Msoto ndio enemy
— Nyashinski
Professor King’ori, the Oxford researcher, ran a documentary on how Kenyan scholars are keeping many academic departments in Europe afloat.
The mining of brains in our country has been going on, just like all historic mining, hidden from the public. Resources are not always physical.
Many undergraduate and graduate students depend on outsourcing their academic writing to shadow scholars. Schools continue to graduate cohorts who have not done the groundwork to complete their theses. The real workers get paid peanuts in comparison.
A student can pay someone to write a thesis for them and pay around $ 1,000. This student then graduates and gets a job that pays them over fifty times that, but the actual scholar seeks another student to pay them another $1,000. It’s not enough to be smart. You need money.
Straight from school, we’re taught that the bright ones will reap the most profits. Since the rich are a small percentage of any population, their reality is different from most. A family boasting of generational wealth will not care how their child fares in school. They will inherit the family business, wealth, and connections — what every smart person wishes to have — even if the child is dumb.
But utazoea
Numbers
In my first year in medical school, I was super interested in research. Our lecturers shared some of the studies done in the anatomy department by students who had published by the time they were in their final years. I was inspired. I joined the intercalated programme. I later learned it was a scientific factory. Publish or perish. The nearly perpetual machine of academia.
The number of published papers serves a purpose. Departments gain prestige the more papers it produces. These departments gain leverage to ask for more money. There you go. Money. It’s not enough to be smart.
Utazoea
But once the money starts trickling in, scientific work stalls, because the struggle is now not only how to make scientific contributions, but how to keep the money taps open. Every paper comes with a suggestion for further study, seeking more money.
The dependency on funding depletes novel, creative ideas for conducting research cheaply. It is easy to conduct a cross-sectional study in a basic science. It’s expensive to do a randomized clinical study. The former ranks low on the hierarchy of evidence. The latter is superior. It’s not enough to be smart. Or, as Nyashinski raps:
Msoto ndio enemy
Say you have creatively found a way to conduct your study. You still need to publish in a reputable journal. But before they accept your manuscript, you have to pay them. Absurd.
Before publishing my first peer-reviewed paper, I thought journals were supposed to pay me for feeding them with material. That’s how money dominates wit. More accurately, money trumps those we’re primed to believe are smart.
Here are a bunch of brilliant individuals who have to pay someone upfront to have their ideas published. Even then, it may not be fully accessible to the public. Scientific publishing is the very opposite of any publishing out there.
My first article in a major African publication attracted a small token. Before you launch your book, a publishing company will pay you an advance. As the number of sales increases, you begin to reap from royalties. Nothing of the sort exists in academia. It’s the opposite. You pay the publication to tell the world about yourself and your smarts. It’s not enough to be smart. You need money.
Scientists are finding it difficult to continue their work after the budgetary cuts from the USA on research funding. Smarts without money is throwing a dart blindfolded, hoping you strike the bullseye. The warning Nyashinski gave was:
Ni wapi unajua degrees zinagurantee kupata job
Ni maybe ka unajuana
So kwa matembe na marijuana utapata vijana
Na hivo ndo kuko jo
Bestsellers
The best author is not usually the best seller. To get your book into the bestseller list, you can buy a chunk load of your book. You can game the system. But you need money.
A bestseller badge registers in most minds as an author whose ideas battled the others and emerged the best. Surely, it must be the best. These are rare cases. In most situations, you need money.
Michel de Montaigne was perhaps the first essayist to self-publish. He had the money to do it. The rest needed to get a publisher who would approve of their ideas. Some got into competitions, won, got some money, and were then given a platform to air their smarts.
Intelligence, like art, is inefficient. Evolution did not preserve the brain to improve its intelligence, but to persist its existence. Brains latch onto the easiest, most feasible option, not the smartest. Better an app where I can stream movies than move to the theatre. Or an app that allows me to make calculations than do the math myself.
Many ideas will be shelved as drafts. Many innovations will not take off. They need funding. The ones that spread are facilitated with the financial winds of change. Thus, from a numbers point of view, the ideas that spread are usually the ones that have gained enough backing. Financial backing.
When did the world discover Gregor Mendel? After his death. He was smart, but didn’t have the funds to share his work. He published in an obscure journal. Intelligence, remember, is inefficient. Perchance, someone discovered his work. Mendel was not a bestseller, but he had the best idea on how traits can be passed down through generations.
Jane Austen wrote fantastic books. When did the world discover her? After her death. She was not a bestseller. Her works did not take off during her life. Intelligence becomes a bestseller only after it has received financial lubrication.
Context matters. When discussing the geniuses of the world, we need context. Leonardo da Vinci was backed by the financial muscle of the Medici family, as was Michelangelo. They were bestsellers who had great ideas. But because they had money to create their distribution channels, who’s to say there were no Mendels and Jane Austens somewhere waiting for the world to discover their brilliance?
True story, si-exaggerate
Education vs tutoring
Education is a large-scale failure to produce geniuses. All known interventions have proven suboptimal. In essence, these institutions are money-minting machines, not caring much about who gets in and who leaves, but the money they get from tuition fees and alumni donations. A few individuals will get mentioned, used by the institution as a marketing stunt to bring more interest to the school.
In contrast, tutoring has nurtured many geniuses. Not just any tutoring. Aristocratic tutoring. Bertrand Russell had countless tutors, as did Virginia Woolf and John von Neumann. These families had money to establish the tutorial sessions. It was not enough that the kids were smart. Their parents needed to part with serious pocket-loads to get their kids private lessons from the best.
Meanwhile, schools, the systems that facilitate education, continue to praise these geniuses but don’t have the environment to spawn them. By the time one of these geniuses was joining school, they were practically young adults. That’s an unconventional route.
Imagine every other kid going to school every morning while Bertrand wakes up hours later, when the sun is already out. He gets his lessons for a few hours. And when the other kids get back from school, they are bogged down with assignments and little time to play. You need serious money to keep the private tutoring going on for years. The Russells had that money. It reinforces a stance that contradicts the societal norms. You cannot go against these rules unless you have money.
Partly, it means the chances of discovering genius minds are limited to the wealthy. Consequently, it means that you need money to boost your chances of becoming an extreme intellectual outlier. It’s not enough to be smart. You need money.
Unashindwa kukataa
Unashindwa kukataa
Starting gate theories on education further stultify the efforts of the poor. When a rich family knows their kid will gain a reputation by attending a certain programme or school, they begin to prepare them early in life. Life’s goals, at the initial stages, are judged based on the small gates — the high school one attends, the university one enrols in, the society they are affiliated with. The rest are just that — the rest. It may have some brilliant minds, but it’s not enough to be smart. You need money.
True story, si-exaggerate
The education for all rule gives an idea of eliminating these problems. In contrast, they augment them. Making education free means anyone can get into these institutions. More students means a reduced chance of tutoring. The conditions for generating geniuses are extremely diluted. Teachers get frustrated by the weak students and spend more time there, interested in raising a class’s mean in a subject.
The rich, however, can hire private tutors. Means are not the goal. Private progress and improvement are. Maximum time is spent on the student. A win-win for the parents, tutors, and the children. And yes, there is the financial lubricant.
The goal of the smart
In the Foundation series, Gaal Dornick solves a problem that has proven difficult for many centuries. Her brilliance is noticed by the leaders in a far-off civilization. Unlike Mendel, they notice her when she’s still alive.
This is the goal of every smart individual. It’s that they are acknowledged for being right. The bigger one gets, the larger the recognition one wishes to get.
The goal is three-pronged:
You are right
Despite massive rejection
You are properly acknowledged for being right.
Being right could be easy. Many people have been right about their solutions. Others have been right by sticking to the hailed ideas in different domains. The second part is the difficult one — being right despite massive rejection. It is enough to kill through depression. Finally, the icing on the cake is proper acknowledgement.
I doubt Darwin could have easily been acknowledged for discovering a theory of evolution if he wasn’t associated with the powerful people in the Royal Society.
Michael Faraday is remembered because of his affiliations with Humphry Davy, who took him in as his lab assistant. Davy discovered chemical elements such as chlorine, iodine, sodium, and potassium. He was also a member of the Royal Society. It’s not enough that Michael Faraday was smart. He got the backing of money.
For the world to acknowledge that you’re indeed the smart one, there must be public evidence, and especially against an opponent. Richard Dawkins had Stephen Jay Gould. They wrote pieces that got shared in scientific journals, defending their case. But remember, to publish in top-tier journals, one needs money. It’s not enough to be smart.
Have I acknowledged my fate? I don’t have money. I will not say I am smart, but I try to reduce my degree of stupidity. But the goal of being smart is linked to the leverage of money. Today, we have what most people don’t. The internet offers leverage. Ideas can spread without money. That’s the first-order thinking.
Second-order thinking shows that as everyone notices that their ideas can spread, the degree of competition accelerates exponentially. It becomes clear that money got the smart individuals’ attention. Attention is the currency. That’s the crack. You can then blow it open.
Thus, I will buy a good number of my books so that they can feature in the New York Times bestseller list. The bestseller badge is the attention-seeking hook. Money gets you attention. It’s not enough to be smart.
But money has been an indicator of success for a long time. Attention is usually given to those who have been successful. Usually, those with money. So eventually, even the smart people will still need the money to get and preserve the attention.
Countless times I have seen people lend attention to the moneyed individuals and think their ideas are credible because money justifies it. You can have a lot of money but be as dumb as bricks. Without filters to screen the folly of some of the ultra-wealthy, they can convince you of their ideas. AI will cure cancer. It hasn’t. In contrast, it has created a version of online cancer. But look at the people who preach about AI. It’s the moneyed guys.
It comes back full circle. It is not enough to be smart. You need money.
True story, si-exaggerate
What I’m trying to say is…
Smarts is one thing. Money is another. You can be smart without the money, and the world wouldn’t care.
You can have money, and be stupid. And when you cough, the world applauds.
When smarts meets money, gravitational waves emerge. Mass moves. It’s not enough to be smart. You need money.
This song inspired some of the lines used in this article. Source — YouTube