This is one way an author can world-build a totally new civilization: you take one variable like the energy supply, change it, and see how it might affect everything from the morning coffee to marriage customs to the global economy.

But lest you think our problems would be solved with enough energy (without the downsides of torching the world), I don’t think it’s going to be that simple…

WE’VE HAD ENOUGH FOR OVER A CENTURY

According to some sources, we’ve had enough energy to feed, house, clothe, and care for every human on earth since about 1870. Yes, it came with the downside of torching the world, and no, we haven’t actually done that with our munificent bounty, but not enough energy is not our problem and hasn’t been for a while.

The problem and opportunity, and challenge, are what we build with that energy. The true constraint is taking that raw energy and building complexity with it.

WE’RE ONE OF THE ONLY PLACES IN THE UNIVERSE THIS CAN HAPPEN!

Most energy stays in its simplest form and gets flung out into space by the stars. Occasionally, endless energy will collect and squeeze together into an impossibly small space until it’s too dense to even comprehend, and you get a black hole. And very occasionally, you get a little chunk of rock that builds a layer of gas around itself where the energy hitting the surface and leaving the atmosphere is close to even. Basically, where entropy doesn’t win for a couple hundred million years.

And if you wait long enough,  weird things start to happen! Like eventually that energy self-organizes and starts breathing.

And if nothing happens to destabilize this exceptional little pocket of complexity in millions upon millions upon millions of years, it starts becoming aware of its own existence. And then it starts having existential crises, dancing on its toes, blowing into sheep’s bladder to create an instrument that can be heard two miles away, chasing balls in circles, and building other things of even more beauty and complexity.

WHEN THERE IS ENOUGH COMPLEXITY

It’s amazing. The vast majority of the universe is enjoying ever-increasing entropy: more and more chaos and less and less order until everything is far-flung and dark.  We’re one tiny little planetary exception to that rule where energy has been able to complexify for millions of years.

Which is why adding to our available energy is not going to solve all our problems.  We don’t need a bunch of energy; we need to turn that raw power into more complexity.

HOW DO WE DO THAT?

On a physiological level, we eat food, digest the food, and take the energy and the dirt and build ourselves. But even without any excess, most of our lives are spent just maintaining our own complexity. Just keeping a bit of complex intelligent life breathing takes enormous energy and work.

But some of us are extremely lucky to have a little bit extra. When we don’t have to just survive, we have kids. We write books. We build businesses. We make music. We build our bodies and see who can be the strongest and fastest. We play games.

It’s my favorite thing about humans: all the crazy complex beauty and fun we can create out of sunlight.

I think a lot about what it actually takes to do this. Yes, it takes the power that we get from food, which came from the sun via the plants we eat (or the animals that ate the plants that we eat). It also takes the stability of the ozone layer, the climate, and no giant asteroids to maintain the homeostasis that makes complexity building possible.

What else?

TIME

Growing a human takes time. Digesting food and turning it into muscle takes time. Putting one word after another on paper takes time. Teaching a kid the nuances of manners (and spoons, the alphabet, Russian disinformation campaigns, and every other insanely complicated skill we’re expected to master) takes time.  Yes, you can speed it up with an influx of more energy, but only to a certain point. Things take the time they take.

SKILL

Skill is really just neurons that can fire in a particular pattern at the right time. There’s a reason humans are capable of more complex feats of engineering than a turkey. We can shove more skills into our brains. That process also takes time and energy.

EFFORT

There’s a myth in our society that the more skill, time, and money you have, the better you should feel about life. And there’s some truth to that. Things get easier, but that’s because of the complexity you’ve already built. Building new skills, houses, books, and humans is hard and stays hard no matter how long you do it. 

We are literally patterning chaos and that is ridiculously hard to do.

CHAOS

We have less chaos here with energy constantly entering the system, but the number is not zero, and can’t ever be.  The whole of evolution came from random mutations. Chance, luck, disaster, and problems are vital to building complexity. They are two sides of the same coin, constantly melting into one another. This is the part where I say that a life you can predict would be boring. I don’t know about that. We could do with some more boring, but I will say that it won’t be very complex.

What else? Seriously?

What does it take to create something new? Because I don’t think we’re very good at it yet, nor do we understand it that well. We’re currently engaged in the madness of ever-expanding energy, even as the consequences of that are completely screwing up the air quality as we use our filters for fuel.

We need a new way to look at what we’re doing here when we can’t accumulate great excesses of stored sunlight. I actually think we’ll be better for it because then we can focus on the time, effort, and skill to manage the energy and build so many more fun things!

The post We’ve Had Enough Energy Since 1870. What Have We Done With it? first appeared on Postcards from Pluto.

Well, maybe. Someday.

It’s important to note that sustaining a tiny sun on earth may never be possible; though we said that about the energy! At the very least, this solution is decades and decades away.

If it ever happens, what does it mean? Let’s do a little world-building, shall we?

One of the most fun and important steps of writing speculative fiction is, well, speculating. Change a variable in your made-up world and play out all of the implications on money, religion, gender, power all of it.

Variable: We now get energy from fusion, not from ancient dead plants.

What does a world like that look like?

POWER INDUSTRY

I feel like this would be the least changed, ironically, since it doesn’t fundamentally change electricity. We already have the grid. We even have real estate for power plants. We just hook our existing cables to a different source. (Which, hey, we don’t have to wait to do! The same is true of all green energy too! Yay!)

TRANSPORTATION

What if you could go anywhere you wanted for the price of a car or plane? It puts a whole new spin on globalization, borders, fiancé visas, and moving for work. People will get a whole lot more mobile with a whole lot less fuss.

ECONOMICS

Here, things start to get more fun. Our insanely complex economy obscures the fact that money is energy and energy is oil. The whole of our economy would shift completely if we switched to a different fuel source. This is where fusion and green energy start to diverge because oil is old sunlight and solar is new sunlight, so there are still recognizable constraints on both.

But when we make our own sun?

Power gets cheaper, so that is one bill shrunk immediately. Food gets way cheaper. (Do you know how much oil it takes to deliver a pineapple to your average grocery store?) Building things gets way cheaper. Which means everyone everywhere gets a lot more disposable income.

This is so hard to imagine because right now, the excess is getting funneled up to a few individuals and why would it be any different with fusion?

But that is deceptive because we don’t have endless energy. In fact, energy is getting more and more expensive. Digging up oil is more expensive; rich countries have already exploited all the poor countries, and there are no new frontiers to vacuum up for money. So now we’re cannibalizing ourselves and hollowing out the middle class and pushing the poverty line down to continue the merry-go-round a little longer. But what happens when that squeeze lets up and there’s just always more energy? They can hoard as much as they want, and for the cost of a power plant, there’s more where that came from?

LABOR

If living expenses become a fraction of your salary, current monopolies become harder to maintain. The labor market gets tighter. The robot revolution takes on even more importance. Job perks become insanely more important. And work weeks would get shorter, which I know is something that has been predicted for decades, but instead, we’re all killing ourselves by enriching billionaires. But if there was no limit to energy, even billionaires can have their cake and eat it too.

ART

Everyone will have a lot more time, which means amateur art will experience a renaissance.

All of these are relatively small changes at the personal level. Professional art and sports will also improve like we can’t possibly imagine. Why? Because more people can participate, and more people will have the resources to devote to full-time study. Right now, pursuing professional athletics is a game of desperation, luck, and sacrifice. What if all those variables were two clicks easier? Even a slight change in how easy it is dramatically changes who wins.

POLITICS

The global order as we know it would be over completely. It would take a few decades, but the Middle East would fade from importance as their main export becomes useless. Oh don’t worry, we’d still compete for resources like precious metals and raw materials, but the pinch points would shift around the globe.

The talking points at home would also shift as everyone gets a little bit less desperate. What would be the selling point then in a political campaign? Perhaps the culture wars become even more important?

HEALTH

Healthcare is one of the most resource-intensive industries we have. It just takes a lot of money to keep people well. So what happens when you glut the system with energy? Hopefully, again, less desperation. More access. More resources to put towards research. More positions funded. And yes, probably more 21st-century diseases as food becomes more ubiquitous and we can get more for less, so staying active becomes even more of a choice.

MILITARY

Oh, the wars we can wage with endless energy. The weapons we can dream up. Even the fusion plants themselves can be major targets. But also, hopefully, the fewer wars we’ll feel we need to wage. We’ve waged purely ideological wars, but the majority have been over resources and if everyone has more, you take those off the table. [She says, naively. I mean, optimistically…]

TECHNOLOGY

Tech of all sorts will accelerate rapidly. Building complex machines takes a great deal of energy. If that suddenly got cheap, AI computing suddenly looks totally doable. Cloud storage that currently has to be built on literal rivers to keep them cool becomes much more feasible. New players can have access to more, more informally, to invent things much more quickly.

SPACE

Getting off the planet also becomes ridiculously easy when you strap yourself to a tiny sun. As does mitigating the inhospitableness. It’s hard for humans not to live on earth. Which means we start becoming a true space-faring civilization. Though, that literally means our little solar system. I think we forget how big the galaxy is. We’re not going that far.

ENVIRONMENTALISM

Getting off oil has been the rallying cry of the green movement for decades. Plus cleaning up climate change will take a truly insane amount of energy. I think we turn more and more to technology and geoengineering to fix it instead of behavior change, and we deal with a host of unintended consequences. I mean, we’ll still be the short-sighted, reactive species we are now. Free energy won’t change our ability to screw up our main safe haven, but at least we won’t be actively setting more of it on fire anymore.

EDUCATION

This is another resource-intensive project that will hopefully get easier and more ubiquitous every decade, especially worldwide. Raising kids in general takes an insane amount of energy.

INTENSITY

The last way to think about this is not what exactly is changing but how much. There is a plausible scenario where a new energy source plugs into our existing extractive capitalism. Billionaires become trillionaires, and the world order pretty much stays the same.

On the opposite end: if everyone truly, madly, deeply has enough energy to live and to move, the concept of a nation-state as we know it dissolves and we become a truly globalized society where you can be employed anywhere by anyone and the world looks NOTHING like it does today.

WHAT’S YOUR GUESS?

Is this what’s Going To Happen? Some of it, yes, and some of it, no. That’s the difference between telling a story and trying to foretell the future. These are just some of the different ways to think about how changing things change other things.

Do you agree? Disagree? It’s within the realm of possibility that this could happen. Okay, very far from now and still more unlikely than likely, but it’s within the realm of possibility!

Is it the start of a grand utopia on earth?

No, we’re far too competitive, violent, and short-sighted ever to achieve that. But will life get just a little bit easier? Absolutely. When you have enough energy, you get more time and have to spend less of it surviving, which makes it just a little more pleasant.

Everyone will hopefully be just a little less tired and a little less desperate. Tourism, arts, entertainment, and sports will loom larger in people’s imagination as the basics get cheaper. Global society will develop as moving becomes easy. The geopolitical order will shift completely and rearrange around the new mineral and raw material bottlenecks, not oil. And we’ll find ways to muck up the climate some other way and compete and kill each other for new reasons.

The post How to World Build a New Future with Endless Energy first appeared on Postcards from Pluto.

SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY ARE ALWAYS ABOUT NOW

Whether authors intend it or not, speculative fiction is always a commentary on the present. Ironically, often more than a lot of contemporary fiction.

One of my favorite short stories by Asimov, and I wish I could find it again, had miners working in space with essentially, nanotechnology. But the conflict of the story was about women working in the mines, which was eventually solved with a priest. Women in the mines turned out to be fine, so long as there was somebody there to marry everybody! This is what I’m talking about. Successfully predicted nanotechnology, but thousands of years from now, everyone will act like it’s the 1950s…

Frank Herbert was particularly topical, whether he intended to be or not. He anchored Dune in politics, government, religion, power and those evolved to match the world from the 50s to the 80s.

So I did a little thought experiment. Here’s how I think Dune would have been different if Frank Herbert had been writing in 2020.

METOO COMES TO DUNE

The Bene Gesserit warrior concubines of the Dune universe had a lot of conflict in 98 hours, but questioning the ethics of their sacrifice wasn’t one of them.

Things like consent and bodily autonomy in and gaining power through sex with powerful men would all have been fascinating themes to explore if it was being written now. There’s a lot of conflict within the Bene Gesserit, but not one woman refused their assignment as they definitely would have now!

SECRET SOCIETIES WOULD HAVE NOT SO SECRET SCANDALS

Sex would rear its ugly head again in the other warrior disciplines. Most of the eastern contemplative communities to spring up in the 60s that were aped so favorably in Dune have almost universally been rocked by sexual scandals. Yoga, Buddhism, martial arts, the New Age. You name it and someone’s got caught doing something with somebody and the shine is definitely off.

GOVERNMENT WOULD STILL SUCK

Dune started as an empire and ended as a broken empire. At no part, did anyone get any more rights. And unfortunately, I don’t think this would have changed in 2020. If anything, his prophecies about tyrants seem only more and more accurate as time goes on.

PEOPLE WILL WORSHIP ANYTHING NOW

The deep antipathy towards religion in Dune I don’t think we have changed in 2020, but I do think it would have spread beyond just the official religions of Dune.

In 2020 with a wellspring of cult research and cult-like groups have greatly expanded our definition of religion.

We have wellness, political, beauty, and diet cults now. And sometimes we have diet cults that morph into political cults or vice versa. They all have the trappings of high demand group with fervent followers, but with none of the traditional religious expression. It’s a fascinating phenomenon. These days, religion does not stay its lane and it wouldn’t in Dune either.

PLANTS MATTER…MORE THAN EVER

People read climate change into Dune, which I don’t think was the case when he wrote it in the 60s. Yes, the environmental movement was just getting its start, but the focus really was on getting noxious chemicals out of our air and water and food supply.

Did people know about climate change? Yes! People have known about climate change for centuries! But it wasn’t a part of the national consciousness.

If you were written today, I think it would have been more of a critique or a metaphor for climate change. The desiccated planet as metaphor is just too perfect.

DRUGS ARE A HEALTH PROBLEM!

Drugs (Spice) probably changed the most in the book from this amazing thing that granted everybody powers to a kind of shameful addictive weakness.

Today, it’s morphing, (rightly!), into a medical problem with a raft of failed policies behind it. So perhaps that same tension between the realm of criminal and the realm of health would infect Dune.

What story do you think would change if it was written now?

The post The Future is Now… In Fiction first appeared on Postcards from Pluto.

I talk a lot in this newsletter about how to dismantle your assumptions and beliefs and question the water that you swim in. But equally important, if not more important, is the ability to get new and better ideas once you’ve done that.

One of humanity’s main tools for seeing things differently is the scientific method. Don’t click away! I know, boring, Middle School level science, but we have a massive problem. We were never really taught the first step!

WHAT WE DID LEARN IN SCHOOL?

How many tests and experiments did you run in school? How many times did you have to come up with the question, not just the answer?

I remember an upper division writing class in college. I got a C on my first paper.

Somewhat gobsmacked, I went to the Professor who informed me that I had come to a different conclusion, not the one he gave me.

I said, “Let me get this straight, you gave me the hypothesis, the evidence, and the conclusion in bullets, and you want me to turn that exact hypothesis, evidence, and conclusion into five paragraphs?” He was thrilled that I understood. I did. I got an A on the next assignment.

I did learn an important lesson that day, but I don’t think it was the one he was intending. 

A similar thing happened in science in high school, where we burned a peanut to calculate the calories. (Did anyone else have to do this?) We were given how much energy is in a peanut. My group ran the experiment and got that amount of energy.

All good… Until we got to the part of the proof about how our answer could be wrong.

My teacher suggested that maybe we screwed up the assignment and then screwed it up again in a way that corrected the first screw-up so we reached the correct number.

I asked if maybe we could burn an almond instead. He looked at me like I was crazy. I said that maybe I want to know how many calories are in an almond since everyone has already done peanuts. He said the calorie count is on the bag. I said, Why am I here? 

You can see the fruits of this kind of education in businesses the world over. The training with no obvious outcome. The products no one wants. The busy work! Dear god, the busy work. All avoided by asking the question: what is the question? What problem are we trying to solve?

OUR EDUCATION TEACHES US WE’RE IN A KIND WORLD WHEN WE AREN’T.

I mean something very specific when I say kind. This idea comes from a fabulous book called Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialist World, by David Epstein.

A kind world is a closed system, much less complex than the real, wicked world. Sports games, board games, and any computer algorithm all limit choices to allow us to learn the right lessons from experience.

The number of choices could be incredibly large, like chess moves, but there are still only a few ways to play chess.

(This doesn’t mean that these worlds are nice/fair/easy. Ask anybody who got fourth place at the Olympics in any sport with seemingly straightforward rules.)

WE LIVE IN THE WICKED WORLD

Olympic podiums aside, we live in the wicked world where decisions are hopelessly complex; randomness and chaos screw well-laid plans randomly, and we often don’t learn the right lessons from experience.

This leads to all manner of perverse consequences and heartbreak. It’s the difference between playing house in a sandbox, versus buying an actual house and setting up real life.

In this world where you don’t know what you’re solving for and you can’t be sure of the feedback you get, coming up with a really good hypothesis is probably the most important thing you can do. And one we get barely any practice at it!

IT’S ALSO OUR ONE MAIN STRATEGIC ADVANTAGE

Computers have thus far not been able to exit the sandbox. They must pretend they live in a kind world where the rules are fixed because they don’t have the complexity to think for themselves when the rules don’t make sense. Humans can.

But due to our education, we spend most of our time pretending we’re in a sandbox. Most schooling and most jobs artificially limit our choices because it’s just easier to function by known rules, even if they aren’t true, but to truly solve the problems we’re facing, for at least some of the day, we have to get out of the sandbox.

ENTER THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD

The idea that you can try something, see what the result is, guess why, and repeat the experiment to see if it happens again is revolutionary. And if it happens enough, you change your fundamental beliefs about what is true. That changed everything.

It’s an idea that took thinkers all over the world almost two millennia to figure out.

Egyptian Medical texts in 500 BCE explained how to examine, diagnose, and treat problems, while Babylonian astronomers first applied math to the stars (and everything we’ve mathed since).

By 1000 BCE, Indian philosophers and Buddhist scholars were diving into the brain, perception, and the self with what Einstein and any physicist since would call well-designed thought experiments.

Aristotle’s inductive-deductive method of reasoning went very viral, while many other Greeks and Romans created whole new disciplines of math and science from geography, to physics, to alchemy (some of these were better ideas than others, but sure fun to try!)

The scientific method of experimentation, particularly with specially designed instruments, came from the Islamic world. A physician named Ibn an-Haytham was as instructive as Aristotle, though sadly far less studied in Western curriculum, particularly because he proved Aristotle wrong. Like, a lot. He was particularly interested in vision, color, and light, but that’s greatly understating all he brought to science.

By the Renaissance, the scientific revolution was in full flourish, and a world view based on observable reality, as opposed to gods, fairies, coincidences, and luck, was increasingly better established, a trend that continues today.

So how do you come up with a good question? That will be next week, for now, enjoy the wicked world!

The post How to Learn to Love the Wicked World first appeared on Postcards from Pluto.

The post The Greatest Social Experiment in History first appeared on Postcards from Pluto.

MY FIRST BRUSH WITH SKYWALKERS

I was 7 years old and wandered into the living room to see what my parents were watching…

And froze. 

The scene playing out onscreen was unlike anything I had ever seen in my short life. It was Jabba’s palace in Return of the Jedi, and the only thought in my head was that they had discovered Sesame Street for grown-ups. (Which, given Yoda’s antecedents, was truer than I realized.)

I was transfixed. 

It was dynamic, tense, and shocking for a girl whose main media diet was Disney and PBS. 

I was hooked. 

ONCE A FAN GIRL

I watched all of the films, over and over again, which at that point numbered three. (And have never gotten over the fact that I watched them out of order and never got the shock of Luke’s Father.) 

I ditched school for the first and only time with friends from marching band to see the first prequel when it came out in theaters. I avoided the internet for a whole month before I could get to The Force Awakens.

And have just had a delightful night watching the new Obi-Wan series. I’ve only seen one episode because vertigo and screens don’t mix and it’s going to take me MONTHS to see it all, but I’ve noticed something odd.

ONE MOMENT OF TRIUMPH

The exultation at the end of Return of the Jedi has turned out to be the only success the Skywalkers have ever achieved.

Since they want to keep making new stories, every one has to end the same way: the plucky rebels win one battle (and usually destroy a death star) and continue to lose the war so we can keep getting new Star Wars movies.

It’s what happens when you try to serialize an epic.

What if in Lord of the Rings, destroying the ring didn’t also destroy Sauron? You could have endless books where the wizards say: “JK, there’s another ring! What’s that? Destroy the guy who keeps making rings? No, no, no… way too hard. We just got to get this ring!”

It’s had an interesting side effect on the message of the films. They’ve become meditations on failure.

PHILOSOPHICAL, DEPRESSED OLD MEN

This is one reason I’m writing this newsletter. Fiction is the most powerful way to move people, but it’s also super finicky. Story is more important than theme, if you do it right, which means that in pursuit of story, you could end up with a message you really didn’t intend.

Like a property aimed at preteen boys that now cranks out story after story about philosophical, depressed old men reflecting on everything they did wrong.

IF YOU WANT TO KEEP BLOWING UP DEATH STARS…

Did anyone plan it like that? I doubt it, but since they started with the biggest threat and the biggest weapon in the first movie they put out, they were kind of stuck. Shrinking the threat would be an anti-climax, and you can’t really grow the threat more than a planet destroyer.

It’s just death stars all the way down, now. 

The heroes who knock them out get to jump up and down and maybe get a medal, but then also get to spend the rest of their lives reflecting on their failure to actually conquer evil before it builds yet another death star.

I’M NOT UPSET ABOUT IT?

I enjoyed watching Kenobi working his dead-end job cutting meat with his dead-eyed stare. I felt that.

Particularly because I spent the first half of the pandemic managing a grocery store and spent an appreciable amount of time behind the meat counter. 

(Side note: my only beef with the episode was how they clocked out at the end of the night and just left everything sitting around. It takes almost two hours to clean your average meat department with many varied disinfectants. No one in food service worked on this script!) 

I felt confident writing this now without seeing the end, partly because it’s going to take me a couple of months, and partly because even if he gets his confidence back and rescues the princess… Literally…

We know how this ends.

Kenobi spends the rest of his life in that desert. Then on one last adventure to rescue the same princess, (Do they have another plot?), his erstwhile student cuts him down. 

IT’S UNEXPECTEDLY PRESCIENT

I think a lot of people could enjoy this, but I don’t think kids will get it. It takes a few years to work up a good dead-eyed stare, and a few massive failures to feel any interest in philosophy. 

I don’t think when Lucas was writing the original stories (mostly in the 70s and the 90s), he had any idea how much failure was coming our way as the world burns and evil rises. Watching Obi-Wan fail so spectacularly and then live the rest of his life regretting it is unexpectedly validating these days. 

AN UNINTENDED DARK SIDE?

Dark side…. get it? 

There are also reports of the actress, a black woman Moses Ingram who plays the main villain and was amazing in the first episode, getting a lot of hate. Unfortunately, this is a familiar story for so many actors of color and women starring in Star Wars properties, and this inadvertent focus on failure may contribute to normalizing that.

Again, I don’t think anybody is doing this on purpose. But the empire is not just. It destroys planets. It enslaves lots of innocent aliens. 

And none of that is really discussed or fixed in these films. It allows a bunch of people who have much more in common with the empire than the rebels to continue their fantasies of persecution and taking out the man, when they are in fact, the man.

The unintended message of this constant failure is that the status quo, no matter how terrible, is better. That truly changing the empire is an unreachable goal. That the unacceptable is acceptable and just blow up the next death star already…

HOPE

Regardless of the perverse lessons Star Wars now broadcasts, I think the message Lucas did intend to send was one of hope. I know that by the name of the very first movie he filmed, A New Hope. (Literary criticism is hard!) Before we got stuck in an endless loop of mega weapons, it was a revolutionary movie about impossible odds and saving princesses, and changing the world.

And I hope one day, they actually, truly, madly, deeply succeed, not just at destroying the last Death Star, but at making a better universe. It’s a low bar, but I have hope. 

The post Lesson from Star Wars: How to Fail Spectacularly 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.

Here are some tricks to help see the existing world in new ways and hopefully shine a different light on the water we’re swimming in and come up with new solutions in the existing world. Or just make you giggle.

Fundamental #1:  Life is dirt and sunshine, full of ocean.

Every bit of energy, movement, heat, light, thought, and life in the world comes from our sun (with very few nuclear exceptions). It shines down on the world; the plants take dirt and marry it with that sunshine and fill it up with water; we eat the plants and break down those bonds to make ourselves. Complex life is just dirt and sunshine full of ocean.

And it’s not just that we do this once; we run out of ocean every few minutes and sunshine and dirt every few hours.

We are constantly remaking ourselves and trying to maintain our own complexity.

And we will eventually, inevitably fail, decaying back into just the dirt without any ocean or sunshine, and we know it. It changes everything about what we do.

Fundamental #2:  The purpose of life: Homeostasis

(I didn’t say the meaning of life.)

What do we do with this energy that takes so much of our lives gathering? Staying the same.

Yes, we spend the majority of our lives, even in the vaunted first world where we are so good at everything [saracasm], trying to stay at the right temperature, the right arousal (the sexy kind and the safety kind), and the right amount of water and food, and other unsexy things like salt balance. We are not self-improvement machines, we are self-maintaining machines, who, yes, have to improve when circumstances grow more inhospitable.

I’ve been wrestling with migraine recently and feel this deeply. Migraine triggers are basically anything a little bit outside of perfect homeostasis, so I essentially wear a shock collar that zaps all the blood vessels in my head the moment I get thirsty, cold, sleep-deprived, or anything else. (Though we all suck at this one… Put this down and go get some water!)

Special Human Wrinkle to this Fundamental fact #1: We are herd animals.

Our main project after ensuring our blood has the best salinity is maintaining membership in the herd. We are a social species, which means we mostly get all of these needs met through our group membership, not directly.

Arguably these days, we don’t have to worry about thirst or hunger directly if we maintain our place in our group. (Short of actually picking up a water bottle. Did you get some water? Go get some water.)

This means we spend almost all of the rest of our energy cooperating or building dominance and are constantly balancing between what we need, what our group needs, what the other groups have, and who is in our group.

Special Human Wrinkle #2: We don’t mature for a quarter-century.

The current accepted thought is that our brain is done cooking by the time we’re 25 years old. That is crazy when you think about all the threats to it.

It’s a huge drain on our collective energy stores, those with and without kids. Though obviously, it’s the hardest on parents to launch the next generation, especially because in the vaunted first world we treat it as an individual project.

It informs so much of what we do, takes so much of our energy, and informs so much of our policy and our world.

Special Human Wrinkle #3: We have way more than we need.

The most special part of being human: we have leftovers!

I’m not even kidding. In the animal kingdom, scavengers and dung beetles take care of the excess, but the rest of the ecosystem lives really close to the edge, finding extra energy just in time. We are the only ones who have figured out how to store vast amounts of dirt and sunshine and water for our use whenever we want it.

Don’t get me wrong, it still takes most of our lives to maintain complexity and homeostasis, our spot in our group, and spend a quarter of our lives launching the next generation…

But what do we do with the extra?

That’s the biggest existential question.

I write these postcards. (This is not a newsletter. If I ever break any news…. you’ll have your signal that a great deal of our civic institutions is in serious trouble.)

Or we write symphonies. Run the fastest. Swing a bat at a ball. None of our hobbies violate the first two rules, but one of the miracles of humanity is that we manage to grab hold of extra energy beyond what we need for right now and we do genuinely spectacular things with it.

And it’s also I’d say the Achilles heel of humanity as we eat everything in sight.

What isn’t in one of these boxes?

I’m not going to try to sum up all of civilization in one postcard, usually, but this is a big place to start. Our laws, entertainment, technology, communication, schools, military, law enforcement, marriages, water treatment plants, religion, and spa retreats with little circles of cucumbers – everything can fit into these boxes like Russian nesting dolls of reality.

Okay, maybe not the cucumber water. That is totally irrational and has no function on earth, contributes nothing to our survival, does not help us raise our young, maintain our group, or have any redeemable value.  I am not biased. That is an objective fact.

The post Life is just dirt and sunshine first appeared on Postcards from Pluto.

Authors of science fiction and fantasy have cultivated a special skill (beyond the ability to torture characters and be tortured by commas all authors acquire). Simply, we speculate.

Yes, all authors need to build a world, but we spend hours (or months, or years…) creating an internally consistent alien species or a complete currency and economic system to back it up. Put more poetically, it’s the ability to see the water we are swimming in and imagine something different.

How we pay for things is one of the biggest rivers

One of the things I’ve been doing more recently is using these world-building skills on the real world. It’s so hard to get out of our bubble without jumping into someone else’s that may be even more bizarre. Deconstructing the world in the same way you can construct a fake world is a way to pop the bubble, at least for a few seconds.

What a society is willing to pay for collectively, to tax, and what it insists is an individual purchase reveals everything about the true values of that society.

What are the prerequisites and rewards of any society?

What actually are taxes? One way to think about them are prerequisites to citizenship. Just by breathing, these are the things you get from your fellow citizens.

Anything that we pay for individually, literally our income after taxes, becomes rewards for productivity in our society. You only have access to these if you are a productive member of society. (And I can’t emphasize enough, that I mean productive in the narrow economic sense, not anyone’s value as a human being just by breathing, which is infinite! This is a thought experiment to try on a perspective.)

When this goes wrong, it goes REALLY wrong.

The most brutal regimes in the world often start with innovation in what should be a prerequisite and what should be a reward. When everything is a prerequisite and the government provides everything equally, you end up with some really boring fashion choices. Also, it’s never equal, and it’s usually unspeakably repressive.

But similarly, when somebody gets a great idea that everything should be a reward and the government should provide nothing to its citizens (or put another way, citizens should provide nothing to each other), you get somebody trying to sell shareholders on sewage treatment. And a fairly brutal time if anything goes wrong for you and you’re not in a private in-group of some sort.

What does it look like in a sane system?

What do we pay for collectively? (AKA, tax)

Things that are prohibitively expensive for an individual or even an individual company, but everyone can benefit from.

Building weather satellites, collecting data, analyzing it, and predicting the weather are prohibitively expensive for one person or one company to do, thus it behooves us to collectively launch them.

Which sounds obvious, but America’s launch of a new weather satellite was delayed over funding fights when one legislator said we don’t need government weather services because we have the weather channel. Until somebody asked where they thought the weather channel got its data…

The interstate highway system cost $500 billion in today’s money when it was built about 60 years ago. Jeff Bezos (and every other billionaire today) are worth less than half that. Even the biggest shipping company on earth could not have financed the roads it needs to operate in one country, but it was a drop in the bucket to do together.

Things that everyone needs but are only profitable at scale.

There is significant overlap with the first one, but there is a slight difference here, because the things in this bucket could be done by private enterprise in cities, mostly, but are not profitable in rural areas because there just aren’t enough people.

Highways and post offices come to mind. Also radishes. I’ve moved back to a rural area and have not had a fresh radish in a year. Apparently, they just droop when they’ve gone more than a few hundred miles from home?

Political wish lists for multiple or powerful constituents.

This one could go either way in the good or evil column. Politicians and interest groups get a bee in their bonnets all the time about what we should be providing for the community. They go ahead and try to convince us to fund it and often do.

This is how we get oil subsidies and solar subsidies in a climate crisis, bridges to nowhere, 5-cent bags, and several states where we tax candy made without flour at a much higher rate than those without. True story.

Things that we personally need to be productive.

Before your first day of work, there are a couple of things you need to be a productive worker that traditionally, the entire society funds.

One huge example is national education. Workers come into work knowing how to read and add and work in groups and all the other things that you learn in school. There are countries without national education so children who enter the workforce without the ability to pay are restricted to jobs that don’t require literacy.

Most developed countries agree that health is a prerequisite for working. If you are sick, you can’t work. In the US it’s a reward for productivity, in that your employer pays for your health and then stops if you’re sick. (Ask me how I know.)

That’s… a choice. It’s a weird choice, but it is a choice. We like to spend on national defense instead. Productivity goes way down if you’re invaded, so we collectively fund that to magnificent levels.

Protection for the vulnerable.

Every society has to confront the fact that there will always be members of that society who are unable to be productive or care for themselves or have anyone to care for them.

I want to seriously emphasize again that I mean productive in the traditional economic sense, and not in these folks worth as human beings or ability to contribute to the world by being alive, which is priceless.

This again gets very controversial as some people want private industry or a religious institution to be the one to care for them and believe it should be none of the government’s business. But most agree starving children should be a public responsibility.

And sometimes we publically fund just weird things for no reason whatsoever, like getting all the gold you want for $1 in Whiskeytown National Recreation Area. (Technically, you have to get it out of the stream yourself, but it’s yours when you do!) It’s also probably on fire, so good luck.

Behavioral control

We offer rebates or extra taxes to try to get people to do more of one thing and less of something else. This is controversial, both in efficacy and execution, but nobody seems to be able to resist trying it.

A high tax on cigarettes in part was meant to discourage cigarette use. First-time home buying credits privilege homeownership over rentals. Married couples make out like bandits in the tax code!

My favorite is the perverse consequences you see. Like when Greece taxed blue water, so rich people hid their pools under green covers. Or the most famous example when the British government offered a bounty for cobras killed in India, so people bred cobras to get a bigger bounty, with a net increase in cobras.

Moonshots

Much of our scientific and medical research is funded by the government in the US because a private company could never put together that amount of funding and remain profitable. But since profitability isn’t the goal, we can do crazy things like go to the moon or cure cancer or stop climate change because we can throw our collective might at these problems and not worry about keeping the lights on for another year. [She says optimistically.]

What things lend themselves to private investment or individual payment?

These are the rewards for productivity in society. i.e. what we do we our literal after-tax paycheck or profits.

Competition and choice are desirable and possible.

You can buy a $1000 car or a $1 million car or a house with one room and a house with seventy. Wherever products get better with competition and choice, it’s ripe for individual profit and private reward. Of course, hopefully, housing homeless people falls under protecting the vulnerable, but for the most part, when you get a choice, it’s better from private hands.

The fun stuff.

We’re just so weird wacky and wonderful that a government program to distribute board games would be very, very sad. Whereas the smorgasbord available can contribute to every taste. Flux Monty Python which is a fantastic game, by the way, serves such a niche audience that it needs the kind of agile freedom of private experimentation and private reward in the form of profitability.

Crusades and pet causes

A robust social safety net hopefully will keep the vast majority of people healthy and a robust National Institute of Health or equivalent will hopefully keep researchers working on big problems. But there are always going to be conditions or other problems that numerically just don’t make sense for a major investment. (I’m not saying that’s a good thing, just that that’s reality.)

It’s going to matter a whole lot to a very small group of people and it’s up to those people to fill in the gaps when you paint with a broad brush and get research funded or get projects done.

What does this look like in fictional societies?

It can get so fascinating! In the Dune universe on a desert planet, the phrase the author Frank Herbert constantly used was that “A man’s flesh is his own; his water belongs to the tribe.” Water was so scarce that it became a collective resource, a tax on everyone.

In Ursula Le Guin‘s radical novel about a true anarchy government, The Dispossessed, almost everything was collective, yet not exploitative. That was the premise she was exploring. Almost everything was a prerequisite of life and there were very few rewards. Everyone worked to provide for each other regardless of ability and though nobody had very much and everyone had a level of freedom that we have not matched.

Almost diametrically opposite, Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, explored a society attempting to be completely a reward where nothing is a prerequisite, and also not exploitative.

You can do this yourself. Take a current government benefit and make it a reward and see what perverse consequences might result? Public land becomes private, and what happens to tourism, economy, and employment in many parts of the country?

Or say what happens when, say, the internet becomes a public good, as it has in some places, and how that affects employment, oversight, censorship, good and bad? The possibilities are endless.

When things end up in the wrong bucket?

I’ve tried to stay relatively neutral in the writing, and not get into the politics too much, because that’s not the point of this particular newsletter. Mostly because I’m not in the business of making my blood boil every week. Or yours.

Plus, this will never, ever be resolved. We can and will talk forever about what to fund what not to fund, who pays for these things, and who is not paying enough. And even the best programs have inevitable perverse consequences. But I wanted to share this as taxes are due to maybe give you a new framework to think about these debates.

Is this something we should pay for collectively because trying to make a profit at it is a fools errand? Or is this something that’s better in private hands that it will be profitable or in such a niche that the majority of us are never going to care about it or one of the other?

One insane example: power.

In my opinion, a private electric grid is an insanity, because electricity is definitely a prerequisite for productivity in this day and age; installing one is prohibitively expensive, and you’re trapped by where you live, meaning you have no competition and choice. On the other hand, solar companies where each can compete to make the best product and the investment is within reach of most homeowners and businesses, you can shop from a company in Indonesia if that’s where you get the best deal, making it perfect for the private market.

Same product, two very different endings that become automatically political positions, but if you look through the lens of what is a good collective purchase and what is a good individual purchase and what is a necessary prerequisite for life, and what is a reward, and where we monumentally screw this up, you maybe see something a little differently.

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