Please Make Yourself (Un)comfortable - A Prologue

京都にて京を思ふ ほととぎす
作者: 松尾芭蕉
出典: ‘笈の小文’ 

Though I am in Kyoto,

I long for Kyoto

—the cry of the cuckoo.

Matsuo Bashō
The Records of a Travel-Worn Satchel

The Prologue

I am not, technically speaking, a professional scientist. Nor am I, according to the credentialed gatekeepers of academia, a doctor. I also don’t possess a postdoctoral degree. I do not have an exhaustive string of peer-reviewed publications trailing behind my name like a parade float of comfortable scholarly approval.  

Truth via Shoplifting

What I am, instead, is something older, and something wilder—a shoplifter of knowledge. In addition to gathering the facts and looking at them very carefully, I pilfer, I plunder, I shamelessly steal from the painstaking research of those so specialized, so hyper-focused in their respective fields, that they fail to notice the intellectual gold dust slipping through their fingers. And what do I do with this treasure? I do what any self-respecting gentleman scientist would: with critical thinking, logic, and imagination, I build a monster.

Yes, what I have created here may be a Frankenstein monster—not a sleek, genetically optimized, Victoria’s Secret model of an idea, but something raw and unexpected, something assembled from the discarded brilliance of those too myopic to recognize their own insights.

And—it is alive.

This is the manifesto of a renegade thinker, a troublemaker armed not with a lab coat but with a crowbar to pry open the locked doors of conventional thought. (Someone just paying attention, when others look in the other direction.)  

Jump on the back of this dirty old motorcycle, and let’s get somewhere.

Easy now. Before you put this book back on the shelf and step away as though you’ve just discovered a newspaper-wrapped package ticking ominously in the back of a mad scientist’s lab—wait! Let’s take a moment to acknowledge the noble tradition in which I stand.

A closer look reveals a collection of oddballs 

Science, for all its formalities, has long been propelled not just by those with the right letters after their names, but by those willing to think outside the constraints of institutional dogma. Where would we be without the theory of evolution by natural selection, if not for… that guy? You know the one. The bearded fellow who spent years staring at pigeons and finches until the great realization dawned. That’s right—Darwin. Charles Darwin, the very prototype of the gentleman scientist, who never held a formal scientific position and yet managed to rewrite the story of life itself. A rebel. 

And Darwin was hardly alone. Consider Michael Faraday, the bookbinder’s apprentice who became the father of electromagnetism, despite lacking formal mathematical training. An obvious upstart! Or Gregor Mendel, the Augustinian monk whose quiet pea-plant experiments would eventually form the bedrock of modern genetics—only to be ignored for decades because he wasn’t part of the scientific “in-crowd.” Oddball genius tinkerer. Or take Benjamin Franklin, who, with a child’s kite, a key, and what can only be described as an alarming disregard for personal safety, casually uncovered the fundamental principles of electricity.

“Team Outside-Looking-In”

Darwin, Faraday, Mendel, Franklin, and all those lost to history, have contributed to humanity’s ability to push the gigantic scientific poo ball forward. This is the grand tradition of the gentleman scientist: the outsiders, the cross-disciplinary thinkers, the uninvited guests at the banquet of academia who, despite their lack of credentials, manage to pull a chair up to the table and start carving the roast.

This is precisely my mission.

While researching and publishing my (admittedly famous*) paper, AI, Robots, and Cognitive Training in an Era of Mass Cognitive Decline and AI and the Future of Human Intelligence**, I stumbled upon certain principles in neuroscience and energy that made me stop. And think. And then stop again, because what I saw was impossible to ignore. One idea or question led to another, and as I followed the intellectual breadcrumbs, one door opened two more, then four, until I began to suspect something unsettling:

Science had missed something. Something big. 

How could this happen? Because the modern scientific enterprise—despite its brilliance, despite its rigor—has shackled itself. Higher education, research funding, and the entrenched conventions of thought all demand specialization to such an extent that scientists become prisoners in their own fields, unable to see beyond the narrow corridors of their expertise, despite all the undeniable good they do. There are exceptions, of course—organizations like the Santa Fe Institute, which encourage interdisciplinary thinking, for example—but for the most part, the intellectual landscape is one of silos, not synthesis.

But I am a generalist, as David Epstein, author of Range, might say. And therein lies the difference.

The analogies and perspectives I bring from outside these academic echo chambers allow me to see what is hidden in plain sight. That is the reason for this book—to make visible the invisible, to expose the hidden force that shapes our thinking, our choices, our very perception of reality.

And, yes, if I may risk elevating my role here to near-biblical proportions, it is through the ideas collected in these pages that the Truth shall be revealed. 😊 (Only this time, it’s not a through a burning bush—it’s a book! Which, let’s be honest, is much easier to carry around.) 

My goal is this: by making these unseen forces visible, you will finally see how you’ve been buffeted about, misdirected, constrained by invisible hands shaping your decisions. And more than that—from Book 1 to Book 3—you will understand how to push back. To reclaim agency. To clear the fog. Turn down “the noise.” Perhaps to develop a greater sense of humor about those things that challenge you and make you uncomfortable.

And that, after all, may be the most important discovery of all.