Rebecca Bar-Sef
Cognitive Engineering & Geopolitical Analysis
Israel
English. Hebrew
Rebecca Bar-Sef is a cognitive engineer and geopolitical researcher. Growing up across four or five different cultures taught her that what feels obvious is usually local: people don’t merely reach different conclusions; they can inhabit different possible choices. After military service, Computer Engineering at the Technion, and career in technology, she spent years teaching and working with people from around the world. That observation became a research question, leading to models connecting geography, culture, language, cognition, questions and identity to the systems societies build and the decisions they make. Her next goal is bringing those findings into future language models.
How to Bring Down an Empire Without Firing a Shot
How do you change a society’s sense of right and wrong so thoroughly that its old sanity checks stop working?
This lecture traces the relationship between language, morality, ideology and subversion. Small changes in terminology can change how people perceive reality — and their own role within it. Ideas that were once unthinkable become obvious, while old assumptions become difficult even to articulate.
Through historical and contemporary case studies, we follow the mechanics of ideological penetration and learn to distinguish an ordinary political argument from something far more consequential: a system quietly rewriting the rules by which arguments themselves are judged.
What No One Thinks About When They Think of Islam
Why is it that, even with outside help and intervention, much of the Muslim world seems stuck in a loop? What keeps pulling it back? What binds societies across radically different countries to recurring patterns?
The lecture moves backwards through one of humanity’s oldest arguments about knowledge — from a striking Qur’anic story to Adam, Eve and the Tree of Knowledge — and asks a deceptively simple question: what happens to a society when curiosity itself is treated as a threat?
Can We Analyse the World Without Injecting Ourselves into It?
The same piece of information can lead different analysts to completely different conclusions. Why is it that, even when the logic is sound and the methodology tested, we still fall for the same old tricks?
Using cases from Iran, Russia, the United States and the Middle East, this lecture explores the hidden assumptions we bring into analysis — and why intelligence failure is not always caused by information we didn’t have. Sometimes the decisive failure is the question nobody thought to ask.