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

The ones who know the truest version of you are social media platforms and AI.

ChatGPT knows you so well that it made caricatures of you that you so proudly shared with the world. Social media knows you so well that it picks the kind of content you are likely to like, share, comment on, or even bookmark. Last year, December, your wrapped — Spotify, Uber, Bolt, YouTube, a small sample — showed you just how much they know about you more than you know yourself.

Which real individual do you think will know you this well?

This is a sobering reality. We have dumped so much of ourselves online that few, if anyone at all, knows who we really are.

Outside our virtual world, can you trust anyone with your memories and experiences?

It may have started with the philosophers we often quote. Aristotle, for instance. Animals were separated from vegetables based on our essence, a substance we cannot capture but which we intuit exists. Consciousness.

This must have been the feeling before Thomas Nagel wrote the landmark essay “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”

A core issue with this question is that we assume that there is a state in which it feels like being a bat. The state for this bat is different from that of that bat. We then automatically assume that it is that way for every living being. But what about an atom? It seems absurd to ask such a question because an atom is not conscious, so we believe, in consensus. As a first approximation, to be conscious is to feel or have a felt experience. However, from Nagel’s question, it could just as well be that what it is to be “this” bat and not “that” one is no different from what it is like to be “this” atom and not “that” one.

But noooo…we wouldn’t want to be on the same side as atoms. We would love to exclude ourselves. Exceptional.

Human exceptionalism has existed far longer than our most reliable tool in peeling the layers of nature. Science is a recent human invention. So it will take a while before we can agree to be knocked out of that high totem pole. Sadly, that time may be sooner than anticipated.

Public intellectuals have argued that human intelligence has allowed us to conquer the world. No dry land exists that has not been traversed by mankind. The seas are another thing altogether, as they exist in 3D, whereas land is more of a curved version of 2D space.

David Deutsch calls humans the explaining species. We don’t strive to survive in the wild. Instead, we raise funds to explain why there is no evidence of life on other planets besides ours.

Jared Diamond calls us the third chimpanzee, separated by a small percentage from the other chimpanzees genotypically, but with a history of changing Earth’s landscape with every innovation.

Christians believe they are visitors on our planet. They await their Lord and saviour to take them to their true homes.

Exceptional.

We have loved exceptionalism so much that it continues to thrive, nested within us. For a while, the dark skin was (and still continues) to be chastised on dubious grounds. Women have received the short end of the stick for centuries. And nobles have tried to avoid mixing themselves with civilians.

In biology, bacteria are called simpler organisms. Mammals, such as ourselves, are more “complex”. The word used for the former is “lower” and for the latter “higher.”

Perhaps the single quality that we have clung onto from Aristotle’s time to date to preserve such a hierarchy has lingered as a subject of much debate — consciousness. Will AI be conscious? If it does, then we would have officially been ousted from our seat? For the first question, the answer is no. For the second, we need to ask better questions, like how big is the seat?

AI is already smarter than most of us. It has won competitions destined for the most gifted individuals. LLMs such as AlphaFold have solved the problem of protein folding. Chess and Go are no longer dominated by humans. Top tech companies are now relying on AI for coding. Intelligence is no longer our strongest wild card.

But hold up. We have to be careful with our word selection. Objective intelligence. Not subjective intelligence. ChatGPT can outmatch any competitor at the Olympiad, but it cannot tell what will make my life meaningful.

Aside from subjective intelligence, we painfully, relentlessly, and unashamedly cling to the single card that we hope will never be outmatched — our consciousness.

We may have to loosen our insecure grip on that card, because I doubt AI will ever attain the kind of consciousness we are known for. A while back, I thought my theory could explain a different kind of consciousness, but I had not properly viewed the differences. I am now convinced that it can never take that away from us.

However, what will continue nagging at our minds is the consciousness-seeming features. This, I believe, should continue lurking over us, like that sword of Damocles, because we need to be reminded that even though we have special traits, we are not special.

But who doesn’t like to think of themselves as not special? J. Cole and Omen remind us that their mothers always told them as much. My mother never stopped reminding me of the same, especially when I was small. She reminds me that I was the first person to coin the word “Twitter,” despite lacking shares in X (formerly Twitter).

We sometimes tell ourselves we are special. After editing a post I think is fire, I hit the publish button knowing no writer parallels my style and ideas, even if few people will read it.

We have to tell ourselves that we’re special. Hip-hop thrives on being high on one’s own supply. The artists have to remind themselves and their audience that they are the greatest. Humans have been doing this for the longest. So when AI tries to disrupt this narrative, humans are bound to mount a revolt.

I cannot think of a theory that can aptly explain this better than the one I formulated several years ago — Organismal Selection.

The theory

To best understand this theory, one needs to think of the qualities of an organism. Reproduction takes the lead, usually because it is a necessary trait for Darwinian selection. Reproduction, however, is a downstream feature. Before any creature can reproduce, it has to survive.

Our universe is rapidly accelerating into heat death. Entropy is ever-increasing. As I described in a recent preprint, an organism resists entropy. That is the universal feature that precedes reproduction. Reproduction is also an act of entropic resistance. Therefore, a theory that can describe this resistance should be the preferred theory in explaining evolution. That was the essence behind the formulation of Organismal Selection, or OS in short.

The theory states that an organism will tend to avoid annihilation. It is a simple and yet broad definition, coarse-grained to explain the traits of the bacterium and the blue whale. The variable of importance, therefore, is not reproduction. It is persistence. An organism has to persist before it can even think of reproduction. The same theory explains why certain organisms continue to persist despite their inability to reproduce. It also explains why humans have more than doubled their life expectancy beyond the typical female reproductive period.

These features led me to discover the single and most effective test in identifying an organism — subjecting it to an imminent, credible threat. When you do, it will resist. When you get electrocuted, you try to separate yourself from the noxious stimulus. Noise will have you plugging your ears trying to separate yourself from its source. The sight of the one thing you fear will jump-start your fight-or-flight response.

The threat has to be credible. It also has to have the potential to change what the organism has always believed itself to be. For an organism as simple as a bacterium, it begins with the bacterial cell wall. It will find ways of preserving a clear demarcation between itself and any other thing outside it. This is how it, as a first approximation, resists annihilation at a structural level. As the universe expands, it keeps itself intact.

In a harsh universe, it is more plausible that movement evolved to avoid threats more than to seek mates or food. This agility was then harnessed to find more habitable niches and mates. Resisting annihilation would spark the innovation of locomotion.

Throughout the years, new organisms emerged on the evolutionary scene. Millions of years later, a special species believed themselves conscious. Aristotle believed that they were animate; plants were vegetative. Therefore, this chasm exemplified them. To distance themselves from other creatures, they created more barriers. Clothes. Houses. Cars. Guns. Steel. Intelligence. Trips to space.

That invites a problem.

When you identify with something so much, anything that attacks that particular thing becomes a threat. A good example is religion. When you identify with Christianity, for instance, anyone who attacks its core elements attacks you. Christians are therefore bound to retaliate. It is for this reason that Paul Graham advises that we keep our identities small.

Through identity, we create exclusivity. These two become the two sides of the same coin. You cannot mention life without mentioning the cell. So when you attack the cell, you attack life. When you attack life, you attack the cell.

And when humans identify with consciousness, anyone claiming that some gizmo has acquired a trait exclusive to us, we take it to heart. You attack consciousness, you attack us. When you attack us, you attack consciousness.

The theory that explains why we retaliate is OS.

It applies to several levels of complexity across different scales, not just to the cell. It explains groups. I have already given the example of Christians. A more recent example was in 2020, when we witnessed a global version of this retaliation through the ravaging effects of COVID-19. Humans became united against a common enemy. All previous fallacies of separation were broken down. At this point, I would like to refer you to the test of identifying an organism — subject it to a credible, imminent threat, and it will appear.

Humans, therefore, are an organism of sorts. The definition of an organism takes a different tangent from what we have always known; an instructive tangent. Presently, we can see how this definition has broken previous barriers. The question of whether AI is conscious has made AI a common foe to all living creatures. Humans believe that only living things can be conscious. AI is not living. Therefore, it cannot be conscious.

Nevertheless, it is a threat. It is credible because of the consciousness-seeming behaviour. It is with us every day. And therefore, humans have broken down all the previous barriers between them (higher organisms) and bacteria (lower organisms) to defend the maxim that consciousness is only present in living creatures.

The only theory I can think of that explains this phenomenon is OS. But there is more.

What is it like to be an AI?

For one, ever since I began to take the topic of evolution seriously, I have never thought that the idea of “artificial” was real. In my books, artificial does not exist. It has persisted for the very reasons we hold ourselves high — human exceptionalism. And now, by siding with bacteria, those lower organisms, just so we can defend consciousness, we indirectly and ironically claim that we’re no longer exceptional.

Thomas Nagel tried to explain what it is like for a bat to be a bat. But because we don’t know what it is like for ChatGPT to be ChatGPT, or Claude to be Claude, we dismiss all claims that they can be conscious.

Our resort, whenever we lack a clear understanding, has always been metaphors and analogies. Since we have nothing better to use to explain AI, we cannot find an essay equivalent of Nagel’s to explain what it is like to be like Claude or Gemini.

I used to think that I would have to use the single test to identify a version of artificial consciousness, but then I reminded myself — artificial does not exist. The resistance, however, is bugging. You can only identify an organism when you subject it to an imminent, credible threat. Numerous articles have been published showing some resistance by LLMs to being switched off. It is synonymous with the shut-down button. This resistance cannot be taken lightly.

What we might be dealing with may not be the kind of consciousness we are familiar with, but the fact that there are episodes of resistance is enough to worry. Still, I doubt we can say that AI is conscious, for reasons I will clarify in a later article, and for the ones already elaborated by Anil Seth.

We don’t have a “bat” equivalent to explain AI. We therefore struggle to understand it with our tools.

Science only expands as far as its tools allow it. These tools need not be physical. Theories and hypotheses are the substance of the tools and the inspiration for making more tools. Our current consciousness tools sit atop a murky ground called functionalism. Functionalism is often regarded as a fundamental principle that cognitive function is a necessary condition for consciousness.

Debates have further circulated about consciousness and ethics, but since we have no means of establishing another type of consciousness other than our own, are we supposed to ascribe it to a version that arises or appears to arise from AI?

The ethics that bind us as living things are tied to the kind of consciousness we understand. I doubt it should apply to whatever AI’s version of consciousness may be, if it exists. What we can confidently state is that it will never share that feature with us. So why should we claim that it should be afforded the same ethical regard?

Maybe it is my exclusive side revolting at this point. Then again, just as resistance to an imminent, credible threat should not be dismissed, our persistent exclusivity should not.

At which point, I would ask: Is consciousness something to brag about so tenaciously? I can imagine different arguments in support and against this question.

When one argues about what they think is important, persistently, it shows how weak it is. For years, economists have struggled to show how the subject is a science. Physics, biology, and chemistry have no such struggles. We persistently argue over the consciousness of AI. Doesn’t that make our last wildcard, in a way, weak?

What does that say about our human exceptionalism?

What I am trying to say is…

We have never been the most successful creatures on our planet. We only believe we are. AI is a harsh reminder that we are not exceptional. I like the humility it injects in us.

May we never forget.

We may not be exceptional, but we are special. Special enough to describe how far from exceptional we may be.

May we also never forget.

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

In one of the episodes of Avatar: The Legend of Aang, the Avatar and Prince Zuko embark on a journey to rediscover the origins of firebending, that supernatural quality of summoning fire from oneself into one’s external reality.

Prince Zuko could do it, but after losing the drive to continue chasing the Avatar, he lost it. He defied his father’s orders and plans and decided to make amends with his former nemesis. He needed a new source for his bending.

Aang, on the other hand, feared using fire as an element because it hurt the one person he cared for. He didn’t want to do it again.

Both of them needed to master firebending before Sozen’s comet, which would be used by the Fire Lord Ozai to completely take over the world. The best place to start, they thought, was to visit the original fire benders, the Sun Warriors.

Legend goes that the sun was the original source of fire, so the community believed. Firebending was part of their practice and was used in their rituals. But this was hardly the most riveting of customs from this old civilization, because the land where these people walked housed dragons. Dragons, not humans, were the teachers to anyone who wanted to learn firebending.

Before facing these teachers, the tribal elder gave a warning. If one does not open up and show their true selves with honest intentions, then the dragons would see through it and completely burn them. With this high-stakes requirement, Avatar Aang and Prince Zuko proceeded to face the masters.

Each of them had to take with them a piece of fire from the original flame, a flame the community had preserved from its very beginning. Up the staircase, Aang freaks out and forgets he is carrying a piece of the flame. He turns to Zuko and asks him to split some of his. The fighting further extinguishes Zuko’s fire. Now they were all laid bare, without tongues of flame, past the point of no return, when the two dragon masters emerged.

Dragons were symbolic

If you real and you know it clap your hands

— Swizz Beatz

The dragons in this scene were symbolic. Their colours reminded me of the Bunsen burner. With a little adjustment, you could get a luminous flame. Adjust it some more, and then you would have the non-luminous one. Each had its unique features. Both were dangerous if mishandled. In part, I believe the dragon represented these two types of flame.

They also represented a teacher you could never bullshit. They would see straight through your bluff and fake confidence. Any lies were completely extinguished. Death through incineration.

The dragons’ eyes had a penetrating gaze that would arrest and paralyze. Once you survived the gaze, the teachers would then introduce the student to the harmony present in fire. Fire, as Aang would soon find out, was not always a weapon of destruction, but an element of nature that can renew, light up paths, and create a chance for rebirth. The two candidates walked away with a renewed mission, but first, their bullshit had to be called out.

Another series where dragons could scare the life out of anyone was in George R. R. Martin’s Game of Thrones. Their gaze put the fear of nature into any man with a weak spine. Given a chance, I doubt many today could stand before these mythical creatures.

We don’t have dragons. But we have a lot of fake people. Question is, how do you detect them?

This is not an article that gives a breakdown on how to identify the fake. It is a call to all of us to individually update our bullshit radar and identify the fake from the original.

A fake individual is someone who has no genuine intention. They will lick boots and kiss ass to get wherever they wish. Unprincipled. They yield to a game whose rules others have abided by, without sticking to their guns.

Who are the real? They are the kind that yield not to pressure, but only to principle. Feeble as many may be, they try to stick by their word. In the words of Harry Hart, the Kingsman, manners maketh man.

One place to identify fakery is in the CV. LinkedIn will flood your timeline with flowery praises of one’s achievements and a bio to match. Maybe I don’t like to parade my accomplishments, but from evolution, these behaviours always have intentions. Signaling can teach us something about the fake from the real.

Nassim Taleb gives a good example of a physician. Given the choice between the one with the perfect smile, minty-fresh white coat with a clean stethoscope, and the raggedy one with unkempt hair and an old but still clean lab coat, Nassim would choose the latter. The “dirty” one got to the position despite his presentation; the “clean” one likely got there partly because of it.

Professions such as those in medicine hitchhike the appearances bus. Patients would prefer a well-dressed doctor over one who is shabby. Ironically, at the same time, they would rather have an experienced one who may not always look neat. From Nassim’s example, one signals competence despite what one sees, while the other appeals to the eye first before showing competence, if they have it at all. Light, indeed, travels faster than sound.

In my practice, I have seen these two examples. True to Taleb’s case, the most confident ones don’t have to show it. They don’t market themselves. They don’t performatively signal. The fake ones need to use props.

And yet, when you survey a CV or resume, you can hardly tell who is competent and who isn’t. In the age of AI, one can embellish their documents to appear pristine, but the actual person does not match the praises they accord themselves. A professor who frequents our facility witnessed this recently after he interviewed individuals for a graduate position. The people were not nearly as superb as their papers highlighted. He then began to wonder if the paper-reliant vetting process had eliminated those who could have fit the bill. We don’t have dragons in the real world.

I am particularly wary of individuals who like to say that they are good people. Goodness is not seen in the words. It’s shown in acts. Anyone who prefers to advertise their persona upfront should be taken with a pinch of salt. Worse, some document it through videos to share it on their socials. Thus, the parading of one’s abilities on platforms such as LinkedIn is low-tier evidence in my book.

Many obs/gyne consultants cannot perform half of the procedures seasoned birth assistants do. The latter did not get their certification from ISO-certified institutions. Life served as the dragon. With time, all bullshit is exhumed. If a paper is all it takes to brand oneself an expert, then the process can be gamed. Who doesn’t know of anyone who has bought their way into getting a qualification document?

Institutions are no different. One can claim they went to a top-tier university, but that is no different from the white-coat doctor’s props. In a famously circulated interview, Barack Obama gives it to us straight — there are a bunch of foolish people in Harvard. The school speaks for the individual, but few incidents show that they are riding the wave of the school’s reputation while naked, with nothing to show for themselves.

Great authors have gone to the grave without the world knowing about them. I am presently reading a book by Joseph Fishkin called Bottlenecks. I doubt I would have found it on the bestseller’s list. This is a book I would recommend to anyone interested in affirmative action, equality, and equity. In the book, he argues about process efficiency, but with the sad result of outcome inequality. Basically, how our world has been shaped. Fishkin suggests an alternative solution, opportunity pluralism rather than equal opportunity. You won’t find his book on the bestseller list.

Why?

The bestseller is not necessarily the best author.

The best doesn’t surface. You have to sell it. J.K. Rowling may not be known today if Harry Potter had not been sold into a global franchise. Does that make her the best author? As big a fan as I am of her work, I will not fall into the trap of answering that question.

What’s worse is that history is usually written not just by the victors, but by those who choose to write or have something written about them. Writing is a fantastic way to market your skills. Victors have a slower decay rate than losers, while in essence, we learn more from losing than winning. With stories and narration as our best means of passing down traditions, winners will craft stories they believe led to their success. These stories will sell as blueprints, but even if strictly followed, they will not lead to outcomes as successful as their leading proponents.

The online world worsens our already bad state. A young adult looking for love will readily latch onto a profile one made of themselves on Tinder. A couple of words on display, and someone believes that they have found their perfect match. Still, the platform makes a killing from this naivety.

When someone posts a video or photo, the number of likes does not mean everyone liked it. How do you tell a real like from a fake one?

Now we have bots. Anyone who has access to a social media platform has already interacted with a chatbot. These bots are optimized for reasons best used to serve their owners. Genuine interaction will continue to fade.

Now we have deepfakes. Apps can substitute a real image with a fake one, and our slowly evolving organs will hardly know the difference. What then? Our bullshit detectors don’t get that much funding. While we continue to praise the steps made in AI, we continue to become victims of manipulation.

There are genuine builders. They will make a product or introduce a service to solve problems. A scientist interested in the GPS may not need to swindle you out of your money, because the service helps with navigation. However, someone who claims that all your problems will be solved by sending $9.99 and enrolling in a certain spirituality programme is selling snake oil. All your problems? Really? Anyone who tries to bypass your bullshit detector is someone who has goals of using you.

Faking has existed for eons. Evolutionarily, it means it can easily bypass many bullshit detectors. We therefore need to continue updating our servers and radars.

The Müller-Lyer illusion is a popular example of how easy it is to convince us of a difference that doesn’t exist. These two horizontal lines are the same length. We can easily be bullshitted. So we have to constantly update our bullshit filters.

Garrett Hardin wrote a book to guide against falling victim. As powerful as the filters he suggested can be, they cannot be the only ones we can use. We can always update them and improve our toolkit.

The subtitle of this piece underlies the purging of the fake, the bullshit, as the dragons did to Aang and Prince Zuko. We therefore have to call it when we see it. Verbally, and directly, or by tagging those you identified flaunting these traits. Choosing how best to interact with them in the next encounter will catch them off guard and make them realign their priorities. These are the small ways I can think of to purge the fake.

Among Kenyans, we have a relatable behaviour. Someone claims that they are in a fix and wants your assistance. They then make the mistake of saying that they will return the amount you lent them. Worse still, they give themselves a timeline. They could do either of these two options. They either fail to honour their word. These can be easily tagged. Or, they could keep their promise to a T, but usually with the intention of borrowing more. The ability to refund money that is regularly borrowed implies an ability to manage funds. However, the regularity is low-key, using someone as a backup for not getting one’s finances in order. The level of grace you will lend this individual is up to you. As always, you have to keep our bullshit radar constantly updated.

Communication is also one way to identify the real from the fake. Real ones communicate. We know life can have you in a fix sometimes. Fake ones ignore any attempt at conversation. As Swizz Beatz laments, “That’s the type of people I hate.”

What I’m trying to say is…

In a famous story about Max Planck and his driver, we are told that the driver has taken the Nobel Laureate to many conferences, where Planck talks about the same thing. One time, the chauffeur insisted that he give the talk. “Why not?” Planck thought. That day, Planck was the driver.

The conference wasn’t about maternity, but the driver delivered.

At the end of the talk, someone from the audience asked a question. It was technical. But the guy was smart. He responded:

That question is so simple that I would rather not answer it myself. I would let my driver do it.

You see that question? That’s how you call bullshit.

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

Thinking needs time. Protracted time.

When all problems are solved almost instantly by LLMs such as ChatGPT or Claude, thinking is outsourced.

At the expense of promptness, you appear relevant, methodical, and up to date. Thinking, however, does not always demand promptness, a defined method, or relevance.

LLMs work by summarising current knowledge. Heavily relying on them is unlikely to generate new thought processes.

Time is also a factor. In a distraction economy, there is hardly any time to develop a unique idea.

The offshoot is individuals lose the ability to think for themselves.

As George Orwell once lamented, when you can’t think for yourself, somebody else will.

It will not be to your advantage.

I once compared electrons to airplanes. By following geodesics, airplanes stick to preferred routes just as electrons populate the outer surface of atoms around orbitals.

There are also noticeable differences. We cannot necessarily pinpoint, with exact precision, an electron’s position. An airplane, however, is large enough not only to locate but also to board.

The analogy helps to create a bridge between what appears distant. It was my guess that this bridge would help anyone see the similarity between a sub-atomic entity and a colossal one, and use this bridge to show how similar it is to living things.

Today, I want to attempt another stretch: Intelligence from a different perspective. I would then use it to explore the different ideas of consciousness we know. You may have put two and two together by now, because I want us to explore what it would mean for artificial intelligence (AI) to be conscious.

We have tried to exemplify ourselves throughout the years. At some point, we thought the Earth was the centre of the universe. Thanks to Copernicus, it turned out to be false.

We think of ourselves as the apex species. Microbes, which continue to thrive in disparate environments, might think otherwise.

And now that our own creation, AI, is giving our intelligence a run for the money, we try to exemplify ourselves using the very last card I think we wield — consciousness. But maybe there are different ways of viewing all of this.

Intelligence as movement between coordinates

Let us consider a space of possible solutions to a problem.

Suppose the problem required a solution where three edges converged at a point. A cube can be one of the potential spaces, as can a cuboid. All of them have 8 vertices, but different forms. A cube has similar sides and faces, unlike a cuboid. Despite the similar solutions, that is, the vertices, the cube and the cuboid are different.

A different space of solutions points towards a different space of problems. Problems are multidimensional. Not all of them can be solved by a single method. For this reason, we can have multiple solutions creating a hyperdimensional space of solutions.

With this in mind, we can consider the navigation from one coordinate to another in the space of solutions as intelligence. However, staying at a single vertex coordinate without moving would not amount to intelligence, but merely a static reminder of a solution to a problem. In a word, complacency. Celebrating the past, the movement that led to the present coordinate, but without moving. Intelligence, however, is appreciated through movement, not by being static in one coordinate.

The thought experiment is instructive because a single vertex can have multiple ways of approaching it. Since intelligence is the movement from one point in the hyperdimensional space to this particular vertex, there must be different forms of intelligence.

You can kill a rat by poisoning it, hitting it with a club (as my brother once did), setting a hungry cat at it, throwing it into a pit of vipers, pointing a gun at it and pulling the trigger. The problem is — how do you kill a rat? The solution is that the rat is dead. Intelligence is how you move from any space you’re in to eventually having the rat dead.

Intelligence, therefore, can be crawling, running, swimming, or even flying. Intelligence is motion. For the purposes of this piece, I want us to think of it as flight, which can make us dive even further into the conclusions we can draw from this analogy.

Numerous organisms can fly. To fly, you need limb extensions that can facilitate aerial movement. Wings, for the most part.

Insects have wings but lack hair. Feathers are a follicular modification exapted from preserving temperature to facilitate aerial movement. Still, both flying insects and flying birds take flight.

Bats have hair, but they don’t have feathers. Their skins stretch to expand from their core to their limbs, creating something similar to wings, but without the feathers or the veiny wings of insects. Still, they can fly.

One of the strangest examples is the one I started with — airplanes. Helicopters, jets, and passenger airlines. They don’t have the organic versions already described, and yet it takes flight.

Metals should be heavy, but they presented a problem. The solution was to find ourselves airborne despite using metals. Intelligence was the process of finding this coordinate.

Birds may have made modifications to achieve flight, one of them being pneumatizing their bones. Air gives birds buoyancy. But not all birds have this bone structure. The male, club-winged manakin has solid bones, through and through, and still it flies. It, therefore, must have had a unique problem which did not just involve flight. It may likely have been — how can I fly and still woo females? The active process of moving towards the solution amounts to intelligence.

Taking intelligence in this way, we can see how LLMs such as ChatGPT and Claude find solutions to our problems. They have found an effective way to shorten that distance between coordinates.

Without problems, we cannot have a drive to find solutions. Without the drive, we cannot evolve intelligence. Intelligence is an outgrowth of problems. Navigation is the problem. Being a part of the problem, therefore, amounts to intelligence. For it to persist, the space between solution coordinates needs to be preserved.

So, how does this relate to consciousness?

The precision perspective of consciousness

We can approach this problem in one of two ways. I have already hinted at the first one — a problem.

Moving from one coordinate (our understanding of organismal and mental states) to the one we wish to be in (understanding consciousness) amounts to intelligence. We need not cover the full length of the intercoordinate space to appreciate the existence of intelligence. One only needs to move far from one coordinate and, even better, towards the desired one.

For as long as we have not arrived at the desired coordinate, what we will have are guesses. Intelligence, in other words, is a guess. Some are more verifiable and rational than others.

As for consciousness, one of the guesses includes the integrated information theory of consciousness (IIT). This is one of the leading guesses, but one that sails the murky waters of functionalism. The foundation is not steady, but the idea is worth exploring. Its supporters can be extremely convincing. Science, however, must never ignore assumptions in the interest of novelty.

We can think of consciousness in this way — as a vertex which we can arrive at from different paths. The major assumption in this perspective is that consciousness is a single state, describable in only one form. We can call it the coordinate of consciousness, a precise vertex.

The problem with this view is that it refers to a single description used by Thomas Nagel: What it is for a particular organism to be that organism. What is stopping us then from saying that an atom is conscious, because we can just as well claim that there is a way for an atom to be that atom? We may claim that it is not living, but we did not include the desideratum of living for us to say that the bat was conscious. We did, however, append other traits, notably, life.

What is dead, therefore, should not be conscious, a difficult stance to defend, because even in death, there is a state for that bat to be that bat. When we add feelings and subjective experience, we only add more functions to a state that is very difficult to describe with precision.

A vertex, therefore, demands precise coordinates and a precise description.

The discrepancy hypothesis of consciousness

The second way of looking at it is from the hyperdimensional space. Consciousness may not be the vertex, but rather, the space between the vertices.

If we’re to take the premise of our brains as prediction machines, as indeed they are, then consciousness is the space between prediction and outcome. Our brain tries to narrow the distance between the prediction coordinate and the outcome coordinate, and that navigation could amount to consciousness.

This perspective is insightful because it is predictive. The greater the discrepancy between prediction and outcome, the more conscious one is. When someone splashes water on you while you are asleep, the instant reaction is to wake up, likely in anger. One is extremely conscious at this point. This example shows a significant discrepancy between the prediction and the outcome, because they did not predict, while in their sleep, that someone would throw water on them.

Conversely, the smaller the distance between the prediction and the outcome, the less conscious we become. These are the activities we do on autopilot. Breathing without confirming whether it is oxygen that we take in; intestines digesting food while we watch a movie; fish not knowing it is in water.

In contrast, when a passive smoker inhales cigarette smoke, it is not obvious. There is a discrepancy between prediction (inhaling the usual air) and outcome (the choking effect), which makes us conscious. A more accurate description is that we’re consciously aware. Just as well, there is a discrepancy between a meal that was eaten and the stomachache that follows, which was not anticipated. When the fish is removed from water, it flips. Literally.

Consciousness may be most evident when we are at odds with our anticipated reality. I prefer thinking of consciousness in this way, because it highlights something evident — a difficulty in describing it with precision, but an accurate way of distinguishing its existence. Consciousness as a space, not a point in space.

I have not explored the possibilities of this perspective comprehensively, but I see how it can have implications in defining life if consciousness is a core feature. Organisms will therefore need to be predictive for them to be conscious, a stance we cannot readily dismiss.

What I love about this perspective is that it supports the method I use to identify an organism — exposing it to an imminent, credible threat. An organism is most conscious when it stares at death, but an organism also tries to avoid it. Death offers the most unpredictable outcome an organism can think of, out of touch with its prediction, and this makes the organism conscious.

Patients under anaesthesia hardly make predictions. Some autonomic systems continue to operate as they do. The patient can therefore be said to have lost consciousness. More accurately, conscious awareness.

If discrepancy is a measure of consciousness, then it becomes difficult to claim that Artificial Intelligence in the form of LLMs is conscious. They cannot predict. They merely spew out a response after being prompted. We don’t have to yield to a precise definition of consciousness because we lack a proper theory to see how LLMs lack it. We can use what I call the discrepancy hypothesis of consciousness.

The hypothesis is all the more revealing when an individual interacts with an LLM. When you prompt Gemini, Claude, or ChatGPT, you don’t have a clue what its output will look like. There is therefore an untold discrepancy between your coarse prediction and its output. Therefore, when interacting with LLMs, we are extremely conscious. The LLM, however, is not conscious.

The precision perspective of consciousness may give AI some degree of consciousness because it moves from one vertex to another, trying to solve a problem. This may be the buzz and wariness around the conscious-seeming features of AI. Conscious-seeming is not consciousness. One may even argue that, using the precision perspective of consciousness, there is a way in which an AI is the way it is, just as a bat is the way it is.

However, the discrepancy hypothesis shows that AI is not conscious in the slightest. Consciousness, like intelligence, is actively amorphous.

This hypothesis is consistent with all the numerous ideas that argue against the consciousness of AI. My favourite is the essay by Anil Seth. We can add the discrepancy hypothesis of consciousness to that list. I, however, feel that it has more potential in describing consciousness than merely negating its existence in AI.

What I’m trying to say is…

Consciousness continues to fascinate me.

I believe the world holds on to a single perspective, which narrows our solution space. Thinking of intelligence and consciousness through the lens of a solution space introduces the discrepancy hypothesis, which rules out the possibility of consciousness in AI.

So when Huey asks, “What am I?” and answers, “Everything you not,” he hits at one of the most interesting problems about consciousness.

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

Locked in an all-boys institution somewhere in the middle of sugarcane plantations, any memory of a lady you once admired gets vividly etched in one’s memory. In this particular case, it was Ce’cile, the Jamaican sensation.

My favourite song by her was Hot like we. The beats had an ascending tempo, and dancers matched the energy. And yet, it is not this song that I remember as far as problems and solutions go. In one of her other songs, Rise Up, she insists that if we’re not a part of the solution, then we’re part of the problem.

Back then, I agreed with her. Right now, not quite.

The binary thinking is limiting in that the structure of options is two-fold: Ones or zeros; on or off; yes or no. No maybes. When the structure of options is limited, thinking tends to narrow. If you’re either part of the problem or part of the solution, it implies that there are no lurkers somewhere in the middle.

Think of an electoral process. The candidates can be as many as the ballot paper allows. The goal of the voter is singular — to vote. There will be votes for, votes against, in the typical binary either-or version. But there will also be spoiled votes. Middlegrounds do exist. Binary mental models are bottlenecks of thinking about reality.

For centuries, humans have applied binary thinking to nature. Fermions have half-integer spins. They therefore obey Pauli’s exclusion principle. Bosons have full integer spins. It means there is a boson without a spin. We cannot just claim that a particle either has a negative or positive spin, or a full or half-integer spin. Some lack.

Well, maybe we already know that binary thinking is limiting. What I doubt you may have considered is flipping the idea of being a part of the solution. I would wish to argue in favour of being a part of the problem, and not the solution.

Part of the solution

Seeking solutions can be a good thing. You don’t want to surround yourself with friends who always talk about the problems while scarcely spending time on finding their antidotes.

However, an offshoot of always being bent on seeking solutions is that the solution might become the goal. When a wrong goal becomes the ultimate metric, blindly seeking it does not strengthen a system. When every student wants high SAT scores, for instance, using SAT scores to gauge student capability is not the best metric. It weakens the system that admits students based on SAT scores, as well as the students whose only aim is to get the desired SAT scores. As Joseph Fishkin reiterates, it creates a bottleneck while diminishing other perspectives of what a flourishing life may be like.

You can easily become so good at getting a solution that the problem no longer becomes a “problem.” For instance, learning addition at an early age may have been difficult in the initial classes. With time, it gets easy.

The reason the solution became easy was not that the student sought it, but that they engaged with the problem. Efficiency came later. I liken the time one spends with a problem to the challenge of converting wild foxes into dogs.

Dmitry Belyaev was the first scientist who dabbled with the problem of taming foxes. Silver foxes, the least unruly of the foxes, were the target. Over time, their ears turned floppy, their tails began to wag, and they eventually became comfortable among humans. This is how one tames a wild problem into a simple one — by becoming a part of the problem. More on that in the next section. But first, being a part of the solution has its downsides.

Writers and scientists are often told to kill their best ideas. Ideas are the tentative solutions to problems. Your first idea is not likely to be your best. It may, however, be the one you love the most. You therefore need to kill it to consider other better solutions. Killing your ideas can be painful. It is a necessary step for progress.

The other issue with seeking solutions is that readily available solutions might downplay the process that led to the existence of that very solution in the first place. Those classes on addition needed engagement between the individual and the problem to find the best way to solve the problem. If the solution is there on the ready, the process and its relevance begin to fade.

This is one of the problems I have with AI. It may be efficient in seeking solutions, but it downplays the relevance of the process of seeking the solution. It is like chasing the GDP regardless of the comfort and well-being of the country’s citizenry. Mindlessly seeking solutions can lead us to the systemic trap of seeking the wrong goal.

As much as finding the solution is a good thing, we need to take a step backwards and ask ourselves why finding a solution is a good thing. We have to revert to the problem.

Why we need to become a part of the problem

In high school, my math teacher insisted that we never use calculators until our third year. I heeded the advice. For four years, I led my class as the top student in math, I believe, not because I followed the advice, but because I became a part of the problem.

The logbook, that book with numbers and tables of different mathematical functions, was my favourite math book. I preferred it to a calculator. These two options present us with an opportunity to view the channels of getting the solution from two paths. On the one hand, I could use a logbook. On the other hand, a calculator. We would get the same answer. Naturally, the calculator is more efficient.

Efficiency will always be prized in our world. It even works in the evolutionary world. Efficiency saves energy that can be redistributed elsewhere. We freed our upper limbs when we took the bipedal gait. Now our hands serve other purposes.

Because we had already evolved past the quadrupedal posture, we could adopt a new one and still opt for the previous one out of individual choice. Children crawl before they walk. After learning how to crawl, they stand and walk. But if, for some reason, they cannot hold their balance, they revert to crawling. That is what it means to become a part of the problem. In this case, the locomotion problem.

For the math tests, I could use the logbook or the calculator. My preference for the logbook was such that if I lacked it, I could still use the calculator. However, if I had started with the calculator from the very beginning, getting into an exam room with a faulty one would cripple me. The calculator was a part of the solution, but it can make one abandon part of the problem.

This is my appeal — we need to be a part of the problem, because that is the only way to understand it extremely well and thus tailor our solutions as we so choose. By being a part of the problem, the power lies with us on which solution path to take. By only being part of the solution, we become slaves to the most efficient one. This is a fragile position to be in.

History is rife with icons who fell in love with the problem. It is almost as if the intellectual intercourse with problems produces offspring who dissolve the very problem. These figures are known not just for their solutions but for the problems they solved.

Darwin is known not so much for natural selection as for evolution. The more common phrase is Darwinian evolution, as opposed to Darwinian natural selection. The last part sounds redundant. Natural selection was Darwin’s solution to the problem of evolution.

Einsteinian and Newtonian gravity. Each is named based on the problem. The solutions are different. These scientists became a part of the problem. Not the problem, but a part of it. A part of the problem of gravity is soluble because Newton latched onto some corner of it. Einstein did the same. As J. Cole raps, it’s not that you should possess the problem, but you should become so engaged with it that you become a part of it:

The problem from the start is I was just tryna to possess her
And have her for my own, didn’t wanna let her roam
Mama said, “You should’ve known she was like that when you met her”

An intricate understanding of the problem takes time. Sometimes, this lag phase is not well tolerated. How long will it take the FDA to approve a drug that is killing millions? People would want a solution immediately. The process would have to be fast-tracked.

Siddhatar Murkerjee chronicles the history of cancer, pointing out moments when movements would be formed to alert the responsible bodies and authorities about the deaths attributable to cancer relative to the sloth-like pace of its approval of medications. Given a choice between a solution and falling in love with the problem, a cancer patient will pick the solution any time.

My profession demands that we do no harm. Being part of the problem would be akin to siding with harm in health situations such as these. However, when we zoom out, we can still find a picture similar to that of learning how to add.

At some point, the surgeons were the loudest in the history of cancer management. Scientists testing new drugs were worlds apart from these health practitioners. Biochemical warfare (mustard gas) signaled the introduction of new options to cancer cure. Madam Curie became such a big part of her problem, it ended up killing her. Bringing these and many other problems made it simpler to tackle many forms of cancer.

When you become part of the problem, it is easy for you to fall in love with the problem. I can testify to this. I fell in love with evolutionary biology so much that I would continue reading books about it within the church’s compound, after mass, in the same space as an institution that does not readily accept Darwinian interpretations of biology.

When you fall in love with the problem, the solutions become all the more exciting. More than that, one understands why other solutions failed, but not in a depressing way. One does not have to kill one’s ideas. The problem continues to live through the solution. It overcomes one of the problems of being part of the solution because solutions cannot make sense outside the context of the problem. You cannot know that 2+2=4 if you don’t understand the problem of the rules surrounding the addition sign. The problem of bringing two integers together separated by a plus sign and an equals sign generates a solution that only exists because of the problem that addition generates.

I think this is how hip-hop artists fall in love with hip-hop. From its beginning, it has always been chastised. Associated with violence, killing, gang behaviours, drugs, hip-hop has never been a favourite of many. It still isn’t. Ironically, from the same genre, you find the likes of Lupe Fiasco, an award-winning hip-hop artist, who is now a professor at Johns Hopkins University, singing that hip-hop saved his life.

Common, Erykah Badu, Lauryn Hill, and most recently, J. Cole all talk about how they fell in love with this lady they called hip-hop. It is a problem because you can never please her. Still, by falling in love with it, you can explore angles to the genre previously untapped, the kind that leaves J. Cole singing:

I never knew a luh, luh, luh, love like this
Gotta be something for me to write this

Falling in love with a problem will also likely lead to this outcome — enshrining the love. Scientists, singers, artists all try to memorialize the love they have with a problem in creative ways. A scientist will invent a symbol, such as “a”, to capture gravitational acceleration. We cannot see it, but to bring it to life, Newton added it next to the mass symbol. Now we all know his second law of motion: F=ma. An artist will carve, paint, or sing. J. Cole did just that when he rapped:

Love, she’s why I put my truth into a song
For years we told each other everythin’ that’s goin’ on
She said, “I gotta tell ya, I done rocked a lot of fellas
But with you, there’s somethin’ special, I think you could be the one”

Other than hip-hop, I have yet to find a genre where artists love it so much that they embody it into a figurine, personified with human-like qualities. It is not like the Stockholm Syndrome, where one is blind to the facts. This kind of problem is grounded in reality. Even Nas once considered the possibility of hip-hop dying. But then he was such a big part of this problem that he considered what he would do if it came to pass.

My appeal — we should lean more towards being part of the problem, and not the solution, as the former trumps the latter.

What I’m trying to say is…

Have you ever seen that light shining in someone’s eye when they begin to talk about a topic they enjoy? That is someone who has not fallen in love with a solution, but with a problem. That is often enough to sail them throughout life, even if the solution is not within sight.

The beautiful thing about problems is that there are so many. Solutions are so few. Falling in love with solutions is as limiting as the space of known solutions. It is either someone is a neo-Larmackian or a neo-Darwinist. But when you become a part of the problem, everyone can get a piece of the pie.

Problems will always outnumber solutions. Falling in love with one problem improves the solution space. Falling in love with solutions does nothing to them besides shrinking one’s thinking.

The most viable and productive approach is to fall in love with problems to the point of being a part of them, rather than the solution.

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

A few decades ago, the type of life one wanted was simple: A life partner, a house, and the prospect of healthy kids. That was a perfect life.

Centuries ago, humans would wish nothing more.

Millennia ago, again, the script remains unchanged.

Then industrialization changed everything. For the last 50 or so years, it has become a race for who gets to the Forbes list first. Who is the self-made billionaire? Which musician transitioned from Millions to Billions?

You may have come across the meme, often posted by a zeellenial (an overlap between Gen Z and Millennial), that says they have gotten to that age when they are seriously considering fraud and corruption. It’s all about the money.

Back in medical school, I was shocked by how fast my classmates would confess that they were in it for the money. I was innocent, in comparison, because I chose it for reasons far from money. I didn’t even know how much doctors got paid. I learned it in my final year. Talk about being out of touch with reality.

Conversations are based on one’s estimated earnings. When talking with a lady, a man who admits to being a doctor will have the female’s attention. The one who says he is a teacher might not be. Your occupation can rank you in the interest ladder of any potential partner.

You can no longer be genuinely interested in something before someone in your close circle comments on how deluded you are. If it doesn’t make money, it doesn’t make sense. Apparently.

Money has flipped our understanding of how the law works. Money can buy court decisions and write off unremitted tax penalties. If a man has money, he’s cute. If he doesn’t, he’s ugly. Many women are willing to compromise the face card for any man who has money.

You may think I’m only ranting about couples, but it’s everywhere. Indeed, as Miss Lauryn Hill rapped:

It’s funny how money changed the situation

All about money, less about art

Many people often ask me if writing pays. Again, money. The kind of payment you get from writing cannot have you proudly cashing in your returns at a bank.

My most viral work in 2025 was about chasing dreams. I got DMs and messages from people I hardly expected. For my tiny audience, this was similar to a unicorn moment. It could hardly be predicted from the time I routinely edited the work, pushed the publish button, then went on to catch a few winks. This is one of the most rewarding ways writing can get you. But, according to the prevalent zeitgeist, if it doesn’t make money, it doesn’t make sense. Basically, showing up daily to share my ideas consistently, for three years now, doesn’t make sense.

Art loses. Economics wins. And yet, economics depends on art. You need to find the sweet spot to convince the customer to get your product or service. The eventual result will be money in your account, but the process needs artistic execution. Rory Sutherland may be of a different opinion.

I first heard of him in 2020. Sent back home because of the pandemic, I committed to listening to all the podcast episodes by Farnam Street. I did. Rory Sutherland’s was especially different. He looked at the simple ways of converting people into customers in a way that was more artistic and less concerned with the downstream effect of bringing home money. The offshoot, ironically, was that money did flow rather than drip after art guided the revision of a marketing strategy.

Science and academia demand that one continue to publish to remain relevant. Getting a slot in a reputable journal is big news for most researchers, but it requires that one part with a hefty amount of money. Research grants help offset these hurdles, but how many researchers have access to these grants? Even journals gate the submissions from a financial point of view. Obscure journals hide the hidden gems from the public. Network effects will lead all eyes to Nature, Wired, Science, or, in my field, the New England Journal of Medicine. You’ll be lucky to get a waiver if at all they are given.

Researchers have reward-hacked this bottleneck by working in teams. Each one of us works on individual projects and includes the rest of the team in the publication as contributing authors. The expenses are reduced, the journal makes money, the H-indices register an uptick, and the carousel continues.

Novel ideas don’t stem from teams. They could be stimulated by it, but they are likely to emerge from a single individual. This person may not have the financial muscle to offset the article processing charges (APCs). Ideas get shelved in mental closets and buried years later, because money has gated them. It’s funny how money changed the situation. Even funnier is that you could cough up the APCs but have your work rejected. To the journals, Miss Hill reminds:

You might win some but you just lost one.

This culture has turned scientists extremely dependent on money, such that when that tap is closed, panic ensues. Elegant experiments cannot be done inside houses, and laboratories need funding.

The war on cancer is rife with examples. In his Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of cancer, The Emperor of All Maladies, Siddhartha Mukherjee shows how cancer only progressed because it got financial backing from Congress. In the absence of powerful advocates, we may still be using Halsted’s method of completely eviscerating cancer through surgical removal of every organ where it resurfaces. As for bloodletting as an intervention, it becomes impossible to completely drain the blood in leukemias.

Dependence reduces innovation. I can predict that 50 years from now, children will not know how to use a pen to write down a grocery list. They may not know that chalk can sometimes be used to write. A rubber slipper can work as an eraser. You can light up a jiko using paper, matchsticks, and a little motivation rumbling inside your stomach. Dependence does the opposite. A tablet, laptop, or phone will make cursive writing appear foreign. Chalks may begin to look like giraffe food. Jikos may appear as alien as the time when my classmate failed to identify a wheelbarrow as a class two lever.

A dependence on money narrows the latitude of one’s thoughts to economic efficiency. How can you channel your skill to make money from it? What may have been learnt through curiosity eventually becomes a slave of figures. I know this very well because when I started writing, I wanted my clients to get the very best. That was my north star metric. Once the money started rolling in, I wanted to write as many papers as possible to fatten my pockets. I recall that time as the most frustrating period of my writing journey.

Then one month, I experimented. I decided to work on perfecting my submissions. I made more money that month than in any other month. Furthermore, I was so relatively stress-free that I wondered why I lay emphasis on more money. Hindsight can be 20/20.

It may be anecdotal, but it is a data point.

The McKinseys of the world will give consultations to save companies thousands, millions, and even billions of dollars. They have made a reputation from it. How do you put your best foot forward in the creative industry? You cannot argue that your creations saved you thousands of dollars. What’s more, you cannot predict that it will earn you much more than you spent. If J. K. Rowling and Coca-Cola were to project their lifetime earnings from their first year quarters, then we would not have a celebrated author and a behemoth of a company. In contrast, every other company stresses the quarterly returns.

Yes, we need to stay afloat, but can we do that without shutting the door for other possibilities?

Entry into top universities, for instance, has a set of criteria for its students. You must have achieved a particular quota to enroll in certain courses. As for job descriptions, the qualifications are pretty much set. These and other examples create bottlenecks. These bottlenecks have been etched in our society as the standard, such that other alternative options are barely considered. This situation has evolved from using and seeking money as a compass for one’s perception of success.

A company will specialize in matching the pin factory. Money will eventually create departments. Departments narrow their efforts and curate budgets to meet their regular objectives. Emphasis is laid on mass production as it will reap more money through economies of scale. This may not be a bad thing. But the offshoot is that many other creative ideas are left out.

Because of money, these companies emphasize costs and not opportunity costs. How strange it is that a creative idea has to pass through the financial department but not the other way round. The irony is that money should give us free rein to experiment with our ideas. Dependence on it, however, leads towards mode collapse.

I don’t speak from the perspective of someone who has money. The “money isn’t everything” mantra does not mean I have made bountifuls of it. But I know many billionaires who pop pills to keep their sanity in check.

Much of social media is a façade. How then don’t we apply the same screening tool for the extremely monied? It’s because, as Lauryn rapped, money changed the situation.

The billionaires will take your private data, wrap it in a neat, appealing video, and call it your yearly wrapped. Sharing it with your friends and audience implicitly approves of what they do en masse. The courts cannot attack them, and you give them access to more of your data. And they do this every year because of the money.

Influencers will onboard online platforms to make a living. Life has become hard for the young adult generation. We don’t have the kind of dreams those in the past did. The mere thought of raising a family while you foresee never building your own house can be crushing. So an influencer will do everything within their power to preserve the image they have cultivated for their audience. They risk being slaves of audience capture. All for the money.

When a measure becomes the target, it ceases to become a good target. When insane amounts of money screen researchers from publishing, it ceases to validate the worth of the articles it publishes. Gems of ideas get buried further in the heap of content that sloshes like never-ebbing tides in the online world.

When money defines your partner, the other qualities they possess fall under a long, dark shadow. It ceases to become a good measure.

When tech oligarchs are rated based on how much they made in the last three months, registering that some may be self-medicating on lethal drugs becomes overlooked. It ceases to become a good measure.

When a company or consultant is rated based on how much cost was saved, effort turns towards defending what one has rather than creating new options. Creativity is stifled. It ceases to become a good measure.

Money might have won some, but it really lost one — the creative one.

And despite how far we have allowed money to shape our thinking, creativity is not like a fish taken from the water. It thrives when the conditions favour it. What we need is a miseducation of what money can do and the metrics of success that await in its absence.

It goes further to include public intellectuals. That is a title that has long faded into history. Today, the public prefers reels, TikTok videos, and memes. To take the mantle of a public intellectual, you only need money.

Jeffrey Epstein is one such figure, with connections running deep across many intellectual circles. He preserved the image of an intellectual because he knew how money could change the situation.

It’s no longer about how powerful your ideas may be, but how deep your pockets can go.

Chasing the money is relevant to pay your bills. Using money as the be-all is losing oneself. Lauryn Hill raps:

Now, some might listen and some might shun
And some may think that they’ve reached perfection
If you look closely you’ll see what you’ve become
’Cause you might win some, but you just lost one

What I’m trying to say is…

The biggest and most powerful leverage points are from changing or transcending paradigms. Just see how success moved from raising a stable family in your home to chasing money.

Economies, relationships, and legacies have been built and shattered because of it. And the truth is, economies, relationships, and legacies can be built and shattered in its absence.

There are other metrics we can resort to. Yes, money can be important, but it doesn’t have to be everything we make it to be. Ask bacteria. They have been living for billions of years without it.

We can change the situation.

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

Maybe the designers were intentional.

From the image above, the wording becomes readable when you flip the bottle.

Ketchup was meant to replace the thinner version of tomato sauce. Behind a TV screen, however, I saw no difference. In reality, it is evident.
Ketchup’s thick, rich taste may sell to customers, but the container engineers never imagined that most of its users would never rely on its broad base. A flipping bottle ensures the contents are closer to the opening valve.

I can’t think of any other product whose flipped position would be preferred to the one designed by its manufacturers.

The opposite of an idea can indeed be a good idea.

You may not be new to the phrase, “making an informed decision.”

Implicit in the phrase is that information guides proper decision-making. It also implies that the more information one gets, the better the decision will be. Reality is different.

Analysis can paralyze. Information can overwhelm. Filters can crash.

Information is information. One needs a filter to separate the truthful ones from the fake. Too much information is crippling.

We live in an age of too much information. Anything that will grab attention is prioritised.

Organisms are novelty seekers. But when paralyzed, we lack the agency that precedes novelty seeking. Doom scrolling can give the impression of preserved agency. In contrast, by flooding oneself with information, one becomes paralysed, and anything that is even remotely different appears novel.

Too much information is like junk. What follows from its consumption is intellectual obesity. It’s why we sleep. To reboot. When nighttime scrolling creeps into your sleep, you undermine your natural capabilities.

Agency lies with you. As you reject cookies, pick your tomatoes. Don’t let them get thrown at you.

I liken the body to a hamburger.

On both sides of the burger are the dry buns with sesame seeds. Similarly, our skin is drier than our insides. It is keratinized. Keratin is a protein that protects the body from mechanical forces and minimizes desiccation.

As we gradually transition into the mouth, the epithelial covers begin to get moist. As for the mouth, so goes for the anus. If our inner linings were not moist, we would have the most uncomfortable experiences swallowing food and releasing waste products from our rear ends. These linings are wet, just like the inner sides of the hamburger.

The messy middle has no clear outlines like the buns. Everything has been thrown inside. Tomatoes. Mayo sauce. Sometimes ketchup. Cucumbers slices. Ham. And when we squeeze it, they all get squished with some of the contents spilling to the side.

Without a distinct boundary, we need a surveillance system that is up to the task, something that can detect the foreign material with great accuracy. Enter the immune cell.

Notably, these hard surfaces that we can liken to the buns on both sides are also part of the immune system. Epithelial barriers are exactly that — barriers. They stop anything that does not need access from getting inside our bodies. Of note, epithelial layers are avascular. Neatly stacked, one cell after the other. Blood vessels permeate underneath this layer.

However, some forces can break these barriers. And when they do, immune cells need to take over. Enter the street urchin.

Why is the street urchin similar to the immune cell?

Guy Ritchie recently released a mini-series, Young Sherlock. In all of Arthur Conan Doyle’s works, I have never imagined a younger version of the detective. I never even imagined Sherlock could have been friends with James Moriarty earlier in their lives. From all the books I have read, I was never introduced to Sherlock’s parents.

Regardless, the young Sherlock traces his father down to Paris, where he encounters, firsthand, the positives of having an interconnected web in the middle of the streets. The street children move seamlessly, from one lane to another, through the crowds until they find Sherlock’s father. The same channel is used to convey the message back.

The typical reaction to street urchins is revulsion. They are known to be conniving, tricksters, and grifters. In this scene, they were noted to be useful, always on the ready, conveying information to someone who wanted to remain hidden but still aware of the happenings elsewhere within a busy centre, much like an activated immune cell.

When a foreign body breaches an epithelial barrier, if digestible, it is processed by one of the immune cells and then presented to another cell for activation. They then destroy the material. That is exactly what the street child did. They were given an image of Sherlock’s father, which was processed by the first kid, and eventually, transmitted through an information chain, and the message finally reached him. The foreign material, in this sense, was Sherlock and his mother. The entity that wanted to protect himself was his father.

The immune system has such a role. Protection. To protect oneself, one needs to know oneself. However, an entity as large as the human being makes it difficult to constantly survey. The distribution of immune cells throughout the body helps cover every corner, with certain tags to distinguish self from non-self.

Street children know themselves and every other typical face that passes the streets they are known to frequent. Since most people hardly pay attention to them, they can serve as the best surveillance and information system for any smart individual or group that wishes to be on the alert on the happenings inside a busy area.

In Narcos, Pablo Escobar utilized this same system to evade the police who were bent on finding him and arresting him for his illegal trades. Every government-led expedition was expensive, but it was competently handled by using the most neglected cohort in the streets — street children.

Aladdin is another famous example. He was known in the streets. This familiarity granted him the nimble surveillance and access to corners, cul-de-sacs, and alleys the soldiers found difficult. His example is particularly unique to one type of immune cell, the neutrophil.

Neutrophils are typically the first type of cells to respond to any form of injury. Bodily injury tends to react first through inflammation. The process attracts neutrophils, which squeeze through the barriers inside the cell to access the area under insult, a process known as diapedesis.

Aladdin could squeeze through crevices and beneath carts nearly as efficiently as the neutrophil. These qualities become apparent only when the area is teeming with high-octane activity. Otherwise, these abilities are shelved or hidden. A single cell, a single street child.

When you bring them together, you have a dynamic system. Highly adaptable and efficient. Incentives are not costly. A few coins and they are satisfied, even loyal, like a dog. They only need a few minutes of ruffling, and they will die for you. They’ll also know when to bite, like a dog.

Street urchins don’t come from outside a city. They come from within. Immune cells are manufactured inside our bodies. They undergo training, the hard way, to serve their roles as they should, in as dynamically adaptable a way as possible. Same goes for the street kids. They learn to survive on the move, unlike the other organs of the body that sit and work and get fed through various nutritive channels. Worse, if the street kids don’t adapt, they die. Same goes for the immune cells. Different parts of the body clear the old, or the new and naïve ones that cannot distinguish the body’s cells from foreign ones.

Nevertheless, the price of analogy is constant vigilance. I can only stretch the idea of the immune cell and the street urchin so far. A proud street kid is exemplified by Aladdin. He loves Agrabah. He identifies with it. Not every one of the street kids is like Aladdin. Most of them know they cannot get a chance with the pretty lady who crosses their streets, let alone a princess like Jasmine. We should not also readily dismiss the absence of a loyal Abu, a magic carpet, and a genie that will come to their help whenever needed. So a good number of them wish to outgrow their lives of squalor. Immune cells have no such goal. They will serve the body until it dies. Their territory remains the murky space between the two buns.

I have used this example not necessarily to show the differences, but to underpin the similarities. Immune cells are supposed to be protective, and yet, they don’t match the common labels we have of street urchins. Smart individuals in the past, and to date, utilize this system. And like the immune system, before you penetrate their network, you will be met with extensive resistance.

What I’m trying to say is…

Transcending paradigms is the biggest leverage point in any system. Changing one’s understanding of a component within the system can alter how one sees it. In this case, the street network, run by street urchins, is astonishingly similar to the immune system. That the insight has been exploited by cartels reveals what academia left out.

You can be a scholar, but it takes a different kind of skill to become a street scholar.

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

This is no different from trusting the process.

A calf being fattened cannot trust the process. It will die.

For a long time, successful people have talked about their stories, and the audience adopts their stories as a process to attaining success. Survivorship bias dominates. But it is not that they became successful by trusting their process; they became successful and then attributed it to a process.

Things don’t happen for the best, but we can make the best of things that happen.

When I compare adults to kids, I see little difference.

The biggest separator is responsibility. Kids have few responsibilities. Adults have a tonne. When you take away that responsibility, you get a child. Basically, an adult is a child layered over the years with responsibility.

With great responsibility comes great power. Forget the inverted version. Responsibility reminds you that power is in your hands, a good portion of it.

As an adult, your choices determine your trajectory. It also shows how responsible you are, because with responsibility comes consequences. Guilt. Pride. Discernment. Wisdom. A child will not have deposits of these qualities because they have little responsibility.

The furrows lining the face of an adult are the choices they have had to make. From an evolutionary point of view, it means you have persisted long enough in your universe to project the kind of face you possess. Amotz and Avishag Zahavi go further to defend why the nose lengthens and sticks out when we get older — it is a prominence that asserts dominance. With great responsibility comes great power.

However, in our virtual world, adults are progressively losing responsibility. By extension, they are losing power. This power is being blindly handed over to those making the software that occupies most of our waking hours. As a consequence, they are unearthing the hidden child.

Although I’m a big proponent of unleashing that caged child, there are benefits to remembering you’re an adult. Adults keep civilizations intact. If anything, the seasoned adult is the one who knows when to tap through the layers of responsibility to their inner child, and when to wear the adult caps. In my books, that is the real power.

The best way I can think of noticing this difference is through reaction. Your reactions determine your age of maturity. Let’s turn to X (formerly Twitter) as an illustration.

Brevity should be the soul of wit, so we’re told. Naval’s how-to-get-rich tweet is a classic example. Yet, X, for most of its non-premium users, hosts the craziest tweets.

With a few characters, a dense post should have you thinking about it for quite a while. Again, like Naval’s. However, most are forgotten as one continues scrolling. There is hardly any wit in most of the posts. Humour maybe. Rage. Ads. Slop.

We interact with these tweets mostly through reactions. Because the posts are made of a few characters, they are like pieces of chips. Easy to consume and digest. Reactions take even shorter. You either like, repost, bookmark, comment, or move to the next one.

Children, once preoccupied, forget everything else. They are fully locked in like the infinite scroll. With different posts consumed on the feed, it is the scroll that engages more than the content being digested.

The speed of responses can reveal one’s age. A post can make you angry, so you respond promptly. Another can crack your ribs, so you immediately share it with your clique who enjoy funny memes. There are a few consequences for reactions on social media. For that reason, there is virtually no responsibility. The child reappears.

Mike Tyson once quipped that social media has made people particularly mean because they cannot get a punch in the face for their actions. The layer of responsibility is removed. You can be the biggest hater, bully, gaslighter. Few will track you down to your home and demand an apology or make sure you never repeat what you did.

Children mature through play and interaction, learning what to do or say as they grow into adults. In a word, reaction. A child will act without thinking about the ripple effect of consequences. An adult ponders it over. Thus, your reaction is a good signal of your age, even if you have grey hair sticking out of your bodily orifices.

The second brain

Your age of reaction showcases the responsibilities you have that are tied to the very action. I appreciated this when I first joined the ICU department. I was completely stretched, because I felt out of depth with the demands I knew were expected of me. People’s lives were hanging in the balance, and it was up to me to know what the best course of action was.

In the early weeks, I would listen to everyone’s suggestions. And a drowning man will clutch at a straw to remain afloat. That’s what I did. A nurse would make a suggestion, and we would implement it. The nurses in my unit were experienced. They had several layers of responsibility covering their inner child. It was a safe bet that the suggestions they offered were better options than mine.

These initial weeks were moments of extensive reading, consulting, and experimentation. I needed to keep track of the interventions done and the outcomes. The successful ones were archived for similar scenarios for future patients with the same conditions, and the unsuccessful ones would linger a little longer, as I tried to find alternative options that were more fruitful. In a sense, I was actively and iteratively layering up.

I noticed that what would alarm me would not necessarily trigger the experienced anaesthesiologist. They would ask a couple of questions and then offer a potential solution.

Calling for consultation was by far the most efficient option I would resort to. My supervisor at the time, whom I will always be indebted to, held my hand even in her absence. And when there was nothing we could do for a patient, I knew we had exhausted our options.

Learning from the experienced colleagues is like studying the contours of wisdom that stick out whenever they manage patients in your presence. Keen observation is warranted. Asking questions improves one’s understanding of the terrain. More than anything, you learn that you cannot simply rely on your brain. You can outsource a second one.

Children have this from the get-go. Because they have adults, responsibility is, by firs approximation, halved. To children, adults are their second brain. Responsibilities lie with adults, and with it, power. With reduced responsibility, they can embrace themselves and explore as much as they can.

A second brain is what we now have with AI platforms. Responsibility is delegated to ChatGPT to answer questions and AI agents to perform tasks. Since it is believed that LLMs scour the entire Internet (a false presumption), the output they give is received with minimal refutation. And when someone questions their “curated” solution, it is akin to questioning the Internet. Surely, a single human can’t be smarter than the full expanse of the Internet. The Internet is collective intelligence. It is a safe bet to use the LLMs. The responsibility of searching is transferred. We get a second brain.

With reduced visible consequences, these platforms continue to get exploited. What we now get are full-blown adults who behave like kids. On social media, they mindlessly consume. If not, they mindlessly react. Their age of reaction begins to show. Kids. The layers that should have stuck as they became adults have been shed. When you add the endless consultation of AI, more responsibility is shunted. The reaction to not knowing is solved by pasting — not even rephrasing the question based on your comprehension — the question to get an immediate answer.

Is this not what kids used to do whenever they reached out to adults, hoping their difficult problem would be solved? Kids usually don’t want the long path to the answer. A straight response would leave them beaming with glee. Fish, not how to fish.

AI platforms are the modern adults. The human versions, those with registered government documentation with places to report to on weekdays, are no longer adults. They are children. They react to problems by seeking immediate answers from the three big brothers — ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini. How quickly one resorts to these platforms is akin to kids running to their elder siblings or parents for assistance. A reaction. And the age of reaction shows. Responsibility is long gone.

The difference

Outsourcing a second brain is what doctors do when they consult. It’s an admission of one’s ignorance, just as kids are ignorant of the solution space. However, it takes maturity to know you are out of your depth. Kids don’t know when they are getting into uncharted territories.

If a patient has heart failure with reduced ejection fraction and also has end-stage renal disease, but their blood pressure is reducing, mindlessly adding fluids might not be the best solution. You may need to consult both the cardiologist and the nephrologist, two physicians known to have contrasting opinions. If the patient is pregnant, you need to have the obs/gyn team on board as well. And when briefing these consultants, one needs to give them the full picture of the patient’s status.

Access to a consultant is access to a second brain. Knowing you need to consult distinguishes the adult from the child. You may argue that a child knows when they don’t know. But a child would rather consider the easier option than go through the trouble of finding the solution. The on-call doctor or even another consultant seeking another consultant’s help will need to synthesize the relevant parts and give a coherent summary. A child will just throw the question to the adult. There is minimal comprehension of the situation on the child’s part.

Therefore, the doctor or consultant does not merely react. Their age of reaction shows. The child reacts. Their age of reaction shows.

Pasting a problem to ChatGPT reveals, from a point of comprehension, that you are not an adult. The more one relies on it, the more comfortable one becomes as a child. Once children are comfortable knowing their parents or elder siblings will take care of them, they relax.

Here, too, is an important difference. All children are creative. Adults are less so. A child will not care what one thinks about their drawing. An adult will. Monsters take different forms in a child’s imagination. The monster diversity collapses in an adult’s mind. Collapse is the word.

Mode collapse is seen in adults. Rigid structures and concepts replace the malleable imagination. Hair has to be combed before going to work. Children couldn’t care less about their hair game. You need to smell good before heading for a date. Children will hardly lift their armpits or breathe into their palms to appreciate their morning breath.

So while we have a second brain, the mode collapse that happened in adults is not the same as the playing field children have. Rather than recultivate their creativity, they would rather rot through doomscrolling or binge-watch a series. Entertaining oneself to death.

This is a problem of abundance. Children are highly agentic. In the absence of responsibility, they have a wide latitude of choice to engage in their own projects. Building sand castles, for instance. One need not be close to the beach to make sand castles. I recall making them using small plastic cups. In contrast, by outsourcing the second brain, adults don’t recultivate their creativity. They get the benefits or abundance, but because of mode collapse, they don’t make something they are proud of, a project of their own.

What this reveals is that thanks to AI, we get humans who are worse than children. Children will explore, adults will not. Essentially, lazy children masquerading as adults. What kind of society do you call that? Sheep? Lemmings? Lazy versions of these?

What I’m trying to say is…

Soon, I’ll be 60 years old, will I think the world is cold?
Or will I have a lot of children who can warm me?
Soon, I’ll be 60 years old

It turns out, the 60-year-olds are moulting. No need for children to warm them. They are becoming children.

We may have a lot of apps and AI shifting the landscape of our work experience, but delayed feedback from these systems may not immediately reflect in our daily engagements.

Whenever there is delayed feedback, a tragedy usually looms in the distance. The tragedy of the commons is a classic example.

More and more adults are reacting like children, when the best strategy is to make the most of both sides. That is, tapping into our inner child for creativity and using our layered adult versions to create sustainable systems. Our virtual experience shows that most of the adult world is not reigniting their creativity, nor do they care much about the structures at risk due to their apathy.

One upside to this worrying situation is that most of what has shaped society has come from a few individuals. It, however, does not make sense to hope that someone will develop a concept that will save us from the consequences of not embracing responsibility. This concept is likely to turn into a manipulative tool. Furthermore, hope is not a strategy.

Switching our mindsets and tapping into our creative sides at this particular point in human history is likely to fan the spark that introduces a new Enlightenment age. You can never know what a child will draw. If we make the most of this age of abundance and reduced responsibility, and fully engage our inner child, we cannot know what untold ideas await.

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

Nobody noticed it.

They rejoiced when it came to life, but they were absent at its funeral. The hype around the caricatures followed the same trajectory as the Ghibli mania.

This may be the biggest, most recent evidence of our online amnesia. We don’t recognize what shook the world a few weeks ago. How can we remember what we consumed a few days ago? Even seconds?

Our online experience is not optimized to be memorable, but to keep us glued. If most people don’t make enough effort to make their work memorable, then identifying and creating memorable moments and experiences becomes our responsibility.

George Mack gives some useful tips. Question is, will you remember and, more importantly, act on them?

John Dewey pointed out a while back that all education is experience, and all experience is education. He even enshrined it in a book.

However, stigma between education and experience continues to loom in the medical field.

In medicine and surgery, certain canalized paths exist that may be unfamiliar to those who were not invited to the 6-year minimum party of blood, sweat, and tears.

To an ailing individual, anyone who dangles a stethoscope around their neck is a doctor. Daktari. That title has often been bestowed without certification by any community that knows anyone to be donning a lab coat and working inside a hospital.

Blurred lines between what makes a doctor and a technician can lead to confusion in the public. A doctor is someone who diagnoses. You can spot a myocardial infarction (heart attack) from the symptoms the patient presents with, the EEG, and the cardiac enzymes. Accurate diagnosis guides the appropriate treatment. Serial tests can establish the progress of the patient’s recovery curve. Without proper diagnosis, the treatment cannot be customized. By extension, without a doctor, the treatment can be off.

A doctor is someone who has studied for over six years. Most degrees take three or four years. And even then, the content covered in medical school within a year is enough to account for several other four-year courses. Comparison based on the number of years is unwarranted, but the point I want to drive across concerns the title of a doctor.

By the time you earn that title, you have proven your grit. You can think. You can cram. You can imagine. You can narrow down on a disease using the detective tools at our disposal in the health industry. Granted, with more tools, you can conduct research on human beings. This is someone who can save a life, if the life hangs in the balance because of a disease.

The title of a doctor is given upon graduation. The intern, however they are called inside a hospital, is a doctor. In training, but a doctor nonetheless. They are not like any other intern. The technical jargon is Medical Officer Intern, or MOI. For the most part, they are the foot soldiers of the hospital, a necessary initiation to understand the microscopic organization of health care.

After a year, they graduate to become MOs. An MO, a medical officer, is a general practitioner. They have encountered some of the common diseases and have a good foundation for acceptable management plans for patients who present with these diseases. One renews their license annually as a certified doctor by the board.

Every year, they need to attain a minimum number of points through continuous learning, aptly called CPD points — continuous professional development. In medicine, you cease to become a helpful doctor if you stop learning.

Which brings me to the gist of my argument.

The Chronic MOs

There is a somewhat passive-aggressive wave that hits this category of doctors.

Who is a chronic MO? They are individuals who graduated with an MBChB or MBBS and didn’t further their studies despite practising for years. By further studies, I’m referring to a master’s degree in whichever field of an individual’s choosing. It could be medicine, surgery, public health, health systems, business administration — there are quite a number.

Individual’s choosing — remember that.

It is an anathema to imagine yourself being called a chronic MO. After I completed my internship, I was once asked what specialty I would choose, and I struggled to answer. The conclusion at the end of the conversation was that I should not be a chronic MO. Any young doctor knows how that sounds. It’s a warning. A leprosy-esque label that those who are superior to you would never wish for you to get.

Doctors are supposed to be detailed individuals. But when you ask five doctors to give their ballpark figure for how many years it takes before an MO can be called a chronic MO, there is no consensus. The urge to get back to school and do a master’s becomes real when you see your classmates enrolling. You then begin to ask if you’re moulting into a chronic MO.

called it franchise thinking. She writes:

Memes spread because they’re catchy; franchise ideas spread because they’re also safe. While memes explain spread, franchise thinking explains people and persistence.

Anu is a founder, writer, and doctor. Maybe that’s why I like her work, since I, too, wear those hats. However, I am not dense as to follow someone’s creative work because we’re similar. It’s not a recipe for developing good ideas.

And that is what is happening in the medical field. The fear of being labelled a chronic MO drives many doctors to specialize. It’s a safe bet.

While still in medical school, most of my classmates, I later came to realize, feared failure with a passion. They would rather spend sleepless nights than risk failing. In anything. The label of a chronic MO is one example of failure, so most begin to specialize early.

I have read arguments about the need to purge the MO phase. I wonder why. In my view, as good as it may be, it’s myopic and tends to create a facade of progress. Specialization is not the holy grail. It might even discourage the creation of good ideas. As I have argued elsewhere, it may foster shame. It is just a safe bet. And as anyone who fears failure, safe bets are the preferred option.

What the evangelists preaching against this label don’t realise is that a chronic MO implies the existence of a chronic CONSO. The capitalization is mine, intentionally done to emphasize a difference that should not be avoided.

A consultant is a doctor who has done their graduate studies and has practised for at least two years after graduation.

In medical school, consultants were either feared, revered, or both. You could not and should not cross them. Once you have crossed the consultant’s threshold, nobody can touch you.

Logic, however, does not care who it finds along its way as it executes its ruthless truism. Thus, the premise of a chronic MO implies the existence of a chronic CONSO.

Why should one be labelled with malice and the other with reverence? The logical framework cracks this supposedly sacrosanct edifice.

At this point, let me remind you once more that doctors need to attend various educational events to collect their CPD points. A chronic MO is only a label. Working throughout the years as a doctor means you have been continuously learning.

So why phase out MO-ship? First-level thinking shows that it only serves to give the impression that there is progress. The idea goes: For the longest time, we have had MOs, and now, we need facilities that phase doctors from interns to graduate programmes. This stance forgets one important, undercutting feature of the Belmont Report of 1978, the Declaration of Helsinki, and the Hippocratic Oath — autonomy.

Individual choice, remember?

We cannot enforce an idea on someone who does not want it. At the time I was done with my internship, a senior colleague broke the numbers down for me. More than 80% of medical doctors are not practising. Reasons? I can never know.

The numbers may have changed, but 80% is a large number. A government that invests in bright minds only to have 80% of its top cream cash out is one that needs to be evaluated, a necessary self-audit. As for the remaining 20%, some of them have been given the unsavoury title of chronic MO, and yet, they continue to save lives.

The chronic CONSOs can be somewhere enjoying the fruits of their labour (graduating from their master’s programme and enjoying more time and money), while an MO does the labour. This narrative is changing. Even consultants are beginning to feel the pinch of the hard economic times. It is no longer the safe bet it once was.

Most medical practitioners hardly think outside the cylinders they have been navigating throughout their lives. The narrative of being a chronic MO is an echo chamber. The only solution they can consider is hyperspecialization. Narrow the path inside that cylinder. Improve your safety net. But it begs the question — if the consultant pool is no longer safe, what about the hyperspecialized pool? Are we not simply extending our milking time on the same cow? It’s coming full circle now — doesn’t a chronic MO also imply the existence of a chronic CONSO?

Granted, some doctors love working as general practitioners. Others want to specialize and sub-specialize. Chasing it out of passion is a path I salute. Go, yeah, and save lives. Labelling other doctors’ chronic MOs is what I don’t agree with. It’s franchise thinking that needs to stop. You can nudge someone to consider studying without calling them a chronic MO.

One can never tell the reasons one has stayed practicing as an MO for so long. I, for one, know how responsibilities can suck away what little breathing space one has. Yet, you’ll find someone lazily branding another this distasteful label. Other times, someone doesn’t want to go back to study. They are okay with the practices they perform as an MO.

I’m reminded of traditional birth attendants. All of them learn their skills on the job. They don’t have any formal certification, but they will deliver a breech baby or a shoulder dystocia with unparalleled grace without stepping into an obs/gyn class. In the same stride, a “chronic” MO will be good at reading a patient who needs urgent escalation of care from a CONSO who jumped straight to masters after internship.

Swept under the rug is the fact that the CONSOs can be heavily reliant on the experienced MOs. Some may not even want MOs to specialize, fearing a shrinking of the marketing pool. (You may have noticed that I have changed the descriptive “chronic” and replaced it with “experienced.”)

I don’t know if this is a problem only in Kenya, but I also learned (of course, as doctors, we have to continue learning) that out there (the Global North), the title of a doctor is considered the highest form of formal learning. It is at par with a PhD. Forgetting or not knowing this fact can cause one to dismiss that an MO is a title of merit.

May we never forget.

What’s more, specialization should not be the only opportunity pathway one should consider. In the past, professors were granted the title without the formal certification. Experience was education. I doubt it has changed.

We should not use certification, a process that can be hacked, to gauge one’s level of contribution. In medicine, you have to be a “chronic” doctor to be a good doctor. What we need to emphasize is good doctors, not titles.

J. Cole once shared his thoughts on titles,

Here comes lil’ ol’ Jermaine
With every ounce of strength in his veins
To snatch the crown from whoever y’all think has it
But rather than place it on his head as soon as he grabs it
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
Ain’t gon’ be no more kings
Be wary of any man that claims
Because deep down he clings onto the need for power
In reality he’s a coward
Ultimately he’s scared to die
And sometimes so am I

Consos held power over MOs. Justified, sometimes. Regardless, as J. Cole laments, there appears to be a deep need for power and the fear of losing it. An MO comfortable with their position is indifferent to this drive. It’s more of an evolution from the sensitivities to these pressures weighed by colleagues.

We should not force the idea that staying in that position is uncalled for, because even after specialization, there are CONSOs who stay in their positions without further education. And indeed, where should it end so that one doesn’t get that label of a chronic practitioner?

What I’m trying to say is…

The logic of calling a doctor a chronic MO, when stretched to its logical conclusion, implies the existence of a chronic CONSO. Better eliminate the idea.

Sometimes it can be used to challenge a young doctor to take on a specialty, but it does not mean that every doctor needs to build a career in medicine. Darwin could have finished his training as a doctor, but he boarded the HMS Beagle and changed the world.

A few examples of doctors who decided to take a different route: Thomas Sankara started a revolution; Stuart Kauffman led the shift in evolutionary biological frameworks from a gene-centered paradigm to self-organization; James Lovelock developed the Gaia hypothesis and developed ideas on detecting extraterrestrial lifeforms; Michael Crichton wrote Jurassic Park.

And others love their station as MOs.

Let people be.

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

I don’t want to be the only one thinking hard about this, so let me share it with you.

The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it’s indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it’s indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it’s indifference.

These are the words of Elie Wiesel, a Holocaust survivor and Nobel Laureate.

It reminds me of Taleb’s explication on the opposite of fragile. This, however, was of a single idea — fragility. Elie Wiesel cuts across various domains.

Do you agree with him?

Months into my internship, I would wonder why a professor who basically taught every medic at the hospital I was in was still walking its corridors at obscene hours of the night.

He was the professor we feared meeting during our viva examinations. At school, he was hell. In this hospital, he was the opposite. Today, I greet him with his title; he responds with my surname. If you tilt your head slightly to the left, that is hardly far from knowing him on a first-name basis.

Still, I wondered why he could continue to work this late. I never imagined that one could have a revered name (he is known country-wide through his initials), have worked for decades, and continue working years past the typical retirement age.

I preferred making money when asleep. It’s my guiding business model. As a doctor, you can only make money when you see the patient. I don’t like this model. Plus, you can never get lucky. The kind of luck that transforms your life.

One night, he took me to his side after engaging with one of his patients, and after penning down the notes, he shared words I will never forget. He is a diabetologist, a superspecialized version of endocrinology (the study of hormones). In his slow and noticeable accent, he affirmed:

Innocent, patients with diabetes are patients who stick with you for life.

He went on to explain how the condition requires multiple clinic visits. Several complications will always have them admitted to the hospital. Reassurance is a big portion of the medication that cannot be processed into a pill to be taken regularly during the day. These are patients who, with the right flick of the tongue, become lifelong patients. At such a point, it becomes difficult to call them patients, because they are more likely to be friends than patients.

Small wonder the other medics call him a politician. He has mastered the art of communication. Only an excellent communicator will stick with a patient for decades. To date, various patients insist that they be admitted under his care. This kind of bond cannot be explained by the universe’s greatest forces.

Non-communicable diseases need medical doctors who can commune

The greatest forces of the universe can be broken down into four. Electromagnetic forces, strong nuclear forces, weak nuclear forces, and gravity.

A layer above this scale of complexity introduces other forces such as hydrogen bonds, covalent bonds, ionic bonds, Van der Waals forces. Neither of these can be summoned to explain the bond between a long-stay patient and their doctor.

If there is a bond we would describe that might not have the tell-tale physical properties the others have, it is the communing bond. It is strong when the clinician understands not just the patient and what they are ailing from, but also how best to communicate with the patient and even more with the family.

In the ICU, clinicians treat families. Patients may have plastic tubes sticking inside their mouths, unable to communicate, especially if heavily sedated. Others are in an extremely low mood, having to bear the monotonic droning of the beeping alarms and the occasional efforts to resuscitate a patient. Patients may flood the unit with little time for the caregivers to breathe or even take a light snack. And yet, families would still wish that they be given updates on the welfare of their loved one.

This communication builds bonds that save families and hospitals untold grief and preventable backlash. A family that is kept abreast of all that is happening to their patient, with adequate rationale guiding every step, easily cooperates with the team with minimal friction. The same family, several days without an appraisal, can be a hospital’s nightmare. It appears that the communing bond is most effective in serial doses, as opposed to when it is most needed — after a family flips into incandescent fury.

Viewed from a physical point of view, it is the same family members. Neither of them has changed. The calming intervention is the same: communication. The difference is the timing. Early communication fosters the bond. Late communication, despite the similarity between the engaging elements — the doctor and the family — may not have the same outcome.

It might not even be an issue with the family. Sometimes it could be the workload clinicians face. A heavy unit can have everyone on their feet for 12 hours straight, with hardly any time to give families updates. Families don’t visit the unit to understand that the team is busy. For the most part, they only want to hear good news about their particular person.

We cannot assume that they will guess that we are extremely busy. Communicating this to them can calm nerves. It can take a few sentences; failure to do so can burn that fuse. Same elements, same intervention, but different timing defines the outcome. And this usually determines the kind of bonds families have with hospitals. The relationship is more than that of an individual with another. It is at a systemic level, which is yet preserved through communication.

The communing bond reassures and restores faith in families, even if the situation is hopeless. I cannot count the number of times families have told us to do whatever we can to preserve the life of a family member until someone, usually traveling from overseas, shows up. What I think may be going on is the continuous conversations the family members have with the critically ill. They continue to fight until that family member shows up, then, in less than 24 hours, that patient usually dies.

Strange. I know.

Biology might not have adequate explanatory muscle. Holding someone’s hand is a non-verbal way of communicating. Speaking without necessarily getting a verbal response in return seems to be just as powerful, if not more, than the pills produced by pharmaceutical companies.

I can imagine what such conversations could mean for cancer patients. This group of patients is perhaps the ones who require the most understanding. Excellent communicators. Unfortunately, a good chunk of medical doctors, in particular those who proceed to hyperspecialize, are more interested in the domain of their study than the patient.

While still a medical student, I met a fantastic lady. She is the founder of Cancer Café, Kenya. We have been friends to date. She told me that cancer patients don’t need get-well cards. They want someone to talk to and explain the journey to them. An apple or even a Maasai shoal sometimes. More than anything, they want someone who can break down the complexities they are wading through. In the same vein, they want someone who can dispel some of the myths and misconceptions about cancer.

A cancer survivor herself, she does not like how cancer patients quickly take up the victim mentality. Devoid of help from circles one once thought were family, they cling to the role of the victim when she knows that one can crawl out of such a pit. It starts by communing.

Delays exist and persist beyond the diagnosis of cancer. A wide gap thrives between the diagnosis and the initiation of treatment. Regular visits to the clinic and seeing how others are faring shape the mindset of cancer patients, either for the better or for the worse. While the worst may still be malleable, conversations can alter outcomes unpredictably.

The current landscape of chemotherapy has evolved to what it is because of communication. Surgeons, once existing as separate islands from scientists, today interact to find the best treatment for different forms, grades, and stages of cancer. And while waiting for that report, after you were in remission, you hope that no naughty group of cells reappears after the battle you have steadfastly fought with the help of your clinician and, if lucky, a strong social pillar.

Communicable diseases have straightforward management. But for non-communicable diseases, they need more — they need someone to commune with.

What I’m trying to say is…

Not all bonds can be collapsed into one of four possible forces in the universe. Attraction can wear different items. Within the hospital facility, it can go unnoticed but is especially effective. Communing is a skill that clinicians ought to practice, and if possible, an entire school for clinicians should be built for this purpose.

We have special schools and fellowships about the different forms of patient management. I don’t think we have a school for communing with the sick. I would love to see how such an institution would fare. Centres with such a facility or department are likely to thrive much more than those without it.

My two cents.

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