Skip to content
The Daily Triptych098 / 365

8 APR 2026

Day 98

We do not learn from experience; we learn from reflecting on experience.

John Dewey · How We Think
A cup carved from dark glass with openwork figures and vines forming a cage around the vessel. The glass appears greenish in the photograph, with the carved scene showing human figures and foliage in relief.

I · THE OBJECT · BRITISH MUSEUM

The Lycurgus Cup

Roman · 4th century · Dichroic glass, silver

Hold a light behind it and the glass glows red. Light it from the front and it turns green. Roman glassmakers made this work without understanding why.

Enter lesson 6 MIN

II · THE IDEA · ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Bias, Harm and Safety Training

Systems and judgement · Reinforcement learning from human or AI feedback · Constitutional AI (Bai et al., 2022)

A model trained to refuse harmful requests still carries the same statistical patterns it learned from text. Alignment moves the likely outputs; it does not rewrite the weights.

Enter lesson 7 MIN

Written before source checking was enforced · facts in this lesson are unverified

A frontal portrait of a young man with large dark eyes, painted in luminous wax on a wooden panel, showing his head and shoulders against a pale background.

III · THE WORK · ART HISTORY

The Fayum Mummy Portraits

Egypt, Roman period · Encaustic on wood panel · Greco-Roman portraiture

A person who died under Roman rule in Egypt was buried with a panel portrait tied over their bandages. The wax paint, gaze is direct, and colours unfaded.

Enter lesson 6 MIN

The daily email

Four lessons in your inbox, every morning at seven.

One object, one idea, one masterpiece, one game. Deep links to that day’s pages. Unsubscribe with one click, any time.