The High Inflation Rate of Content
Relative to the churning rate
Inflation is a fantastic way to understand the decay rate of money.
Let’s say you have Ksh100 today, the equivalent of the Rotary dollar in my country. It can get you a plate of French fries, and you will be somewhat satisfied at the end of the meal.
Five years later, French Fries are Ksh150. The Rotary dollar cannot get you the plate. You’ll need an extra fifty percent. But, to ensure the business is running, the same plate is not filled with fries as it used to be five years ago. They are now rationed.
Ten years later, a plate goes for Ksh. 200.
The decay rate is roughly 7.2%. This is the inflation rate.
It means, if you keep your money under your mattress, you’re still losing it. You’re losing your purchasing power. You also hope no rats or termites feed on it.
If you keep it in a fixed deposit bank account with an interest rate of 6%, you are still losing money, but not at the rate of the one who only saves it.
The smart one invests in options that return anything above 7.2%. They are making money since the production rate exceeds the decay rate. The general advice thus goes:
Put your money in investment options that compound at rates higher than the inflation rate.
The inflation rate for online content is insanely high. It also means the purchasing power of online content, the equivalent of what learning can get you, is not compounding nearly enough. It’s mostly decay. The decay rate started declining long before the World Wide Web was established.
Tutoring and schools
This world is changing right in front of me
— J. Cole
It is widely accepted that one-on-one tutoring is the best teaching method. Almost all the classical geniuses and polymaths had tutors. They were the benchmarks for the rapid synthesis of content for young scholars.
John Stuart Mill documented the lessons he learned from his father. He began with languages before evolving into other complex fields. Before long, his father would involve him in actively contributing to his work.
What’s more, he would integrate what he had taught him during his walks. There was little room left for decaying what was initially taught. Or is it tutored? Whichever word suits you.
Bertrand was flowered with experts for tutors before he officially enrolled for school. At Cambridge, he was further tied to Alfred North Whitehead, another towering figure and tutor, who engaged him in mathematics and logic.
This kind of school is different from the present-day ones. For most institutions, the teacher-to-student ratios are insane. The number of students in my first year of high school stood at a record 66. I know of others who had more.
Strathmore has a stricter ratio, sticking to a maximum of forty students. Schools like Makini Academy and Newlight have a tradition where they single out the bright students, keep them inside one class, register them as a separate school, and let the small numbers represent the rest.
This clever trick has another force working in its favour — the law of small numbers. The extremes lie among small samples, the extremely intelligent, and the opposite. Sequestering these students from the rest further gives them access to the brilliant side of the teachers, who wouldn’t struggle as much with the other students.
This small student-to-teacher ratio benefits from the extended effects of one-to-one tutoring. But it is not the same. Colleges have struggled to preserve the low ratios, but the incentives are skewed.
Legacies have to be maintained. Colleges need funding. Institutions announce one-off successes to preserve face and thus keep the conveyor belt of students running. As Freddie deBoar has argued, a prestigious name doesn’t add much to a student.
The decay rate took its toll when the ratios changed. Today, lecturers and teachers hand out assignments, hoping the students will build on what they have learned. Due to the numbers, teachers can hardly focus on the bright ones. If they do, they may get shamed or called out by the other students.
Aristocratic tutoring used to fatten the pockets of the experts who would spend an hour or two with the child. Teachers and lecturers are nowadays paid by the institutions. Sometimes, they aren’t and go on strike. The decay rate of knowledge suffers dual blows when this happens.
Exams were supposed to be the saviour. To get into prestigious colleges, you need to have high SAT scores. But if the goal is to get a high score, then it ceases to become a reliable goal. The assessment is not about how much someone knows, but how well they can sit for a given exam. The knowledge decay rate continues to suffer after qualification exams were gamified. As J. Cole raps:
But this is not a gaming experience, I’m serious
Despite deBoar’s debunking analysis of prestigious schools, we still hope to take our kids to these institutions. It's now the name that most seek. A Harvard, MIT, or Oxford thrown somewhere in your CV opens doors, at the expense of the decay rate.
Suits, the popular TV programme, now shows how easy it is to forge a degree. How can we tell who is an Ivy League alumnus? If the document is all that people seek, then it too ceases to become a good measure.
At this rate, the decay rate seems impossible to surmount. It gets worse. The internet changed the playing field.
The internet
Naval has been converted into the modern-day online philosopher. His short pieces resonate with many users, reflecting his large followers on X.
He once remarked how it’s now easier than any other time to learn from the internet. I agree. I learned about evolution and worked my way to develop a theory that I believe is superior to Natural Selection.
This kind of learning differs from school-based teaching because one holds oneself accountable. You need no exam. If you’re building an app, the test will be right there before you, establishing whether the app works seamlessly as you had planned or not.
The decay rate for such creative forces is reduced. Thankfully. But while the internet is open to everyone, the dark side of this moon is dense with the detrimental effects of social media. One minute you are viewing a video from the Royal Society, and two hours later, you’re browsing through your seventh cat videos.
Meaningful content is drowned by entertainment. Entertainment drowned art. Ted Gioa has argued that we have long outlived the entertainment era. We are now in the dopamine era. Distraction has trumped entertainment.
Where does that leave the decay rate?
The global data generated annually has been on an exponential climb:
Most of this content is not educational. It’s not a tutor holding your hand from the other side through a video interface. It’s a mixture of entertainment and distraction.
As for the written content, the most common is emails, most of which are work-related. Who likes reading these emails? Who remembers the ones they received two days ago? By this metric, what does that say about our decay rate? What’s left to retain?
Most Gen Z and Gen Alpha want to become influencers. It looks fun until one falls prey to the perils of audience capture. These are the figures they have grown up knowing. There are no polymaths or household geniuses to inspire the growing generations.
TikTok has fashioned its algorithm such that the algorithm is the content itself. In a matter of minutes, it can know what you like and continues throwing it at you. Distraction on steroids.
If you can swipe up just as fast as you can swipe to the left, how high is your decay rate? It suffers because of overabundance, as there is little incentive to remember because online scarcity is a foreign concept. You would want to preserve what you value, but a quick swipe or scroll shows little value in most online content.
Yes, the internet has made it easy to teach us whatever we want to learn, but how well will you account for the decay rate when distraction is eating everyone’s attention?
AI appears to have completely shifted the goalposts. It means at this point, I should continue writing because I like the process, but not because my readers will remember my pieces. The medium, clearly, is the message.
AI writing
I recently stumbled on a breakdown of the worrying effects of AI writing.
This comes at a time when AI has dominated almost all spheres. But the AI-written content, the article continues, is not channeled to help you retain. It’s meant to subdue your thinking. True to Garrett Hardin’s lesson: Words not only convey thought; they prevent it.
AI scripts are notorious for multiple listing. Three is the perfect number in rhetoric. I came, I saw, I conquered. A government of the people, for the people, and by the people. You can’t argue with threes.
AI uses this trick. In the past, the trick was just as powerful when we didn’t have the internet, back when we had thinkers. Now, it is used on populations of individuals who didn’t have the luxury of aristocratic tutoring, who were dumped into educational institutions, hopefully to be well socialized, but ended up parasocially hooked in the global dopamine economy.
These are the individuals who insist that AI will be a game changer. I don’t argue with that. I have already seen it. I occasionally use it. But AI is not a tool.
A recent Microsoft study has shown how AI users have reduced the amount of effort used in critical thinking for the tasks they perform. These are people who were good at their work. You need to be top tier to work in a company as huge as Microsoft.
But if AI has not spared even the elite, where is our decay rate? It’s probably in Alpha Centauri by now. Retention is on the opposite end of this graph.
Furthermore, I don’t reckon that AI is a tool. Yes, tools make work easier. But tools sit and wait for you to use them. They don’t keep you hooked. Once the task is done, they are stored.
AI wants you to keep going. How else will they get data about you to keep improving? Like the social media platforms, they don’t want you to leave. You can try it now. A simple hello to ChatGPT will result in a question, well worded, to make you answer.
If you can’t see the hook, you are the fish.
ChatGPT, the supposed tool, will throw a spanner into the works by always agreeing with you. I told my cousin, an avid reader, who felt my stance contrasted with her regular experience and use of AI. She was so shocked she sat on the carpet, I guess searching for her jaw because it dropped somewhere in the sitting room.
The only time it disagreed with us was when we tried to see if it could comment on a racial issue. It deleted the text and responded. Besides that, it will agree with you on everything. Try it!
And because it will keep you hooked, you will create your echo chamber. We don’t need a lot of evidence to believe our ideas are true. I mean, when backed by AI, who can stand in your way? Through the steroid augmenting of confirmation bias, postmodernism is about to get a loading dose of ‘AI proofs’. And who would know better?
Ironically, I almost forgot — where is our decay rate again?
AI will churn more in a short span than humans have ever generated in the lifetime of the internet’s existence. For poetic effect, I have to ask where my train of thought went because it somehow got lost by my declining retention rate.
What I’m trying to say is…
We are producing more than we’re retaining. It’s affecting all age groups.
The wisdom of systems thinking tells us that such a combination leaves our reserves suffering, nearly always empty. Doomscrolling on the internet tends to leave you more tired than when you started. Some have called it rotting, as opposed to resting.
Unseen among the GIFs and memes shared is the decay rate, which continues to soar, while we keep our heads in the clouds of our own making. J. Cole captures it all and also expresses his worry:
I seen babies turn fiends, addicted to the screen
Their dad shares cashiers replaced by machines
Don’t buy, subscribe so you can just stream
Your content like rent, you won’t own a thing
Before long, all the songs the whole world sings’ll
Be generated by latest of AI regimes
As all of our favorite artists erased by it scream
From the wayside, “Ay, whatever happened to human beings?”
This song inspired some of the lines used in this article. Source — YouTube