My mother recently asked me a perplexing question as part of a joke I no longer remember the other day, and I thought to share it with you.

It goes: “Are you smart?”

It’s not a very complex question and it’s one that I’ve heard many many times over the course of time, but for some reason or another, when I heard it this time I processed it a bit differently. 

The child’s standard response is to say “yes!” and then offer up any number of different things.

“I got 9A’s for SPM ma!” she goes and in the midway of life’s sliding scale it becomes, in somewhat chronological order:”I got into X college da! This many scholarships and people threw money at me qa!”

Over time though, I’ve come to realize that none of these responses really work.

I worked hard for sure, but I will always remember freezing up and writing incoherent paragraphs on my BM and Sejarah papers before I walked away with A+’s in both subjects yet only to momentarily ever forget how that happened – I will remember how I shamelessly sold myself and learned the good graces of social dynamics in group situations – I will always remember, partly from personal experience and partly from observations, that someone could go to a great college but then end up receiving a great measure of high idiocy built on paper tiger sense of false superiority as a reward.

If there is something that I got from these different experiences though, it’s definitely at least a sense that calling myself ‘smart’ on the basis of this constellation of documents and proofs is not something I can really accept, even if sociologically and societally speaking that is actually how it works, even if your personal estimation of your own abilities doesn’t match up with the observed reality; even if the world sees you one way and you see yourself another. 

Naval Ravikant maintains a simple and singular idea of what it means to be smart: Are you getting what you want out of life? 

It sounds intuitive and I agree with it, maybe because being ‘smart’ is always a contextual thing, in the sense that you are only ‘smart’ if what you do brings you more of what you want in life = but I feel that given the possible scope of what a person could want in life, that definition can be both too broad and too narrow at the same time, because do you want your time? Money? Happiness? You could pursue all of those things in a zeroing in of consciousness upon these Northern Stars, but what’s the solution to the puzzle that unlocks the constellation of your human wants at the end of the day really? 

So yes, I like Naval’s insight, but to it I would add this:

A dumb person may *feel* that they’re smart, but feeling smart and being smart? There is a difference. I don’t have the irreverence to say that I stand amongst the smart ones, but I think it would be an insult to say that I’m dumb or to presume over the range of universes what you consider as smart or not smart, dear reader.

So I ask you a question in reply to the question I was asked, then.

Even if you thought that you were smart, would it matter? 

I thought a little more about the ‘influencer’ question, and it brought me down some interesting pathways – and I have to agree: It does take a little bit of delusion to feel that you influence people, that you completely change their ideas.

But that doesn’t mean that influence doesn’t exist.

I mean if you think about it, surely it does.

As we know, people are related to one another – we shape one another’s behavior and experiences.

Even right now, as you think about every one of the words that come off the tip of my fingers as I write it out seconds, minutes, or hours after I wrote, these words are shaping a small part of your day as you think about what’s in front of you and ask yourself:”What is he trying to get at?” amongst other things.

But you know, that’s like toy level influence – it’s trivial.

It’s kind of like how if you wanted to, you could move your right hand or your left leg upon reading this sentence (or not at all, or both at once).

You have some choice at some specific moment of what you’re going to do – I’m sure you could think of it cognitively for a moment before you actually take the action. In a moment when you choose to make the choice (maybe in a couple of seconds, in a minute or so), you could possibly plan out what you would like to do.

Not super controversial.

But could you have controlled the very first impulse, the very first thought that came to your mind? That is doubtful.

Now imagine that you are attacked by a rabid flesh eating bee (or wasp. I don’t know lol), it just attacks you and specifically attacks your right hand, then your left leg at the same time.

At that point, faced with the pain, movement for 99% of you becomes a forced choice; there is only one real choice in that scenario which is to move, to do anything to address the pain.

So yeah no, you don’t even have complete mastery of how you react to things.

So why should you say that other people are unable to influence you?

Now, I don’t think that this means that there is a silver bullet to so-called influence people, and I would maintain that if you were to believe that you can actually influence people’s actions to the point of say brainwashing them, that would be a delusion of the highest order.

If you are like David Chase Taylor, as I shared in my podcast with Tim Tiah, perhaps it plays out in your head and then because you can’t disconfirm it, and it then ends up ringing out to you as what you call reality as you end up in infinite rationalization regress.

Here is an example of this, brought to you by the keyboard of David Chase Taylor.

I may write a post dedicated to this man a little later because I think he deserves at least that much. But here’s the basic point:

There are a lot of people out there who believe that they have massive influence over events and will state their names and reputations on their beliefs; David, for one, writes these posts almost daily and has been doing so ever since I first saw him in Switzerland in 2016.

It is remarkable consistency and a shocking amount of work and time that this man has put into what he has written for no apparent reward because he believes that he shapes the course of events.

There are plenty of delusional people like that, and in fact there is a Wikipedia article dedicated to the subject of messiah claimants – people who go out saying that they are the new messiah, that they’ve come to save the world, influencing themselves more effectively than they ever could influence anyone else to travel in the general direction of oblivion.

But you know, even as you read about that, there’s a good chance that I was influencing you in the direction of feeling that David is delusional and he’s not a truth-bearer in his universe.

But if we think about it, I am just a separate human being.

Why should my opinion that he is delusional hold sway over his opinion that he is eminently rational?

You could argue that maybe I’m just speaking a little more persuasively, but if that’s the case, then implicitly, I suppose, you already admit that influence is a possibility.

Now, there are all sorts of other complicated things out there to think about and that we could also think about in the context of this blog.

Why did you find this post, for example? Was it because Google revealed something to you? Did a friend send the link to you? “Check out this guy”. Was that friend cynical, serious, a raving fan, poor, rich? Do they have buying intent or none?

Did something that was said here increase, decrease, or leave unchanged with nothing but a ‘lol’ as residue your inclination to either work with me as a student and get past the friction of emailing, or did something else happen?

All of those different things aren’t really captured in the simple whole numerical measure of daily visitor statistics.

Let’s refine our thoughts here.

At heart, I am agnostic, skeptical, yet leaning constantly on the edge of believing that influence is both real and possible.

In my mind, it would be delusional to say that we are influential over others on every level in every way – It would take an act of immense human arrogance to assert that you really are in control of things around you.

But I think it would take also an act of immense human arrogance to say that we definitively do not influence the people around us. Or for that matter, that it is not a skill that we can refine over the course of time—whether for good or for bad.

What does it mean to influence?

Is it just dancing weird dances, using affiliate links to make money while recommending products you may not even use, or doing live sales to no end?

I’ve spoken a bit previously about how I think being an ‘influencer’ entails changing people’s behaviors, and I spoke about influence in the context of institutional power though I didn’t elaborate at that time.

Some of us believe that we have no influence on others, or the way that algorithms may decide to shape how we show up to others or who would seek us out – the latter point is what Tim Tiah seems to believe, even as he says that none of us have influence anymore.

I disagree with that point still.

Well, in any case, we had a nice chat with the man about this topic and a couple of other things just the other day, and that conversation is now on YouTube.

Check it out here!

But I guess beyond the question of what an influencer is and whether humans really have influence or not, I guess I would ask – whom do we influence?

If you had talked to me a while ago, I might have told you in the long or deep conversation (if it ever got to that point) that maybe it is really all algorithmic (and therefore) we don’t need to go out of our way to impress people or go out of our ways to impress people – you cannot change people or the way that they behave on a large scale (let alone individuals), so why try?

Just take the world as given, and do your thing. Your crowd will find you and if you serve them you serve them.

I think that that’s true still – because one of the very worst things I can imagine a person doing is just sublimating themselves, trying to optimize, change people, you know? Going out there and then acting out “I will pander to every single thing that I think you want, everything I think you will like – I will become your dream destiny desire!!!”

For me, that’s intuitive – you have no reason to try to impress every single person in the world; most people will not change their thoughts, attitudes, and behaviors for you – and what do you care about what goes on in the head or heart of a random person in a country you have no connection to, who doesn’t speak the same language(s) as you, has no money to buy anything you might sell (not that money should be the only or primary reason that we interact with others), and has totally different attitudes, values, and principles from you?

But as time has gone by, my thinking’s started to become more nuanced – cause at the end of the day, whether we like it or not, this is true:

As human beings, you don’t need everyone and surely you should not always respond to others by changing yourself either frequently or even at all in some cases – but I believe you do need other people, and in responding to that need, you are influenced by others as so you influence others however imperfectly this is modulated through the algorithm and however more frequently algorithms cause you to be seen relative to whether people seek you out or not.

Sure, we might not want to impress everyone or bungee jump off tall buildings to make every single person in the world look and scream and algorithms to go wild as digital hearts explode into a fusillade; it seems silly to scream about that, really – but it’s a fact that as human beings, we relate to others, we converse with others, we rise and fall with others as our feelings rise and fall; friendships are real, commerce is real, and love, like the very concept of money, is intersubjective – it isn’t something that you can share only with yourself – and you could argue that algorithms alone govern this in an impersonal, gaslit, engagement-driven way that reshapes the very architecture of our desires.

And it feels to me that we need the identities of others in life still, that agency matters, that who says something matters even if an algorithm patterns our choices and an FYP determines the difference between visibility and invisibility – that our identities still shape how we are seen and whether we are seen beyond just a like and a subscribe.

It seems to me that we could break down the total number of people who look for you into at least three parts:

• #1: The number of people who find you via organic algorithm
• #2: The number of people who search for you intentionally, modulated by chance encounters, community vibe, choice of topic or admittedly, through a route facilitated by #1.
• #3: The number of people who find you via paid advertising.

…And that those things interact with one another.

I think that this applies to everybody in this world, whether fat or thin, tall or short, breathtakingly beautiful or downright Jar-Jar-Binks ugly – whether we understand, know, or appreciate that or not.

Sure, some people are more popular than others and some people get more heard because of the algorithm, and some people say things that may make you want to disconnect from it all in a crowded world and shadowbanning is surely a thing, but I don’t think that just because that is true that #2 disappears just because it is small – or perhaps, more importantly, that we should behave as if we think #2 has disappeared while attempting to optimize ‘for the algorithm’.

For one thing, I feel that this is icky because the way that algorithms are designed is that they are meant to correlate with human behaviors – the more you find your crowd, the more followers you get, generally the more you do find your crowd, the more likely you will influence in the sense of getting more followers at a faster rate.

But I think that regardless of whether you find your footing via #1, it’s part of a human journey to find your crowd, and it is meaningful and possible that human connections can shape the person you are seen as, the way, rate, and means by which you are followed, that the people who resonate with your voice and what you can bring to the world even if technology is what would bring you the lion’s share of the views, the sales, the comments, and any actions that people might take in relation to your existence, even if the algorithm does not favor you.

Surely some people might not like you, you might not like everyone, and maybe there is a destiny out there that affirms that like parallel lines, you can go on and on into eternity without ever meeting one another because the algorithm has not chosen you.

But I don’t think that means we should start treating the algorithm the way some people treat God – as a God of the gaps whose will we cannot explain – but also recall that people need one another, and that algorithms may satisfy that need on an outsize scale, but that doesn’t disconfirm or deny that human identity or presence matters in ways that algorithms may approximate but do not necessarily capture, even if they are becoming better at doing so.

In many ways, I don’t think that people should go out of their ways to become social, to be gregarious, life of the party and everything to shape and reshape how they are seen by an algorithm – But I think we can’t deny that so as we need others, others may need us, and that that need, even if an algorithm captures it in the space where we have our accounts and we aren’t blocked, will ever be totally subsumed by an algorithm and its whims – and in a world we need others and others need us, I think it is meaningful to grow in life to become someone that others need or want to be with or to work with, whatever the algorithm may say this day or another.

Off to the next part of the plan, and to expanding that small space out there of the ones who matter deeply on this journey 😀