June 14, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
18:18
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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| Hey everybody! | |
| Come on in here. | |
| If you're in early, you're gonna see my evil villain reveal. | |
| Are you ready? It goes like this. | |
| Pretend you didn't see me just now, okay? | |
| Hold on, hold on, hold on. | |
| Good morning. | |
| So, I'm a little bit gel-agged, but we're going to be talking about a couple of things today. | |
| including placebos and the placebo effect. | |
| And I'd like to drink a glass of nothing. | |
| To the placebo effect, if you have a beverage, you could drink it at the same time. | |
| It would be the simultaneous asynchronous sip. | |
| First time ever. | |
| Now, I have the placebo. | |
| If you have the real thing, let's drink. | |
| Now, I don't know how good your real coffee was or real beverage. | |
| But the placebo? Delicious. | |
| I think it's doing the trick. We'll talk more about the placebo in a moment. | |
| So I just tweeted an article from CNN. In which CNN did its classic thing where it starts by assuming that the president is a racist and then goes on to write an article about all the ways he's making the country worse and people should be happy because the economy is good, etc. But they're not. | |
| And they blame the president for the divisive feeling in the country. | |
| And I looked at their examples and sure enough it's a list of fake news. | |
| So they've created such a body of work of fake news that they can pull out three random ones to prove that the president is a racist no matter what context they're talking about. | |
| But because we were having the conversation today About the National Anthem and the NFL and who's invited and uninvited to the White House. | |
| One of the examples in the article on CNN was that he called the NFL kneelers sons of bitches. | |
| And that's often used as an example of why he's a racist. | |
| And I thought to myself, Really? | |
| Is that what you hear when he swears at somebody? | |
| Because I'm pretty sure he was mean to Rand Paul. | |
| I think he was pretty mean to Marco Rubio. | |
| I was reading one of your comments and it made me laugh. | |
| The answer is no, whoever asked that question, that non-judgmental question. | |
| So, there's such a game of whack-a-mole going on at CNN that the moment you say, oh no, that's not a real one. | |
| They use the NFL's or sons of bitches. | |
| Which, I'm not sure how you get a racial thing out of that. | |
| Because the people he was talking about were going to be something. | |
| He was just doing his thing and supporting America. | |
| So that's part of the two movies on one screen. | |
| Other people will see it the other way, as you know. | |
| Now, I want to talk about this book. | |
| I was just reading on the plane. | |
| By Wayne Jonas, MD. He was an MD and a researcher. | |
| Did a lot of research testing various medications and practices to do controlled studies and that sort of thing. | |
| Now what's interesting about this book, and I've only read part of it but I already recommend it, is We all know about the placebo effect, right? | |
| So everybody who's smart enough to get on the computer and watch me on Periscope knows what that is. | |
| But didn't you think that the placebo effect was something like 30%, you know? | |
| It's like, yeah, you'll even get a gain with the placebo, but it's not going to be as good as a real drug. | |
| Well, it turns out that if you do larger and larger and better controlled studies, that difference almost disappears. | |
| And who does the initial studies for anything? | |
| It's usually the drug companies, right? | |
| So when you get placebo here and drug here, In many cases, I don't know what percentage of the cases, but enough to make a topic in a book, when you do better and better tests, you find that the real drug is, well, if you really control for everything, it's pretty close. | |
| And sometimes the real drug will have a side effect that the placebo obviously doesn't. | |
| And so it's just the worst choice, and the placebo can be that strong. | |
| Now what's interesting about this book, and I won't give away the full plot, let me just give you an idea of why it's interesting. | |
| If it were just about, hey, there's something called the placebo effect, that wouldn't be interesting at all, because we already know that. | |
| But he takes it to the next level to figure out what is it about this placebo effect? | |
| What elements do you need to have in order for it to come into play? | |
| What makes it stronger or weaker? | |
| And it was a fascinating approach for a medical doctor and a scientist because he was taking the holistic view of whatever it is that makes you better We're not going to rule anything out. | |
| So if there's some way you can harness this or understand it better, the placebo effect, well, maybe that's useful. | |
| And his conclusion was that, and let me give you the best example. | |
| Well, I'll give you the example after. | |
| His conclusion was that to get the good placebo effect, you needed a combination of the person doing a routine, such as taking a pill or getting an injection, so that there was something about it that was sort of built into their habit, for a while anyway. | |
| So that seemed to be a factor to help the placebo effect, to routinize whatever it was that was causing the effect. | |
| The other was to have family and loved ones being involved somehow, either around you or to at least put you in a good social family situation. | |
| So if you were the subject of other people liking you and giving you attention and hoping for the best, that that was also correlated. | |
| But then there was this far more interesting one. | |
| Which is that the placebos are different in different cultures because the culture brings with it its own expectations. | |
| So for example, if you're in China, your expectation of acupuncture might be, oh yeah, that works almost every time. | |
| And so the placebo effect would also be larger. | |
| And here's the thing you have to understand. | |
| It wouldn't matter if the individual was a doubter That's the weird part. | |
| It's not even about your own mind saying, yeah, this acupuncture is going to work. | |
| It makes a difference if you live in a society where, wait for it, other people expect it to work. | |
| Now, who knows if these conclusions in this book would also survive future studies and replication, and who knows if people would have other interpretations. | |
| But it was fascinating to see a pretty well thought out set of descriptions for why this placebo effect happens. | |
| But as I was reading it, I thought to myself, you know, there's another explanation. | |
| And it's compatible with everything you know about persuasion and everything I talk about affirmations and everything I've talked about that maybe were a simulation. | |
| And you can kind of get to the same point. | |
| So imagine, if you will, that you're a person who's a candidate for a study of a new drug. | |
| If you're a candidate for the drug, that means a couple things. | |
| One, you have a problem. | |
| And whatever other remedies there are don't work for you. | |
| So you're starting with people who are specially chosen because they have no remedies. | |
| Why aren't I in California voting today? | |
| Why don't I vote at all? | |
| So here's what I'm getting at. | |
| If it's true that society has an impact on the placebo effect, Could it be that reality, according to the physicists, is being created because we observe it? | |
| In other words, are we creating our reality through observing and expecting a good outcome? | |
| If you're a person who's been selected for a study, you've got a problem and no solution. | |
| And what were you thinking and what was everybody else thinking about your situation up until the point you got into the study? | |
| Well, you were thinking there was no other solution, because otherwise you wouldn't get in the study for the most part. | |
| So you were thinking about, wait for it, the problem. | |
| So before you got in the study, your entire mental process was focused on the problem. | |
| Everything I've taught you about persuasion is that people steer toward the thing they're thinking about, even if they don't want to. | |
| So as you focus on the problem, And other people, maybe if society also has an impact, they're also creating a reality where the problem is magnified because everybody's focusing on it, making it real. | |
| But now you get into the study, and suddenly you're focusing on your routine. | |
| Oh, I go in once a week. | |
| I get a shot. I take a pill, whatever it is. | |
| You meet other people. | |
| They're talking about they're also in the study. | |
| You tell your friends. | |
| Your friends ask you how the study is. | |
| They hope it's working. You talk about whether you think it's working. | |
| So very much like affirmations, the mere focus on your objective may be the only thing that makes a difference. | |
| So it might not be that you believe it works. | |
| This is where I'm departing from, normal thought. | |
| And this is just speculating, right? | |
| This is just for fun. | |
| It could be, if it's like everything else we know about humans, merely concentrating on a thing draws you closer to it and sort of paves your reality. | |
| We know it in physics. Things don't really exist at the tiny level until you observe them. | |
| It's weird, but it's true, according to scientists. | |
| And we see lots of people who seem to be able to steer toward good things by thinking positively, and people who have bad frames of mind who steer toward bad things because they think of it. | |
| Now, one of the reasons I think about this is that I had a surgery to correct my voice, and it was thought to be an incurable problem called spasmodic dysphonia. | |
| So I couldn't speak for three and a half years, and I was told that it was incurable. | |
| And so all I thought about was my problem. | |
| And then I saw a doctor who said he had a surgery that could fix it, and I talked to people he had done surgery on, and sure enough, their voices were good. | |
| So it was kind of newish and still in the advanced experimental stage, so it was a little bit risky to get involved, but I had the surgery and I recovered. | |
| That's why you hear me now. | |
| And I always asked him, why, if they knew that this problem was apparently a brain problem, there's some kind of misfire in the brain, but his surgery was just on the nerves in my neck, in really just the exterior of my neck, not even interior to the vocal cords. | |
| And I asked him, how in the world did you know that would work? | |
| And he said, well, it's the sum of my knowledge in the field, and it was sort of an inspired guess. | |
| I'm paraphrasing, but it was something like that. | |
| And now I wonder if it's because the surgery was such a, and also this is another factor that Dr. | |
| Jonas talks about in this book, How Healing Works, that a small amount of trauma In the service of trying to fix somebody might actually serve to reboot your body and to just get it back into a healthier mode to fight off something on its own. | |
| So the surgery was a trauma. | |
| During that time, all I thought about was, man, this is going to work. | |
| I feel good about this. | |
| I've got a cure now. | |
| For two months solid, I couldn't think of anything except how I was going to be able to speak as soon as I healed, because it takes a few months before you can actually talk. | |
| So on one level, I went from having a problem to having a surgery, and the normal way to look at that is, well, he had a surgery, he fixed it. | |
| But there's so many examples in this book where even a surgery... | |
| Doesn't fix, let's say, back pain as well as the placebo effect. | |
| So there's actually plenty of evidence that things that even can be cured by surgery, and I'm not talking about every problem here. | |
| I'm not talking about magic. | |
| We're not talking about curing cancer and healing broken bones and stuff like that. | |
| Nothing magic. But there's a whole category of things that are in that gray area where I think this surgery will fix you, fixes some people, or take this pill, it works for some people, I think, a little bit better than the placebo, we're not sure. | |
| So within that category, we may be completely misinterpreting what's going on. | |
| So it's just a thought that maybe it's a generalized fact, And maybe a feature that we're in our simulation and that the way we steer our player in the simulation is by focus. | |
| And the things we think about are the things that we move toward. | |
| So imagine yourself in a simulation. | |
| You're an artificial being in a three-dimensional simulated world created by, who knows, maybe yourself before you died. | |
| You created a simulation. | |
| But whatever. Just imagine focusing on where you want the simulation to go and see if it makes a difference. | |
| Now I've referred to that as affirmations, which is just the process of focusing on a specific task and writing it down every day. | |
| But what this book talks about is how a routine that focuses you on something can get you the placebo effect in many cases. | |
| So a routine might get you there. | |
| Changing your expectation from, I don't know how to fix this, to I'm doing something that might fix it. | |
| Even if that something you're doing is completely unscientific, apparently it doesn't matter if you think it's astrology or anything else, as long as it's not hurting you, and as long as you don't have a better system, you can actually sort of generate the placebo effect on your own. | |
| So, yes, somebody said the power of prayer. | |
| So whether or not there is an Almighty God, the power of prayer should, if any of this is true, speculation and just a different way to look at the world. | |
| Focusing might be how you steer in the simulation. | |
| Did I write the placebo scene in the Dilbert animation? | |
| I don't remember that one. | |
| I might have. | |
| It sounds like something I would have done. | |
| All right. | |
| There's an "I" up here, isn't there? | |
| Show us hypnosis. | |
| I can't really do that on video very well. | |
| Is there a God in your simulation? | |
| Well, if each of us can steer the simulation, that would make each of us godlike with a small g, I guess. | |
| All right. I think we're done for today. | |
| And I hope you enjoyed your Placebo beverage. | |
| I'm going to have another sip of the placebo. | |
| And you know what I know about this? | |
| If I drink this, it's going to mean I'm going to have a great day today. | |
| You too, probably. So just think about that every time you have a sip of your morning beverage. | |
| Hey, this means I'm going to have a great day. | |
| Because maybe you will. Mmm. | |
| That's good placebo. Alright. |
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