream
Your content like rent, you won’t own a thing
Before long, all the songs the whole world sings
Will be generated by latest of AI regimes
As all of our favorite artists erased by it scream
From the wayside, “Ayy, whatever happened to human beings?”

Indeed, whatever happened to human beings?

What I’m trying to say is…

Self-correction is a protective measure.

Sacrifice it, and we live in a fake world. Science has an in-built self-corrective mechanism. It’s why scientists ascribe to it. As does analytical philosophy. Blind faith does not.

AI tends to flood anyone who prompts it with convincing information. Users don’t need a lot of it to believe it. Its output eventually gets shared as the gospel truth, like the portrait of Jesus.

I attend quizzes with my friends every other week. Some teams like to argue they are correct based on what AI tells them, even when it’s clear that they may be wrong.

That time I have been worried about, the time without efforts at self-correction, is already here with us.

This song inspired some of the lines used in this article. Source — YouTube

I was born and brought up in Nairobi’s Eastlands. Kayole and Komarock, to be specific.

In Eastlands, the teachers we were exposed to had a limited range of potential careers for students. The essays we wrote about our anticipated futures depicted reduced creativity. A doctor. A teacher. An engineer. Maybe a pilot or an air hostess. That was it.

Schools are supposed to be spaces that inform students. Ironically, before enrolling in school, the options were more varied. I wanted to be a professional soccer player. My family members and close friends were the only ones who supported my ambitions. Not my early school teachers.

Years later, career departments bring you back to reality, to your everyday living situations. In high school, they would match campus courses to your strengths and advise which professions you might excel in. It was never that you could be picked by a top football team, despite the same teachers knowing you were good at the sport.

These are what I call endogenous preferences. Societal engravings of what a child can grow to become. Several historic figures have proven successful in revered careers and parents induct their children to take these paths. Sometimes, the parents never had the opportunity to follow their dreams, and wish their children could achieve them on their behalf. From one generation to the next, the cycle continues.

Endogenous preferences are not just the good kind. Even the bad ones apply. They define the range of options for parents and children. Kanye raps:

My Aunt Pam can’t put them cigarettes down
So now my little cousin smokin’ them cigarettes now

This eventually determines the future not only of individuals but also of societies. The bad and the good.

Picture two children. One born in the country’s capital and the other somewhere in the rural area. Neither of them has ever crossed the country to explore the other side. The one born in the city is aware of other professions besides the classical teacher, doctor, engineer options. Growing up knowing only a limited range does not reveal how limiting it is. Thus, endogenous preferences blind individuals and communities.

It’s a two-way street. Children take up these options and apportion their efforts accordingly. Parents also apportion their praise and support to match these endogenous preferences. The leaders and the led become blinded to other existing options. Compared to the one who was born in the city’s capital, both children, should they follow the paths laid out by their parents, will believe they are successful. Endogenous preferences are somewhat similar to the situation of residents inside Plato’s cave.

Autonomy

And nothing lasts forever, but be honest, babe
It hurts, but it may be the only way

— Adam Levine

Success is a perception.

It is either what one feels, regardless of what society may think, or what society says about one’s decisions and luck. Lionel Messi has always been compared to the football greats, but pundits felt he fell short of glory without the most coveted trophy in the game — the World Cup. After he won it, everyone believed that he had checked all boxes.

Through endogenous preferences, society can encroach on one’s autonomy without their knowledge. Messi, for instance, had already achieved what most footballers can only dream of, and yet, the pressure from society and fans weighed heavily on him. Indeed, the whole country looked to him to achieve what Diego Maradona did in 1986.

In the absence of such a heavy burden, individual autonomy has space to breathe. The higher you go, the cooler it becomes. The cooler the space, the more rarefied the air. Breathing space and ability get blunted when society starts to look at you. Perception of success, thus, is largely determined by the individual when the position is not highly regarded by the community, and by the community when the position is of unmatched repute.

That autonomy contributes to one’s success is evident between the two children who were born in different places. Endogenous preferences have to be embraced before one can feel they have succeeded. I wanted to become an electrical engineer. My mother wanted me to become a doctor. I had the ability. Both options were considered successful and highly regarded by my community. I chose medicine and surgery because ex ante, it was a safer bet. The world will always need doctors. At the time, all doctors were deployed and unemployment was unheard of.

More endogenous preferences were induced in us from the moment we enrolled in medical school, such that by the time I had finished, our arms had embraced the career options our lecturers had told us.

As one finishes their internship, the question “What do you want to specialize in?” is pregnant with endogenous preferences. Autonomy, it seems, is a perception of what one was exposed to.

In its full strength, autonomy should mean you can enrol to become a pilot in your seventies. That is far from the case. It also means that children should choose upfront what they wish to become. Children, however, draw inspiration from parents, guardians, and the successful members of the extended family, so that autonomy in this regard, too, is illusory.

What we may think is our decision is largely the options that have been incepted in our brains. Take the example of a supermarket. The Gruen effect shows that a flooding of options can make one think they have bought an item because they wanted to. Or when choosing a subscription option, the company offering the services gives you its preferred tiers. You don’t customize yours. This is the decision architecture. You get the feeling that you have chosen one over the other because that is the slice of autonomy that has been handed to you.

In truth, we can never know the complete extent of autonomy because we have never known it. As an ideal concept, it contrasts with the picture reality draws for us. As it is, everyone seems okay with the manufactured options given to us. Thus, we can begin to see how judges can influence the lives of children when they make the final ruling in custody cases.

Endogenous preferences reveal the subtleties of autonomy and societal growth and development. A society can indeed grow if it nurtures the said preferences to achieve above-average performance. But it would not improve significantly in terms of complexity. It may grow, but it may not develop. Development happens by expanding the options of endogenous preferences.

Consider the two kids. All of them have illusory aspects of autonomy, but the one who grows up in the nation’s capital is aware of other career options compared to the one who has been in the countryside. Development will continue in the urban centre, while it doesn’t in the rural area, unless there is a means of expanding endogenous preferences upcountry.

One way to inject these new options is by sending individuals to the developing centres and having these individuals bring back what they have learned to the countryside. Think of the first person who does this as a footpath, like Barack Obama Sr. As more people follow this path, it naturally turns into a common road. With time, it gets tarmacked. There is little resistance in the flow of people leaving, as compared to those who are coming back.

This road is not fiction. When I was young, the road connecting Misori and Bondo was rough and dirt-ridden. We would board unroadworthy pickups popularly known as “You-Look-Familiar” because we would sit close to each other, facing one another. Nobody could sleep once the long, bumpy journey began. Today, it is tarmacked. The journey takes less than 30 minutes. Misori continues to develop, as does Bondo. Using this physical example, that’s how metaphorical resistance reduces.

Scholarship options, for instance, can introduce these bonding requirements. As much as the individual may want to continue living elsewhere, the need to go back has multiple upsides for the community that raised these lucky ones. It also speaks to autonomy. Society looks up to you. The higher you go, the harder it is to breathe.

By extension, and perhaps counterintuitively, expanding endogenous preferences also expands one’s autonomy. But to increase endogenous preferences, one needs to sacrifice one’s individual autonomy for others to expand theirs. For instance, I may want to become a cardiac anaesthesiologist. For this reason, I fly to Italy for a 10-month fellowship. I love the place. As an art lover, I’m enamoured by the streets and their history. After completing my fellowship, the team gives me an offer to remain. A generous offer, the kind that will change my life completely. My options have been enhanced because of the endogenous preferences in the new space I have been in. Just as much, my autonomy has increased.

I can also decide to work for three years and then broker a deal with them to make annual missions to my hometown. When I go back home, I not only bring myself but a team that addresses congenital cardiac cases. If I had rejected the generous offer and gone home, I might have capped my options, but I would have given a new set of preferences to growing generations. They would know that external fellowships are possible. The option is mine. My autonomy is preserved, even increased in a way, although it might not appear so. Development for my people follows.

Game theory shows that this is a win-win strategy. The community wins, and so does the individual. Win-win options, which vary in degree, are usually the best options.

These paths, between regions with richer endogenous preferences and those with anaemic ones, are, as far as I have described them, separated geographically. Distance is physical. But what if the distance was a question of nodes and edges rather than cities and the means of travel?

Network theories link entities in abstract ways using nodes and edges. In network systems, distance is no longer measured by geographic space but by points of separation. This is the basis of the six degrees of separation — you are six people away from getting to anyone in the world. Distance is now replaced with separation. The footpath that once evolved into a tarmacked road is now a free-fall highway to any part of the world.

Nevertheless, we have to be cautious. Just as we have seen that complete autonomy is an illusion, this highway that Internet connectivity has increased may be an illusion, largely augmented by AI and social media. AI creates individual echo chambers, isolating more than uniting. It can offer more information than social media, but with brains moulded through confirmation bias, it risks creating individual echochambers. With time, traditional villages get replaced by individual-only islands. The effects are unpredictable. Kanye raps:

The things we seen on the screen is not ours

Indeed, a free-fall highway may do little to empower the raised hopes it tends to inspire. It can create awareness of other preferences, but it separates the endogenous part.

Wonderful institutions made by societies have persisted because of self-correcting mechanisms. Persistently being fed material that cannot be validated or that one cannot experience is not the kind of life I would want anyone to lead. It is not a win-win strategy. While AI and social media persist, the individual loses. However, the chance to open the different corners of the world to the rich and diverse endogenous preferences is something I wouldn’t want us to prevent.

What I’m trying to say is…

It really does take a village to raise a child. Conversely, to improve individual autonomy, we have to improve our endogenous preferences.

Careers don’t always have to be fixed. They can evolve and expand. Pushback against new ideas may be dicey, especially when the new option does not have the interests of the community in mind. For instance, AI may be a good thing, but it does not necessarily reveal how blinding it may become. They give the illusion of authority when in reality, they are more self-isolating of one’s opinions.

When we think of increasing opportunities for individuals, endogenous preferences should be taken seriously, as it determines the future of upcoming generations.

That moment when the world realistically turns into a global village will be the time when everyone has similar endogenous preferences.

Will we ever get there, though?

And I heard ’em say
Nothing’s ever promised tomorrow, today

This song inspired some of the lines used in this article. Source — YouTube

Creativity is irrational. It has no formula. When it strikes, it strikes.

Yet, the creative ones have to pass their ideas through rational people.

The finance department runs the costs of the creative team. It has to be within budget. Yet, you can never confine the potential returns of a creative feat to a quarterly review.

Jane Austen wrote three of her most famous books, but they did not make her as wildly successful as she was after her death.

With numbers, there’s a need to prove the idea will work before releasing it to the world. It’s only rational. But creative ideas are irrational from their inception to their spread.

Now creativity is being drowned by AI slop. Few creative companies are placing bets on the upcoming talent. The more rational option is to acquire the past copyrights. It guarantees future money. Then continue with movie sequels. Attacks on multiple fronts. How unlucky can one get?

The paralyzing paradox is that we need creativity to progress, to create value. Yet the very process is stifled to preserve a façade of rationality.

We can never know the full returns of a creative idea or concept. We should treat it as such.

Killing creativity kills progress.

I must have been a tad too excited, noting the parallels between mitochondria and AI. The roles of both convinced me that we could learn a thing or two from the two entities. I did, however, give a warning that we should not take an analogy as the real deal.

To date, when I ask my students what the role of mitochondria is, they respond in unison, “The powerhouse of the cell.” That response is simple. In science as in philosophy, the simple should be taken seriously.

Cells can be broadly divided into two groups: those with membrane-bound organelles, such as ours and all living organisms in the eukaryotic domain; and those without, such as bacteria and archaea. With mitochondria serving as the powerhouse of the cell, a disclaimer is in order: this role applies only to eukaryotic cells.

Genetic studies reveal that mitochondria were once free-living bacteria. Some antibiotics kill mitochondria since they share the same RNA and protein complexes as bacteria. Their cell membranes have a similar structure to that of alpha-proteobacteria. They divide independently of the eukaryotic cell, and they have their own DNA. Other bacteria have their structures too, but don’t need mitochondria to survive.

Another caveat is necessary. Not all eukaryotic cells have mitochondria. The parasite responsible for excessive flatulence among school-going kids, Giardia lamblia, lacks mitochondria. The other one that causes the sexually transmitted disease Trichomoniasis also lacks mitochondria. They are eukaryotes, but lack mitochondria. We can therefore say that the mitochondria are also not the powerhouse of all eukaryotic cells.

It is these exercises in taking something simple seriously that clearly demarcate where a hypothesis loses relevance. By the same token, we need to revisit the simple AI-mitochondrial comparison to avoid being misled, as I was back then.

Reality, Consciousness, and Agency

Listen, history repeats itself and that’s just how it goes

— J. Cole

History may rhyme, but we shouldn’t be quick to pick the similarities and gloss over the differences. A good place to start is to bring ourselves back to reality. The first thing to remind ourselves about is that mitochondria were once living bacteria. AI isn’t anywhere close to living.

Sci-Fi has dabbled with the idea of uploading our consciousness to AI, hoping to achieve immortality inside silicon chips. Anil Seth’s cri de coeur argues against this possibility. The much that AI does is appear conscious-seeming. Most research also tries to imitate conscious behaviour, but imitation is not instantiation. No matter how many times you imitate the sound of rain on your phone as you go to sleep, it will never produce rain. Your phone doesn’t get wet. Achieving consciousness through instantiation is impossible.

For you to be conscious, you have to be alive. Granted, we have no clear definitions of what it means to be alive, but AI is nothing but. It has the same features as a computer. You can remove it from a power source, and it shuts down. Once you plug the power in, it comes back to “life.” Living creatures don’t have this luxury.

What’s more, we self-correct on the go. A cell needs to find solutions to its problems. A computer may not know the problems it faces, and if it does, it often requires permission from the user or administrator to correct them. Algorithms are the only ones that can attain the self-correction function, but a computer continues to erode outside the software parameters. Computers cannot replace their chips once they have lost functionality. A cell, in contrast, does. As does the mitochondrion.

These metaphors are off for the simple reason that you cannot distinguish cellular software from hardware. As much as the cell changes, so do its developmental goals. At some point, it escapes a noxious stimulus, and in the next, it duplicates. We cannot make that distinction between cellular software and hardware as easily as we can for computers. AI seems to have this demarcation. Thus, the analogy with mitochondria can be a misleading one. Indeed, the penalty for use of metaphors is constant vigilance, which has positively led to this revision I’m currently sharing with you.

As long as a computer serves its role, it is oblivious to the time outside it. It has to be conscious for it to be aware of time moving while it cranks its functions. Cells are very much aware. Cellular properties, such as division, happen after certain checkpoints are crossed. Eukaryotic cellular division goes through an important but highly variable stage known as the G1 phase, where all the organelles duplicate. Throughout this process, certain checkpoints ensure that the cell’s processes are safe and well-done before tipping into the next phase, the S-phase, where the cell will inevitably divide. A computer is lauded mostly because of its software capability, but the hardware gets lost throughout this excitement. A cell has to be cognizant of its hardware and software. Time is a harsh reminder, bringing it back to the worldly reality of wear and tear.

Anil Seth further described an interesting point about computational time. Working through bits, 1s and 0s, for as long as there has been no progress from 0 to 1, time for the computer has not passed. Time steps inside a computer program differ from those of cells. Whether the cell likes it or not, time continues. Mitochondria are well aware of these “timely” reminders.

For instance, as an embryo develops, there are moments when excess cells have to be pruned. The webbing between your fingers is the more conspicuous evidence of a process known as apoptosis. Apoptosis is programmed cell death. It happens without inflammation, and therefore without pain. In its absence, our hands would have been webbed like a duck’s. The mitochondria house a compound in their membrane that, when released, tips these cells into death.

I likened this role to the possibility of a civilizational collapse if AI decides to decimate humanity. But I took the role shallowly, because the mitochondria’s role in death happens because cells have boundaries.

I have previously argued that consciousness is impossible without a boundary. AI lacks a boundary as discrete and clear as that of a cell. Its data centres are housed elsewhere while its functions continue on any device with online access. To execute a one-stop death like that done by mitochondria, a boundary is necessary.

Also, apoptosis occurs in phases. That’s another step I overlooked. Once the cell begins the process, there is no going back. Humanity, as many Avengers movies and all of Tom Cruise’s impossible missions show, will always mount a resistance. The death of a cell triggered by mitochondria will never be similar to death executed by AI against people who pride themselves on being the apex predators.

The example highlights another feature crucial to life — agency. AI may have some form of agency, as seen by the countless reports of resistance against a shutdown. This was yet another analogy I blindly took, without noticing that humans, too, have agency, as do mitochondria. Agency is the reason humanity will not accept being overtaken by AI.

Notably, the series of steps it took before a cell housed another, with the latter eventually becoming the “power house,” must have taken several bouts of pushback. My central argument was about these steps that precede the emergence of a viable symbiosis. The kind of agency we note around AI, however, is a mild or subtle one, which persists because its programmers have wired it to do so. For instance, when you use ChatGPT, as I did a while back (honestly, last year is a good while, don’t you think?), it does not just let go of you immediately. Like social media platforms, they inquire more about your topic of interest, suggest more connections, and, worse still, act as individual echo chambers, almost always agreeing with you. The last bit need not be forgotten, because it runs contrary to the pushback we see prior to a viable symbiosis.

Mitochondria, for instance, have a different structure and DNA from that of their host. However, it lost most of its genes to the host, most of which are non-essential. Essential ones were preserved to reduce the time lag that may otherwise manifest when an emergency arises. But to completely dock proteins from the cell onto the mitochondrial membrane, we must evolve a docking mechanism, one that does not mount a host attack on foreign material. To avoid death, mitochondria also resisted. It did not simply comply. This series of attacks preceded the resolution into a viable symbiosis.

The way LLMs behave is by finding the best data that fits your query. Effectively, as individual echo-chambers. Worse, they don’t power the host (you); they merely gas you up. Mitochondria offer real feedback. If there is a problem somewhere, it sends the signal to the host cell. If it cannot rectify it, the cell, along with the mitochondria, dies, another important distinction.

Apoptosis includes mitochondrial death. I was so keen on death as a fact that I did not see that it involves its very perpetrator. If AI were to cause humanity’s collapse following the mitochondrial route, then it would mean AI itself would die. But first, it would have to be alive. It isn’t. So the analogy is wrong.

Aside from powering the eukaryotic cell, mitochondria, as Nick Lane has argued, are responsible for the existence of only two sexes. Even among those eukaryotes that lack mitochondria, at some point in their evolutionary history, they possessed the organelle. It then divided the organism into two sexes for easy mito-nuclear compatibility. This compatibility was a central argument in my previous essay.

But I fail to see how AI can create such sexes. For all the arguments I have already mentioned, AI cannot cause sex change, nor can it fuel such a division among organisms. It can, however, result in what Alberto Romero called the AI-rich from the AI-poor, through a sinister game of manipulating its users to continue getting more high-tier subscriptions to access premium services. These distinctions are different from those of mitochondria, resulting in two sexes, by being maternally inherited. AI is not inherited in any biological way. It does, however, spread.

A vital difference that I don’t see regards information. Living and organic systems, when flooded with information, collapse. Doomscrolling turns humans into living zombies. Supermarkets flood shoppers with content such that, without any guidance of a shopping list, they buy what they never intended to. Without rest, organic systems crash.

AI does not have this shortfall. More information improves it. An important distinction. One that we should be worried about. Even mitochondria tend to give out when flooded with too much information, since they were once believed to be bacteria. More accurately, the more information AI feeds on, the more it attunes itself to the world that is producing this information.

Our world is now flooded with more information than truth. Operationally, we’re living a lie. A bubble of sorts. A dash of truth and a flood of fiction. This information is taken by AI. But since humans are not as wired to find the truth as we may desire, the risk of AI conflating fiction with truth and sharing that with us is extremely high. There is hardly a correction mechanism of equal ability to control that. Mitochondria, on the other hand, have corrective mechanisms wired into their system and intricately linked to the workings of the cell. Overload leads to cellular death. I doubt that can happen with AI. That is a problem. For sustainability, we need self-correcting systems.

What I’m trying to say is…

As much as AI and mitochondria have similarities, they are so wildly different that assuming that the roles of mitochondria might guide us into predicting what the future has in store for us is a far cry.

AI can dominate our lives as it already does for so many people today. But will it be king? Adam Mastroianni doesn’t think so. J. Cole further echoes:

Poof, boom, paow, it’s like magic
With a flash and a bang, the crown disintegrates
And falls to the Earth from which it came
It’s done

Also, AI will never be conscious. It lacks a boundary, the kind we see in living organisms. This may be the only reminder we need to bring ourselves back to reality.

AI may be powerful, but it is not as powerfully relevant as the powerhouse of the cell.

This song inspired some of the lines used in this article. Source — YouTube

For his revolutionary contributions in the field of optics and electromagnetism, James Clerk Maxwell was likened to Louis Pasteur. Were it not for Maxwell, Einstein confessed, he may not have discovered special relativity.

Because of his achievements, Maxwell was chosen to take up more administrative roles, shelving some of his scientific work. This pattern, in which the intellectually gifted are assigned administrative roles far from the very source that made them famous, repeats itself throughout history.

Presidents of the Royal Society are picked based on their achievements. Sir Peter Medawar shared his schedule, which was crammed with administrative roles, leaving only a few days to scientific research.

Achievements are taken as proxies for ability. Administrative work, however, does not develop the kind of groundbreaking work seen in science.

Awarding people with roles because they display above-average intellectual abilities is so common that we don’t stop to ask why we do it. It is assumed that brilliance would spill over into the new leadership role.

In high school, it was a requirement that the prefects be top performers. In retrospect, I feel this was a safe and easy way to pick leaders. Safe because it is difficult to question the selection of a smart individual. Anyone who objects needs to be smarter than the chosen person. Easy because there will be little objection. And yet, this means of choosing leaders reveals something about us — we award recognized capacity and mistake it for functional capacity. Let me explain.

All societies have hierarchies. Positions were initially generated out of need. Abundance generates other necessary positions from the merely existing. Because it was once useful, it is difficult to replace or eliminate certain positions. It is somewhat similar to Peter’s Principle, where promotions happen up to the level of one’s incompetence, but replacement hardly happens because of previous achievements and historic competence. These capacities, acknowledged through positions, remain because they were once useful. These are the recognized capacities.

Recognized capacity, thus, is what society apportions to individuals. A tall man is thought to be a better leader than a short one. It is right there in the metaphor — standing tall. Judith Rich Harris reported how easy it is for the public to vote for the taller candidate during elections. The society awards recognized capacity.

Since society knights these individuals, it means the awards are limited. There can only be a single president. There will only be a single leader in a firm. One prefect in every class. It is a twisted version of the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy, where it is assumed that they are brilliant because they are already leaders. These false logical precedents lead to other false dichotomies about whether leadership is inborn or developed.

The other capacity is functional. A woman who is tall is not likely to be the president. They are “intimidating.” Even masculine. Eloquence may be a better example. However, regardless of the height, an eloquent woman may not be thought to be a good leader, as opposed to a man. Both sides of the sex have been accorded qualities based on their natural traits. The functional capacity of the woman to become a leader, however, is not readily recognizable from her speech prowess.

Merit does not show capacity

The problem with granting all the smart individuals leadership roles is that it could partly be explained by our proportionality mindsets.

To our evolutionary minds, trends are more reliable than one-off situations. If the sun shines this morning, we automatically think we’ll have a good day. This proportionality stretches to the awarding of individuals based on their supposed achievements.

Merit is not capacity; it is its outcome. Capacity denotes breath and depth. Merit is a one-off data point. Persistently outcompeting others may show capacity, but it is not the best tool.

Capacity is a dynamic feature. It is shaped by oneself and their environment. In a community where women are allowed to vote, one can throw their hat into the ring to be voted for. That is their environment. Where women are barred from voting, few will care about politics, because their fate will always be sealed by the men. Functional capacity appreciates the multiple opportunities one can be exposed to throughout their journey; recognized capacity shoehorns individuals into already established roles.

If a position is already established, the capacity is rigid. It is perhaps for this reason that we don’t have many leadership ideas as the insane, ground-breaking concepts that catapulted these people to the top seats in the first place. It might even be preserved for the same reason — once everyone has limited capacity, they are easy to compare.

Between Obama and Trump, who was better? One can make comparisons based on the limited capacities of the president of the United States of America.

You cannot compare coffee seeds to Nescafé. The former is raw, while the latter is a finished product. Coffee has capacity. Nescafé is one of the options, but not the only one. Nescafé has recognized capacity.

Nevertheless, capacity should not limit. It does grant opportunities. Functional capacity acknowledges that a woman can apply for the same job as a man in a STEM company. Recognized capacity will bias the board to pick the man over the woman, even if the woman has a better record.

Recognized capacity is a deep-seated concept, so much so that it’s difficult to imagine a society run without one. The alternative may not be welcome, nor will it be easy to establish. For instance, I know someone very good at bringing people together and coordinating events. They were not the best student in class, but they had leadership potential. They had the capacity, which was ruled out by a system that prioritises a single metric, academic achievement, which society awards. Recognized capacity.

These systems are beginning to lose their lustre as they unearth the discriminatory imprints in various ecosystems. For instance, I didn’t get any training on Microsoft Office, but I use it daily. I have excellent knowledge, practical knowledge. However, when I was applying for various positions after high school, the institutions wanted someone who had completed the Office packages. I did not have the papers to show it.

Certifications are a means of rewarding merit. Although they can be acquired through unscrupulous means, they are taken as evidence of capacity, recognized capacity. By excluding me, my functional capacity does not come to light before a selection committee.

Birth attendants have been guiding women through the birth process for years without the valid certifications from ISO-certified institutions. My supervisor during my obs/gyn rotation would confess that in his many years of practice, he could never match the skill of the birth attendants he witnessed at work in the rural areas. If such a birth attendant had gone to school and gained the proper papers, international organizations may be ready to listen to them. Papers are recognizable evidence of merit. The keyword is recognized. The missing, silent one is capacity. But because traditional birth attendants don’t have them, they only reside in the memory of someone who has observed their skill. Unfortunately, that is not usually awarded by society as it should be.

It’s a difficult problem because what should we rely on if merit is not the best option?

For starters, understanding that capacity is a dynamic quality helps. Early shooters are not the final winners. David Epstein dedicated an entire book to underscore the point that generalists make some of the exceptional leaders across multiple fields. Range considers capacity; specialization tailors merit. It may even work against the very individuals who chase merit.

A recently published synthesis arrived at the same conclusion as David Epstein’s. The early performers are not usually the eventual stars of the highest levels of human excellence. It means recognized capacities may be putting a cap on individual capabilities — in essence, culling functional capacity.

In my country, it is not a guarantee that a doctor will find work. And yet, diseases will never cease. No country in the past or in the future will always be overstaffed with doctors. And yet, thousands of Kenyan doctors continue to seek jobs. Specialization is not a guarantee of job security. That field will also get flooded, generating a cohort of highly educated but extremely frustrated medics.

After sacrificing 7 years as an undergrad, a tenuous year for an internship, and five more years to specialize, branching out seems absurd. Merit carves this trajectory for many doctors, and I suspect other professionals. But merit is just a product of recognized capacity, a small, rigid space that does not unmask one’s potential.

Functional capacity means taking a chance on someone. It means you can create an entry test to show ability rather than sticking to one’s college or ticking a box confirming one has the required papers. We should therefore nurture the possibilities that not all competent individuals should have hailed from Ivy League-like institutions.

Capacity, as a dynamic variable, is first acknowledged by an individual if they know they are capable. Several of my former classmates are now exploring sports medicine, a field that none of our lecturers had inspired in us. It was always surgery or internal medicine; basically, already established spaces fortified by recognized capacity. Sports medicine is a rich and diverse space. Clinicians who were exposed to this potential path took it up.

It means we can, but should not narrow down capacity from an early age. At some point, I wanted to take my country to the World Cup, but my goals were nipped in the bud by forces I couldn’t control. Now I am a doctor, and my seniors ask questions about my future in a way that matches the paved paths of specialization they have always known. They are mostly surprised when I tell them I am building a festival.

A core concept behind functional capacity is that gates are not closed, should one express interest. E. O. Wilson enrolled for a class in calculus just so he could understand his research better. He was the world’s leading expert on ants. Recognized capacity closes these gates. Gates are a poor metaphor to use, but a convenient one for now.

If there’s a question I dislike, it’s, “Where do you see yourself in five years?” This question is mostly thrown at young adults, who have their whole lives ahead of them. Those who don’t know how it will take form are perhaps the ones with the highest functional capacity. The world is their oyster. It has nothing against those who know what they are chasing, which can be fulfilling as well. It’s just that the ones who look lost because they don’t know what their next five years will look like don’t have stories to look up to. A good start may be picking David Epstein’s book, Range.

Hindsight analysis may have also made it difficult for us to establish that capacity is open going forward in life, and not fixed, looking back at it. As natural storytellers, we believe the path we tread, if it eventually results in success, delineates clear cause-and-effect rules for anyone to execute and achieve similar milestones. Luck doesn’t make for a good story.

Hindsight analyses should be taken as a single probability event, not as the standard. Your opportunities and developmental advantages were not there when I decided to take the same journey you did. Considering every journey as unique can be a game-changer in revising our ambitions, because it shows that one’s path is different. It is a testament to the functional capacities we can never box, but the untold potential that awaits.

Consequently, it would mean society needs to broaden its concept of merit and awards. That I can play chess extremely well means I can enrol in championships without necessarily having to continue with the classical path of education. Key word — necessarily. Societies, however, take a while before they adopt something new.

What I’m trying to say is…

My mother sang the lines of Nas when he was asked to give a talk to students:

I know I can,
Be what I wanna be
If I work hard at it,
I’ll be where I wanna be.

Intuitively, she was referring to functional capacity.

Functional capacity is taking a bet on yourself. We never do that often. We wait for people to choose us. Basically, to be recognized. Hence, get crowned with recognized capacities. Choosing ourselves is believing we have potential, functional capacity. We should do that more often.

A pluripotential society is one that acknowledges that capacity is not limited. I can only think of bacteria, which have lived for billions of years, with no pre-fixed notion of what should be awarded in terms of innovative ideas and potential. Scientists have seen these results — in one station, it’s antimicrobial resistance, and in another, it’s symbiotic relationships with animals.

Recognized capacity is a crystallized form of functional capacity. It sheds its dynamic fluidity once it’s embedded in societies.

Functional capacity, on the other hand, cannot be caged. We should cultivate more of it.

This song inspired some of the lines used in this article. Source — YouTube

I had to read Lincoln Michel’s piece twice to find myself in the post. My younger self. Presently, my English teacher would not believe that I write daily, and even earn a few pennies on the side from it. Why?

You see, I was never the best writer. I recall that morning when she brought the composition books. She kept mine. I was to be used as an example of how not to write. Bear in mind, I didn’t have a bad mark — 30 out of 40 was not a mean feat. However, being in a top class, 30 is not the mark you should be fighting for.

Cinematic, she animated every sentence with the lesson she didn’t want any of my classmates to repeat — my emphasis on commas. When one uses humour in their argument, rationalism hardly wins. I couldn’t explain that I wanted my reading to sound conversational. Commas were my go-to punctuation marks to make the reading seem simple. While she read every sentence, she did not pause where I used commas; she read it out loud, “comma”, then continued with the sentence.

She made her point. I didn’t make mine. The result is a day I will never forget.

Her perfect example of how an essay should be was written by one of the girls — it was often the girls who scored higher marks. She would emphasize that we create a vivid image of the scene with our words. I recall once in primary school, our teacher used the example of Charles Dickens describing Oliver Twist. By the time one was done, your imagined version of young Oliver would be hardly different from mine.

What I think our teachers failed to comprehend was that Dickens was a writer of a different stripe. The punctilious detail was necessary for the reader to picture the squalid life Oliver led. It was not the book that was emphasized but the paragraph. It was pounded into us that we should relay extreme detail with every chance we got. That, I believe, is not the power of prose. That is the power of visual media, or what Michel calls — the TV-brain.

The powers of the media

If you have ever felt that a book was better than its re-enactment as a movie, then you have some intuitive version of the power of a medium. An avid reader will usually notice the differences. Heck, all movie versions of a book will always be different, because we digest prose differently.

Prose leaves gaps for readers to fill. That emphasis on detail is not always present. A good writer invites the reader to participate in the creative piece that is their written work. For instance, my version of Dobby in The Deathly Hallows is nothing like the one I saw on film.

TV-brain does not let us create. Daniel Radcliffe as Harry Potter will always be Daniel Radcliffe. The power of video is such that I cannot picture anyone other than Johnny Depp as Captain Jack Sparrow. Prose, in contrast, lets the reader fill in these details. By asking students to be painstakingly detailed, our teachers may have stifled the powers we would have developed from writing.

In truth, I will not say that they completely robbed us of these qualities. They did insist that we read. Widely. Here, I will hand it to them. My preferred series was by Enid Blyton. My favourite work, to date, is Charlotte’s Web. I have read many beautiful books, but my particular affinity for this book is unparalleled. I have never read another fiction work more than once. I read Charlotte’s Web at least five times. One time, I read it in class, when our teacher of English (they always insisted we phrase it that way, as saying “English teacher” would imply that they hailed from England) was in session.

You may or may not have noticed what I have done in the previous paragraph. I have tapped into my personal taste. I have not painted a picture of the cover of Charlotte’s Web. I have taken you from the present to the past. Time didn’t matter. I then added a quality about our teacher. A relatable quirk, if you went to school during my time, in my country.

Unknowingly, this may be the reason I love hip-hop, especially from legends. Here’s an excerpt from Lupe Fiasco’s Ms. Mural:

“If you had to paint the gutter, which color would you choose?”
Said the patron to the painter, the painter said, “The blues”
Do you act off intuition or languish and peruse?
More like tap into tradition from the angle of my mood
He looked back at his canvas while strangling a tube
A master of the palette, all sanguine and cool
The music mostly jazz, the jazz mostly old
Punctured by some punk and some old smoky soul
An atlas on the trunk from the land of broken goals
Just a cover and a back that you open and you close
“Where are all the pages?” The painter said, “Defanged
I ripped ’em all out and made some paper planes
Fish grease absorbers and some origami cranes”
Poured himself a drink and then poured it down the drain
Looked at the empty canvas, said “I think I have a name
I’ll call it “Gasoline Pouring on the Flames”

From this verse, we have no setting; no idea of the sex of the painter, we don’t even know how they are dressed. What kind of canvas are they using? Are they wielding a paintbrush? Where did the jazz come from? What are the covers of the Atlas like? What about the pages? And how did we all of a sudden switch to giving the canvas its name?

Listening to the tune of the song, the Jazz part is partly answered. Lupe is the narrator, but in his narration, we have two characters. Gaps are evident. I chose Lupe because he is often the unappreciated genius in rap that most contemporary listeners of the genre know. It is usually mostly about Nas, Jay Z, Eminem, or J. Cole. Kendrick and Drake. Lupe, like great writing, gets forgotten. Therein lies the lesson — gaps.

Writing is not about being exhaustingly descriptive. It welcomes the reader to the craft. It’s trusting that the reader will fill in these gaps and not get lost. Time, for instance, can be dilated or contracted at the author’s whim. Interiority can be added and not lose the reader in knowing whose voice the author uses. These are the powerful aspects of prose that you cannot get from visuals.

Today, we consume more visuals than prose. Some have even converted online posting to include performative reading, a vain attempt to show their audience that they are a different kettle of fish.

Streaming platforms host movies with the best actors at affordable subscription prices. Most of what is consumed is modelled after the TV. With this as the primary input, a lot of the writing will have this structure.

It doesn’t pay to create material that is far from visual. If it’s written, then short tweets or quotes, taken out of context, like that description of Oliver Twist, are preferable. Short pieces leave little space for gaps to be filled. Often, the well-read can make a short piece packed with wisdom, as is the case with Naval Ravikant or Seth Godin. Just as well, a well-read figure will take deep dives into an essay, as is the case with Paul Graham.

The power of the medium begins to take shape the more one is exposed to it. Countless hours of consumption of visual content nurture a TV-brain. Prose, like Lupe Fiasco, gets drowned by endless screentime. The sad situation I foresee is a populace of individuals who passively consume and thus get continuously unintentionally restructured. When you pick a good book — using the Lindy filter — chances are your mind will be positively reconfigured. The work will call you to elevate your thinking, sometimes by causing friction with what you previously knew. However, visuals, particularly from our rectangular portable portals, shape passively and not usually positively.

The brain rewiring shifted goals from emphasizing our olfactory senses to vision. Vision was necessary to distinguish the outlines of predators and potential mates. Animated beings. We were not wired to flip pages of books. That’s why a book is consumed from its beginning to its end with intention. Reading is a call to a higher level of complexity.

Mindlessly advising that we should read or write becomes all the more meaningless if the kind of material that is read and the writing that is shared loses the benefits of the media used. What I mean is that there are qualities about the TV that don’t feature in prose and vice versa. Using the TV-brain to write loses the powers of prose writing and completely misuses the powers of TV — a lose-lose situation.

Harnessing the strengths of the medium of choice is the best way to create the preferred craft one wishes to create. I may be wrong, but I doubt Johnny Depp can make a great writer, although he’s a fantastic actor. Similarly, I doubt J. K. Rowling can match the cinematic plays of Johnny Depp, but she’s an unparalleled writer.

Matching the strengths of the medium brings out its most potent means of transforming minds. This reminds me of a heart condition that usually needs surgical correction as the only intervention of choice. It’s an inborn disease where the major arteries — aorta and pulmonary artery — are transposed. Instead of the aorta coming from the left ventricle, it comes from the right, and the pulmonary artery emerges from the left. Aorta then takes the deoxygenated blood back to the body without oxygenation. The only way this condition is compatible with life is if there is a shunt between the aorta and the pulmonary artery. Blood can then be shunted from the aorta to the pulmonary artery and then to the lungs, to be oxygenated. It’s not an efficient solution, but it gives the kid a fighting chance at life. A fighting chance, but a lose-lose situation, like the dumping of a TV-brain on a writing document.

What I’m trying to say is…

While reading Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, I got a grasp of why she towered in the literary space. She is one of the powerful guides to writing exceptionally.

The best way to learn and become better at your skill is to study and practice. Writing is the practising part. Reading is the studying part. You cannot become a good writer without reading. Not just any form of reading. Studying the greats will infuse tidbits of their greatness into your work.

Writing devoid of reading is like asking J. K. Rowling to replace Keira Knightley. It’s possible, but it will be crap.

To write, one has to follow Kendrick’s advice now and then and turn the TV off.

This song inspired some of the lines used in this article. Source — YouTube

This song inspired some of the lines used in this article. Source — YouTube

Education is a recent innovation. Humans succeeded before it was developed.

Education is also a diluted version of aristocratic tutoring. It doesn’t generate geniuses.

So, is aristocratic tutoring the key? And what came before education that could lead one to success?

Success is so pluralistic that we cannot attribute it solely to aristocratic tutoring, nor is genius the only path to success.

One key, however, opens all known doors to success: action.

Whether smart, dumb, or somewhere between these two extremes, action is the key to success.

Act.

The best time to act was yesterday.

The next best time is now.

My mother introduced me to books at an early age. She held the strong opinion that readers are leaders. That phrase is not uncommon in our setting. I’ve heard it throughout my primary and high school life. The same advice contrasts with my reality, as certain political leaders who hold top positions in my country know little about reading. They don’t know how to read the crowd, the political climate, or even the plight of the citizens.

Still, we believed in the phrase.

Popular examples included the likes of P.L.O Lumumba, whose complex jargon could leave all our teachers of English running for their dictionaries. My reading over the years has revealed that well-read individuals would not usually flood their works with unnecessary, difficult words. My go-to example was and will always be Karl Popper, whose works are extremely lucid, although heavy. His works are usually worth the mental heavy-lifting.

The sharp contrast between the political leaders and the advice we were being given is the same contrast I see during this era of AI. I liken it to the real-time climate changes compared to the teaching school children get. A few years ago, I was worried that students might not observe what they were taught in school. Heavy, long rains in the tropics begin around March. The weather for the last couple of years around that time has been anything but rainy. I wondered how teachers could reconcile their classes with reality.

Advice, as these examples showcase, needs boundary conditions. You cannot always claim that anyone who works hard in school will get a leg up in the future. Numerous athletes have shown that you can be just as successful without seeking higher education. Artists have bought their way into rich neighbourhoods. OnlyFans has a small fraction of whales (big hitters), convincing others that they can get money just as fast and live the lives they have always wished for. Influencers are buying homes, getting multicorporate endorsements, and travelling the world. Are readers leaders?

The age-old advice about reading had a boundary condition that was supposed to be immune to online technology. Today, all that is taught in schools can be learned over the Internet if one is sufficiently motivated. Regardless, while you might be highly experienced, institutions may still require you to present your papers. Education, which can be hacked, sometimes through unscrupulous deeds, serves as a screening tool more than evidence of capability. Behemoth companies are gradually leading the rest away from relying on CVs and educational qualifications, which may wake the world up to the reality that the crust of education has shifted from a school-based structure to one where goals can be achieved, provided an individual has access to the Internet.

These may be all too obvious to the observer of current trends. Nevertheless, my issue centres around two activities dear to my heart — reading and writing. In some ways, the advice may be growing to be meaningless for those who wish to secure their future.

May.

As Lauryn Hill laments, “Nothing even matters to me.”

Reading and writing

The year was 2007. I was in class seven, and we were staying at Old Race Course, near Kariokor. Nairobi’s CBD was within walking distance of home. If I wished, I would walk to town, get the kind of French fries I desired from my favourite spot, and walk back home. Life was simpler back then.

This one afternoon, I had to choose between food and my other favourite pastime — books. My mother’s tricks had wound themselves into my capillaries. I enjoyed reading for the sake of reading. Rather than argue which I would prefer, my stomach or my brain, I chose both. I had my usual at Sonford Fish and Chips, then proceeded to Holy Family Basilica. They had a bookshop I had wanted to survey for a while.

Once inside, I took my time moving from aisle to aisle. As a Catholic bookshop, most of the works were religious in genre. Catholic teachings and saints. I didn’t bother getting those since my mother made a habit of buying these prints ever since I could remember. One particular book caught my eye. It was a pocketbook of wisdom, so the title claimed. I opened it and saw the quotes by famous historical figures. It was Ksh 60. I had Ksh 100. Extra change and a pocketbook I could peruse at will. A bargain.

Books have always been a source of knowledge and, more importantly, wisdom. I have always known an author to be someone who cares about their work or story. They care enough to see through the entire process from ideation to eventual publication and marketing. The author lives on through their books even when they die. A book is an intimate relationship offer that an author extends to a reader.

The very leaders who populated that pocketbook were readers. Thus, when our teachers told us that readers were leaders, I understood it at a different level, a deeper and more practical level.

Without a tablet, laptop, desktop, or phone, my early reading days could only happen through books. I wasn’t interested in newspapers. It was books I preferred. Implicitly, teachers also referred us to books. Today, we have too much to read. We read texts, emails, memes, rejection letters, tweets (I can’t call them X’es), notes, PowerPoint slides, and any truncated format that you can think of. Books come last.

Children were the ones who had time to read books. Adults needed to work. Today, even children don’t have the time to read books. It’s screentime. To which I ask — is the advice of “readers are leaders” still relevant?

It is.

Up to a point.

Before an author releases a book, they will take their time. Clarity is essential. It is the product of countless hours of writing.

Writing cannot be separated from reading. The active reader usually has with them a note-taking tool, a pencil and paper, for instance.

Next comes ideation. It happens to all of us. Writing is the first process of germination that brings it to life. You then have material you can design, as you so wish, to match the idea you conceived.

Writing is like the chisel Gian Lorenzo Bernini uses to sculpt the eyes of David. The sculptor has to care.

They may not know who the reader is, but they are confident that the work is strong enough to stand alone, in their absence. Great writing is something an author aspires to, and after its completion, something one is proud of. The book may have a price tag, but getting a reader who understands your idea is priceless.

It used to be that writers would write because they wanted to write, not to make money. Stephen King has been the typical example, exemplifying an author who didn’t care much about the rewards that came with writing. They just wanted to write and share it with the world. J. K. Rowling became the first author to cross the billion-dollar net worth. It then became clear that it was possible to make a tonne of money through writing.

Writers then began to optimise to achieve similar results. I can’t think of any other author who has achieved this feat. There are, however, multimillionaires. They made money through books. Today, multiple options abound. Medium. . Patreon. Submitting articles to leading publications.

How this all ties to AI is best explained by Lincoln Michel in his recent piece on AI slop. He gives the example of an author who uses AI to publish books at an alarming rate, the kind of pace that makes one wonder if authors even care anymore about their work:

With the help of A.I., Ms. Hart can publish books at an astonishing rate. Last year, she produced more than 200 romance novels in a range of subgenres, from dark mafia romances to sweet teen stories, and self-published them on Amazon. None were huge blockbusters, but collectively, they sold around 50,000 copies, earning Ms. Hart six figures.

While we spoke over Zoom, an A.I. program she was running ingested her prompts and outline and produced a full novel, about a rancher who falls for a city girl running away from her past. It took about 45 minutes.

I worry for the romance readers. Among all book genres, romance is the most read. Anna Lembke, the author of the bestseller, Dopamine Nation, confessed that there was a time when she would have a monthly budget for romance books. Admittedly, she conceded, it was addictive, but the flip side of this story is that back when romance authors were serious about their craft, they took time to create characters that had readers hooked.

When you churn out 200 romance novels in a year, do you even care about the book?

At some point in his career, Lil Wayne used to make so many songs that he would have to search the lyrics to some of them. His was a passion that he had without any assistance from AI. But if Lil Wayne would come up with 4–5 minute songs and couldn’t remember, how can an author write an entire bookstore and recall which one she wrote? Is this someone who cares about their work or the reader? Optimising for money can leave you hollow, devoid of meaning and genuine connection.

Let’s do the math. A year has 365 days. That’s 52 weeks. Take off the weekends, and we’re left with 261 days (365 – 104). When you count the holidays, you’d be somewhere around 250 days. We don’t have the specific numbers of books published, but the more you take out the days, the closer we get to a book being published every day. That’s insane.

I write daily. I get interested in sharing my ideas so often that days later, I might forget the title of my work. Most of my long-form work varies between 1000 and 4000 words. Mark you, I don’t use AI. A book contains much more. Remember, we’re talking about romance books. The plot has to build. How does one want to make money off books so much that they are bent on churning out books like that without even enjoying the writing process?

To write, you have to care. With very few exceptions, I would be hesitant to call anyone a writer before they can publish a book. A book is the honest, expensive signal I use to confirm that you’re a true writer, someone who cares to share their idea regardless of the outcome. If AI can equip just about anyone with the tools to publish a book within a day, then we’re voiding these gems of their relevance.

In a single working day, we can get at least one email. At the same rate, someone somewhere has already published a book. This has never been a mean feat. I recall the tireless days I took to write my first draft. A whole month, but after years of collecting evidence. Last year, someone somewhere took just one day. Tomorrow, they will release another one. Such individuals risk converting the sanctity of books into slop. To which I ask — will there be an individual my age, who may walk into a bookstore and find a book that will convert them as that book on wisdom did? Will there be future generations moved by a philosopher’s written works, such as those by Bertrand Russell or Karl Popper?

Where are our sources of wisdom?

Years after my short trip to that bookstore, I came across a post by Ted Gioia expressing why he reads, and I immediately reconnected to that point in my life. It was at a time when I was worried I was not reading enough. I already knew the value of the unread library, but it did not clear the dark cloud that loomed over me. Comfortable on my toilet seat (which is where I start my resting day, with an article or a book), I saw it. Ted read to become wise. He was talking to me. All my chakras aligned.

Writing takes time. Reading takes patience. Wisdom takes work. They all compound. And just like compound interest, the rewards are not evident immediately. Reading and writing may not be the only tools for getting wisdom, but they are reliable ones. The age of AI slop, distraction, shorts, notifications, bite-sized advice, and “time-is-money” quotes makes anything that requires time, patience, and work seem useless.

We don’t have Bertrand Russells and Wittgensteins. Yet, these figures who shaped the thinking of the 20th century wrote. How will we seek wisdom? On screens? Through social media? Which is populated with bots and AI slop? The same screens that hold apps that have notifications? Or access to the Internet, where the online book stores are flooded with authors who publish over 200 books in a year?

Is it even writing if you publish a book a day? After releasing my first book, I thought I would publish another every year. Three years later, I still don’t want to release my work prematurely. I still have a lot to work on. Someone somewhere would have 600 books to their name.

adds:

There are already far more novels published than anyone can read. Far more manuscripts filling agent inboxes than will ever be published. Even a novelist as famously productive as Stephen King only averages a book a year or so. Could an AI program help King produce 100 novels a year? Maybe. But it’s unlikely people would read that many, and even less likely that the publishing ecosystem could handle them. How many book reviews can be published? How much shelf space exists in bookstores? How many books can a publicist work on at a time? There are already far too many books written than we can handle. What the world needs is better books. More original books. More visionary books. But not simply more books.

Aren’t we risking getting more garbage with AI than gems? Should we call these people authors? Is the title of an author eroding because of AI? Is it meaningful to simply tell the young people to read to become wise? Or to write without guidance on what it means to write? Or seek wisdom through writing, reading, or both when writing, reading, or both can be outsourced?

This AI era has taught us that advice, like scientific hypotheses, needs initial conditions. Where is the domain for which they will apply? You cannot just tell someone to work hard in school for them to end up in a field that may be turning obsolete. If social skills are important, how do you give the kind of advice that a young adult will execute and make a living off it if every other person they know spends more time recording themselves in front of their phones?

Sage advice used to be important because it survived multiple zeitgeists. The one I find that still holds ground is that old is gold. Peter Kaufmann narrows it down to three buckets that can be used to sift the relevant from the transient: physical laws, biological laws, and sociological laws. The first two are more reliable than the latter. Physical laws, because our universe has existed for over 13 billion years. These laws are not likely to change. Biological laws, because evolution continues and has persisted for over 3 billion years. It is unlikely to be altered. Sociological laws are tied to biological laws, although they are more recent.

Taking a step back from the AI hype may be necessary to weed out the meaninglessness of several pieces of advice and make us more cautious of what we tell the young, who will likely have a dearth of islands of wisdom to make their home if the tide of slop continues to rise, as it already is.

Miss Lauryn Hill sings about love, which can make one forget about every other thing. I recall when I escaped the afternoon session in my third year in high school to finish Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Nothing, even the planned afternoon session, mattered. By having something that I considered deeply meaningful, all else didn’t matter. Times have changed. Now it’s the books that may be released that won’t matter. How I grieve.

What I’m trying to say is…

Advice typically isn’t without good intention. However, my observation is that it can be meaningless if it is not in tune with reality. You can’t just tell someone to read to become wise without pointing out which books to read.

Charlie Munger gave me a healthy list, which I devoured. I couldn’t access some of those books when I was on campus, but now I have no excuse.

Books, however, can be manipulated. Recently, works by Roald Dahl, RL Stine, and Agatha Christie were altered to appeal to modern sensitivities. Even in death, they are changing the author’s works. The ones alive are making a factory of book production. The few honest and true ones would likely not sacrifice the art of writing.

Regardless, in this AI-slop era, I would much rather advocate for author recommendations lists over book lists. Matter of fact, if you can get an author-signed copy, even better. Show up at their book launch.

In the era of deepfakes, we need to preserve realness. Otherwise, even that which is real may be corrupted and turn meaningless.

This song inspired some of the lines used in this article. Source — YouTube