Mirna en Marte

So when said horde did arrive, they saw the general sitting outside the city’s open gates, drinking tea. The horde sent a couple of emissaries over to see what was what, and the general greeted them cheerfully and invited them all to come and take tea with him.

The horde decided that this was a scenario that had “MASSIVE FUCKING TRAP” written all over it in beautiful calligraphy and promptly fucked off.

so this story is the Romance of Three Kingdoms, and essentially takes place between Zhuge Liang, resident tactician extraordinaire, and Sima Yi… OTHER resident tactician extraordinaire.

The two were both regarded as tactical geniuses and recognized the other as their rival. Zhuge Liang had a reputation for ambushing the SHIT out of his opponents and using the environment to his advantage, thus destroying large armies with a small number of men. Sima Yi (who kind of entered the picture later) was a cautious person whose speciality was unravelling his opponent’s plans before they began. So it was natural that the two would butt heads; however, since Sima Yi tended to have more men and resources, he started winning battles against the former. Which, y’know, kinda sucked.

On to the actual story: Zhuge Liang is all like “shit i gotta defend this city with like 10 men.” Literally if he fights ANY kind of battle here, he WILL lose; his only option for survival is not to fight. And that’s looking more and more impossible until he hears that his rival is leading the opposing army. And then he gets this brilliant idea. He basically opens all the gates, sends his men out in civilian clothes to sweep the streets, and sits on top of the gate drinking tea and chilling out and basically makes the whole thing out to be a trap

When Sima Yi comes he’s all like “yo come on in bro”

and Sima Yi is like “yeah he’s never been that obvious about his traps before. this is definitely a bluff” and he’s about to head in when he realizes

wait. he knows that i think he’s bluffing.

and so he gets it in his head that maybe, just MAYBE, Zhuge Liang has this cunning plan that will wipe out his army - recall that he has a pretty good handle on what his rival is capable of. And after a long period of deliberation (which is just like “he know that I know that he knows that etc.”), being the cautious man he is, SIma Yi eventually decides to turn his entire army around and leave.

Zhuge Liang later points out that the plan was based specifically on the fact that he was facing his rival; if it had been anyone else, there’s no way it would have worked. A dumber or less cautious person would have simply charged in and won without breaking a sweat. 

Well, that day was super foggy (which Zhuge Liang had predicted. Did I mention he was also a freakishly accurate meteorologist?). So the enemy across the river sees a fleet of boats armed to the teeth with what appears to be half an army of men. They panic! and start firing arrows like crazy. 

Zhuge Liang lets this play out for a while, then he’s like, ”Ok guys that’s enough.” They calmly turn the boats around and go back to base, where they dismantle the scarecrows and pull out all the enemy’s arrows.

Especially since it makes Zhuge Liang look like this:

Museum of Moss 

Upworthy carried a story summarizing an experiment demonstrating that rats exhibit empathy. Why do I care about this? Because the graphics showing the experiment on Upworthy made me smile, and smiling is good. Here’s the link in case you want to watch the video embedded in the story.

Some scientists ran an experiment to demonstrate that. Here’s how it worked:

The scientists put a rat in water (which rats hate). Not enough to hurt the rat, but enough to annoy it.

Then they put another rat in a safer, dry area with a door it could open to save the first rat.

When the dry rat heard the damp, miserable rat get upset, she came to the rescue.

Still not satisfied with the result, the scientists ran a more complex test.

What if you bribe the dry rat with food? Will she ignore it to rescue the wet rat in the next chamber?

Scientists presumed it would be easier for the not-in-peril rat to take the obvious selfless route when it was given only one choice. But what if they gave her a delicious bribe (chocolate cereal) and then let her choose between saving her friend and a buffet?

The rats, by a significant margin, still usually saved their friend before getting their delicious bribe. What does that mean?

Rats might care more about each other than things like food, and that prioritization might be encoded in their DNA.

Why should we care about super-thoughtful rats?

It is often argued that humans are inherently selfish — that without guidance, we would all default to killing and stealing and an “every person for themselves” mentality. That we only help others if it helps us. That evolution can’t make us selfless; it’s something we have to force ourselves to do.

But if rats show human-like qualities (they laugh like us, they dream like us, they like to have selfless lovers) like altruism, that means it isn’t a human-learned behavior. It could be encoded in our DNA. It means humans could be empathetic and kind by default.

It also means that rats and humans have more in common than we think.