Why do you do anything?
Aemula Writer Spotlight - 1.22.26
Our actions are governed by a fairly simple equation. The perceived benefit of doing something has to exceed the estimated energy cost of taking that action. If the reward feels too small, or the effort feels too high, we don’t do anything. We might rationalize it later in more complex terms, but the underlying calculus roughly remains.
While this holds true for our trivial daily decisions, it also dictates how people choose to participate in public discourse. We only share our thoughts if we expect them to have an impact. Otherwise we would just be shouting into the void (though sometimes void shouting is cathartic).
The work it would take us to share our thoughts also can’t be too difficult. Even on social media, where the bar for sharing our perspectives is on the floor, most of us choose to lurk, for sound reason. Even if anyone can create an account and start posting for free, financial rewards are only available for the select few who achieve influencer status. Coupled with the ever-present social risk of etching your bad or embarrassing takes in the annals of digital history, continuously scrutinized by internet sleuths and the judgement of your loose acquaintances, the rewards rarely outweigh the risks.
To plagiarize ourselves, “only those who are passionate enough about an uncommon belief are willing to commit the time to posting on social media without pay. The result is the elevation of fringe voices, further radicalized by algorithms that are fundamentally geared towards generating controversy.”
If we want to see more high-quality perspectives reflected in our media environment, we need to increase the incentives for contribution while lowering the barriers to entry. We need to cultivate an ecosystem that encourages original, in-depth reporting. We need to know that pressing publish is actually worth our time and effort.
But accurately reporting the news is hard work. Discovery, research, verification, drafting, and revision are cognitively expensive tasks. Doing it well requires sustained attention and a deep willingness to invest time without any guarantee of a payout. Journalists are currently trapped in a persistent tradeoff between working within institutions that provide support resources in exchange for limited autonomy, or going independent to gain full creative control while accepting significant personal risk.
To successfully and sustainably go independent relies on building credibility, attracting attention, converting paid support, and assembling reporting infrastructure, all while also doing the hard work of the reporting. Most people, even highly capable ones, rationally decide that these costs outweigh the potential reward, especially when the success stories are so sparse. Additionally, one’s ability to report on their topic of expertise is rarely correlated with their ability to build a brand and business from scratch.
Our goal with Aemula is to eliminate the tradeoff that journalists face. We want to de-risk the decision of going independent by providing publication infrastructure, distribution to an existing network of paid subscribers, and professional resources for research and collaboration, all while empowering writers to retain full ownership and creative control of their work.
With strong incentives and low friction, more people with real expertise will choose to contribute their perspectives to the public discourse. With more diverse, independent perspectives, we all will be able to build a more accurate understanding of the world around us.
Journalists no longer have to choose between support and freedom. When we say that Aemula is a platform for independent journalists, we see a future where every journalist is independent.
This week, we highlight writers discussing the mechanics at play behind the scenes that affect the quality and types of content we consume. We encourage you to explore their work and consider subscribing directly.
The Prism
Written by Gurwinder, a British-Indian author whose work has been featured in The Free Press, Areo, Quillette, The Humanist, and The Sunday Express, and previously featured in our spotlight, “Time Theft”.
“the brain is commonly regarded as a thinking machine, but it’s more often the opposite: a machine that tries to circumvent thinking. This is because cognition costs time and calories, which in our evolutionary history were scant resources.
As such, the brain evolved to be a “cognitive miser” that operates according to the principle of least effort, taking shortcuts in thinking and perceiving that build a workable but hugely simplified (and cost effective) model of the world.”
Experimental History
Written by Adam Mastroianni, an experimental psychologist with a PhD from Harvard, with publications in The New York Times and The Atlantic, and covered by many top blogs and publications, previously featured in our spotlight, “Complexity”.
“The hot new theory online is that reading is kaput, and therefore civilization is too. The rise of hyper-addictive digital technologies has shattered our attention spans and extinguished our taste for text. Books are disappearing from our culture, and so are our capacities for complex and rational thought. We are careening toward a post-literate society, where myth, intuition, and emotion replace logic, evidence, and science. Nobody needs to bomb us back to the Stone Age; we have decided to walk there ourselves.”
New Science
Written by New Science, a research nonprofit dedicated to advancing basic science, examining how scientific research works in practice by profiling the people, tools, and institutions shaping the future of life science, with the below piece written by Roger’s Bacon, co-founder and head editor of Seeds of Science, a journal dedicated to nurturing independent, exploratory thought at the frontiers and fringes of science.
“Selection improves the average fitness of a population, but drains it of diversity and limits its potential for future adaptation. Mutation increases diversity, but lowers the average fitness of the population.
Like mutation, aesthetics are diversifying and generative, but generally harmful to clarity and concision. And like selection, restrictions on style and format may improve the average quality of our writing, but at the cost of creative potential.”
Are you writing on Substack? You can easily set up automatic cross-posting with Aemula to instantly:
Increase your earnings
Expand your audience
Verifiably own your work
Plus, you will have opportunities to access community resources and grants to support the content you want to create!
Link your Substack to your Aemula account using this link or reach out to writers@aemula.com to get started!
No cost, no obligations, and you can stop at any time.
If you want to support any of the writers we spotlight in our Substack, we highly encourage you to subscribe to their individual publications.
If you want to support independent journalism more broadly, create an account on the Aemula platform.
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Any writers you want to see featured here? Send them our way! We are always searching for great new publications.
