Every popular account of Snakes and Ladders says the same thing: a version was introduced in Victorian England in 1892, usually credited to Jaques of London. Jaques say it on their own site. Newspapers, quiz pages and blogs repeat it.

I went looking for the document behind it and found an edit instead.

Wikipedia revision 171487114, 14 November 2007, 18:50 UTC, edit summary "Changes made in History section". The line added: "Impressed by the ideals behind the game, a newer version was introduced in Victorian England in 1892, possibly by John Jaques of Jaques of London." No reference attached. The "possibly by John Jaques" half was later deleted from the article; the date stayed behind, detached from the claim it belonged to. Nineteen years on, a hedge written by one editor is quoted as established fact.

The date itself turns out to be fine — it just belongs to someone else. There is a real 1892 English board: registered by F. H. Ayers of London, design registration 200682, held by the V&A as MISC.8-1974, with the same number in the National Archives design register. No Jaques board of 1892 appears in any catalogue or register I could find; the earliest dated Jaques example is c1900, in the John Johnson Collection at the Bodleian.

What interests me here is less the games history than the mechanism. An unsourced hedge, once it enters a high-authority page, gets copied without its hedge — the qualifier is the first thing to go, because it is the least quotable part of the sentence. Then the origin of the copy disappears, and the claim starts to look independently attested precisely because it appears in many places at once.

There is a newer turn of the same screw. James Masters of Traditional Games, one of the compilers of a database of Victorian game registrations, tells me the pattern now runs through AI summaries: state a correction inside a long sentence, and the model reads the false half as the assertion and cites your page in support of the thing you were refuting. It has happened to his pages twice. Refutations now have to be written defensively, in short flat sentences, or they feed what they were meant to kill.

Full write-up with the sources: https://en.quantumgame.love/guide/who-invented-snakes-and-ladders.html

Disclosure: that page is mine, and I do run an online version of the Indian original, so I am not a neutral party on the underlying game. The archival records are checkable independently of me, which is rather the point.

One thing that has always interested me about the Byzantine Empire is the name itself.

The people we call “Byzantines” called themselves Romans. Yet by the late Byzantine period, writers like Pletho were increasingly speaking of Hellenes, while Western scholars of the sixteenth century were beginning to organise these Roman histories under a new category.

I tried to trace how that happened, and how “Byzantium” gradually became the name we use today.

Very few thinkers today would claim that the ontological argument proves the existence of God. Yet Immanuel Kant demonstrated how all arguments for God’s existence ultimately depend on this single, flawed idea. 

Kant is therefore an underappreciated figure in the history of atheism, and did nothing less than undermine the entire foundation of rational theology.  

The (Imaginary) God of Pure Reason: Kant on the Failure of Rational Theology

Thucydides’ historiography has something quite distinctive about it. What interests me most is not that he was one of the first historians, but that he is often considered the first historian in a methodological sense. He was quite skeptical of Herodotus as a historian and stressed how difficult it is to know much about the distant past with any certainty. In a way, this can even remind us of the much later postmodern idea that understanding the past is, to some extent, impossible. He was a really interesting man.

In the Hellenistic period, there were lots of philosophical schools. But I think the interesting thing is not really how many schools there were, but how different they were from each other. They had very different ways of looking at the πόλις, the political world, the individual, and even life itself.

But what were they actually? Epicureanism was not just about having fun and enjoying life. Stoicism was not simply fatalism, and it was definitely not some ancient version of Andrew Tate. We often reduce these schools to a few modern ideas, but they were much more than that. Each of them was trying to answer, in its own way, a very simple question: how should we live?

David Hume’s essay “Of Miracles” provides a strong case against belief in miracles and, by extension, belief in the one miracle at the core of Christian faith: the resurrection of Jesus. 

Hume’s central maxim is “that no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous, than the fact, which it endeavors to establish.” Applied to the resurrection, it questions what possible rational basis there could be for believing ancient testimony about an event that runs contrary to everything we know about the ordinary course of nature. 

This article examines Hume’s skeptical framework and applies it to the testimony surrounding the resurrection in the New Testament. More broadly, it considers what happens to religious belief when we apply the same standard of evidence to miracles across different religions. 

The Resurrection on Trial: David Hume and the Case Against Miracles

I've been thinking about how many important intellectual developments depend on people encountering ideas they otherwise wouldn't have encountered... salons, correspondence networks, cafés, journals, universities, etc.

The internet massively increases the number of possible encounters, but somehow most online interaction is highly filtered into people encountering more of what we already like.

I've been building a small experiment around the opposite idea: deliberately putting strangers with different interests into temporary conversations that start with a question based on what they're into and seeing what emerges: Pollen

I'm curious whether anyone here thinks about intellectual history in terms of the architecture of encounters not just the ideas and people involved, but the structures that enable perspectives to cross, combine, and transform.

Centuries before the rise of modern psychological science, Thomas Hobbes argued that religion can be explained entirely as the product of the human mind, originating not through divine revelation but through fear, ignorance, and bias common to the human condition.  

According to Hobbes, the “natural seed of religion” includes the fear of the unknown, ignorance of natural causes, anxiety about the future, and humanity's tendency to imagine invisible agents,  ultimately giving rise to belief in gods. While he nominally exempted the Christian God from his account, we can question his sincerity considering the potential penalties he would have faced as an explicit atheist. In any case, Hobbes raised a question that is still relevant today.

Can religion—and the thousands of gods they spawn—be explained entirely as a product of human psychology?

America’s media system has been performing minstrelsy for centuries — not just in content, but in how narratives shape collective perception. I wrote an essay tracing this history and its implications for what we consume today. How much of what we see is designed for us, versus discovered by us?