Engagement or Enlightenment?
And how can we achieve both?
The book won the Phi Beta Kappa Award in Science in 1993.
This is an award given to scientists’ synthesis of an idea simplified for a broader audience without sacrificing accuracy.
It was also a recommendation by Charlie Munger.
Ever since I picked one book recommended by the intellectual giant, I have devoured the entire recommendation list. This particular one was by Garrett Hardin.
It was during the COVID-19 pandemic. Classes were suspended according to my sleep schedule, so I barely paid attention to them. But I paid attention to the argument Hardin put forward in his treatise — Living Within Limits.
Shane Parish, the founder of Farnam Street, had also recommended another book by Hardin — Filters Against Folly. He preferred this to Living Within Limits. The reason, I think, was because he was interested in clear thinking. It’s no wonder he wrote a book on it.
On the other hand, I preferred Living Within Limits because it talked about the departure between economics and ecology. Ecology is a portmanteau of two words  — oikos and logos. The former means household and the latter means study. Thus, ecology is the study of your household.
Economics is the management of your household. It uses numbers because, as the saying goes, if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.
Today, you can barely find people who know the relationship between these two fields.
Economists are busy explaining the macroeconomics of nations and market trends, often falsely.
On the other side of the world, ecologists are preoccupied with saving the planet from the controllable outputs of man’s ambition.
Same word root. Different fields.
The economist wants to maximize output while minimizing input. The ecologist wants to control the production of harmful output by managing the processes from the input to the output. All of them are managing their household.
In short, Garrett Hardin was able to enlighten and engage me throughout the book.
This runs contrary to our online experience.
Engagement
In Filters Against Folly, Hardin cites the influence of literacy in a way I can never forget. Paraphrased, he stresses:
Words not only promote thought; they prevent it.
A good example is the blue tanks circulating in Nairobi distributing what they call ‘clean water’. The tanks are painted blue. The writing is white. Few would stop to question such a manipulative gimmick. Why?
Words not only promote thought; they prevent it.
Enter social media.
It’s not social at all. It’s parasocial.
Words with the prefix para- explain something similar but not quite like the original. For instance, a paramedic — a medic but not a medic but still doing medic duties. Paralegal — a lawyer but not an official lawyer but still doing legal duties. Parasocial — social but not really social but giving the impression of something social.
Social media promotes parasociality.
The owners in this space will do anything to keep you on their platform. TikTok is the largest culprit, using the algorithm as the product. After a few swipes, it will narrow down the content you like and then start guiding you to it. The point is to get you engaged. The idea is to get what Hardin did to me with his book but not feed you content that can filter folly.
Gurwinder gave an example of a filter to use to establish if what you’re consuming is worth sparing time. The 10–10–10. Ask yourself:
Will what I consume be relevant for the next 10 minutes, 10 months, or 10 years?
If not, you’re likely on the path toward intellectual obesity.
Granted, you need a little break from always taking in the classics. Bacteria, however, don’t have such luxuries. They have dominated for billions of years because of it. They don’t have social media pages. But they engage.
Once they release a certain molecule and get feedback, they know they are among its people. This is the process of quorum sensing. It’s the mechanism bacteria use to engage. It also enlightens.
But the gamification of social media makes it difficult to be enlightened.
Content creators follow the statistics to hone in on what the audience loves. The numbers will satellite around likes, comments, shares, retweets, bookmarks, read ratios, clicks, and even subscription rates. They will then customize their content to replicate what the audience likes. This is what a company will ask of you if they want to target your audience. They will call it engagement.
To these companies, engagement is the number of likes you get on your Instagram account. It’s the reposts you get from your tweets (I find it hard to call them Xes). It’s the comments you get from your LinkedIn. It’s the shares you’ve had from your posts. It’s the fraction of people who opened your email after you sent your newsletter. It’s the clicks for every link used in the same newsletter.
Engagement has morphed into a quantified parameter.
There goes the word again: parameter — meter but doesn’t actually meter but mimics the meter.
Engagement is no longer experiential. What you can’t quantify you can’t manage. And social media companies want to manage.
They’ll know the kind of content you consume and know which ads might interest you. They’ll know which videos you watch so they can suggest more for you. They’ll know your taste and how best to use this data.
They call it engagement.
Meanwhile, the engaged are not enlightened.
Enlightenment
When I picked up Popper’s The Open Society and its Enemies, I could barely put it down.
And when I did, it was because I had more questions than answers from the book. That’s what I like to call enlightenment.
It’s the product of meaningful engagement.
In 2017, 7th of July, walking down from Chiromo at around 1 am, I was robbed. I can’t forget the date because it was the birthday of a close friend (Hi Samantha?). I was from watching an episode of Gilmore Girls on the computers at the department where I worked.
The group of seven took my phone and headphones.
Luckily, I didn’t carry my mini laptop. It housed all my books. That was the beginning of my riveting experience with Nassim Taleb’s works. Taleb was a fan of the Socratics. They carried timeless wisdom.
In the past, you would only write when you had something to write about. There’s a difference between doing something and having something to do. Today, everyone is a journalist. Most of them are shaped by metrics hijacking our most base instincts — reward.
When I started my online writing journey, I had a plan: infuse all my articles with local music. Readers, I would imagine, would be enthralled by how I mixed my knowledge of evolution with popular music. The engagement would keep them coming back. I didn’t care much about the numbers. The comments I got from friends were all that mattered to me.
The end goal, however, would be one that required numbers. If someone wanted to promote their music, they would want to know how many readers visit my page. How many would click a link I shared? This would be the level of engagement my readers have.
The numbers are a proxy. However, this number forgets that I could have readers who are simply entranced by the content. They might not opt to listen to the music at the bottom, but the breakdown I’ve given on a topic. This is valuable engagement, but it’s not captured by the number of clicks.
Enlightenment is not the same as engagement.
The result is most content creators are shaped by a metric. No, they become enslaved by the metric. They started as free creators, but should they become successful, they become enslaved.
Engagement, as used in social media, prevents thought. Engagement is not the number of likes you get from an article, a post, or the comments. It’s the experience one gets from your creation.
Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould can get into a heated debate about evolution. The sitting audience would be heavily invested with only a few asking questions. That is engagement. It can enrage or inspire. It can make a reader unsubscribe to your work or have them upgrade their subscription to a paid option. Engagement is not a number, it’s an experience. You can never wrap that up with a figure.
And the best kind of engagement leads to enlightenment.
What I’m trying to say is…
Ask yourself if what you’re creating will foster meaningful engagement.
See what Andre 3000 said about the lady she was about to marry in the video of this classic song:
So I typed a text to a girl I used to see
Sayin’ that I chose this cutie pie with whom I wanna be
And I apologize if this message gets you down
Then I CC’ed every girl that I’d see-see ‘round town
And hate to see y’all frown, but I’d rather see her smilin’
That is engagement. Experiential. Numbers aside.
I don’t want to dismiss amazing content. Dancing, for instance, is a fantastic way to engage others. But hopping onto your account now and then to see how many people have liked your dances sucks away the dancing experience. And when your experience is defined by a number, you’ve relinquished your power.
Engage.
If possible, engage to enlighten.
But don’t let go of the force you wield by chasing a statistic. Choose you. Don’t be played. But:
Play your part.
This song inspired some of the lines used in this article. Source — YouTube