Author: Michael Burry
Compiled by: DeepChain TechFlow
The New York Times, Saturday, June 19, 1880
Welcome to the series "History Always Rhymes." In this series, I shed light on current events through key perspectives from the distant past.
On a quiet Saturday, I was flipping through old newspapers—as I often do—when I came across a report from June 19, 1880, that strikingly mirrors our current anxieties about AI.
This is the story of Melville Ballard. He grew up without language, yet stared at a stump and asked himself: Did the first person grow from here?
This case, from 144 years ago and formally published by the Smithsonian Institution, raises a potentially fatal question for today’s large language models and the massive investments behind them. Through the story of an ordinary person, it boldly declares: complex thoughts are born in the silence that precedes language.
Today, deep in the 21st century, by placing language ahead of rational capability, we are not building intelligence—we are merely crafting an increasingly sophisticated mirror.
In that old newspaper, two articles are worth noting. Let’s start with the one in the middle of page three, titled: “Thought Without Language.”
Of course, large language models, small language models, and reasoning capabilities are currently the hottest topics.
The full title of the article is: “Thought Without Language—A Deaf-Mute’s Account: His First Thoughts and Experiences.” The article was originally published on June 12, 1880, in The Washington Star.
The protagonist is Professor Samuel Porter of Kendall Green National University for the Deaf, who published a paper at the Smithsonian Institution titled “Can There Be Thought Without Language? A Case Study of a Deaf Person.”
The opening of the paper discusses mental activity in deaf-mute individuals and children without linguistic forms, and the phrasing reflects ideas that are far outdated by today’s standards; I originally intended to skip it.
But the protagonist of the case is Melville Ballard, a teacher at the Colombian School for the Deaf and Dumb, who is also deaf and dumb and a graduate of the National University for the Deaf and Dumb.
Ballard said that as a child, he communicated with his parents and siblings through natural gestures or mime. His father believed that observation developed his intellect and often took him cycling.
He continued: A few years before he was formally introduced to the foundations of written language, during a bike ride, he began asking himself, "Where did the world come from?" He developed a strong curiosity about the origin of human life, the first emergence, and the reasons for the existence of the Earth, the Sun, the Moon, and the stars.
Once, he saw a large tree stump and wondered to himself: "Could the first person to ever come into this world have grown out of that stump?" But then he realized that the stump was merely the remnant of a once-mighty tree; and where had that tree come from? It had slowly grown from the soil, just like these young saplings before him—he immediately dismissed the idea as absurd, concluding that linking human origins to a decaying tree stump made no sense.
He didn't know what triggered his questioning of the origin of all things, but he had already developed the concepts of parent-child inheritance, animal reproduction, and plants growing from seeds.
The question truly swirling in his mind was: At the furthest beginning of time, when there were no humans, no animals, and no plants, where did the first human, the first animal, and the first plant come from? He thought most about humans and Earth, believing that humans would eventually perish and not be resurrected after death.
At around age five, he began to understand the concept of familial inheritance; between ages eight and nine, he started questioning the origin of the universe. Regarding the shape of the Earth, he inferred from a map showing two hemispheres that it consisted of two massive circular discs placed side by side; the Sun and Moon were two circular, luminous plates, which he regarded with a sense of awe, and from their rising and setting, he deduced that some powerful force must govern their movements.
He believed the sun slipped into a hole in the west and emerged from another hole in the east, traveling through a massive tunnel inside the Earth along the same arc it traced across the sky. To him, the stars were tiny specks of light embedded in the celestial dome. He described how he futilely pondered all of this until he entered school at age 11.
Before this, his mother had told him there was a mysterious being in the heavens, but when she could not answer his persistent questions, he could only give up in despair, filled with sorrow because he could gain no definite understanding of that mysterious celestial life.
In his first year of school, he learned only a few sentences each Sunday; although he studied these simple words, he never truly understood their meaning. He attended services, but due to his limited sign language skills, he could understand almost nothing. In the second year, he obtained a small catechism containing a series of questions and answers.
The combination of language and rational ability drives the development of understanding.
Afterward, he came to understand the sign language used by his teachers. Some might say that his curiosity had been satisfied. But that was not the case—when he learned that the universe was created by the Great Sovereign Spirit, he began to ask: Where did the Creator come from? He continued seeking to understand the nature and origin of this Sovereign. While pondering this question, he asked himself: "After entering the Kingdom of the Lord, will we be able to comprehend God’s nature and understand His infinity?" Should he, like that ancestor, say: "Can you by searching find out God?"
Professor波特 then presented his central argument to the audience of the Smithsonian Institution in 1880.
He said that animals might understand certain words and distinguish certain objects. But he pointed out:
Even accounting for all the possibilities possessed by animals, is it not obvious that humans possess certain abilities that cannot be conceived as having evolved from anything shared with lower animals, nor as merely an enhancement of those shared traits?
……Regardless of how similar the manner of impression formation or the structure of the organs may be, regardless of the degree of dependence on organic activity—that is, regardless of how close the physiological connection may be—the perception of the eye as a sensation or perception is fundamentally different from that of the ear, head, or tongue, and implies a special faculty or ability not contained in the latter. Rational action and the operation of lower faculties are not so.
"...The presence of certain shared elements between the two does not prove they belong to the same order, nor does it make the transformation of one into the other possible. If the eye of the soul—the higher reason that enables us to perceive the cosmos of all things—cannot turn inward to clearly discern its own nature and processes, we should not therefore forget its function, deny its inherent superiority, or equate it with the lower, subordinate faculties that it enables us to examine. That which allows us to understand all things must, by its very nature, be superior to anything it understands."
One audience member specifically noted that Ballard’s gaze, above all else, perfectly conveyed the meaning without any ambiguity:
The most fascinating moment of the meeting was when Mr. Ballard used gestures to describe how his mother told him he would be going far away to school, where he would read books and write letters, fold them, and send them to her; and then acted out, through mime, a hunter who shot a squirrel and accidentally shot himself. Mr. Ballard’s gestures, movements, along with his gaze and facial expressions, conveyed his meaning perfectly to the audience. As one member put it, the expression in the eyes is a language that cannot be misunderstood.
Please look at these two sentences:
- The thing that enables us to understand all things must, by its very nature, be superior to anything it understands.
- Eye expression is a language that cannot be misunderstood.
In summary:
- Language without the capacity for reason cannot achieve understanding.
- Language can unlock understanding only when rational capacity exists.
- Full understanding that goes beyond language itself
Large language models prioritize language, establishing a primitive form of reasoning purely through logical inference. However, this reasoning has been shown to be flawed and prone to hallucinations at the many rough edges of knowledge.
Rational capacity never truly existed. Therefore, language cannot be elevated to understanding through reason.
In his work with deaf and mute individuals, the professor discovered that true rational capacity must exist prior to language, as language unlocks understanding—understanding is the result of true rational capacity interacting with language.
Eye expression is a language that cannot be misunderstood.
In other words, the expression of eye contact is the appearance of perfect understanding—without the need for words.
Large language models place language ahead of true rational capability and can never reach understanding.
If understanding truly transcends language—as revealed in this lecture at the Smithsonian 144 years ago—we should have no trouble finding evidence today.
I have come to understand this through my own study and practice of medicine. Throughout pre-medical undergraduate coursework and much of medical school, deductive logic serves as the tool students use to organize the vast body of medical knowledge. It is only when entering the clinical phase that the art of medicine—signs, emotions, and humanistic expertise—begins to develop. Then, at some point during residency or early practice, as experience accumulates, understanding finally dawns: all these elements become interconnected within a vast and complex network, enabling experienced physicians to deliver comprehensive patient care.
Two surgeons performing a complex head and neck cancer surgery or trauma case, or the nurses working alongside them, can sometimes communicate simply through eye contact—complete understanding is conveyed, actions are triggered, because everyone present has reached a level of comprehension that transcends logical deduction and the early, memory-based, puzzle-like reasoning of medical training.
The gaze thus provides an intuitive grasp of reality, grounded in shared understanding, which arises from the rational capacity present in language.
Large language models—and small language models—permanently remain in the middle ground. They can simulate reasoning, but lack true rational capacity, eyes, or understanding.
The Turing Test: An entity must demonstrate rationality without language to truly possess understanding.
This is a known flaw, a poor starting point. The initial direction of AI research was to first generate genuine rational capabilities, but this was never achieved, so the field shifted to a language-first approach—because it was easier to accomplish.
This "bad start" led to a "parameter trap": brute-force language processing driven by countless power-hungry chips has become an intensely ironic bottleneck.
As emphasized in my conversation with Klarna’s founder Sebastian Siemiatkowski, the path forward lies in compression—prioritizing "System 2" reasoning to digest information redundancy and the relatively limited set of human-generated queries, thereby significantly reducing computational demands.
This new path rejects the approach of pursuing a singularity through language models conversing with each other in an infinite mirror—a directionless waste of resources, destined to be unachievable due to the lack of economic realism.
Frontier research such as Google's AlphaGeometry and Meta's Coconut is shifting toward this "reasoning-first" architecture, but they are essentially rediscovering what the Smithsonian Institution presented 144 years ago: language is the output of understanding, not the engine of reasoning.
This trillion-dollar "computing power myth" may be shattered by a return—a return to the silent rationality of the prior language. It is the restoration of the full-spectrum rational capacity of the deaf and mute, whose silent thoughts had already reached toward the stars of the heavens before finding the words to express them.
Silicon Valley
As mentioned earlier, another article worth noting is also on the same page. Its relevance to the first one likely exceeded what anyone in the 1880s could have imagined.
The article is titled: "San Francisco's Wealth: A City Full of Get-Rich-Quick Speculators."
The article was written on June 1, 1880, in San Francisco and was not published until June 19 in The New York Times.
In French, there is a saying: "The more things change, the more they stay the same." It arises in me now.
What San Francisco calls "hard times" might mean "quite comfortable days" in eastern cities—referring not to poverty or destitution, but to avoiding extravagance and lavish spending.
At the time, California was a haven for small-scale investors. To satisfy speculative desires, a unique public bidding system emerged: for just $50, you could buy a share in a mine, entering at $1 per share, two shares for 50 cents, or any quantity at varying prices.
When a stock is "booming," it seems to only fuel the urge to "do it again." It ignited the same speculative fervor in San Francisco, as people rushed to chase the opportunities lost by the get-rich-quick groups; the "boom" was accompanied by market losses, and when the "boom" faded, the stock price returned to normal.
The ending of the article delivers a powerful strike against today's reality:
San Franciscans seem to have grown accustomed to the idea that wealth must come all at once, and after their big strike in Virginia City fizzled out, they appear unwilling to rally behind other avenues such as manufacturing, trade, and agriculture. Almost the entire city is suffused with speculative fervor; if a new bonanza mine the size of Nevada were discovered here or nearby, stock prices would surge again to absurd heights, and San Francisco would once again relive those days of sudden wealth—only to endure once more everything it suffered over the past two years.
In the article "The Core Sign of a Bubble: Supply-Side Greed," I outlined this remarkable tendency originating from the San Francisco Bay Area: speculation continuously intensifies, driving investment far beyond what any foreseeable end-demand could absorb within any reasonable time frame.
Reading through these old newspapers allows us to interpret today's events from a unique perspective. Whether Silicon Valley will "experience that era of rapid wealth creation again, and then endure it all once more," as it has so many times before, or whether it will break the mold—no one can say for sure. We hope this article has been helpful to you.
Finally, I recommend Midjourney, a tool for generating images and videos, to my readers.
It's truly fascinating and thought-provoking. Get creative!
See you next time!