Speaker 1
And this went on and off for a few months. And I went and saw a doctor, multiple doctors, and had him tests and they said, Oh, you're losing your hearing and the low frequencies of your, of your hearing in that ear. We think you have many ears disease, many ears is this degenerative thing, which usually people end up completely deaf when they have it where basically the nerve cells in the inner ear start dying and they don't really know why they think it's something to do with like salts and ion channels and it's incurable as far as they know. And so I was told that's what I probably have and they're like it's pretty really sorry it's you know it was just bad news to find that out. And also because one of the symptoms of it is you start having balance problems as well you get like these vertigo attacks and people be like vomiting and so on. And so you can imagine I was like really down in the dumps, finding this out, and then cut to three months later or so go to Burning Man. And I have for the first time, one of these vertigo attacks, one of the days. I mean, I wasn't completely sober, but it was not a good time. As you can imagine having a vertigo attack while not being sober for the first time. So I was then really down in the dumps. And then on the last night of the burn, I was talking to some friends and started talking to this girl who I kind of, I don't know that well, but she's a friend of a friend. And I mentioned about my ear and she's like, Oh, well I do energy healing. I'm an energy healer. I was like, I don't know what that is, but sure. Do whatever you want to do. Yeah, have a go. She's like, I can try. And after she sort of put her hand over my ear for a few minutes. And then she says, I remember saying something like, there's something there, I need to get it. And she starts sucking over my ear with her mouth, like not touching it, but just like, and it was really unpleasant. You can imagine that sensation of someone inhaling over your ear. And I was like, oh, please stop. She's like, no, I need to get this. There's something there. And she does it, I don't know, for a few minutes. And then eventually kind of collapses in a heap on the floor crying and freezing cold going, oh my God, that was bad. I don't know what that was. That was really, really bad. Again, I was not fully sober. So this is a slightly, you know, retelling, but I just remember being so shocked. I just didn't expect anything to actually happen. I didn't really feel anything other than this like unpleasant sensation of her sucking, but I was so shocked at the way she was now reacting because she was shocked. She did not seem to expect whatever had just happened to her. And she said afterwards, she came around after a little while and she's like, I don't know what it was. It was like bad energy. I don't know. It's gone. I'm very pleased to say it's fully gone and it's gone away. And I was like, well, okay, what does that mean for my symptoms? Am I cured? She's like, yeah, yeah, you'll probably have symptoms for a couple more weeks and then you'll be fine. And that's exactly what happened. And I haven't had any problem since. It kind of just like, it just blew my world open, because aside of that premonition thing, which I kind of forgotten about, I have not ever subscribed to anything like that. Like, like, I'm a physicist. In fact, like, you know, I've proud, like I kind of built a career of being a like materialist, rationalist physicist. And I don't have any time for any of that stuff. It's all nonsense. It's all confirmation bias. No one's ever actually tested it empirically or proven it. Show me the study and I'll believe it. But here I am having that experience with two, what feel like pretty incontrovertible data points, that something that I cannot explain happened. And fortunately would be incredibly beneficial to me. Such a blessing. So yeah.
Speaker 2
So these experiences are particularly interesting to me as direct firsthand experiences. Of course, secondhand now that I'm listening, but are particularly interesting to me when I'm speaking with someone who has demonstrated a very well developed ability to use system two thinking and, and rationality and reasoning and mathematics and so on in not just the world, but in competitive arenas, right? So you have a calibrated and also tested ability to use those faculties that you've developed. And I'm glad you're mentioning these things just because weird shit happens. And the idea that we have it all figured out is ludicrous. Even though humans at any point in history, whether you go back to the middle ages, the dark ages, I'm sure, you know, 6,000 years ago or whatever it was with the Egyptians, I'm sure they thought they had most things figured out. And it's just so clear when you begin to really poke and prod and as you gain more years and have more experiences, especially if you start pushing into some strange corners, that there's a lot we simply don't understand. And even if we were to say not chalk those up to false memories, but let's just say we chalk it up to placebo effect. Right. Nonetheless, even if it were just placebo effect. Incredible. That doesn't diminish the absurd inexplicability of it. Exactly. With the current mechanisms that we understand. And that's super exciting to me. It's super exciting to me. And it doesn't mean that you nor I would advocate that people just accept everything at face value. Of course not. There's horse shit everywhere. I mean, we're sitting in Austin, like the world capital of spirituality. There's so much nonsense and so many charlatans, but I do pay attention to people like you who have demonstrated in other areas that they have the ability to think rationally and have some grasp of a very good grasp of science and so on, right? That's kind of one of the first litmus tests for me. If someone's sharing something me, I'm like, all right, can they fight logically out of a paper bag, right? Like, can they, have they demonstrated any ability to use structured reasoning in other places? Are they able to cross-examine
Speaker 1
their own beliefs? Right,
Speaker 2
exactly, exactly. And are they skeptical in other areas? Or is it just like, okay, they accept anything as long as it's alternative, but they reject, you know, like Western science, or any number of reasons that don't make sense to me. If you've ever had antibiotics, yeah, Western science may have saved your life. And there are many other examples. I certainly wouldn't be here for more for Western medicine, let's just say, not science. And I struggle with where to even take this because there's so many directions that could go that are pretty strange. But, and I don't want to co-opt physics, so please give me a slap here if this is just an amateur butchering the good name of physics. But had a number of cognitive scientists on the podcast, like Donald Hoffman. I've had physicists on the podcast, although some would consider Michio Kaku more of a science communicator, but still as some fundamentals. I've had private conversations certainly with a number of physicists and I lack the foundation of mathematics necessary to fully appreciate it but when you even start to look at the conversations that were being had between Einstein and Bohr way back in the day relative to quantum mechanics putting aside even the experimental design and evidence for quantum entanglement that have been done, I think, in the Canary Islands and in other places. Stuff is really strange. Just even space time itself as an objective reality. I mean, there are pieces people can find online by qualified scientists on the death of space time, right? And thinking about that as almost a UI that we have evolved to utilize, but not as the one and only user interface to whatever we might be contending with.
Speaker 1
And like Donald Hoffman even thinks that, well, not just Donald Hoffman, he thinks that consciousness essentially rise to space. And while a lot of theoretical physicists poo-poo his ideas, and I think by and large they are correct to, even they would agree that it seems like space itself is an emergent property. It's not a fundamental thing. We're not objects rattling around in a big empty box. It is a thing that emerges from basically interactions of mathematical functions on some, whether it's on a substrate or whether it, I don't know if it even needs a substrate. I'm too rusty on that stuff, but it's super weird. If you dig into the fundamental structure of this reality. Yeah, this is not a,
Speaker 2
you know, wiccan witchcraft shop with like tarot cards in the display case, not to knock that right. But like we're talking about some of the most esteemed scientists in a hard science with peer reviewed publications and so on. And if you just look at that stuff closely enough. Shit's really weird. Yeah.
Speaker 1
There's a paper I was recently reading that's like digging into the, that it seems like space time is, well space itself is essentially coming out of observers interacting with each other. Oh, I love this too. Consciousness is interacting with each other, but it's really, from what I can tell, really granular, legit physics. I mean, it's a math paper, basically.
Speaker 2
It's beyond my pay grade. So, I don't know. But I may need your-
Speaker 1
I wanna send it to Sean Carroll. I don't know if you've ever had him on.
Speaker 2
Sean Carroll, I haven't had on, but my brother introduced me to his podcast, Mindscape. Is it Mindscape? Yes. Excellent podcast. So good. So if Sean Carroll is out there listening, or if anyone knows him, let him know. He may not wanna hear this I don't know what his pin will be of me, but big fan of his podcast. He's a damn fine Thinker in a damn fine communicator. It
Speaker 2
and I hit an excellent episode on sort of archaeological exploration of Stonehenge and other artifacts as external mnemonic devices. Super cool. Saliv, Olivia, question for you. How do you, as someone who is a trained rationalist, materialist, although you may not identify as solely those things. I don't want to imply that. How do you integrate some of these experiences into your life, your framework, your worldview? What do you do with that?
Speaker 1
it's walking this fine line between gullibility, open-mindedness, whatever you want to call it, and skepticism and cynicism. And I think where my poker training comes in handy is that poker trains you to think in probabilities. You're never certain about anything. You could be bluffing me with, you know, you could have aces or you could be bluffing me with, you know, six-four suited that missed the card it needed. So you become very comfortable in terms of holding concurrent belief states in your mind with different weighted probabilities of those things being true. So with these like, you know, these two weird, unexplainable experiences that I had, you know, whether it was the ear thing was just pure placebo, which would still be crazy, because it would mean that they basically I have the ability to heal my mind by thinking I was going through some kind of like thing being sucked out my ear. Fine. Potentially hear
Speaker 2
heal your inner ear.
Speaker 1
Yeah, like, like, I was literally told I had a degenerative thing and I was going to go deaf and like, no one's been cured of it. And this is miraculously gone away. So whatever the hell happened, the point is I didn't go and change my life. I didn't suddenly go and be like, that's it. I'm going to go and practice energy healing and become a witch and so on. I continued still like I'm still am an adherent to the scientific method. It's just that I've now broaded my, as you mentioned, you know, it's almost like people become, they believe in the scientism as opposed to being scientists. A true scientist is that you are maximally curious. You do your best to devise experiments in order to get reliable, robust results that you can use to predict the world. And you try and minimize all the biases and things that could mess up your experiment and give you a faulty result. And so there's no reason why I can't incorporate these two data points in terms of, I mean, I haven't gone out and done any science. I really should, I guess, go and do some tests and see if I can try and recreate that experience. But it's very difficult because it was set and setting were very important. And what happened there, I would assume anyway, I don't know that. Well,
Speaker 2
when they make the Netflix series about it, and they recreate the entire environment, and then you can sit down and try to recreate. Yeah.
Speaker 1
So what I guess I've done is I have up-weighted, you know, whereas before I would have given the probability that energy healing is a real thing. I would have given it like a, probably if you'd asked my old like skeptical self, I would have literally said it's zero, but, you know, I wasn't such a bad Bayesian that I would give it actual zero. Maybe like one in a million.
Speaker 2
Bayesian. That's good. We don't have time to unpack that.
Speaker 1
But yeah. I would have given it a one in a million and now I have updated it, you know, with this evidence to how many orders of magnitude do I want to go? I mean, I will give it, I at least give it a one in 100, but I think it's more likely that there is a, an explanation through what we know conventionally, that is still more probable than that it is something completely like some completely novel thing that is untapped. But that said, you know, I've actually had a few other little ones I won't go into, but like other little data points of just like weird energy things that have happened in certain scenarios, it's helped me. But it's still important to keep the skeptical hat on. And extraordinary beliefs require extraordinary evidence. And in order for me to give up everything that I know about our current understanding of the world, I would need significantly more data points. And I think that it's just not the practical way to go forward.
Speaker 2
Yeah, I would also add to that that if folks want to be proper skeptics, you owe it to yourself and to the people you interact with to be an informed skeptic. So if you are going to invoke the name of science and not invoke it like the name of Odin and some like, you know, God works in mysterious ways, kind of way. You need to actually, my opinion, have the ability to read a study and understand a study and study design. It's not good enough to get the journalistic interpretation from the Wall Street Journal or fill in the blank online publication, that's not good enough. It's also not good enough for you to just get the gist of a few sentences in an abstract and
Speaker 1
Confidence intervals, right
Speaker 2
so confidence intervals understanding powering and because you also find folks who and I was I've been saying Sciences, but I guess a scientism the sort of capital s in either case and as a capital lesson is not good So if you succumb to that one of the telltale characteristics that I've come across is they'll ask if something was a controlled study or a placebo controlled or randomized study, randomized control, you know, RCT, and then say, well, how many subjects were there? Or what was the end if they get fancy? And I might say 20, 25, and they're like, oh yeah, small study. Well, and I'm like, it's not that simplistic. There are quite a few variables you have to take into account. So recommendations for folks who are interested in number one, studying the studies by Peter Tia, MD, excellent series of blog posts that take you into the fundamentals of understanding how to dissect and understand a study, which includes meta-analyses and gets into the risks of taking meta-analyses as gospel also because garbage in, garbage out, and there's a lot to it. Another recommendation, actually a podcast that I did six years ago, I realized when I pulled this up, this is podcast number 194, The Magic and Power of Placebo. This is with Eric Vance who wrote a book called Suggestible You, subtitle the curious science of your brain's ability to deceive, transform, and heal. And he's written very widely on Placebo. It's an excellent book. Many of his feature pieces are exceptional. There was a great piece in Wired magazine probably 10 years ago on the evolution of the placebo effect and how it has changed depending on the culture and other influences. So in certain places, say a placebo pill in a blue capsule or a red capsule perform better than other colors.
Speaker 1
You need to do, don't do a blue or red
Speaker 2
one in this day and age. That's true. That's true. Yeah. We could pick other colors, but the context that surrounds that is really, really interesting. And then the last thing I would recommend people check out is cognitive biases and looking at both frameworks intended to avoid them and just getting a better understanding. So you can go to Wikipedia and just look up cognitive biases and get a pretty basic list. You can look at something like poor Charlie's almanac with Charlie Munger, although it's a bit dense. And it's a little user unfriendly in a lot of respects. But what were you saying?
Speaker 1
I think I would recommend is some of Julia Galiff's work on the Scout mindset and motivated reasoning. What was the first one? The Scout mindset. Yeah. I mean, she did a TED talk on it, but she's just written a book on it as well. And I think she actually goes in, if I remember rightly, she goes in. Yes. She goes into that sort of, again, that when I first learned about rationality, like I've read everything on less wrong, if people know that, which is an incredible resource for it. It really breaks down how you get your brain, which is the map, to match the actual territory, which is the universe, as accurately as possible. little bit now because I've had some of these weirder experiences, which actually. Where I wasn't in the classical sense, rational, I clearly went off the beaten path into some like weird land, but it was actually very beneficial to me, even if it was like some completely useful fiction, it was still useful. Yeah. And this idea of useful fictions, I think, needs to be explored further. Yeah.
Speaker 2
And also add that much like poker science, don't think a lot of folks realize is largely a game of probabilities. You don't prove something a hundred percent most of the time. It's like, well, literally never actually. Yeah, exactly. I mean, you, you can have overwhelmingly compelling data, even with say an observational study, say with the sort of quintessential example, it'd be a cigarette smoking causing lung cancer, right? But most of the times like this suggests with this degree of certainty that this is the case. But when you start to look at the replication crisis, which is not just in social sciences, it's all over the place. And especially if you start to actually roll up your sleeves and get involved in science, whether that's as a subject, I've been a subject in studies at all sorts of places. I started doing it as an undergrad. I was a subject in one of Daniel Kahneman's studies. And it was not very intellectually engaging. It was like spacebar every time like a green square popped up or something, but I needed the $7 an hour or whatever it was. And I've been a subject at Stanford with heat exhaustion experiments. That was also not terribly fun. Marching to exhaustion with like a esophageal probe and an anal probe kind of meeting in the middle in fatigues with weights on a treadmill and a sauna to like complete mental collapse. Why do I do these things? Because I'm interested in seeing the process. Even some of the best science you could point to in the most prestigious journals, when you actually get in there, it's a lot messier than people think. But people want to have confidence in something, then religion has become so out of fashion that they look to the high priests of science. And they're like, at least I have the confidence in this being true. So
Speaker 1
I actually wanted, one of my next videos I want to make on this, which is about basically these signaling, prestige, bad incentives that gets society stuck in these kind of, these traps essentially. So we're stuck in one of those with the current status quo of the way science is done. And this is not a tool to knock any scientists, you know, they're doing the doing their absolute best. But the way the system has been designed, we give all the reward to the people who first make the new fancy discovery and don't give any credit to the people who then actually replicate it and verify it. Yeah, totally. So there's this incredible incentive to be always looking for some new novel thing in order to get that, you know, get your, your thing published in nature and get those research dollars for the next time. But it doesn't actually really advance human knowledge, because so many of these things don't replicate. And it's, we're sort of stuck in the spiral of just like everyone's trying to please do whatever they can to get in the journal. And it's, there's a name for it. So there's this really incredible short online book called Inadequate Equilibria by the guy who wrote most of the stuff on this wrong, Eliezer Jodkowski. And I recommend-
Speaker 2
Inadequate Equilibria. Yes.
Speaker 1
It's a heady name. Oh man, I know it sounds, it's so good. It has one of the best things. It has a discussion, a fictitious discussion with an alien from a perfect society, like a basic person who thinks everything's explained, you know, everything that's wrong in our society is because of like, there's bad people being greedy. And then with the cynical smart economist, and they have this three way discussion talking about like, reason why the US healthcare system is so expensive and it sort of goes into this meandering thing about. That's a cool premise. It's so good. Like, you must include this in the show notes.
Speaker 2
How long would you say it is?
Speaker 1
I mean, ideally they read, they could just read chapter three, honestly. It's, I don't know, it's like a 45 minute read. Yeah, it's just, it's like a book chapter and you can kind of read it standalone. We'll put this, we'll put it
Speaker 2
in the show But
Speaker 1
basically it's, it's talking about these like these traps that we can get into where it gets people now speaking game theory, it gets society stuck in like shitty Nash equilibria. So a Nash equilibrium is when two people or multiple people are playing in a strategy where it would be bad for anyone to deviate from that strategy. It's like everyone's stuck doing that, but not all Nash equilibria are actually created equal. There are some where if everyone was doing x instead of y, everyone would be happier. They'd also be like, you know, now stuck in a new thing. So like a good example of this would be, so I just made a video called the beauty wars about this like fictitious thing called Moloch, which I call the demon of negative sum games. Basically, it's like the god of negative sum games. It's a force of bad, usually economic incentives that make people sort of sacrifice things that they want in order to optimize for a short term goal. And the example I talk about is these beauty filters on Instagram. I don't know if you've spent any time. They are horrifying.
Speaker 2
I mean, in how dramatic they are. I'd never seen these things before until my girlfriend showed them to me and I was dumbfounded.
Speaker 1
They're horrifying not only in how impressively good they are at doing stuff, but also how now the really insidious ones are the subtle ones. Because there are some where you would never, you'd go online and you would not be able to tell. If you don't know the person, or even if you know the person, you wouldn't necessarily be able to tell. You just think it's a good picture of them. They're so subtle, but they're so effective. It seems like there is clearly just some kind of optimal face structure that our eyes find pleasing. And it just tweaks people, makes their eyes a little bit wider apart, or a little bit bigger, or the lips, you know, just changes the proportions right that it sets to the dopamine spike off in your brain. And it's
Speaker 2
going to make online dating really hard.
Speaker 1
Oh man. Well, so as a girl on Instagram,
Speaker 2
I'm on the field, I'm not on the playing field, but if I were, that sounds like a headache.
Speaker 1
Well, and, but also for people who use them, like, so I'm a girl on Instagram, you know, I for a while, certainly like made a lot of my career off the way I looked. There's such an incentive pressure, you know, if I want to keep playing the game, trying to grow my Instagram, like sexy, yes, the arms race, exactly. And that's what Moloch is. Moloch is this like the God of arms races. And it's like these these bad incentives where we could, the cheap thing for me to do is just to use one of these AI filters on on on all my pictures. And I know I look good and I'm going to get a ton of likes and it'll grow my thing, but it will make me miserable in the process. And if you poll probably most particularly women on Instagram, they are not having a good time with these things either on themselves.