Orit Halpern
speaker
133 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 7 Sep
Orit Halpern’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.
Appearances
So the fundamental innovation here was t try to mathematically calculate human behavior.
Well, blitzkrieg, total war, when we think of World War II, it comes under these very totalizing terms that imply, right, the fact that there were entirely new kind of groupings of technology and media coming together to battle this war.
And we had, indeed, a new scale and speed of warfare, blitzkrieg, aerial warfare, but also new media.
Radio, for example, had put Hitler in power.
Cinema, propaganda.
So you have an entirely new combination of things that people had to deal with and contend with, and scientists and engineers had to.
And in the face of the kind of speed of battle and the blitzkrieg, a new level and size of scientific endeavor emerged.
As the United States and Great Britain mobilized, they recruited scientists, engineers, but not just scientists and engineers, also psychologists, psychiatrists, anthropologists, sociologists.
This was total war.
And like I said, it mattered as much how we influenced people's brains and minds and propaganda as the actual technologies and kind of material structures of the war.
And so under this condition, particularly during the Battle of Britain, at MIT, people started being concerned about war happening at speeds beyond the ability of human beings to process.
MIT being the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
And at MIT, they were working on a particular issue that really kind of, I think, identified this war, which was a new idea that information and communication in some sense is power and that you have to manage and control them to win the battle.
And at MIT, they were working on radar, which is basically how do you see the enemy before they see you, right?
And along with the radar, they were also working on a certain question of basically how do you shoot a plane down, which isn't that easy because it's moving pretty fast, and how do you process signals, which it sounds pretty simple to see a plane, but really telling a plane from a flock of birds is not that easy when you're trying to figure out how radio waves are changing.
And basically, you need to predict where the machine will be.
So people were preoccupied with signal processing, but they're also preoccupying with where the plane will be.
And under these conditions, bringing together mathematicians and engineers together, certain people, Norbert Wiener, a mathematician at MIT, being one of them,
started thinking that maybe people act repeatedly, repetitively, or mathematically, or algorithmically under stress.
That is to say that pilots, for example, might veer left or right on a systematic and regular basis.
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