A closer look
Oracle bones were the ultimate mystical consulting firm in ancient China, where kings would ask totally mundane questions about the weather or their toothaches, and priests would heat turtle shells until they cracked to read the cosmic answers; if the divine message was wrong, the royal diviners would literally just carve a note next to the prediction saying that the ancestors were being difficult that day, effectively inventing the ancient equivalent of blaming the algorithm for your own failures; these desperate attempts to control the future accidentally became the earliest known records of Chinese writing, meaning that the foundation of an entire civilization's written history is basically thousands of receipts for bad psychic readings; it is wildly reassuring to know that three thousand years ago, the most powerful people on earth were still so crippled by anxiety that they needed a charred turtle shell to tell them if it was a good idea to go hunting on a Tuesday
