Happy Sunday!
My girlfriend is away, and I’ll be home alone for a week. I tend to get easily bored whenever I’m alone, so I’ll mostly indulge myself in experimental cooking and movies whenever boredom strikes. Suggest other fun activities that I should try.
And here’s your weekly dose of multidisciplinary reading to upgrade your thinking and decision making. If you’re seeing this newsletter for the first time, you can subscribe here.
Q: Is ‘the simpler the better’ a practical advice?
Since the 1920, for over a period of 40 years a doctor named Walter Jackson Freeman performed lobotomies — a surgical process of severing connections in the brain’s prefrontal cortex in order to cure mental disorders — on whoever was brought to him.
His methods were so simple, swift, and brutal that it would make any respectable doctor recoil. Instead of any surgical instrument he inserted a standard household ice pick into the brain through the eye socket, tapping it through the skull bone with a hammer, then wriggled it vigorously to sever neural connections.
He painted a nonchalant description of the procedure in a letter to his son:
“I have been…knocking them out with a shock and while they are under the ‘anaesthetic’ thrusting an ice pick up between the eyeball and the eyelid through the roof of the orbit actually into the frontal lobe of the brain and making the lateral cut by swinging the thing from side to side. I have done two patients on both sides and another on one side without running into any complications, except a very black eye in one case. There may be trouble later on but it seemed fairly easy, although definitely a disagreeable thing to watch.”
The procedure was so crude that an experienced neurologist from New York University fainted while watching a Freeman operation. But it was quick: patients generally could go home within an hour.
It was this quickness and simplicity that dazzled many in the medical community. Freeman was extraordinarily casual in his approach. He operated without gloves or a surgical mask, usually in street clothes. The method caused no scarring but also meant that he was operating blind without any certainty about which mental capacities he was destroying. Because ice picks were not designed for brain surgery, sometimes they would break off inside the patient’s head and have to be surgically removed, if they didn’t kill the patient first.
What is perhaps most remarkable is that Freeman was a psychiatrist with no surgical certification — a fact that horrified many other physicians. About two-thirds of Freeman’s subjects received no benefit from the procedure or were worse off. Two percent died. His most notorious failure was Rosemary Kennedy, sister of the future US president.
In 1941, she was twenty-three years old, a vivacious and attractive girl but headstrong and with a tendency to mood swings. She also had some learning difficulties, though these seem not to have been nearly as severe and disabling as has sometimes been reported. Her father, exasperated by her wilfulness, had her lobotomised by Freeman without consulting his wife. The lobotomy essentially destroyed Rosemary. She spent the next sixty-four years in a care home in the Midwest, unable to speak, incontinent, and bereft of personality.
Even after the emergence of psychoactive drugs, Freeman had a steady flow of patients, and he went on performing lobotomies up until his 70s. Unlike the drugs, it was cheap and quick, and therefore took quite some time to fall out of fashion. It was only after it became evident that Freeman was leaving trails of human wreckage with his quick fix that the medical community became seriously concerned.
Lobotomy did actually work up to a point. People with lobotomies generally became less violent and more tractable, but they also routinely suffered massive, irreversible loss of personality. The hidden risks in the procedure were simply too high, and the long-term consequences, as was later discovered, were disastrous. Yet, lobotomies were popular — because of its simplicity and swiftness.
This simplistic method was originally devised by physician Egas Moniz whom Freeman idolised. Moniz was no better. He undertook operations without having any idea what damage they might do or what the outcomes would be. He conducted no preliminary experiments on animals. He didn’t select his patients with particular care and didn’t monitor outcomes closely afterward.
He didn’t actually perform any of the surgeries himself, but supervised his juniors — though freely took credit for any successes. Despite the many shortcomings of the procedure and Moniz’s lamentable clinical standards, he was feted around the world and in 1949 received the Nobel Prize.
Despite their popularity and recognition, Freeman and Moniz’s methods are perfect demonstrations of what Einstein warned us about: “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.”
It cannot be said with certainty if Einstein actually said it, but it makes a lot of sense nonetheless. Einstein’s ideas and theories could get complex, as was his theory of relativity of which, at least initially, he was the only one who was able to understand the maths completely. But if one is to fully understand the essence of the theory, then that understanding must be conveyed as simply as possible for the sake of good communication. But making it simplistic just for the sake of communication would make it easily comprehensible, but it won’t convey what the theory actually is. Based on this, Freeman and Moniz basically demonstrated how science shouldn’t be done.
As a principle, you should be weary of quick fixes that seem to solve a big problem — such as mental disorder — in an easy and simplistic manner. It’s bound of have a lot of hidden risks that are likely to cause long term disasters in the future. It is true that simple and easy-to-comprehend business models, medical procedures, financial plans, and growth strategies are highly revered, but that’s only because human beings are gullible.
Humans — even the people at the Bank of Sweden who gave Moniz a prize in memory of Alfred Nobel — understand a direct, unswerving, and straightforward answer rather than a nuanced one. Therefore, it’s a good strategy to remain paranoid of things that appear too simplistic, especially when the downsides are high if the plan fails — such as in lobotomy where you are very likely to end up as a vegetable, if not dead. Even if all goes well, you would definitely lose your personality.
People often oversimplify things to sound good or make their ideas easily comprehensible. It’s common in professions where they are rewarded for perception, not results. Think MBAs. Don’t be fooled! Just because something sounds comprehensible, or just because a lot of people subscribe to it, or just because it’s recognised by an authority, doesn’t make it right. Always remember to do your own research, engage yourself in second-order thinking, and be a better judge for yourself — be it in business, finance, or health.
Tiny Thought
If you think you are too busy, do a 30 minute by 30 minute audit of a day. You’ll find out how much time you’re wasting.
I Enjoyed Watching
Although I don’t consider the Oscars as the benchmark for good film, I believe Parasite is an excellent movie. If you haven’t watched it, you should. If you’ve been contemplating watching it, here are my (almost) spoiler-free thoughts that will make the movie all the more beautiful to you.
It’s definitely a movie about the class divide, but it’s not just about the haves and the have nots. There’s a third layer as well—the have nothings. The haves live on the higher ground, the have nots live in a semi-basement, and the have nothings live inside a basement. Their worlds are divided by stairs.
A parasite is an organism that has sustained contact with another organism to the detriment of the host organism, and the irony is that the haves, the have nots, and the have nothings—all of them are parasites in the movie. It’s obvious how the 2nd and the 3rd categories are acting as parasites. What isn’t very obvious is that the haves are also taking advantage of the others without giving anything back.
But the deadliest parasite of all in the film is hope. The hope for a better job, better money, better education for the kids, and better life. Hope sucks out everything and gives nothing back.
I Enjoyed Reading
Pioneers vs. Process People — “Whatever project, in the beginning, it needs builders, pioneers who come up with clever ideas and execute upon them fast. They improvise a lot along the way. Later, when a company grows and matures, its focus shifts. A typical post-early-stage startup now has a product which needs a lot of incremental improvements, nitty-gritty regulatory details which need to be figured out and a developer team which works well and only needs some fine-tuning. For lack of a better word, I call them process people.”
The Wall Street Journal’s Fake and Distorted News — “This lack of an objective quality control process is the main problem in “journalism” today. To make matters worse, those who know the true facts are reluctant to speak up because they are afraid to fight the media.”
How Will You Measure Your Life? — When renowned Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen passed away several weeks ago, the world lost a truly innovative business thinker. While there are countless business lessons you could learn from his work, here’s where he gives some crucial life advice. “I think that’s the way it will work for us all. Don’t worry about the level of individual prominence you have achieved; worry about the individuals you have helped become better people. Think about the metric by which your life will be judged, and make a resolution to live every day so that in the end, your life will be judged a success.”
Timeless Wisdom
I recently watched Jojo Rabbit — such a beautiful film! Taika Waititi puts slapstick in Nazi Germany with dollops of sweet melancholy. The following is a composition of a poet mentioned in the movie. It’s such a beautiful line, and so true! Hope you love it as much as I did.
Let everything happen to you.
Beauty and terror.
Just keep going.
No feeling is final.
— Rainer Maria Rilke
Before You Go…
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I’ll see you next Sunday,
Abhishek 👋
PS: All typos are intentional and I take no responsibility whatsoever! 😬