btrmt. | Betterment

ideologies worth choosing

btrmt.

about projects latest

About

betterment

noun

making or becoming better;

ideology

noun

rituals of thought, feeling, and action;
the science of ideas;

Humans are animals first. At our core, we are creatures like any other—responding adaptively to the environment around us. We see this in our habits, our routines, and our rituals. Automatic patterns of behaviour that gracefully handle the predictable shapes of everyday life. But rituals of behaviour are preceded by rituals of thought. This is what brains do. And unexamined, such things are karstic: pretty landscapes that obscure sinkholes, caves, and rivers beneath. I thought, better to look where you tread. Hence, btrmt. A place to discover ideologies worth choosing.

Projects  |  Newsletter  |  Latest
Who am I?

Projects

Analects

analects

I have a terrible memory. Everything I learn I have to leave somewhere I can find later. This is where I put them. Analects are a collection of ideas, extracts, or teachings. These are mine, to myself, and anyone else who might find them interesting. With a background in brain science and the sciences of mind, I explore how ideas become ideologies become action, for better or worse. Here, you’ll find links to all the content I produce for any of the btrmt. projects.

The latest | See them all

Animals First

animals first

You might have read about me, but now, let me introduce you to btrmt. Animals First walks you through this little website of mine. The philosophy, and all the major threads and minor projects that make it up. Let's see if you can't find something worth your time.

Check it out

The Armchair Collective

armchr

The Armchair Collective is the membership community of btrmt. You see, humans, of all the animals, have the greatest capacity for nurture. Our capacity to thrive is due to our ability to adapt, and our ability to adapt is merely a reflection of our ability to come together and share ideas. The Armchair Collective is a place to do just that.
Check it out

Content

Random Featured

Featured

article

Ideologies are presented to us as distortions of reality---a synonym for 'false belief'. But they are merely a subjective understanding of the relationship between things. In this sense, all things are ideologies. We can only choose those better or worse.

Latest Content

Latest

article

Neurotransmitters are psychological snake oil. A confidence game pop-psychologists play with their audience. There is frankly no convincing story of human behaviour made more comprehensible by talking about dopamine.

article

The 'naming' problem, where by naming something we feel we have explained it, the 'language' problem, where the words we use stop others from understanding, and the 'question' problem, where we fail to find the right questions, are common and funny.

article

This book is basically, “men are terribly emotionally fragile, and they can make small steps to be better, but women need to just <em>stop bothering them with all their pedantry</em> and just let them be who they are.”

marginalium

Marginalia are my notes on content from around the web.

marginalium

Marginalia are my notes on content from around the web.
All the Analects

Recent Missives

Missives

October 11, 2024

October 11, 2024

Last Changelog

I updated my article on neurotransmitters so substantially that I republished it this week. I still think they’re useless to talk about, but at least now you’ll come away better informed about them than anyone who tries to use them to make you buy something.

All the Missives
Join over 2000 of us. Get the newsletter.
Read it first | Privacy | Not working?