Annie Jacobsen: belief

Transcript context

…Have they been able to find anything interesting in this squishy science analysis of trying to see how the human mind could be used as a weapon? The CIA most definitely believed, from my reading of the documents, that there was something very legit, shall we say, about ESP. It was uncontrollable, it was unreliable, but nonetheless it existed. Being the intelligence agency that they are, they cared less about why it worked. They just wanted to know how they could use it. And then, it got into all kinds of elements of placebo effect. When the military stepped in and got involved in the programs, that was a complete disaster, in my opinion, because the military needs to control everything in a mechanized, systematic way. And so, they started, for example, teaching people to be psychic, which is a really, really, really bad idea. Flash forward to where we are today, these programs still exist. There’s a Navy program which is working, based on a lot of data that came back from the war on terror, with certain soldiers knowing, “Wait, don’t walk down that path. There is an IED there.” They call this the spidey sense, and they actually have a program that works from this. These things never go away. They circle around in terms of being made fun of and then taken seriously, and a little of this and of that. My biggest takeaway from writing that book was a quote that I referenced in the beginning, which is the Thomas theorem, and it says, if men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences. I mean, placebo, as you’ve mentioned, is a fascinating concept. By the way, a short plug, I started listening to it, Andrew Huberman just released a podcast on placebo, the placebo effect.…

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