On Pascal, the placebo effect, and the arrogance of needing to understand.
I just got back from a run. Although calling it a run is generous — it was more of a walk-run-waddle along the water just north of the Queensboro Bridge, in the park whose name I can never hold onto. I'm so sore I can barely think. Which is, apparently, exactly when I do my best thinking.
While I was stretching and quietly dying, I watched a woman doing Tai Chi. She had a cane, and she was wielding it like a sword — slow, deliberate arcs through the air. And I couldn't tell: was she using it as a sword on purpose, or did the motion just happen to flow that way? Hold onto that question. I'm going to come back to it.
Because the thing I actually want to write about is how wrong I was.
The clean math that bothered me
Everyone knows Pascal's Wager — the idea that faith is an asymmetric bet. Believing costs you almost nothing, and the upside, if you're right, is infinite. So purely mathematically, you should always believe. The expected value of faith asymptotes to one; the cost asymptotes to zero.[^1] Believe, and you win. The math is clean.
And the math always bothered the hell out of me.
Not because it was wrong — because it was convenient. It felt too easy. Intellectually dishonest. I understood the logic perfectly, and that was exactly the problem: it was an argument optimized for me, for my outcome, dressed up as truth. Believe because it's a good bet for you. That's not faith. That's a hedge.
So I built the opposite
Being an extremist by nature — I find balance through extremes[^2] — I built the inverse. I drafted a thing I arrogantly named Diaz's Wager.[^3] (Yes. I named a wager after myself. We'll get to the arrogance.) This was all downstream of my own messy route through belief anyway — Catholic, then atheist, then something like pantheist.[^4]
Diaz's Wager went like this: it is better to be intellectually honest and go to hell than to disingenuously believe in a God you don't understand.
Say it out loud and it sounds almost noble. Purity over convenience. Honesty over the hedge. I'd rather be right and damned than comfortable and fake.
Here's the part that took me years to see
Diaz's Wager was the arrogant one.
Pascal's Wager is at least humble enough to admit it doesn't know. Mine wasn't. Mine smuggled in a much bigger claim — that the things I couldn't understand weren't just beyond me, they were false. Not "my picture of the world is incomplete." No. "The parts I don't get are factually wrong." That's not intellectual honesty. That's Richard Dawkins energy: what I cannot understand must be incorrect.[^5]
And the cleanest proof that I had it backwards is sitting right there in the medical literature, wearing the most insulting name we could possibly give it.
The placebo effect
Think about how much contempt is packed into that name. We ran the trials. We found that people who believed they were taking the real drug got real, measurable, tangible benefits — and our response was to file it under a term that roughly translates to "the improvement that doesn't count."[^6] These poor idiots thought they were getting the medicine, and wouldn't you know it, they got better anyway. Jokes on them.
But read that again. Belief produced an outcome. The conviction that something was happening made something happen, in the actual body, measurably. And instead of stopping and asking what does it mean that belief can do that, we named it — with a little sneer — and moved on.
Because naming is how we stop looking
You name a thing and you own it. You name it and you control it. You name a star, a species, a law, a disorder[^7] — and the act of labeling lets you file it away as understood, handled, closed. We do it constantly. We slap a name on something we don't actually understand, leave the root cause untouched, and the name itself becomes permission to stop looking. "Placebo effect." Solved. Next.
Except it isn't solved. It's the most interesting thing in the room.
Because the placebo effect, and Napoleon Hill, and Think and Grow Rich, and every manifestation book your skeptical friend rolls his eyes at — they're all pointing at the same thing.[^8] The belief in the thing helps make the thing real. Not as metaphor. As mechanism. There is something about conviction itself that bends outcomes, and we have a hundred names for it and contempt for most of them, and not one of those names is the same as understanding it.
That's the part younger, arrogant me couldn't hold. He thought a name was a victory. He thought not understanding something was evidence against it. He built a whole wager on it and stuck his own name on the front.
So — the woman with the cane
I never figured out whether she meant to wield it like a sword or whether the motion just carried it there. And standing in that park, wrecked and stretching, I realized the question might be the wrong one. Maybe intention and emergence aren't as separate as I wanted them to be. Maybe the belief that you're holding a sword is what turns the cane into one. Maybe she flowed into the meaning and it became true on the way.
I don't understand it. Which, these days, I've decided is the honest place to stand. Not "it's false because I don't get it." Just: I don't get it yet.
That's the wager I'd make now. It's a worse bet, mathematically. I think it might be the true one.
Notes & cross-references
[^1]: Expected value deserves its own post — the upside/cost framing, why "infinite" is a weird concept and why I prefer collapsing it to one-vs-zero/binary. (link once written)
[^2]: "Balance through extremes" — my whole operating principle here. (cross-link)
[^3]: The original Diaz's Wager draft. I should just publish it, embarrassing as it is, and link it here as the primary-source artifact of the arrogance. (link the draft)
[^4]: The Catholic → atheist → pantheist journey. Needs its own piece; this essay assumes it. (cross-link)
[^5]: Richard Dawkins / the "what I can't understand must be wrong" pattern — worth a standalone piece on this specific failure mode. (cross-link)
[^6]: Placebo effect deep-dive — its own post. The mechanism, the literature, and why the name itself is the tell. (link once written)
[^7]: Naming as control / the power of labeling — "you name it, you own it." Explore across domains: naming a species, a star, a planet, a law, and especially psychological disorders (labeling without understanding the root cause). (cross-link)
[^8]: Napoleon Hill, Think and Grow Rich, manifestation, and the placebo effect as the same underlying phenomenon — belief as mechanism, not metaphor. (cross-link)