how can we be smart — 4 things they don’t tell you

we, as a species, have been trying to be smart for a while now. i, as a person, have been trying since roughly tuesday. the species seems to have a small head start. what they don’t tell you is the gap is not closing. so i typed how can we be smart into the search bar like a man who already lost the argument with his own browser, pressed return, and watched the laptop fan get loud.

it is a thursday, somewhere around 11:23am, and i’m at the desk i was assigned for spreadsheet work, doing something that is, on a strict reading, not spreadsheet work. the boss is on a fireside chat with the regional team — meaning a slack call with a fake fireplace background — and i have, by my own optimistic accounting, the rest of the morning.

how can we be smart: short answer, by my desk on a thursday, we mostly cannot, in the way the search bar implies. we can be slightly less stupid this hour than we were the previous hour. smart is what survives between two interruptions. it is not a permanent upgrade. it is a temporary state, like being on time, that we leave the moment we look at our phones. that is the working definition. it is not in any dictionary i would lend to a friend.

SMART. IS. NOT. A. SETTING.

i need that on the wall before we go any further, because the four answers below — the algorithm’s, the productivity bro’s, the chatgpt one, the unopened mail pile’s — all assume otherwise. each one thinks smart is a switch. each one is wrong in a different shape. one of them, the mail pile, is wrong with dignity. we’ll get to it.

how can we be smart, the short version

the short version of how can we be smart is the one i would write on a coaster if someone asked across a bar: pay attention to the question for ten more seconds than you want to. that is the whole post, technically. it has the inconvenient property of also being a procedure i have not personally followed in fourteen months. but the procedure is sound. the operator is the problem.

i tried, two springs ago, to follow it. i set a timer for ten seconds before answering an email from dave about, predictably, money. the timer ran out. i answered exactly the way i would have answered without the timer, which was poorly, and dave is still owed the three hundred. the timer did not improve me. it just witnessed the same decision more slowly. that is, in some ways, also data.

this overlaps with what i wrote about how to be smarter, which i drafted, badly, at this same desk a few weeks back. the smaller question — smarter than what — has at least the courtesy to be specific. how can we be smart goes plural and ambitious in the same breath, which is the kind of question that produces a tab count, not an answer.

the algorithm has its own answer

the algorithm — and i mean the actual one, the one that picks what i see — has been, for the last eighteen months, telling me that the way to be smart is to listen to a podcast about ancient rome at 1.5x speed while doing kettlebell swings. i have done neither. the algorithm does not care. the algorithm, in its unblinking patience, will keep recommending kettlebells. the algorithm has no theory of me. the algorithm has only theories of demographics that contain me.

that is the first thing they don’t tell you. the algorithm’s answer to how can we be smart is not addressed to you. it is addressed to a column in a database that you happen to be filed under. you happen to share that column with someone who, in 2022, bought a kettlebell and watched a podcast called imperium drip. that is the sole foundation of every recommendation in your feed. you did not opt into the column. you cannot opt out. the column is closer to fate than the algorithm would like to admit.

i am, in honest accounting, related to the kettlebell man only insofar as we both have a router. i have never owned a kettlebell. i once held one, in a friend’s living room, for ninety seconds, and then put it down and pretended it had been heavier than i expected. that ninety-second event, somehow, lives in a column. that column is, somehow, the input. that input is, somehow, what the algorithm thinks i should do to be smart. the chain is broken at every link. the chain still pulls me forward.

there is a long tradition of suspecting that the way the brain quietly confirms what it already believed is the engine doing most of the work — that’s the pillar this whole cluster orbits. the algorithm is just the same engine wearing a uniform.

productivity bro disagreed with the algorithm

the productivity bro, who i do not follow but who finds me anyway, posted at 5:31am that how can we be smart is the wrong question, and that the right question is how can we optimise. he attached, as usual, a photograph of a green smoothie and a watch i could pay rent with for three months. he did not attach his brain. he never does. we are asked to take, on faith, that the brain matches the smoothie.

i read it at 9:34am, on the elevator ride down for a coffee i had not earned. i felt the precise feeling i think the post was designed to produce, which is the feeling that i should be doing something else with my hands and that the something else costs money. this is innovation, i thought, briefly. then the elevator opened. then a man in a freshly ironed shirt walked past me and i remembered that credit cards are a personality trait — that take is not negotiable — and the spell broke.

i closed the tab. it reopened, automatically, on a different device, on the bus. tabs persist. takes persist. the bro persists. the smoothies are seasonal. that is the only mercy.

the chatgpt version that filtered me again

i did, against better judgement, ask chatgpt. i typed the question and waited. it gave me four bullet points. they were, in order: read widely, sleep enough, ask better questions, and (this is the one that broke me) journal. i closed the tab. i opened it again to read them again. they were the same bullet points. the second reading was, somehow, more deflating.

here is what they don’t tell you about the model. the bullet points are not addressed to you. they are addressed to a kind of average person the model has constructed from twenty thousand articles about productivity, written by a kind of average writer who has, themselves, never been the smartest person in any room they did not also dim. the average is fluent and helpful. the average is also, in this exact way, useless. it has never met me. it has never met you. the average is, in this respect, just a slower algorithm with better grammar.

i tried again, with a follow-up: specifically me, age unspecified, with seven dead microwaves and a fridge i have not opened in eleven days. the model paused longer this time. then it gave me four bullet points. they were the same four bullet points. it had, in good faith, attempted to address the microwave situation, but its answer for that was buy a new microwave. that is a fact about microwaves. it is not an answer to the question.

the unopened mail pile votes too

the unopened mail pile, on the kitchen counter, has been growing since march. there are, by my unscientific count, twenty-three envelopes in it. some of them are red, which is a font choice that has not, historically, made me move faster. some of them are from a department i used to work for that has been trying to clarify a tax matter from 2022 in increasingly polite language. one of them is from my landlord, who is good at finding new ways to say the boiler. the pile has weight. the pile has, in some weeks, more authority than i do.

the pile’s answer to how can we be smart is the most honest one i have collected. the pile says: open one of us, on a thursday, before lunch, while you still have the morning. open one specifically — not all of us, not the red ones, not the brave choice. open the smallest, beigest envelope on the top. read it once. put it back. then, having earned the right, get back to whatever you were doing.

the pile says this without saying it. the pile communicates by mass. the mass increases. that is its only message. and the message, transcribed honestly, would read: you are not smart, you are merely busy, and the difference between the two is the act of opening one envelope at a time.

i have not opened any of them today. i wrote this post instead. that is, in its own way, also a vote.

and somewhere in the apartment two miles away, the third yoga mat is under the couch from 2023, possibly evolving, definitely not voting, definitely also not the answer. i mention it because the mat and the mail pile are, in some structural way, the same object. one was supposed to make me healthier. the other was supposed to make me solvent. neither has been opened. the mat has more dignity. it does not bill me.

this connects, faintly, to the working definition for people with a working brain, which is what made me, three years ago, start the pile in the first place. the bias was the optimism that i would, eventually, get to it. the bias is still operating. the pile is still growing.

verdict, we are not, but we keep asking

if any of this is too abstract, the next-door question — how to make your brain more intelligent, allegedly — at least has the courtesy of being smaller in scope. i drafted that one a month ago. it answers the more modest version of the same anxiety. the bigger version, the plural one, the we, is the version i’m parking here, mostly unsolved, on purpose.

the fireside chat ended. someone in the call mentioned “synergies”, twice, by my count. the morning lost about twelve minutes. the pile, two miles away, is unchanged, which is to say, growing.

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