There are two conflicting pieces of advice that drive me crazy on a regular basis.

1. The “trust your intuition,” “go with your gut” crowd that says you should always heed your instincts as if we have magic intestines.
2. The “feel the fear and do it anyway,” “push harder than you want,” and “don’t let your fear limit you” crowd.

Of course, the answer is both. As with all pieces of advice, context really matters.

The problem?

IF WE PICK WRONG, IT CAN GO SPECTACULARLY WRONG

In both directions. Of course, those are the people who consistently take no risks or consistently take all of the risks, but the rest of us are just a messy combination of playing it way too safe and then practically killing ourselves.

Sometimes you do exactly right and still get hurt. To quote Jean Luc Picard, or at least an anonymous Star Trek screenwriter: “It’s possible to make no mistakes and still love.”

You listen to your gut and your gut is just plain wrong. You play it safe and miss the perfect opportunity. You take a huge risk and reap the consequence. So it’s not like the tips in the rest of this newsletter or foolproof and if you just do this you’re not gonna get hurt and you’re not gonna miss out. Both of those things will still happen, but maybe a LITTLE less often

OTHER PEOPLE SEVERELY SCREW UP YOUR RADAR IF YOU LET THEM.

We are herd animals. Many of our instincts are about getting along with the herd, which means we are much more likely to disregard our own gut when we’re trying to fit into the group.

You are most likely to disregard your gut for other people.

If you’re risking everything for somebody else, even though that feels really noble, pay real close attention. Part of our instincts includes overriding our own instincts in order to follow the herd, particularly the most powerful members of the herd.

You’re most likely to play it safe for fear of other people.

The corollary is you could be avoiding risk because you’re afraid of people who aren’t in your group. Be wary of that, because again we are built to be afraid of them. Whoever your particular them is.

“Us” are never so noble as we think and “them” are never so scary.

ABSENT INFORMATION, EVEN YOUR GUT IS GUESSING.

One of my favorite books on earth is The Gift of Fear by Gabin de Becker who talks about how our brains can make super-fast judgments about situations that keep us safe.

But what often gets left out of most conversations is that you have to feed your brain data in order to make a call.

It isn’t intuition, so much as lightning-fast evaluation. If you don’t have all the facts. It’s not gonna work.

How many people make moves or take jobs without ever speaking to someone at the company or in that role or living in that town? If you’re having a strong gut feeling about something, ask yourself how much you know about your decision. The less you know, the less you can trust that gut feeling.

AT THE SAME TIME, YOU’LL NEVER KNOW EVERYTHING.

While you can’t fly completely blind, you will also never have enough data. The analysis paralysis of researching until you know when you’re never going to work. It can help to make a time limit: either a certain amount of days or sources, or whatever, and after you’ve learned them, you call it.

Will any of these protect you from disaster? Nothing protects you from disaster. But hopefully, it will protect you a little bit from regret, both for taking a risk or passing up an opportunity.

At least you can tell yourself you have decided how to make a decision.

The post How to Go With Your Gut and Push Your Limits. Magically at the Same Time. first appeared on Postcards from Pluto.

It was near the end of the semester, and we were in the 80s and the Fall of the Berlin Wall. The teacher was very proud of the fact that he had a piece of it which he brought like show and tell.

As he passed an unremarkable bit of cement from hand to hand, he said the most incorrect statement I have ever heard in my entire life about anything ever.

“The fall of the Berlin wall was the most significant historical event to happen within my lifetime. Probably within yours as well.”

REMEMBER THE OPTIMISM?

If you are too young to remember the 90s, or heaven forbid, you weren’t even born in the 90s, there was a real sense of optimism.

Yes, the Dot Com crash kind of wrecked the economy for a hot second. And yes Y2K and the turn of the new millennium potentially would’ve wrecked all our computers, but that was a false alarm. Yes, we just elected a president that had lost the popular vote and probably also lost the electoral college but we didn’t actually count all the votes. And yes being gay was still illegal in a lot of states. And being any kind of minority might as well have been illegal in a lot of states.

But we didn’t have the kind of hyper-connected social media saturated world, so we were still getting the official version of history, which was very optimistic.

REMEMBER WHAT HAPPENED NEXT?

The infamous Berlin Wall comment was made in May of 2001. Remember what happened in September?

At the time of his statement, I smiled and nodded and genuinely believed him, because again, I was still used to smiling and nodding and believing Authority figures about their take on the world.

There were very few places to learn anything to the contrary. The internet was still the Internet Movie Database, some janky chat rooms, amateur sites about extremely niche passion topics, and a bunch of businesses putting up one-page websites with a phone number to call if you wanted to conduct any actual business.

As I watched the two towers fall, the first thing that popped into my head was his declaration.

And then we declared war on a country where Osama bin Laden wasn’t. And I thought of that teacher and the Berlin wall. But that country did have nuclear weapons. Except they didn’t. And I thought of that teacher and the Berlin wall.

Every time something historic happens in the ever-increasing avalanche of events that change everything, from elections to pandemics to electronics, I hear his voice in my head.

HISTORY WILL NEVER BE OVER

That throwaway comment is probably the single thing I think about the most from all of my education.

It’s helped me mostly avoid giant pronouncements, I hope. But it also helped me speak a little more freely as well.

Because we’re going to get this wrong. We don’t know what happens next. We can extrapolate. But how many trendlines are going off the rails? The world looks nothing like it did. It’s not a logical progression.

WHAT WILL THE TRULY MOST SIGNIFICANT EVENT BE?

It also has me wondering what really will be the most significant historical event in my lifetime.

I don’t think any of us alive today are going to know. When we look back at history the moments that truly change everything can seem so insignificant.

Hitler is elected chancellor instead of drummed out of town. A dude named Watts figures out a more efficient steam engine and launches the Anthropocene age and the industrial revolution. A super cold winter froze the Rhine, allowing Germanic tribes to bypass the usual Roman defenses keeping them north and destroyed the Roman Empire.

The moments of significance are never once we think they are.

What is the worst take you’ve ever heard on a subject? Let me know!

The post The Worst Prediction in the History of Educating People first appeared on Postcards from Pluto.

“Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense. But the real universe is always one step beyond logic.” ― Frank Herbert, Dune

I listened on audiobook to all of the Dune books written by Frank Herbert. (There are over 30 now completed by his son Brian after his death, but I had to draw a line in the sand somewhere!)

WHAT DID I LEARN? WHAT DID I NOTICE? WAS IT WORTH IT?

WARNING: SPOILERS FOLLOW

Herbert started the first book, Dune, in 1959 (published in ’65) and published the last book Chapterhouse: Dune, in 1985. Those were pretty important decades in our history, and the change from the unrest and idealism of the 60s to the stability and disillusionment of the 80s drenches the text.

WHO WAS FRANK?

During my English major, we always debated how much of the author you could really find in a work of fiction. And whether it was useful or appropriate to play a game of Author Gotcha as literary critique.

So now I’m going to do just that…

Because this was by far my most shocking takeaway. Dune, like Lord of the Rings, is historical fiction now.

This old article from NK Jemison has the best take on Lord of the Rings, I think. Tolkien was progressive for his time, which matters! But given that he was a man of his time, he still seems pretty racist to us.

Which to me means: don’t cancel Tolkien or his work based on today’s morality. But definitely cancel anyone wanting to use Tolkien’s morality today. In other words: more fantasy characters for everyone!

Like Tolkien, Herbert’s beliefs and morals and those of the original readers are so changed from now that they are becoming inscrutable.

He was officially conservative in life, but his death was over 20 years ago, and his birth was over 100 years ago, and that kind of conservative doesn’t exist anymore. And we’re so much more than our political party, but it’s a useful shorthand for a drastically different worldview.

The morals of these made-up people and the critiques of government, ecology, religion, sex, gender, and sexuality else do not feel current anymore. Not any less genius or fun to read or important in the canon of Science Fiction! But they are a social commentary on a world that’s gone. And it’s completely fascinating.

HOW IT STARTED: 1959

MASTERY OF MIND AND BODY = MASTERY OF THE WORLD. AT FIRST.

The fifties and sixties saw an explosion of hippies and Eastern practices become The Way to deal with the suffering of modern life. It’s very much apparent in the first few books how deeply that interested Herbert.

One of the central myths: we can train ourselves out of our weaknesses. That’s the joy of fiction, in Dune, they succeed!

His Mentats (human computers) train their minds. Sardaukar, Fremen, Fish Speakers, and other warriors train their bodies. And Bene Gesserit (warrior concubines) do all of the above (mind, body, and especially, sex.) You see what I mean about the ’60s?

GOVERNMENT SUCKS

All of these were basically monkish disciplines to get better and overcome the horrors and slovenliness of the fat bureaucrats through personal asceticism at a time with inflation and stagnation and unrest were sweeping the world.

The fight between the slovenly, enslaving aristocrats and the noble Atreides is the main plot of the first books.

In Dune, power doesn’t just corrupt, it makes you fat. (And sometimes a pedophile…)

RELIGION SUCKS MORE

All throughout the books, there’s a deep antipathy towards religion. The concubines seed worlds with Messiah narratives so that later any disciple who needs to can “fulfill” a prophecy they themselves have foretold in order to be treated well. The later books are basically the evolution of Atreides from Messiah to Tyrant. And over and over again priests and prophets get mowed down for their faith.

Believing in anything except your own physical and mental discipline is a really, really bad idea in Dune.

PLANTS MATTER

How do you get oxygen on a world without plants? (Answer: you can’t, they just live deep below the desert!) It was genius at a time right after Rachel Carsen’s Silent Spring launched the modern environmental movement. The evolution of Dune from desert to water was, and very much in line with the ’70s environmental consciousness.

ESPECIALLY IF YOU SMOKE THE PLANTS

This first book obviously was also very concerned with Spice and the supernatural powers that drugs give you, which are, again, huge themes of the time!

HOW IT ENDED: 1985

Fast forward to the last book, published 25 years later, and though it’s about the same universe, the stakes change completely.

MASTERY FADES IN FAVOR OF POWER

The warrior monks continue to have supernatural powers. Still, we spend most of the time watching them jockey for political power as they use their mastery to maintain their positions. And the horrors of personal power just… go away. The main bad guys of the first book die out in favor of the supposed good guys acting A LOT like them.

This is justified because if they didn’t, all of humanity would perish. PERISH, I tell you! A journey we took as a world, not just in Dune.

PLANTS DON’T MATTER ANYMORE

(Especially big spoiler alert!)

The books end with Dune destroyed and a worm on a new planet making new spice. Which is… kind of the thing they were all trying and failing to do for most of human history and the central problem of the first books? Dune has a monopoly on spice that controls everything about the universe. And it’s suddenly done! How? I don’t know. They just do it. Ecology clearly faded from importance.

BUT IMMIGRANTS DO MATTER!

The ecology is all but ignored in favor of a panic about immigrants who have the warrior monk’s power, but none of their integrity, and so are wrecking everything as they come in from the scattering of humanity speaking a weird form of Spanish and are evil because… Yeah, that’s also never clear. And also indicative of the times.

DRUGS ARE BAD NOW

Spice’s evolution is fascinating! It’s necessary for interstellar travel, but they figure that out with the technology they used to hate more than anything. But it’s suddenly better than spice! People still use it, but hide their glowing blue eyes and become ashamed of their addiction. Sound like the ’80s?

GOVERNMENT AND RELIGION STILL SUCK

Governments get more and more corrupt and religion gets more and more gullible as the books go on. This is one thing that doesn’t change throughout all the books.

“Liberal bigots are the ones who trouble me most. I distrust the extremes. Scratch a conservative and you find someone who prefers the past over any future. Scratch a liberal and find a closet aristocrat.”  ― Frank Herbert, God Emperor of Dune

HOW IT’S GOING

THINGS I LOVED

I appreciate how the success of the book allowed him to really play as the series went on. The first novel was a fairly standard hero’s journey welded onto a Shakespearean family tragedy. By the last book, the story had taken fifty different turns exploring sex, youth, history, cloning, space travel, and so much more. 

I also loved that for all its epic scale, it stayed intimate on a few characters, still focused around an Atreides. And I also loved on the timescale that went on for thousands and thousands of years. It was clear he had a lot of fun imagining the implications of a Messiah figure ten or twenty generations down the line.

THINGS I COULD HAVE DONE WITHOUT

The central message, if there is such a thing, is that if you do not control humanity, humanity will die out. Even though, it seems to me, through the control, all of the fun parts of humanity have died out in the process, what exactly is worth saving at the end of the process?

That and the outdated gender roles and homophobia and stereotyping and the dominance and illiberalism were surprising. I feel like people see the hippie stand-ins in the first book and take them for radicals, but they are completely not. At all.

But again, that became more swallowable as I related to this as historical fiction. Important not in spite of those flaws but because of them. 

WAS IT WORTH IT?

I enjoyed them all. The world is fascinating.  The characters were bizarre and relatable. Race relations and gender relations were hard to stomach sometimes and were bloody brilliant at other times. This is seminal science fiction. It’s an important part of our canon and it’s also an amazing snapshot of this moment in time in our culture change from the 50s to the 80s. Dune is historical fiction now. Who would have thought?

So yes, 98 hours later – more than worth it.

The post Do Judge Authors by Their Time? Dune, Tolkien, and Outrage first appeared on Postcards from Pluto.

Do you remember learning about the placebo effect? 

I remember a few references to it in high school biology, and a few jokes about it in various TV shows, but it just seems to be one of those concepts you learn by osmosis and never question.

But it is insane!

IT’S GETTING STRONGER

We have powerful drugs to change our brain chemistry, how our guts work, and how our immune systems heal, and we must very carefully design studies to account for the fact that none of them measure up to the power of eating a sugar pill that you’re told might make you better.

And even then, sometimes the effect that you think is the drug turns out to also be placebo. Sedatives are less effective if the pill is red or yellow and more effective if they’re green or blue. Was it the drug or the color?

Not only that, but the placebo effect is getting stronger. The more time goes on, the harder it is to get an efficacious drug passed because every drug we have is measured not against a baseline of people taking nothing, but against people spontaneously improving by believing they can. (If that is indeed the effect that’s happening. More on that in a second.)

Then it gets even weirder because there’s another study that shows the effect works even if people know it’s the placebo effect. You can give someone sugar pills, tell them it’s sugar, and they will still see an improvement.

IT WORKS IN REVERSE

Then there’s its terrible opposite, nocebo, where people can cancel out the effects of extremely powerful medication if they truly believe it’s not going to work. Worse, they can give themselves side effects like nausea and fatigue if they expect to experience them.

It’s not just drugs. You can get drunk by believing in alcohol. There are studies that show most feelings of intoxication may be placebo, just for fun; If you expect to get drunk, you can get there on juice if you think it’s alcohol. (Though your level of impairment remains objective.)

This brings me to the dangerous part of believing anything.

PLACEBO IS NOT A LACK – IT IS THE PRESENCE OF STORY

I’m not a medical doctor, I’m an English major. My interest is not scientific, but story. Two researchers, Jones and Moermon call the placebo effect a myth, and suggest we rename it the “meaning effect.”

AN ACTUAL TREATMENT?

This is fascinating to think about: placebo is not fooling ourselves with the lack of real treatment, but an actual legitimate treatment made of story, specifically a new setting, a ritual, and perhaps a trusted leader. It’s just another treatment, with its efficacy, limits, advantages, and disadvantages like any other.

Moermon goes on to say that calling it the meaning effect is “to make it more evident that our physiology was responding to the context and rituals that imbued meaning to a treatment rather than to a substance, inert or otherwise.”

WE CAN’T PLACEBO OURSELVES

Why do we need the story, the ritual, or a leader at all? If our beliefs affect our illness, why can’t we just change our minds ourselves?

Dr. Laurence Sugarman, MD asks this question: how can it be an advantage, evolutionarily speaking, to believe that we are not in control of our own minds? That other people can fix us? When did that start?

WILLING TO BE INFLUENCED

Sugarman is a clinical hypnotist, who calls hypnotism an ethical use of placebo. He says, “Hypnosis is not about the trance, it is about willing to be influenced by the other person.” 

Even the people who supposedly are using placebos on themselves are using other people’s remedies, rituals, or ideas. So there is still influence from someone else.

PART OF OUR STRESS RESPONSE?

We are herd animals. There’s increasing evidence that when something upsets us, before flight or fight, we tend and befriend. We look around to higher-powered members of our groups and family, and if they are not upset, our own biology calms.

In many circumstances, we believe the herd over ourselves. It may be this simple: in a herd, the ability to influence and even control other members of the herd so everybody goes in the same direction whether some of them want to or not may be the smallest seed that has blossomed into the full-blown placebo effect. You can convince someone of almost anything if you surround them with enough authority and caring.

SIMPLE SURVIVAL

We don’t trust our own minds, but we do trust someone with the trappings of authority because, in our ancient past, it was basic survival. “We’re all running this way! Oops, it’s a cliff. Sorry!”  

This may also be the basis for most life coaching, self-improvement books, and seminars. We need ritual, belief, and caring from another person to calm us down and allow us to take a risk.

Take away the pageantry and our own loyalty, and our bravery disappears. One lone human telling themself it’s going to be okay is not reassuring. Even one lone human telling themself that in similar situations other people were okay will work better.

IT’S THE RELATIONSHIP

In mental health, we are beginning to acknowledge that the relationship between caregiver and patient is the primary thing that helps people.

Even supposedly “objective” therapies like Cognitive Behavioral Therapy are failing the test of objectivity. It turns out it may just be the relationship with a good clinician that people need, and the belief that it will work.

Ditto AA, where researchers have tried to figure out what in the 12 steps is efficacious, and couldn’t find anything either way. It turns out that the main differentiator between success and failure may be that it works for the people who believe it will, and it doesn’t work for those who don’t believe in it. 

UNTIL IT DOESN’T WORK

There are so many stories of people believing in unproven, often New Age treatments or faith healing that are probably primarily placebo (which is to say story/meaning/ritual/leader interventions). And they work because Placebo works in a lot of cases, until it doesn’t.

Joe Dispenza even called his book, “You are the Placebo,” saying perhaps the quiet part out loud. (One I did not link to deliberately, because of the people who have been harmed by the limits of placebo that he does not acknowledge in any teachings.)

There is story after story of people seriously harmed by avoiding or seeking evidenced-based treatments far too late because they sought an unproven treatment or tried to think themselves well.

WHERE ARE THE LIMITS?

Unfortunately, because we view it as a trick and not as a treatment, we haven’t really studied where the limits of ritual start and medicine begin.

Things like surgery and antibiotics are very hard to replicate by wishing. Even if that wishing is surrounded by a very convincing ritual and a charismatic healer.

(But they also all work better if you go into them believing they will.  So placebo won’t cure your infection, but will most likely increase the efficacy of the meds. Brains are SO WEIRD!)

RESPONSIBLE FOR WORLD DOMINATION!?!

There’s also increasing evidence that many cult leaders and high-demand groups use a form of the placebo effect to control their followers. Their ability to get followers to believe almost anything and change everything about their lives is a terrifying abuse of this.

Alice Grecyzn talks about this how placebo may be in effect during altered states of consciousness. Greczyn argues that our capacity for believing a story is what allowed us to dominate the earth. Because it allowed a level of cooperation heretofore unheard of.

Chimps cannot talk to each other, so they have to stay in contact. But humans can convince each other of things from across the globe. We can get on the same page about what we’re doing here and why.

We have two stories in two separate minds in two separate languages on opposite sides of the planet that allow us to still work together.

WHAT DO WE DO WITH THIS?

It’s not like we can suddenly kill off all belief, nor would we want to! And it’s not like this article settles the question. My deep dive into this phenomenon has left me with a hundred more questions not fewer, and it seems like researchers are at a similar place.

We know that it works, can be used for positive and negative effects, works even if you know it’s a sugar pill, and that having a leader involved, a ritual, a setting, and a belief makes it work the best. And we know it’s limited.

We don’t know why it works, exactly what the limits are, why it’s getting stronger, how to control it or stop it, or what exactly it is.

SO IN CONCLUSION… KIND OF, NOT REALLY

It’s made me appreciate how cobbled together, elegant, deeply weird, and fragile personhood and the world actually is.

It’s also made me more flexible about what is under my control and what isn’t, and how powerful the herd, leaders, ritual, and belief can be in my life. And how many, many, many unethical healers, coaches, gurus, and the like take advantage of this.

It’s also made me really appreciate the drugs that have been approved because it turns out beating belief is a really, really high bar.

It’s also made me more aware of the stories I am telling and being told – not just with words, but with setting and ritual and who I am speaking to, and how I am being influenced without even realizing it.

May you find a similar awareness in this age of endless influence.

The post Placebo Effect is Responsible for World Domination?? first appeared on Postcards from Pluto.