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Episode 256: Placebo effect, Frustrated at societal costs, Living with distortions
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in episode 243 dr lyle defined the pleasure trap roughly as the state of an organism being fooled by artificial stimuli into believing it is achieving biological success how does the placebo effect fit into this picture given that the placebo effect typically makes a person feel better without the underlying condition improving it seems like we have evolved with something akin to the pleasure trap built right into us and therefore the platter's wrap may not be a modern phenomenon um oh it is a modern phenomenon and the placebo effects are infinitesimally small by the way and they're very short-term so the so the place if this placebo effect had any really good effect then it would be it would be more useful than it is so the uh the the world is fascinated with placebo effects because of when when they found out about them they they basically make it problematic to analyze very well some clinical trial on some drug um but actually the i believe the effect size of a typical placebo effect is about three percentile so in other words if the if the control if the if the drug if the control group was it at 50 50th percentile for the average member uh on something then the placebo group uh when you tested them when they were still believing in the placebo which is short term they're at 53 percent percentile so it's an incredibly small shift [Music] now the uh now it is interesting placebo effects are are inherently an interesting uh event because the the the it looks like they exist it looks like it's a real thing and so it's the only thing that occurs to me as i listen to this question and i have never really thought about placebo effects before but it occurs to me that they would possibly be a design feature of of humans in order to help us observe truly small effects that were plausible so in other words uh your if you're if you're like i don't know put some some kind of little padding in your moccasin and then you step on it again you're like oh i think it feels better you see and and it might in other words if it draws your attention to uh events that would otherwise be lost in the physiological noise but you have reason to believe that you have an innovation that may actually be improving something then it would it would draw your attention to it the same is definitely true the other direction so in other words if you think that something may be hurting you or that you may have been this is the medical student's disease like oh i think maybe i've got a slipped disc i feel my back you know a little tightening up so it works the other way too and that would make sense in other words it makes sense that by turning your attention to either a plausible improvement or a plausible threat that you might be able to then actually pick up or be more likely to pick up legitimate uh legitimate changes with respect to self and environment so uh so we don't do we don't test placebo effects for negative effects but if we did i'm sure we would find them uh and i'm sure that they would be reasonably small like oh this pill is supposed to make you feel sick do you feel a little sick and you know a few percentage of people would say gee i feel like i do feel a little bit sick so um so i think that that's probably all a placebo effect is and it is most definitely not the pleasure trap the pleasure trap is uh specifically supernormal stimuli causing the the nervous system to miscalibrate its actual relationship between self and environment in a way that's uh could can is going to be causing error in the system in terms of your best interest and the degree of that error is going to be simply mimicked by the degree of the distortion uh that whatever the supernormal stimuli is causing so if it's heroin and methamphetamine and crystal meth and crack cocaine then the distortion is massive and you could expect that the danger for the organism would be tremendous uh if the if the distortion is we're adding some refined sugar to i don't know some bread and we're making it into a little sweet muffin then i'm going to expect that we're going to get a very subtle amount of systematic overeating in that organism and we're going to essentially wind up uh not in quite as good a physical condition but it's going to be minor so but the pleasure trap is is is not the placebo it is clearly an entirely different thing wow thank you dr hawk i'm sure in your research you've kind of run into people asking about placebos um any uh any comments on this no i think doug has got this dialed in i'm i'm i'm a little i'm still kind of trying to parse the question is is the question really is the pleasure trap itself a total placebo effect or is it like in the sense that it's yeah i'm just a little lost i wonder if some of the listeners might be too and what the question is really trying to get to yeah yeah it is a strange question i i did kind of feel that um they're saying it feels better without the underlying condition improving i.e you want pleasure maybe maybe they're trying to parse that people are trying to get pleasure but they're underlying unhappiness isn't improving who knows but i don't know either so with that without without more insight i have nothing else to add all right yeah all right there we go fair enough okay all right thank you uh our next question uh dear doctors my anger and frustration is increasing as folks insist on eating foods that cause their disease which in turn incurs costs that all of us are then obligated to bear everyone wants to complain about the high cost of health care and global warming but choose to ignore this obvious solution but i need help in dialing back my frustration and increasing sense of despair well jen have fun with it and then i'll yeah the whole part yeah well we both we both have lots to say on this general topic i mean this is where uh really understanding personality is your key to liberation here um it's it's i have talked before about how i spent so many years in the buddhist world chasing enlightenment this idea that you know you cannot be bothered by any worldly things or by people's bothersome personalities and it wasn't until i discovered behavioral genetics that i i really finally started to um not hold hold people's bad choices and bad personalities against them and and to not take them personally and to really be free of all of that so i completely relate to this um sense of frustration that this person has and i hear it from people all the time um and the only way to to really dial back that frustration that you're talking about is to really come to terms with the the first the fact that because of the nature of the pleasure trap people are really uh even if they really want to change and they really want to do the right thing um they're they're not insisting on eating these some people are insisting on it uh out of some kind of ideological conviction but a lot of people they just can't they can't not do it they're they're addicts um and they may not be fully aware of the state of the addiction but this is this is the nature of the pleasure trap people are i mean we talk to people who are could not be more motivated to get out of a pleasure trap they have health issues they have appearance issues they're really they're trying to fix this problem and they might get uh you know a good month a couple of months and then they slip and then it's back in and out and i mean we've talked about this many many times and these are the people who are motivated who have who understand what to do and have tried to do it and have had some success um and just it's it's nearly impossible to to beat the pleasure trap it's certainly in my opinion it's impossible to fully beat it all the time one and done we're never dealing with this again which is why i prefer to talk about it in terms of something that you manage you really manage your relationship with the pleasure trap in a way that works for you so when you stand back and you look at that it's very frustrating to watch people um you know eating terrible foods that are contributing to their disease processes but once you really understand that their their free will is a very small part of that equation and that they really are just pawns in a larger process that is largely beyond them um that that allows you to have some more empathy for their situation and to take it less personally and to be less personally frustrated by it the other part of what makes them capable of making those choices or not including their willingness to do so so we've all met people who were like well i'd rather i'd rather live 10 years shorter and eat my bacon every day than then live a longer life and eat that cardboard that you're eating that's a really common trope that you'll run into and that's personality that's a mix of the this addiction process and the personality so there are just some some particular lower i mean there's i i hesitate to pin particular personality traits on compliance issues because then people take them very personally if they take a personality test themselves but usually what you see with that kind of pattern is lower conscientiousness and higher disagreeableness and if somebody has those kind of traits and a predisposition to this thing it's it's really kind of outside of their immediate control and it's there's nothing you can do about it and um just learning to to let that go comes with learning about personality and how beholden people are to to these personality traits that are genetic in nature um and then i guess the only other thing i would say is that it's yeah it's unfair that these are costs that we're all obligated to bear and that there are broad social costs by individual choice but it's also sort of like ah well that's the flip side of living in a in a developed democracy with huge abundance of food and everything else is that you've got a lot of people that are kind of bringing down the pot the the greatest possible equilibrium of that society but you you get to free ride on a lot of really good stuff and you were living a better life in in a western democracy than 99.99999 nine percent of your ancestors uh even even if your life pretty much sucks so and you pay a lot of taxes and you're not super happy your life is still vastly better than any of your ancestors uh until even a generation ago and dr hawk wouldn't you say that the government's gonna find a way to spend money anyway even if everybody was healthy oh well yeah of course yeah so if that's if that if this really if this complaint comes down to um you know i'm i'm being taxed to subsidize people's bad life choices then then we can we can wind up doug's libertarian um script and let him go he's like like a wind-up doll but but i think there's also some frustration here in in the particular nature of you know you're somebody likely who's asking this question with a personality that makes dealing with the pleasure trap easier than it is for most people out there in the world and and sometimes people will look at that with some contempt and be like well why are you doing that you're just making things worse for everybody stop doing that and it's very frustrating because you're looking at it through this egocentric bias of your own conscientiousness your own ability to get your act together and make better choices and you're just not recognizing that they're they're they're not they're not doing it for any other reason other than that's the kind of animal that they are they're they're they're all like my dog melly yeah yeah the um i would add a few things to this obviously this discussion could go could go into a lot of different directions but uh i think i'm in a hundred percent agreement that that's the it whether it's a personality variable or it's an iq variable uh any way you slice it i mean if you just add iq to the concept of personality individual differences you're just you would never i mean you could be frustrated at some uh kind of poor stupid person that you're supervising i don't know on a on a car lot you know you're and and you're uh he's a new employee and you yell at him because he's doing something ridiculous stupid and then you because you think that what you're looking at is abstinence and insolence yeah essentially and then when you find out oh no no no i was looking at low iq and when you cross examine them you're like oh my god you're you're not actually being defiant and shitty you're you were being as effective as you knew how to be now let me explain and you you can imagine that moment and all of us have had that moment where instantly you fought you find yourself with a great deal more compassion and even to the point of forgiving people even if they cost you something because of their lack of intelligence okay and i can remember i can i can have many instances of this but i was speaking of car lots i was on a car a lot negotiating for a car and the finance guy who is like a super high paid the smart guy that the salesman just turned the things over to he and i were starting to argue and i was feeling my ire go up i was feeling like uh dude don't try to trick me okay i got a lot of chops and math okay and uh and so we're kind of we're starting to get we're starting to bed heads and i immediately spotted errors and what he was giving me and i said listen this doesn't add up that doesn't add up this is a problem that's a problem and he looked at it and he goes huh and he went back and he came back and he goes i don't really understand this you know what i mean and and he and then he he had to do 10 15 minutes with the research and call somebody and he came back he goes oh this is how that's done this is the mouth and i'm like got it so he you know i could spot was quick for me to see where there was an arithmetic problem and i'm like hey dude you're trying to pull it over my eyes and grab another 40 a month screw you i know all about car sales people [Laughter] when i when i uh when i held his feet to the fire and instead of getting him pushing back he he was embarrassed and over his head and as soon as i saw that my my anger was gone okay and so this is kind of what jen's buddhist insight is that she finally carries out of the ashram which is that hey these people are limited okay and uh and they are particularly with respect to the pleasure trap they're in way over their head even really smart conscientious people you know we we chalk up difficulties with the pleasure trap to to uh you know deficiencies i mean it's easy enough to see it as deficiencies and conscientiousness and intelligence that's just where it's accentuated the truth of the matter is you have very high iq very highly motivated and very highly consciousness people who are not able to do a good job at one or other versions of the pleasure trap and that's just because that itself um the uh the big five and how it is that we talk about personality these are very broad strokes the truth of the matter is is that you know you could say okay well there's people that are highly motivated to defend their health those people eat really well really well i'll tell you what if it just so happened to turn out that being motivated to defend your health at a high level involved doing an hour a day with her calisthenics and going to the gym i don't think i'd be in very good condition and the answer is i don't like to do that okay it turns out that eating healthy food comes pretty easily to me but going and putting myself through a bunch of calisthenics every day of my life no that doesn't i'm enough of a flake that i just like to go play so i keep in decent shape because i like to play basketball but that's pretty much all i do i'm really not motivated to do those other things and as i age i'm thinking to myself well when you're going to get into pilates gotta read stuart mcgill's book on back mechanics before you do anything so don't get you like these notes have been on my desk for four years about when i was supposed to like start to get my act together about all that meanwhile it's like well we'll just see we'll just wait until we wind up with a problem on the court because so far eating healthy food and playing a little ball is working out real well but that's just that's a genetic fortunate thing for me that it just so happens that the main variable in maintaining your health and fitness winds up being your diet not your physical fitness routine okay uh it turns out that that happens to be the case because so much of your of your physical fitness and your health has to do with your cardiovascular system and it depends upon just what kind of condition that's in and that has a hell of a lot to more do with your dietary history than it does your exercise history as jim fix found out keeling over and dying of a heart attack at 44 or whatever the hell he did mr mr run okay so the um so once we back this up and we realized wait a minute this is just a bunch of scrambling organisms out here with all kinds of limitations of their motivational systems confronting problems that they weren't designed to solve and god it's a miracle that anybody does anything that isn't directly in the you know into the pleasure drop so yeah you start to make your piece uh with this and i would also add one other thing about any burning issues about the planet and all this it's absurd for us to think that as one little consciousness out of seven billion that anything you think and any influence you have is going to make any difference at all you have to you have to understand when you are truly just one krill in an entire net [Music] forget about it okay we're either all gonna live or the tuna fish are gonna eat us all and so i wouldn't get too worked up about it and i think things are probably gonna be all right fantastic [Laughter] dr lyle you have such a way with words i like this krill krill in the net that's pretty much what it is not a very vegan analogy you need to watch conspiracy dr lyle i just actually watched that last uh two weeks ago very interesting yeah it's it's quite the eye opener yeah yeah all right all right all right what else we got nate our next question it's kind of a deeper one i think um okay dear doctors your recent talk about living in distortions has really resonated with me is this the same as the earlier concept of making a paradigm shift in our thinking looking at the mind map if the self is a calibration system that sets goals and those goals are based on our personality's view of our competitive environment are our distortions derived from outdated calibrations or how are they accumulated over time it seems that many of us get stuck in a particularly particular way of looking at the world and our elevated place in it and if we get stuck in those distortions are we then destined to work towards the wrong goals or maybe i just want to hear more about how we concoct our distortions and how to confront them love the work you all do well yeah what do you what do you feel like jen yeah i can i can jump in a little i mean again we can both both talk about this but um yeah we actually just did uh we had a whole q a membership q a on our um membership website in the living wisdom library where we talked a lot about what distortions are and where they come from so people if they miss that can watch it um it's it's always posted in the in the q a section so we did get into lots of detail but we can revisit some of the the top features here i think of distortions i mean i think this person is absolutely right on so um you know it really yeah this the the language of a paradigm shift is is really just you know i i always like to use the phrase from um the uh oh [ __ ] you're gonna have to edit the snakes i'm missing i'm missing the name that's all right that's one just like it is show people yeah i remembered it the second after the big lebowski where the dude says new [ __ ] has come to light man like new [ __ ] has come to light that is that is like the situation has changed like we we were operating under a certain set of information whether that was coming from you know the the outside environment because that's how we thought things were or it's some some kind usually it's some um combination of personality tendency that gets reiterated by the outside environment and here you're just going through life making choices and making inferences and optimizing your circumstances based on that that whole paradigm and then new [ __ ] comes to light and you're like oh crap i gotta i gotta rethink everything so that's what this is and and some people depending on the nature of their personality can get um really really stuck in uh even in the face of new [ __ ] coming to light they don't integrate it like other people will because they don't have the openness or they are particularly attached to the previous paradigm for whatever reason they happen to be attached to it so this is very it's an individual process just because you give to people who have the same set of distortions new information that in theory would correct those distortions doesn't mean at all that those two individuals are going to make make different decisions in the same sort of way based on that new information so this is a it's a dynamic interaction between a person's previous history including their personality predispositions and what kind of information is is in the environment and how that squares with what else they know and what else other people are doing um and so there are a lot of different ways that you can can think of where we accumulate and and how we reinforce distortions but the main ones are distortion's just a fancy word for information or for for how you see the world um so yeah personality experience and information and the other one that we the big one that we'll talk about is some sort of mechanical distortion like alcohol or meth will definitely distort your inferences about what sort of choice you should be making at any particular moment but generally i think the like calling this a paradigm shift in a in a way that makes it more accessible for people to understand is pretty apt yeah the um yeah we have a uh we have a paradigm shift coming uh thanks to jen hawk we got a major paradox time shift coming about the understanding of trauma as it as it relates to individual lives and relates to the entire global political economic social environment so that'll be on its way um the think about uh i'm not going to try to resave what she said i just want to try to put put it in doug type terms that there's basically two uh two main sources of error one of those sources of error is the hardware that you're born with i.e the the genes that build your brain so if your 80th percentile openness you're likely to be overly optimistic and get into some [ __ ] that the average person wouldn't get into not that there's anything wrong with that people people that didn't see that seinfeld episode you know the the so that's that's one thing so all of us are walking around with with genetically built distortions uh that or i would say they're not distortions they are likely to result in distortions so if you're open you are likely to be overly optimistic and you are likely to find more trouble uh you're also likely to possibly make up for it or more you could more than make up for it or a little bit make up for it by the gold that you also happen to find out there wandering far from the flock so both things will happen the the openness survives and an 80th percentile person is surviving at that level pretty well in the gene pool because occasionally the payoffs you know exceed the costs of the openness and so occasionally a specimen comes along that winds up harvesting a lot of genes as a result of having wandered you know a standard deviation away from home base uh in in some fashion so that uh however they are more likely to get plucked off by a predator as they cross over there to look for the fancy cherries and so that's why it is less than the optimum uh it's less than the than the most likely genetic uh calibration for openness in in the population as a whole so so number one it's the distortions that you're born with uh that you're going to have to deal with your whole life second of all um there is things that you've learned and so your your experiences are uh this gets a little confusing and god knows i don't know i think in the book i'm gonna leave jen to explain this just occurred to me how complicated this is gonna get so yeah there the environment itself is your life experiences are inherently not representative of the true environment they are some kind of a representation so let's suppose you're some uh god the first time i was in college i i grit my teeth and went up and and asked out a really pretty girl in my spanish class the university of idaho she said yes and i was elated and and yet this turned out to be a horrendous distortion of reality because then three days later she was just too shy to say no next class she came up and said gee you can't do it which of course is exactly the right decision and and that that starts to recalibrate my uh pie in the sky thinking that maybe in maybe in college i can put back i can brush back the nerd the nerdfish history that was happening in high school so the so what's going to happen is is that your experiences are going to be non-representative in other words they're not going to be completely non-representative but they're going to be deviations from the underlying reality structure of your of what your life will be if we in other words if you if you buy a uh oh i don't know if you buy a used car the question is did you get exactly the right deal or did you pay a little too much or did you pay a little bit too little okay we don't know but we know it's not right on target we know it's a it was either a little bit of an excellent good deal and you're hoping that it was or it could have been that is a bad deal so i bought a car once i thought it was a good deal and it turned out no that guy knew something about the car that i didn't know and i got hosed okay so your uh so your experiences um you know you take your first test in college in a history class and you do very well on it okay better than you would have expected the question is is this going to be representative of your future in college or was that just a little bit lucky okay and in fact your we the answer is we don't know but but we you know at the time we're all happy about it but then the next test uh we may be disappointed but now it turns out that we're we're now getting a more representative sample so what's going to happen is is that the longer you live what's going to happen is is that you're going to be less and less surprised by what the world shows you and the reason is is that there's going to be more and more data points are going to be piling in on you that are going to essentially be calibrating you and so the so the distortions are your brain is constantly working to minimize distortions because it doesn't want to be either overly optimistic or overly pessimistic it wants to be accurate but the inferences that it makes it doesn't have a choice about the inference that it makes it has a genetic code that built its inference making machinery along a certain lines if it's very open then it's going to be optimistic if it's very disagreeable it's going to be paranoid and pessimistic about how other people are treating you and whether or not this deal was fair okay in other words there's going to be um there's going to be an innate machinery that's your your particular machine is going to be already set at and then whatever your experiences have been they will not be at any given moment a perfect representation of the underlying truth that awaits you in the future uh or that would await you in a thousand iterations of the of your possible future so it means that you are always got you always have distortion creeping in all the time if you're a real estate agent and you just joined up and then in the first three months you sold five houses and you're freaking ecstatic and you're thinking wow i can do really well on this well it may be that you know you sold three of them to your uncle for god's sakes and and one of them was to his best friend etc and so it may turn out that the next three months you sell one house but you are you are right now it's unlikely whatever happened that you're accurately calibrated to the future you're either overly optimistic or overly pessimistic we don't know but what's going to happen is is that new experiences come and new experiences must update the machinery and they do and so based on more information into the system the system then is constantly recalibrating so the notion that we have bad calibrations that have accumulated etc and that this is how we have our distortions that's incorrect the system is a constantly updating database it's designed to do that it has to do that it couldn't possibly operate any other way so your you know my thinking is i don't go looking for my car keys when they're lost to a house that i used to live in i look at the house i'm living in now okay and so your it wouldn't make any sense to have those previous distortions distorted processes have a sort of democracies over your ability to make a decent decision that wouldn't make any sense at all so the system is constantly running essentially regression lines constantly moving it trying to triangulate as much as it possibly can on accuracy when you're 16 and your girlfriend breaks up with you the your inference is oh my god i'm never going to beat anybody like that again it's just to be terrible i'm going to be miserable i feel like dying okay well that's because you don't have enough experience yet this is going to happen lots of times [Laughter] so the uh so the point is is that uh the how your goals are being generated out of your current set of circumstances with your best understanding now of what your relationship is between you and reality on that given dimension seen as clearly as possible through the lens of an inherently distorted genetic code alongside a limited database from which to make inferences about where it is that you really stand that's all you can do okay uh that is however there so we can't improve that in principle what we can do here and what we're doing here beat your genes is essentially trying to define distill and and synthesize decision making strategies so strategies can potentially improve your performance if we adhere to strategies so we can't necessarily make you in principle any better decision maker in a second if you had to make put all the marbles on the table but we can tell you wait a second the right decision is to not put that many marbles on the table put a smaller amount on the table and see what we can learn this is the your nervous system improves its ability to make inferences about what its true relationship is between self and reality with future experiences so what we try to do when we're feeling intimidated or in in you know trapped or essentially whenever we're feeling really uncomfortable is because we've got big decisions to make the strategy is to try to find ways to make those decisions smaller as cheaply and effectively as we possibly can that is the strategy and that enables the system to potentially remove distortions uh at minimum expense and therefore for improve your ability to make decisions so that's that's the god knows i don't know if that's as good as what we did on the living with some library but it's probably similar no it's it's good i think the the examples are helpful um with you know the the getting sort of the distortion from the the early experience asking the girl out in your spanish class like that that just puts you on the wrong track in general like that's really that's how this kind of thing works but that also raises the um how you see the variation on the individual variation here because if you if you had less openness or you if you had a little more instability and you uh your first experience had been getting shot down instead of um the the great success you can see how that would like you you would you would tend to shrink in around that a little bit there would be sort of like okay well oh that's how it is and the world is just too scary and i'm i'm really not going to take another chance on this again and so people will people have differing abilities and different different levels of openness to essentially write you know writing over those scripts that they have about how the world works with that come with additional experience some people are just they're going to collect more data points and in more of a hurry than other people and that's how you d distort is with more information and so if you haven't gotten new information you're still walking around with an entire ontology about that you put the world together when you were 15 because some [ __ ] had happened to you and this is how you saw it and you you never went out there and and found out how it really is because you're very risk-averse because that's your personality then you're going to get you're getting it kind of stuck in that paradigm more likely than somebody who has more openness and is going to wander themselves into new information that's going to correct some of those errors unbelievable i i i probably between now and my death i will probably never hear a person use the word oncology with perfect accuracy brilliantly that's just [ __ ] unbelievable that's that's i'll take a curtsy over here don't freaking disappoint us ontology just means how you how you see the world people that's all it means it's a fancy grad school high falutin gre word it is distinct from epistemology which means how you understand the world [Laughter] yes just for us little people here's what she's trying to say [Laughter] yeah that if you're shy and you get burned you climb up for a while yeah yeah you're going to have a longer and actually all that we do and all that really can be done any quote therapeutic process is nothing other than an educational process and all that process is is the process of removing distortion if it's anything else if it's creating a distortion to get you motivated i i suppose you could create a distortion in order to get somebody motivated in order to go out there and have experiences that would remove distortions you know that that's theoretically possible the um well that's something that's that's something like what you know when tony robbins is riling up his crowd that's what he's doing right he's he's sort of creating an openness distortion by by this shared collective effervescence that everybody's doing it you know we're all in this together so they're all going to get yeah you can absolutely yeah you can manufacture these things especially short term right the uh but like the placebo effect yeah exactly like the placebo effect yeah yeah the uh circle yeah but i think like what what what we do what jen and i try to do and anything in really any any helping we're trying to do is we're simply trying to close our eyes think about what it is that we're hearing ask the questions that help us understand what your personality is and also what your circumstances are and be looking for what it where there's a possible distortion and i i think we both probably do the same thing you know somewhat different ways but it's basically the same concept where i'm looking for any any kind of emotional intensity you know fear anxiety anger you know frustration depression devastation etc anything or even possibly super high excitement okay in other words whenever i i'm listening for and then what it is that you think and very often what we find is the person is making inferences um about their situation that are that are based on pretty obviously incomplete information and they have not actually considered all of their available alternatives um and that's fine that's good because that's that's where we're going okay so uh but it makes sense that they that they would have made mistakes in those inferences or that they would be leaping to some conclusions just out of the economy of the way the mind is built and the distortions that they might have had in it so if i if i'm a young guy and i apply for five jobs and they all turn me down i'm not very motivated to apply for six but if someone else knows actually that the base rate for getting jobs is about one out of twenty then then essentially and they can communicate that to me they could say listen actually we wouldn't have expected you to get a job at this at this juncture this would this would be super important to understand because the truth is is that if i didn't know that then i would take the negative feedback as as the fact that i've miscalibrated in my goal seeking and and therefore i'm i'm doomed and therefore quit trying but if someone could say no actually that your your mistake and you're not understanding uh how it is that that this that this process is structured in terms of its probabilities and so you're actually doing fine let me look at your resume let me hear your presentation this is fine we are doing exactly this and we aren't proven wrong until we've until we've applied for at least 25 more jobs okay and i actually realistically expect that you have a very good chance of landing one in the next 25 but i would not actually expect you to land one in the next four or five because that's not enough and so that that is very similar to a tremendous amount of the quote therapy that i've done for the last 30 years it's it's exactly the the issue of calibration inference uh personality all of that that's that's it's it's the it's all that problem is what it is well good yeah did we lose nate no no i'm here i'm just uh i'm trying to process it all because uh as i was busy googling ontology it took me five minutes to read the definition processing and have a few examples [Laughter] it's a big sort of political philosophy word you run into that in in political theory and political philosophy all the time so it's very yeah unavoidable in my circles all right all right we'll try to be a little less impressed and intimidated i don't think so well all right nathan thank you so much i hope you enjoy the uh the waves uh in seattle dr lyle i hope the uh the water is just the right temperature for you yeah and uh and we will look forward to speaking with you both next show you
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