Essays

Changing the Face of War – Sir Harold Gillies and the Origins of Modern Reconstructive Surgery

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[Describing World War I] Only one village in all of France escaped without losing at least one of its citizens. This explains why, even in the tiniest of villages, there is a monument honouring those who were killed in the war. Every year, wreaths are laid, and ceremonies are held. Wherever we went, people kept returning to one theme: the extraordinary amount of blood that had been shed. “World War II,” they would say. “Oh, it was terrible, but it was nothing compared to …

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How Joseph Lister’s Visionary Approach Changed Modern Medicine

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Until the middle of the nineteenth century, surgery was nothing more than butchering services provided by barbers or people with no formal medical training (some were even illiterate), which performed tooth extractions, bloodletting, enemas, and amputations without a thorough understanding of either human anatomy or infection causes. No wonder hospitals were called Houses of Death, where mushrooms and maggots thrived in dirty sheets and, sometimes, the flesh of patients. Most patients were tortured in surgeries until they died or miraculously survived. As there were no …

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How Do People Change Their Minds? 

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In theory, the formula for changing our minds should be simple. We change our minds when we come across new information from credible and trustworthy sources that contradict our existing beliefs. But we tend to forget that Imagine how much harder physics would be if electrons had feelings. Physicist Richard Feynman And so, because of the weight we give to our beliefs, feelings, or biases, changing a person’s mind can’t be solved through formulaic approaches. We may need help seeing what we can’t or …

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Living with AI Fast Fashion Content

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The shock brought by the release of ChatGPT, a state-of-the-art chatbot from the AI research laboratory OpenAI, will redefine how we relate to writing. ChatGPT is an extensive language model trained on a dataset of billions of words and can generate human-like text. It was all good and fun to ask ChatGPT to rewrite Bohemian Rhapsody as the life of a postdoc, how to remove a peanut butter sandwich from a VCR in the style of the King James version of the Bible, generate essays or Harvard applications in seconds. But the AI …

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Avoiding Perverse Incentives

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Part 1: When Incentives Fail. A Story about Rats, Cobras, Nails, and Atrocities.  Part 2: Avoiding Perverse Incentives  When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. Goodhart’s Law (adversarial Goodhart)  Perverse incentives are compensations with unintended or undesirable consequences that encourage people to act in unethical or harmful ways.   Telltale signs of perverse incentives might include: How to Fight against the Negative Consequences of Perverse Incentives? Let’s consider a practical example: a company that wants to offer bonuses to employees who …

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A Deception Study: Operation Mincemeat 

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All warfare is based on deception. Sun Tzu  Deceit and violence – these are the two forms of deliberate assault on human beings. But deceit controls more subtly, for it works on belief as well as action.  When we undertake to deceive others intentionally, we communicate messages meant to mislead them, meant to make them believe what we ourselves do not believe. We can do so through gesture, through disguise, by means of action or inaction, even through silence.  Sissela Bok – Secrets: On the …

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How to Counteract Disinformation

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The last few years exposed more than ever the fragility of our information ecosystem. Elections, Brexit, social unrest, COVID-19 conspiracies, and the war in Ukraine have been used as disinformation operations by certain actors to undermine faith in governments, raise fear and anger, confuse and manipulate us.  Disinformation is information meant to deceive (trolls posting fake news). In contrast, misinformation is false information with no malicious intent (our friends and family genuinely believe in disinformative content and willingly share it).  Why is Disinformation Effective?  …

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Leonardo da Vinci: Between the Tongue of the Woodpecker and Mona Lisa

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Get hold of a skull. Nutmeg.  Observe the holes in the substance of the brain, where there are more or less of them.  Describe the tongue of the woodpecker and jaw of a crocodile.  Give measurement of the dead using his finger [as a unit].  Get your books on anatomy bound. Boots, stockings, comb, towel, shirts, shoelaces, penknife, pens, a skin for the chest, gloves, wrapping paper, charcoal.  This to-do list belonged to Leonardo da Vinci, written perhaps before a journey da Vinci took to …

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