A few days ago I left a comment under an Instagram post that claimed to reveal “5 Harvard Techniques” to get ahead of 99 percent of people, a secret revealed by a Harvard professor. The post had Steven Pinker’s face on it. My comment was simple: if that Harvard professor actually knew the secret to get ahead of 99 percent of the world, why is he still just a professor? That one line unraveled something much bigger than a bad Instagram post. It got me thinking about the monetization of knowledge, and how it has quietly replaced our appetite for actually understanding things with an appetite for turning everything into leverage.
This isn’t really about one account with 1.1 million followers copy pasting Wikipedia summaries and calling them elite wisdom. It’s about what happens to a society when knowledge stops being something you pursue for its own sake and becomes something you package, brand, and sell as a shortcut to power.
The Post That Started It All
Let’s look at what that post actually did, because it’s a perfect case study.
It used a recognizable face, Steven Pinker, a cognitive psychologist who almost certainly has no idea his photo was used to sell productivity tips. It slapped the word “Harvard” on techniques that have nothing to do with Harvard. The Feynman Technique came out of Caltech and Princeton. The Pomodoro method was invented by Francesco Cirillo in Italy. The 2 Minute Rule comes from David Allen’s Getting Things Done. None of it is secret, none of it is new, and none of it belongs to Harvard.
Then it wrapped the whole thing in a promise that would put you ahead of 99 percent of people on earth.
This is not an accident. It’s a formula, and it works because it hits three psychological levers at once. Borrow a famous face for instant credibility. Borrow a prestigious name to shut down scrutiny. Wrap common knowledge in the language of a secret so people feel like they’ve found something exclusive. Add a headline built on fear of missing out, and you have a machine built to be shared, saved, and reposted by people who never stop to ask if any of it makes sense.
And almost nobody does stop to ask. That’s the part that should actually worry us.
The Logical Flaw Nobody Notices
Here’s the question that broke the whole illusion for me. If someone genuinely possessed a technique that could put them ahead of 99 percent of the human population, what would that actually mean?
It wouldn’t mean a modest career hack. It would mean the discovery of an almost unlimited leverage engine. In a world where money, status, and power are the scarce resources everyone is competing for, real asymmetric knowledge doesn’t sit quietly in a university office. It scales. It compounds. It turns into influence over markets, institutions, and eventually people.
So ask yourself honestly. If a Harvard professor actually held that kind of key, would he really just teach a class and package it into five bullet points for an Instagram carousel? Believing that requires switching off basic reasoning. It requires accepting a headline at face value instead of running it through even one layer of logic.
This is where the phrase “ahead of 99 percent” reveals itself as pure noise. It’s not a promise. It’s a hook, engineered to bypass the part of your brain that would otherwise say, wait, that doesn’t add up.
Psychologists have a name for the shortcut that lets this kind of thing slide past our defenses. It’s called authority bias, and it’s one of the oldest, most well documented mental shortcuts we have. When a claim gets attached to a trusted institution, whether that’s a university, a government body, or a respected profession, our brain treats the source as a stand in for the substance. We stop checking the logic because the badge already told us it must be true. Add the halo effect, where one positive trait, like a famous face, makes us assume everything else about the message is credible too, and you get a headline almost nobody bothers to question.
None of this is new. What’s new is the scale at which it now operates, and the speed at which it spreads.
How the Rat Race Ate Curiosity
I had a conversation with a friend who’s a psychologist a while back. She told me she believes most people are fundamentally good. I told her I think most people are, frankly, not thinking. She was offended. But those two things aren’t actually opposites, and that’s the whole point. You can have good intentions and still be gullible enough to be steered into almost anything. History has shown us over and over that the people who understand how to move a crowd don’t need the crowd to be evil. They just need the crowd to stop questioning.
What’s made this worse in our lifetime is not human nature changing. It’s hyperconnectivity. Every screen we carry has turned into a permanent showcase of what other people have, what they’ve achieved, and what we apparently lack. The bar for what counts as a “basic need” keeps rising because we’re constantly shown someone else’s version of more. And when everyone’s threshold for enough keeps moving, the number of people running the race for money, status, and power keeps growing with it.
There used to be a class of people in every society who existed almost entirely outside that race. Their whole purpose was chasing truth. Discovery, exploration, philosophy, art, music, the sciences of human behavior, these were pursued because understanding the world was considered worthwhile on its own terms, not because it could be sold.
That class hasn’t disappeared, but it has shrunk into a small circle of people writing papers to impress each other inside institutions most of the public will never access. And even that circle isn’t immune anymore. The rat race doesn’t stop at the gates of the university. It has crept inside it too.
Once that happens, the love of discovery quietly turns into a different question. Not “what is true,” but “how do I monetize this.” Not “what have I learned,” but “how do I package this into something that sells.” That shift, small as it sounds, is the entire mechanism behind the monetization of knowledge. It’s what converts an intellectual pursuit into an extraction industry.
From the Agora to the Algorithm
It helps to remember that open, public thinking used to have a physical home.
In ancient Athens, philosophy happened in the agora, the open marketplace, where anyone could walk up and be challenged by Socrates in front of a crowd. The Muslim world built something just as open centuries later. Baghdad’s House of Wisdom pulled in scholars from Persia, India, and Greece to translate, debate, and argue over science, medicine, and philosophy, and none of it stayed locked away for a chosen few. The coffee houses that people usually credit to London and Paris actually started earlier in the Ottoman world and the Arabian Peninsula, in cities like Istanbul, Cairo, and Mecca, where strangers gathered to talk politics, poetry, and religion over a cup of coffee long before Europe picked up the habit. Asia had its own version of this too. Nalanda in India drew thinkers from across the continent to debate philosophy and logic in open halls, and Chinese teahouses for generations doubled as informal classrooms where scholars, merchants, and travelers argued about everything from governance to ethics. Wherever you look in history, real thinking happened out loud, in public, among people who had no formal credentials to protect and nothing to lose by being wrong.
That kind of open air intellectual life has mostly vanished. What replaced it is a split into two extremes.
On one side, you have algorithmic noise built for mass engagement, the world of “5 Harvard Techniques” posts, optimized entirely for shares and saves rather than accuracy or depth. On the other side, you have paywalled academic journals and specialist circles where real research happens, locked behind subscription fees, jargon, and institutional gatekeeping that keeps the public out almost as effectively as a locked door.
The truth seekers didn’t vanish. They got insulated. Real knowledge now lives either in expensive silos traded like private currency among specialists, or it gets stripped of nuance and sold to the public as a life hack. There is very little space left in between, the space where ordinary curious people used to be able to walk in, listen, argue, and learn without paying a toll in either money or credentials.
The Monetization of Knowledge
This is where the real damage sits.
When knowledge only travels in two forms, either as a status symbol for a closed elite or as a monetized shortcut for a desperate audience, genuine curiosity has nowhere left to grow. We are living through a strange irony. Humanity’s entire recorded knowledge sits in the phone in your pocket, more than any king or scholar in history ever had access to. And yet most of that access gets spent scrolling past manufactured secrets instead of actually learning anything.
The modern “intellectual entrepreneur” understands this perfectly. Take a well known concept, wrap it in urgency, attach a prestigious name, and sell it back to an audience that has been trained to look for shortcuts instead of understanding. It works because the audience has stopped asking the one question that would break the spell. Does this actually make logical sense.
Getting Back to Real Thinking
None of this means people are hopeless or that curiosity is dead for good. It means the muscle has gone weak from disuse, and muscles that go weak can be rebuilt.
The fix isn’t complicated, even if it takes discipline. Before sharing a claim, ask what it would actually mean if it were true. Before trusting a name, check whether the name has anything to do with the claim at all. Before accepting a shortcut to the top, ask why the person offering it hasn’t used it to get there himself.
That single habit, testing a claim against basic logic before accepting it, is the difference between being part of the audience and being part of the crowd that gets moved wherever the loudest voice points. The monetization of knowledge only works on people who have stopped asking questions. The moment you start asking again, the whole formula falls apart.
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