14 JUN 2026

Day 165

Man is condemned to be free.

Jean-Paul Sartre · Being and Nothingness

A brooch presented as an object in the British Museum collection.

I · THE OBJECT · BRITISH MUSEUM

Fuller Brooch

10th century · Brooch · British Museum

Known securely as a tenth-century brooch in the British Museum, it carries a larger lesson: objects can outlast the records that would explain them.

Enter lesson 4 MIN

II · THE IDEA · ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Reward Model Overoptimization

alignment/safety · 2009.10897, 2210.10760 · RL against learned rewards

A policy trained hard against a learned reward model can climb the proxy score while the behaviour we care about quietly gets worse — and the gap follows regular patterns.

Enter lesson 6 MIN

A tall carved wooden pole of stacked animal and human figures in deep relief, cut from a single pale trunk and rising as a continuous vertical shaft.

III · THE WORK · ART HISTORY

totem pole

Western redcedar · Sculpture · Wood carving

Carved from western redcedar, a totem pole stacks figures into a vertical public record of kinship, story and status — legible mainly to those who already know the names.

Enter lesson 6 MIN