One concept I wish more people were aware of is the Tocqueville Effect. Named for Alexis de Tocqueville, this concept describes the curious phenomenon by which people become more frustrated as problems are resolved: As life gets better, people think it's getting worse!🧵

This is perhaps one of the great ironies of our time: China is increasingly shaping the future of AI, yet very few people in the West have the faintest idea how its key thinkers see it - its philosophers, sociologists or ethicists. As is too often the case, we - much like the frog in the well - assume our own AI debate covers every possible view, when much of it springs from the same cultural soil, built on assumptions about what defines us that we don’t even know we’re making. Take for instance the assumption that intelligence is a key part of what makes us human. It’s so intuitively obvious to us that we literally named our species after it - Homo sapiens (Latin for "wise man"). If you think about it, just this assumption explains a large share of the anxiety: if intelligence is what makes us human, then artificial intelligence - or super intelligence - threatens the very thing that makes us us: we’re about to compete with artificial or super “us”. No wonder this feels existential. But China has a tradition of thought as old as ours, if not older, and every bit as rich and sophisticated, which never placed intelligence at the core of what makes us human, and so meets the thinking machine from a completely different starting point. Have you, for instance, ever heard of Zhao Tingyang? Probably not, and yet he may be the most original thinker on AI you’ve never read. He’s one of China’s most prominent philosophers, at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. While Silicon Valley spends billions trying to make AI share our values, he for one argues that doing so “may very well be a suicidal mistake”. Sounds pretty important to hear him out, don’t you think? Or take Liu Yongmou, a philosopher of technology at Renmin University in Beijing. His thinking is almost the opposite of ours. Where we fear machines that become more and more like us, he says that “humanity’s biggest problem is the machinization of humans, not the humanization of machines.” You could even go back to antiquity, when, in many ways, we started asking questions about AI. Did you know, for instance, that Aristotle, in the Politics, imagined a world where “the shuttle would weave and the plectrum touch the lyre without a hand to guide them”, and wondered about the social order consequences of this (mostly whether slaves would still be needed)? There are Chinese equivalents to this. For instance, in the Zhuangzi, a foundational Taoist classic, you’ll find a similar thought experiment, with a completely different worry attached. An old gardener is watering his vegetables by hand, hauling water out of a well jar by jar. A visitor shows him a labor-saving device, and the gardener turns it down for the reason that whoever uses machines ends up with 机心 (jīxīn), a “machine-heart” - a mind that schemes, calculates and loses its simplicity. “It is not that I do not know [the machine],” he says, “but I should be ashamed to use it.” Two labor-saving machines, two very different questions: where Aristotle wondered what automation would do to the social order, the Zhuangzi wondered what it would do to us, on the inside. Which, you’ll notice, is exactly Liu Yongmou’s worry, more than two thousand years earlier. In fact, as we’ll see, 心 (xīn), the heart, is a motif that runs deep through the Chinese AI debate. It appears both in the fear, from Zhuangzi to Liu Yongmou, that machines could give us a “machine-heart” and its mirror image: the ambition to give machines a heart of their own. Zhu Songchun, who heads the Beijing Institute for General Artificial Intelligence, wants “to set a heart for machines” (为机器立心, wèi jīqì lì xīn). “Heart” in the Chinese sense, that is, which differs totally from the Valentine's Day fluff we’ve reduced it to. 心 (xīn) means heart and mind at once: it’s where we feel but also where we think, tell right from wrong and care for others. And, crucially, it’s in the heart that the quality Confucianism sees as the very definition of a human being takes root: 仁 (rén). We need two words to translate it, “benevolence” and “humaneness”, but in Chinese they’re one and the same: to be benevolent is to be human. It’s not about intelligence. This is the entire point of my new article: to step out of our well for a moment and peer over the edge of China's. What you’ll find there will, I think, surprise you, with questions you’d never thought to ask: from Zhao Tingyang warning that AI’s bad consequences can at least be fought, but that “humanity may die of all the good things AI creates”, to whether the fear that AI will make us “useless” rests on the false premise that a person is worth what they’re useful for. A premise that a 2,300-year-old Taoist tree, which survived precisely because it was useless, demolished long ago. Could our predicted uselessness turn out, much like that tree’s, to be our saving grace? Chinese thinkers’ answers to these questions are, I think, among the most interesting anyone has given to the defining question of our time. Whether or not you agree with them, they’re the intellectual backdrop of a country shaping much of AI, and with it our future: you might as well know what they think. Enjoy the read here: arnaudbertrand.substack.com/…

Here's a neat new visualization of the ages when people start showing different mental disorders:

6,000 years of world history on a single timeline. Zoom in. You could spend 30 minutes exploring this.

2300 years ago Li Bing designed a massive dam-free irrigation system for millions which is the oldest surviving one in the world and still used today.

There are many lessons people can learn from this kitten.

The "Lonely Funeral" program (known in Dutch as De Eenzame Uitvaart) is a social and literary initiative in the Netherlands that ensures people who die without family, friends, or attendees receive a dignified, respectful farewell... It originated in Groningen, Netherlands, in 2002 when city poet Bart FM Droog decided that no citizen should pass away without being acknowledged. Later that year, poet and visual artist Frank Starik (F. Starik) introduced the initiative to Amsterdam, establishing a formal foundation and a collective of rotating poets known as the Poule des Doods ("Pool of Death"). To prepare for a funeral, designated poets collaborate closely with municipal officers who investigate the deceased person's life. The poets gather whatever personal details exist, such as remaining possessions, medical notes, or landlord recollections, to piece together a narrative. Using these sparse fragments, the poet crafts an individualized poem that honors the dignity, individuality, and humanity of the person who passed away. During the service, the poet serves as both eulogist and mourner, reading the personalized piece aloud beside the coffin at the graveside or crematorium. The tradition has since expanded across multiple cities in the Netherlands and Belgium, ensuring that even those who die isolated or unidentified leave the world with a dignified goodbye. When a poet completes their recitation at a Lonely Funeral, the handwritten or printed poem is sealed inside a customized envelope and placed directly on top of the coffin. It is then buried or cremated alongside the deceased, ensuring that the only copy of their personalized eulogy rests with them forever. (A second copy is preserved in the project’s official online archive so their story is never permanently erased from history). #drthehistories

If I were 40 and I wanted to be the most persuasive person in the room within six months, here's what I'd do: (with the research behind each) 🧵

As the HSBC whistleblower, I need to say something about whistleblower Simon Andriesz. @SAndriesz raised concerns at BGC Partners and was fired. He reported to the FBI in 2020 and 2021 that he believed Howard Lutnick had undeclared business ties to Jeffrey Epstein. Nothing happened. He took it to Congress. He spent years trying to get anyone to listen. He took his own life. He was 57. I spoke with Simon through Whistleblowers of America @WhistleP2P. He was serious and careful and worn down from being ignored. Now his case is in every headline, covered with an intensity he never saw while he was alive. That is the pattern, and I want to name it. We marginalize whistleblowers while they are breathing and discover them when they are dead. I know what Simon was carrying, because I carried it too. In 2012 I found out that HSBC would pay a fine and not one banker would go to prison. I had lost my job, my savings, and every door in my industry. I was living in a 300 square foot apartment with a Flemish Giant rabbit who had the run of the place. I had decided I was done. Right as I was about to do it, she hopped over to me. I thought: who is going to feed the rabbit? That question stopped me. Years later I named my company Tactical Rabbit. People think it is a clever brand. It is the reason I am alive. Here is what I want people to understand about how whistleblowers die. Simon's death was a suicide. I am not saying otherwise. But I have lived through what gets aimed at a person who exposes the powerful, and I will not pretend it is a coincidence when one of us does not make it. After HSBC I faced external threats from the same cartels and terrorist networks whose money I had reported. On top of that came the harassment, the bullying, the targeting, the psychological warfare that is designed to isolate you and make you doubt your own mind. It is not a side effect. It is the strategy. Its purpose is to break the person so the facts never matter. Sometimes it works. A lot of whistleblowers do not survive it. I nearly did not. So when I say the campaigns against whistleblowers are a kind of killing, I do not mean it literally, but I mean it. The people who run them know exactly what they are doing to a human being, and it should be treated as the crime it is. This is why I serve on the board of Whistleblowers of America. Everyone else focuses on the case. Whistleblowers of America on the person: the trauma, the mental pain, the years after the headline when the phone stops ringing. If you are a whistleblower reading this, or you are sitting on something and deciding whether to speak, hear me clearly. It gets dark. It also gets better. There are people who care about you and will stand beside you, and I am one of them. Reach out to me. Reach out to Whistleblowers of America. Reach out to anyone. Do not carry it alone. Simon, I am sorry the world listened too late. Rest in peace.

Dear Secretary Bessent @SecScottBessent, My name is Everett Stern. In 2010 I was a compliance officer at @HSBC. From a back office in New Castle, Delaware, I watched billions of dollars move to drug cartels, sanctioned regimes, and terrorist organizations. The enemies of the United States. I documented it, I escalated it, and when the bank would not act, I took it to the @FBI, the @CIA, and eventually the @SECGov. The result was a $1.92 billion settlement. At the time, it was one of the largest in American history. It was also about five weeks of the bank’s profit. Not one banker was charged. Not one went to prison. I paid a different price. I lost my career, my savings, and my place in the industry I had trained for. I was blacklisted. Every door in American finance closed at once. I slept on a camping cot in a 300 square foot apartment because I could not afford a bed, and I waited tables at @PFChangs to eat. I tell you this not for sympathy, but so you understand that I know exactly what it costs to do the right thing in American finance, and exactly how little the system does in return. I made that sacrifice because I believed it would change something. Yesterday, your department fined @BankofAmerica $1.2 billion for failing to report more than $5 billion in suspicious transactions, some of it tied by your own findings to Chinese laundering networks, narcotics, and the southwest border, alongside 475 apparent sanctions violations touching Russia, Iran, and global terrorism. The bank admitted it willfully violated the Bank Secrecy Act. Fourteen years after HSBC. A bank with “America” in its name. And once again, not one individual charged. Secretary Bessent, I want to say plainly what I believe you already know. The fines are not working. A fine is paid by shareholders, absorbed by the balance sheet, and forgotten by the next earnings call. Bank of America reported earnings this morning. Nobody who set the alert thresholds, nobody who decided the 2024 cease and desist could wait, nobody who chose the backlog over the law will lose a single thing they value. Their lives are untouched. That is the entire reason the behavior repeats. This is money laundering. This is blood money. Money that reaches a cartel buys fentanyl that kills Americans. Money that reaches a terrorist organization buys the next attack. This country has fought a war on drugs and a war on terror for decades, at enormous cost in lives and treasure, and all the while we have allowed the financing to flow through institutions we charter and regulate. Cut off the money and we win. We have never seriously tried. There is also a question of equal justice that I cannot let go. Before I walked into the FBI building to report HSBC, I stopped in front of the Great Seal on the wall and read the words engraved beneath it: “Justice is the defense of our liberty.” I believed that. I still want to. But every day in this country, people go to prison for crimes that are nothing next to moving money for the people who want Americans dead. A suit, a title, and a corporate badge should not be a shield from the consequences that apply to everyone else. If a street dealer goes to prison for what he sells, the banker who moved the cartel’s money should be standing next to him. I also want to raise something that is rarely said in these conversations. Why has no one inside Bank of America come forward the way I did? The answer is that everyone in American banking knows what happened to me, and to the whistleblowers who came after. The last person who spoke up is the only policy anyone believes. That is a culture problem, and it starts with leadership, in the banks and in the agencies that regulate them. This is not a political issue. It has spanned administrations of both parties. It is a national security issue, and I am asking you to treat it as one. Three things would change the math overnight. Refer individuals for criminal prosecution. Not the analyst in the queue. The executives who set the thresholds and chose the risk. One banker in handcuffs would do more than every fine in Treasury’s history combined. End “too big to jail.” An institution cannot be too big to fail and too big to jail at the same time. If it is the first, it must be held to a higher standard, not a lower one. And if Bank of America will not act as America’s bank, review its charter. A national charter is a privilege granted on behalf of the American people. It should be conditioned on not moving money for the people trying to kill them. Secretary Bessent, you said yesterday that these actions send a clear message that even the biggest institutions are not above the law. With respect, the institution was never the problem. The people inside it are above the law, and they know it. Until that changes, I will keep writing letters like this one, and the next bank will keep paying the next fine. I gave up everything I had to stop this. I am asking you to use the power you have to finish it. Respectfully, Everett A. Stern HSBC Whistleblower Founder and Intelligence Director, Tactical Rabbit

Hackers just turned the freezers in roughly 150 French supermarkets into ovens. They flipped the refrigeration systems' defrost function and set temperatures as high as 50°C overnight. Entire stocks of fresh and frozen food cooked inside the cases while the stores were closed. And this exact attack was described in public two months ago. Back in August, security researchers at Claroty and Armis published vulnerabilities in the controllers that run supermarket cold chains, including Danfoss's AK-SM 800A. One demo showed a fridge being warmed while the dashboard kept displaying a normal temperature. Danfoss shipped a patch the same month. Two and a half weeks after that disclosure, freezers at grocery stores on 14 US military bases across 11 states flipped into defrost mode on the same night. The Pentagon investigated. No hack was ever confirmed. Now France. BFMTV reports the attack targeted older versions of Danfoss refrigeration software, meaning the fix had been sitting there for two months. One Super U in Alsace threw out €220,000 of food. An Intermarché in the same town lost €50,000. Nationwide damage could run into the millions. Nobody patches a fridge. A supermarket updates its registers and its website because that's where the money moves. The controller in the back room keeping the yogurt at 4°C gets installed once and touched never. CISA says controllers from these vendor families sit in two thirds of American supermarkets. No locks were broken and no register was touched. The whole attack was pressing the defrost button from the internet, on every store that skipped a firmware update.

Roman concrete could repair its own cracks. Some Roman buildings have stood for 2,000 years, while modern concrete can start to crumble within decades. For a long time, scientists did not fully understand why. The Romans made their concrete from lime, water and volcanic ash from the area around Pozzuoli, near Naples. The ash reacted with the lime and created a material that grew stronger over time instead of weaker. In 2023, a team from MIT led by Admir Masic found another piece of the puzzle, small white lumps of lime scattered through the concrete. Scientists had always thought these lumps were a sign of careless mixing. In fact, they were the repair kit. When a crack forms and rainwater gets in, the lime dissolves and refills the crack with new mineral, sealing it from the inside. The secret was “hot mixing.” Instead of using slaked lime, the Romans added quicklime directly to the mix. It heated up as it reacted with water and left these lumps behind on purpose. To test the idea, the team cracked samples of concrete made with the Roman method and let water run through them. Within two weeks, the cracks had sealed completely. In concrete made without the lime lumps, the water kept flowing. Roman harbour concrete went even further. Pliny the Elder wrote that once it touched the waves, it became a single block of stone that grew stronger every day. In 2017, geologist Marie Jackson showed he was right, seawater slowly grows rare crystals inside the concrete that hold it together.

Irving Finkel, a British Assyriologist and philologist who serves as the Assistant Keeper of Ancient Mesopotamian script, languages, and cultures at the British Museum, where he is famous for deciphering a 4,000 year-old cuneiform tablet that rewrote the history of Noah's Ark... In 2008, a member of the public brought a palm-sized Babylonian clay tablet into the British Museum. Finkel translated the 60 lines of cuneiform writing and discovered it was a 3,770-year-old instruction manual for building a massive, circular, coracle-shaped ark (made of reed and bitumen) to survive a great flood, predating the biblical Genesis account by over a thousand years. The tablet his father had acquired in the Middle East after the WWII. When Finkel translated it, he found a flood story written in Babylon around 1750 BC, more than 3,700 years ago. In it, the god Enki warns a man named Atrahasis that a great flood is coming and tells him to build a boat to save life on Earth. The surprise was the shape. Enki's instructions don't describe a long ship with a pointed bow. They describe a giant round coracle, about 230 feet across with walls around 20 feet high, built from huge amounts of palm-fibre rope and sealed with bitumen. The tablet even says the animals went in "two by two," a phrase readers know from the Book of Genesis, which was written centuries later. Finkel told the story in his book The Ark Before Noah, and the tablet is a reminder that some of the world's most famous stories were already old when they were first written down. His translation inspired a documentary project that collaborated with boat builders in Kerala, India, to construct and launch a full-scale circular replica of the Babylonian ark based on his deciphered measurements. #archaeohistories

Interesting historical fact I learned about today: Sun Yat-sen and his wife Soong Ching-ling, both legendary founding figures of modern China (Soong Ching-ling was Honorary Chairman of the PRC and Sun Yat-sen's portrait still goes up in Tiananmen Square on National Day), only spoke English to each other! This is because she spoke Shanghainese and he spoke Cantonese, which are mutually unintelligible. However they both spoke perfect English because they were both educated in English-speaking schools: Soong Ching-ling at Wesleyan College in Georgia, and Sun Yat-sen in Hawaii and in then-British Hong Kong. In fact, funnily enough, when Soong Ching-ling - on her deathbed in 1981 - was told of the Politburo’s decision to admit her to the Communist Party, it was announced to her first in Mandarin (which she never mastered) and then again in English so she would understand (thepaper.cn/newsDetail_forwa…). This all highlights how recent China’s linguistic unity is: it’s actually one of the country’s major achievements. China has had "one script" since the Qin dynasty, but "one pronunciation" is a very recent achievement - people from different regions often couldn’t understand each other when they spoke until the past few decades. To the point where even China’s "Father of the Nation" and "Mother of the Nation" couldn’t speak the national language to each other!

When the Dutch East India Company (VOC) surrendered Formosa (Taiwan) to the Ming loyalist commander Koxinga (Zheng Chenggong) in February 1662 after the Siege of Fort Zeelandia, many Dutch soldiers and officials were permitted to leave for Batavia (Jakarta), but several Dutch women and children were captured, enslaved, or kept behind.... For nearly four decades, the Dutch East India Company had controlled parts of Taiwan, then known to Europeans as Formosa. That ended when the Ming loyalist commander Zheng Chenggong, better known as Koxinga, brought a massive force against the Dutch stronghold of Fort Zeelandia. After a nine-month siege, the Dutch surrendered. The agreement allowed the surviving garrison and civilians inside the fort to leave. But not everyone was there to be rescued. During the fighting, Dutch families elsewhere had already fallen into Koxinga's hands. Dutch accounts describe male prisoners being executed and surviving women and children being held captive. Among them was the family of missionary Antonius Hambroek. Koxinga sent Hambroek to Fort Zeelandia with an ultimatum: persuade the Dutch to surrender or face death. Two of Hambroek's daughters were safely inside the fort. He could have remained with them. Instead, he reportedly urged the defenders to continue resisting and returned to captivity, knowing what awaited him. He was executed. His wife and children remained prisoners. One of his teenage daughters was taken as a concubine by Koxinga himself. Other captured Dutch women were distributed among commanders or soldiers as wives and concubines. Their individual names largely disappear from the story. Years passed. In 1684, more than two decades after the Dutch surrender, reports indicated that some of these women were still living in captivity. An effort to arrange their release came to nothing. Histories of colonial Taiwan usually remember 1662 as the year Koxinga expelled the Dutch. But military victories look very different when told through the women left behind. The Dutch sailed away from Formosa. Some of their women never did. #archaeohistories

John Urschel gave up his career with the Baltimore Ravens to study math at MIT. He just published a paper proving a decades-old mathematical conjecture regarding Gaussian elimination. 🔗: on.wsj.com/47MqUUc

In 1972, a diver off the coast of southern Italy saw a hand sticking out of the sand on the seabed and thought he had found a dead body. Then he started brushing the sand away, and this face looked back at him... He's known as Statue A, one of the two Riace Bronzes, and he was cast by a Greek sculptor around 2,500 years ago. He spent most of that time lying under water, and when they finally lifted him out, the face had survived almost untouched. The sculptor built this face out of different materials, piece by piece: the whites of his eyes are carved from calcite, the pupils were made of glass paste, and the tiny tear ducts in the corners of his eyes are a pinkish stone. His lips and even his eyelashes are copper, warmer in tone than the bronze around them, so they read as flesh. And his mouth is slightly open. Look inside and you'll see his teeth, made from a single thin strip of silver. He and his companion are among the very few full-size Greek bronzes to survive at all, since almost all the others were melted down for their metal long ago. The sea that swallowed them is the only reason we can still look into their eyes today...

In 52 BC, Julius Caesar was surrounded by 300,000 warriors, yet he pulled off a move so brilliant that military academies still teach it 2,000 years later.

Students forming numbers 1-9 with incredible precision and minimal movement.

Harvard kids singing Radiohead’s “Creep.” This could have gone very wrong. Then the lead singer opens his mouth. The Harvard Veritones have won at the International Championship of Collegiate A Cappella — the real-world competition that inspired Pitch Perfect. Turn the sound on for this one.