Ignorance is Bliss

wait to hear this. This fell out because he makes an offer this if you would like, and this is purely optional, I will tell you to the day, to the minute, even when you will die. I have this information here in my in my file, and I will share this information with you. All you have to do is ask would you would you would you like to know? Would you would you want this date and this time to mark in your calendar? Absolutely not? No, No, I mean that's the kind of mystery you want to remain

a mystery? Right? Do you think I want to obsess on that for the rest of my life every single moment? Well that's one argument. Yeah, Robert, do you think I really want to well, yeah, I mean to know exactly

when you're gonna die. It would it would be helpful in some ways, right, You know, if you've been putting on planning, state planning, um, if there are certain projects you've been putting off, it might be nice to know you actually have time enough to complete them, and or if you should should maybe shoot for instead of writing the Great American novel, maybe you would just try and write the Great American short story or the Great American haiku h depending on what the forecast is, or yeah,

a little fly fiction. Yeah. But on the other hand, you would conceive it would be then be living your life in fear, ticking down ever closer to that moment when this same individual in the dark robes and the deathly thin hands might reappear and come to collect. Yeah. You might even say that you're so preoccupied with this inevitability that now has a date on it, that you could do nothing but think about it. So any sort of efforts at writing a haiku or anything else would

be completely hamstrung. Yeah, you would just have that date taking in your mind. You just every and even say it's say it's did you like two thousand eight. You know that's nice, that's nicely far out. Yeah that that even then you would hear you'd hear about two thousand and would it would it would just mess you up? Or even just to hear do you like thirteenth every time it comes around? So I can see the value

and not hearing the thin man out on this particular case. Yeah. Well, and this plays into the idea of why we we exercise a kind of version of this in the form of what's been called the Ostrich effect um. Also, ignorance is bliss because there are just some things we don't want to face, and its human nature all of us.

Do us do this even if you think that, like you're the most self aware, self actualized person on the earth, there is something that you're avoiding, right, I mean, when it comes to our awareness of the world, all of us live inside of a carefully maintained and constructed worldview. And that worldview is not going to in the same way that you'll have a video game world that that may incorporate some aspects of reality and some aspects of

actual physics, but ignore other real life rules. You know, like the character jumps off a building and he'll still die as one would. But but maybe he can run exceedingly fast without you know, running out of steam. That kind of think all of us create this worldview, maintain this worldview that is going to ignore certain risks, incorporate some other risks, totally exaggerate other risks, and uh and

and underplay still other risks to your everyday life. Yeah, even if that means that you could have some really crappy outcomes, say to your health as a result. We'll talk about that in a bit. But hey, what if what if the Finnman could give you that date. I'm we've played with that idea of just you know, this apparition showing up. But turns out that researchers, scientists have actually come up with an idea that is a kind

of death test. Yeah. Yeah, in this case that it wouldn't be a medieval embodiment of death that would be showing up and and offering you the information. It might be a little contraction that you wear on your wrist. Physicist at the United Kingdoms Lancaster University developed this test, which uses painless lasers to analyze endothelial cells. Uh. These are the cells that lying blood vessels under the skin

and are a possible health indicator. So the basically this laser analysis would look at the state of these cells and would be able to extrapolate what your general health is right now and how much time you have. Now. This is not a watch you can pick up that

your local store. This technology is not ready to roll out, but it's sort of a road sign um on the highway to a possible future in which we see more and more of wearable technology, implanted technology which gives us some measure of real time information about the state of

our health. Yeah, here's another example of it, and this comes from the Institute for Molecular Medicine in Finland, and they would look at the level of a particular biomar biomarker which the biomarker could indicate a patient's risk of disease or a likely response to treatment. So, for example, cholesterol levels are measured to assess the risk of heart disease,

right that could be a biomarker. So what they did is they took blood samples from over seventeen thousand generally healthy people, they screen screen them for more than a hundred different biomarkers, and then those people were monitored over a five year period. So in that time, six hundred and eighty four people died of a range of illnesses and diseases and put in cancer in cardiovascular disease, and the scientists had discovered that those people all had similar

levels of for biomarkers. So that's where it really becomes much more laser focused in terms of what are we looking for here and what can predict death in the next five years. And that research that they were doing that was actually just another subset of research that had

been ongoing by Estonian researchers. They initially made this link with it about I think ten thousand people, but they were so skeptical about the results that they went ahead and said to the folks of her at the Molecular Medicine in Finland, hey, do you want to, you know, try this out and see if you get similar results.

Well they got identical findings, which points to this idea that we are getting closer and closer to this idea of hey, can you check out my biomarkers and let me know what's going to go on in the next five years. I like the idea of having even almost like I can imagine a future we have all your wearable computers that are going on your implants, your little handheld device, your little holographic displays that are letting you

and others know about various stats in your life. And I can imagine every morning you call up that sort of holographic death embodiment and you just sort of check in with death and find out what the forecast is, or you think that's how they're going to market it. You know what, death watch, Death doesn't have to You can choose which form death takes. Death can take out like a classic medieval mode. I think that's what I'd go for. But death can be uh, you know, an

attractive man or woman. Death can death avatar petty boop, Yeah, hello kitty. I mean, you name it. But but then I wonder too. In the same way that you know what, if you're like me, you're always realizing for the first time that there's something on your phone that is making a little pop up like you didn't know that you're that this news app isn't is somehow turned itself on so that it needs to inform you when there's a news update, and then you have to go and turn

it off in your settings. We end up in that scenario with this where you realize, you know, I don't want to hear from death every day. I don't want my normal check up. I would rather just live in ignorance of this. I'm going to turn this off, even though all the technology here is at my fingertips. Yeah, I mean you could be like, hey, Siri, what's what's my death watching today? Hold on a second while I

check your bio markers. You know, it's like you could you could do that constantly and just drive yourself nuts, or you could just be like I, like you said, I am just going to toss this uh into the trash and not think about it because I don't want to know. So this is one of those cases where knowledge maybe isn't power or perceived power. Well, knowledge can be power in the long run, right, but not knowledge

in the short run. Like if you tell me I'm going to die in five years, uh, that conceivably could make the next five years, you know, a little more streamlined, but it's going to really crush me right now. So I don't want to hear it, right, Yeah, I mean, at the end of the day, this is basically like knowledge in the short term. In the long term in whether or not it just sucks, and nothing could probably suck more than hearing hey, guess what you have an STD? Right? Well, yeah,

and I bring this up because it's related. And we've just finished talking a lot about about syphilis. So you know, we went into some of the you know, the the the shame that is often associated with STDs uh, in addition to the varying treatment you know available. But say that, say someone wills to tell you, hey, you have syphilis today, that is easily treated. The sooner, you know, the better. But on the other hand, they're still going to come with a lot of shame and then social anxiety over oh,

well I have syphilis. How did I get cipils? Soon? Did I get syphilis too? And am I a bad person in some sense because I have it? Yeah? And but you know, some people might be information averse to that. And some people, I mean a group of eighteen to twenty four year olds, because this is as we know from our research, this is the group that tends to

get STDs most. And in fact, I was thinking about the HBO Girls show in which the character Hannah gets HPV and so it turns out to be the sort of more like a moment where she realizes that all adventurous women will have an STD eventually, right, so she kind of weaves that into her um her worldview. But not everybody does that. Not everybody is like, I need a plot point from my show. I'm gonna go see

the doctor and see if I have an STD. In fact, a lot of people would rather not know that information. And again that's sort of the z and sort of the short term thinking when over the long term term thinking. Is that basic human failure to value the long term view over the short term of view. Yeah, and nothing bears this out more than this this neat little study about STDs and information aversion. And the study was conducted by Josh Tassof, who was an economist at Claremont Graduate University,

and Anonda Ganghoulian, Associate professor of accounting at Claremont McKenna College. Yeah, and it's basically the same scenario we talked about at the top of the screen. You imagine a thin man in a row comes up and says, hey, I have a file here, except he asked you would you like to know if you have her pies? I mean, this is the basic scenario there. And indeed, if this individual were to come to me and asked me, I feel like I would say, yes, let me know, tell tell

me if I have her pies. That would be some good information for me to have at this point. All right, So they kind of did that, except for the lap coats on right. Yes, and it's and it's framed in an actual study. Yeah, And they asked university students whether or not they wanted to get tested for her pie simplex virus. Now, they talked to them about the two different types, the first type being the kind that just

caused cold stores. I'm sure everybody's familiar with HSV one, yes, the second type being the one that causes genital stores. Now here's the rup. They sent them along with little pictures to identify the genital stores and the cold sores, so that they had a very clear under standing of the differences. And moreover, I feel like those photos probably insided in them a bit of fear. Right, these are your these are these are not your This is not

your herpes medication. Uh, you know, person walking in a field, television spot. This is the the full on web md slash, Google image search herpes dive. Yeah, that you did not really want to see, but you saw. So they were then told that a blood test could find out if they had either form of a virus and then test off and ganglie. They designed the experiment to eliminate any reason, sort of extraneous reason that someone might decline to get information.

So they wanted to make sure that they weren't declining the tests because they didn't want to have their blood drawn. Right, So that's one thing that they said to him, Hey, we can have all the students have their blood drawn, but if a student chooses not to get tested, that they would draw just tendency seeds of their blood and

in front of them, they would pour it down the sink. Yeah, so that's it's not the fear of the needle that's playing into this, because you're gonna get stuck with the needle. They're gonna draw your blood. But if you say no, then all right, we'll just pour your blood down the sink. Yeah. The second thing is they made sure to let them know that all of this was confidential, so that they

weren't worried about the results being shared with anyone else. Right, it's not going to be announced to the whole group it's not going to be published in the study. So yeah, it's not it's not a fear of the needle. It's not a fear of public shaming. It's just the fear of the information that they are wrangling with. And to avoid the information, to opt out of the information is

a ten dollar feet Yeah, that's the third thing. They were like, if you don't want to get tested, you're going to have to actually pay us ten dollars not to test you. Yeah. So it's like the man in the robe come up and say, hey, if you give me ten dollars, I'll not tell you if you have her pies. Again. They they structured it this way because they wanted to make sure that it was very clear that the people were burying their heads in the sand here like an ostrich or. That's always the idea, right,

And there's a price tag on ignorance here. They have to actually purchase the ignorance. It's not the passive ignorance of I don't want to know what that credit card bill is. I'm just going to ignore that envelope it. So it's not the I'm just I don't want to deal with that that that the email from my mother in law. So I'm just gonna let it set there on open. No, you have to actively pay ten dollars to avoid the results of the herpes test. I pay

ten dollars to avoid my mother in laws, you know. Alright. So while only five percent avoided the hs V one test, three times as many avoided testing for the nastier form

of herbie. So here here we have very direct conclusions that people were saying three times as much, I don't want this, I don't want to know, even though this could help them in terms of their healthcare down the road the long term, right, yeah, and even I mean the kind of the immediate short term, like the not very long term, like your immediate um, you know, sexual activity. Your immediate health is involved in all this. So it's it's it's really troubling to to to read the findings

in this study. Yeah. And when they, when you actually asked them, said well, why didn't you why didn't you want this? Why did you opt out of this information? Why did you pay to remain ignorant? Mostly they would say, well, I just I didn't need that added anxiety. I didn't want to worry with it with the added stress of knowing potentially knowing that I have this this illness, that I have her piece. Yeah, I feel like it's kind of like that that people are like, I already have

a ton of existential dread and anxiety. I don't want this on top of it. And it might seem to to some people like I can't believe they made this decision. But again, think in your own life, maybe it wasn't an STD test or something else that you were avoiding because you felt like it was just the weight of that one more piece of knowledge might be the breaking point. Well, you know, there's comfort in and we keep saying ignorance, but I want to deframe it a little a little

more compassionately. There's there's comfort in ambiguity. It's it's almost the comfort of a quantum state. You know, you don't open that box, you then the cat is simultaneously dead and alive, and you can cling to the possibility that Shoulder's cat is alive, and so by not by opting out, they're keeping their um, their state of herpes infection in

a quantum state. And you can take comfort in that quantum state because if I don't know for sure, then there's still this chance, then I'm good and I feel like every I love the way you describe. I think that's perfect, that quantum state. Everybody has experienced that, whether or not it's a test that you just took in school, right, and you're you're worried that you didn't pass it or you didn't do as well as you think you might have been able to. Just being in that uncertain state

means the possibility of getting a really good grade still exists. Yeah, another health related option that comes to mind, and I think of it because I think I have a dental checkup coming up. Sometimes month is like right now, I either have a cavity or I don't. You know, I don't.

I don't have any you know, discomfort or anything. But you know, how did you go in and then you if you just wait and you're waiting, you're waiting, and then they'll tell you, oh, you have a cavity, and then you're you're crushed or at least you know, I feel crushed and then they have to to deal with it. But you either have a cavity or you don't. But your fear, you're fearing the absolute judgment that comes down and knowing for sure, do you know, I just went

last week and I have a cavity. Yeah, and now I'm sattled with the knowledge that I'll be in the chair. All Right, we're gonna take a quick break, and when we get back, we're going to talk about why this sort of scare tactic strategy doesn't work in what we can do. All Right, We're back, and I gotta tell you, my tooth is starting to hurt now. All this time, the psychic dread is boring into you. It's it is.

So I'm going to distract myself from that and say, hey, uh, if you were a public health worker and you were gonna you have disinformation now that that this sort of information over exists in people because it's tapping into their existential dread, um, how would you then go about trying to get people to access information that might help them

in the long run. Yeah, that's a big question, and that's certainly the question that the study from Claremont Graduate University, uh dived into a bit at the at the end of the study, because, yeah, doctors don't want that scenario where the patient finally shows up after a twenty year absence and the problems that they've encountered over time have have escalated, you know, because almost always the case, early detection is key to to effective treatment. Indeed, so what

do you do well? One of the things is, and maybe this seems a little bit disingenuous, but one of the things that that you could do is to try to sort of maybe played down the idea of the test itself and the results and the fact that you might have, you know, in this in this scenario, like I just terrible raw case of genal source, right, instead of showing everybody these pictures, maybe you just talk more about the long term management of this kind of thing

and and the benefits that you can have in finding out the positives and other words, Yeah, and and sometimes it goes beyond just like the hardcore like scaring people with facts. I mean, the facts alone can be scary, and you want people to know, you want people to

to to have the facts at their disposal. But but you also look back at say the old syphilis posters that we're talking about in previous episodes, the ones that would which would would show women in sort of a monstrous light was oftentimes literally with ghastly skull like faces and pulling off of demonic mass that kind of thing, and so like that's sending the message, uh that that hey, if you have one of these, then it's probably because

you've been sleeping with monsters and you yourself are a monster, And that's a scary message to send as well. Yeah, it was a kind of slut shaming, like these old posters. So what if you updated him with like the Hannah Horvath version from Girls, We're like, hey, every adventurous woman has an STD You see her like, you know, taking off on a plane. Yeah, I mean, it's just kind of like a kid. But you know what I'm saying, Like,

there's there's a way to reframe it. Yeah, yeah, framing it in a sense like this is just the kind of stuff that happens. Let's treat it, because treatment makes things easier. I mean, it's we're boiling it down here. But that's that's basically the strategy that they put forward in this study. Now, the other recommendation they make comes down to just frequency of tests. Now, the test in

this study, you know, it's a big deal. You're going into this, you're signed up for this study, You're you're you're filling out the paperwork, they're you're being shown information about herpes, and it's all leading up to this test and whether they're going to tell you if you have have herpes or not they're actually going to test there, or if it's going to be poured down the sink um in a way that kind of this big ritual

ends up playing out before you. The argument here is what you do is you make tests like this far more routine, and the more routine the test becomes, the

less of a big deal it is. It's the version of it I keep thinking of is alright, imagine you know you're looking you check into your bed every night to see if there's a monster there, all right, and there's never a monster there, and you can feel kind of comforting and the fact that based on on on on regular studies of the environment, there's not a monster under your bed. But if you only check for a monster once a year, then that check becomes this this

more powerful um experience. If you only go to the doctor once a year, then you have this just added psychic weight associated with the ordeal. Yeah, and now we should say that that some of the problem here is access to healthcare, and in an obstacle would certainly be that if someone did not have a healthcare plan in place, or one that was um affordable to them, then it would be a little bit more difficult to get that

checked out all the time. Yeah, because I mean there's certainly people with ready easy access to healthcare who avoid going to the doctor out of information a version then there, but then there are going to be people who have the added incentive to avoid going to the doctor because

of the financial obligation involved there. So you see, I think you see a varying scale of the the economic and the access um issue influencing and strengthening the information aversion or in other cases to even replacing the information of version. Maybe it becomes a situation I would love to know, but I have zero access to what I need, Yeah, which is really heartbreaking because those results can can be terrible. I mean, if you cannot catch things at certain stages.

So all right, Um, there's there is a good I think based stock of information about how that would affect us,

particularly our health right and how we make decisions. But um, there's an idea that we also carry around with us in bigger global themes information version, and there is a mathematical physicist and professor of mathematics at the University of California Riverside, who goes by the name of A John Carlos Bias, and he has a great uh blog post about this, talking about how global warming is part and parcel of our aversion to say, oh this thing, this

this blue green rock that we're all sitting on and we love and sustains us. Hey, we might be messing it up, and how people are just kind of like, nah, really really, I don't I don't think so indeed, because no one wants to hear, Hey, you've kind of messed up your planet here. I mean, it's it's it's bad news. It's news that comes with a certain amount of responsive billy uh at the individual level, as it certainly as

well as the corporate and state level. UM. So to whatever extent you can just ignore the information or excuse it away or blame it on on this set or the other, than than all the better for your immediate short term um mental health. Yeah. And he points directly to information aversion in this sense, and he says, quote, let's try extrapolating from this. Global warming is pretty scary. What would people do to avoid learning more about it. You can't exactly pay scientists to not tell you about it,

but you can do lots of other things. Not listen to them, pay people to contradict what they're saying, and so on, and guess what people do all these things. So don't expect that scaring people about global warming will make them take action. If a problem seems scary and hard to solve, many people will just avoid thinking about it, and you just readjust your worldview to where you don't

have to engage with that kind of thinking. Uh. There have been recent papers that have come up talk talking about the way we use our social media, especially Facebook, how we inevitably end up just creating the bubble of comfort, uh, regarding what shows up in our news feed and what

we end up up seeing. So the the troubling information, the stuff we don't want to hear, that just gets pushed out into the into the dark, and the only thing in the light of our little campfire is the stuff that is reinforcing our worldview and comforting our worldview. Which was contrary to what people thought would happen in

social media. They thought that people would have more access to different opinions and information, but the opposite seems to be true in terms of how um information is being selected and shared, right, Yeah, I mean, we have access to more information than ever before, and at times it feels like we're dumber than ever before on the Internet. But I think again, it harkens back to that idea of if it's if it's terrible news is nobody's like, Ah, I am an adverse information monger. Tell me, tell me

all the things I don't really want to hear. But I really know, I mean, who, I'm sure there are some people out there who do that, but most people tend to shy away from it. But I guess the thing, hopefully, maybe the thing here is that enough people will want to hear about the other side being wrong because that strengthen their worldview and and their agenda, that maybe it

will keep those things bubbling up to the surface. But then we call it into this whole idea of cognitive bias, because I was thinking, you know, there's somewhat of a byproduct too of cognitive bias and cognitive dissonance and how we take all these pieces of information and try to

fit them into our world views. Um, But I do like what bias is saying about the global warming issue, in which John Muellum has said too in his book Wild Ones, which is keep pushing the idea of the polar bear, you know, slipping on ice that is melting away underneath it, and it becomes less effective and people don't necessarily want to see it because it feels like there is there's no control over the situation. Um, So

what do you do? You try to give people information and a sense of control over what could be done. And to this end, we're actually going to be looking into the topic of rewilding, um. So look for that in a couple of weeks. But we hope to explore the issue of global warming through more positive effects of what we actually can do. So I'm gonna return once more though, to be the idea of of the Reaper.

What what if we did, in a sense, check in with death every day to the point where it became normal. What if? What if? What if death wasn't this thing that's just lurking mysterious at some unknown point in the future, but we actually just lived our lives with a better long term understanding of how our life was going to work. Well, I mean, I think there are a lot of people who would say that we need a better relationship with death.

You know, not that we need to sit around the campfire with with the grim Reaper all the time and have a beer, but you know that we do need to look at it as a natural part of being

as opposed to something that needs to be vanquished. In this NPR piece, they were talking about a community which is actually trying to talk about death with their loved ones in a real and meaningful way so that the end of care um end of life care could be put into place and could be most effective and compassionate for people who have advanced states of disease or just age and what to do with their stuff, and all of these things that you know are just become like

this mental um clap trap of our existence that we just put up in our mental addicts and leave up there to just get dust all over. Yeah, all that stuff in the health on the second floor bedroom that we think we're going to be able to use our entire life, because that's a whole another area. It's just how your living spaces arranged. We tend to not think about the long terms of well, I'm not going to reach the point where I can't climb stairs anymore now,

I'm not going to roll with that. Yeah. So we talked about this a little bit earlier, like we so great to have an experiment with a community, hundred year long experiment to to just infuse that culture of that community with long term instead of short term, because very much of our existence, at least our Western existence, is concerned with the short term. You know. We we know about the long term, but we're really worried more about

like what's going to happen tomorrow or in the next year. Yeah, And it does make me wonder to what extent we can mess with that, like how much of that is culture, how much of that is based in our conscious understanding the world, and how much of that is just the organism itself, Because ultimately, the genetic mission is just to reach the age of which you can reproduce, reproduce, spread the genes, and then get busy dying because that's what the body starts doing at that point. I mean, that's

what our bodies are doing right now. Our bodies are dying. That death is a thing that happens to the body after it has fulfilled as genetic mission. Well, that all seems pretty clear cut, and tell you put on top of that configuration consciousness, right, the hard problem, Why are we here? Why are we doing this anyway? Yeah? And

then that's then we're in the same human mess. We're always in this, uh, this tug of war between between consciousness and the body, between uh the realities of how we uh ascended to this point and uh and what we want out of it. Indeed, all right, So there you have it. So, hey, you want to check out more episodes of the podcast, you want to read our blog posts, you want to watch videos, than head on over to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That

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