Tabula Rasa

The phrase means blank slate, but the object was stone. A tablet, once carved, never goes back. You can fill the marks and cut new ones, but the uncut surface is gone.

While newborns hear every language, by the first birthday, a child will only hear its own. Foreign sounds may still arrive, but as familiar ones, with an ear shaped by what it heard most.

No one shows a four-year-old a slasher film. What reaches a child during formation is chosen, graded, and given in order. The sequencing itself is an intervention.

A language model first learns the whole internet, and alignment trains it to say less. A child raised in one language does not hear in another, and a model trained on the internet does not become safe after.

Every correction is itself a mark.