btrmt. | Betterment

ideologies worth choosing

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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.

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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.

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Karstica

karstica

Karstica is where I put anything designed to impress people who might want to pay me. White papers, development tools, things like that. Something like the research and development arm of btrmt. The things that work and those that don't. Right now, it's mostly just a landing page, until I get the site moved properly.
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Content

Random Featured

Featured

article

Focusing on edge-cases of “trans-regret” is missing the point. If you actually care about these cases, then the interesting issue are the underlying vulnerabilities that lead to regrettable decisions. But probably you shouldn’t care.

The true meaning of family ties

Article

It’s no secret that we are lonelier than ever. We have many complaints of modern society, but our growing isolation is a common one. There are two reasons for this unhappy accident—the difficulty of finding people in ever more crowded cities, and the fact that we have lost sight of what a community is really made of. This article is about the latter.
Focusing on edge-cases of “trans-regret” is missing the point. If you actually care about these cases, then the interesting issue are the underlying vulnerabilities that lead to regrettable decisions. But probably you shouldn’t care.
Read this article

filed under:

betterment collective-architecture connection on-(un)happiness on-culture on-friendship on-love wealth-architecture

Latest Content

Latest

article

Brain networks are groups of brain regions that work together. There are only a handful of interesting ones, but you can actually use them to understand human behaviour.

Not brain regions, brain networks

Article

Brain regions are often oversimplified in popular discourse. The amygdala isn’t just the fear centre, and the prefrontal cortex isn’t solely the ‘smart’ bit. This silly approach to talking about the brain hides the really cool stuff. So let’s talk about those instead.
Brain networks are groups of brain regions that work together. There are only a handful of interesting ones, but you can actually use them to understand human behaviour.
Read this article

filed under:

betterment on-being-fruitful on-thinking-and-reasoning somatic-architecture

article

If you look closely, you’ll see that our ability to speak just hides the fact that other processes are running the show. Find a way to cut the language regions out, and you see other little consciousnesses start to take over.

Mini-brains inside the brain

Article

People love to talk about brain regions, but usually that’s silly. Brain regions usually don’t tell you anything about how the mind works. That’s not true of the language regions though. The language regions tell you something quite weird about the mind, and it has nothing to do with language.
If you look closely, you’ll see that our ability to speak just hides the fact that other processes are running the show. Find a way to cut the language regions out, and you see other little consciousnesses start to take over.
Read this article

filed under:

betterment on-being-fruitful on-thinking-and-reasoning somatic-architecture

article

Basically, reward and ancipation both use the same system, but differently. Anticipation seems to come in through the senses and get sent throughout the brain, but pleasure seems to come in from more evaluatey bits—maybe to help us learn what’s rewarding.

Anticipation beats reward

Article

A lot of people reckon the brain treats rewards quite differently from the anticipation of rewards. And, in fact, the anticipation of reward seems like the bigger driver of our behaviour. And this little tidbit is one of the few places where human behaviour is actually explained well by exploring the brain. So let’s explore it.
Basically, reward and ancipation both use the same system, but differently. Anticipation seems to come in through the senses and get sent throughout the brain, but pleasure seems to come in from more evaluatey bits—maybe to help us learn what’s rewarding.
Read this article

filed under:

betterment gratification on-(un)happiness on-being-fruitful on-leadership somatic-architecture wealth-architecture

marginalium

Marginalia are my notes on content from around the web.

Marginalium

My commentary on something from elsewhere on the web.

Introducing “How the System Works,” a series on the hidden mechanisms that support modern life. As Mann points out, “No poets celebrate the sewage treatment plants that prevent them from dying of dysentery.” Lots of illuminating insights in the first essay, for example:

Today more than 1 percent of the world’s industrial energy is devoted to making ammonia fertilizer. “That 1 percent,” the futurist Ramez Naam says, “roughly doubles the amount of food the world can grow.”

Check out the site

filed under:

wealth-architecture betterment collective-architecture on-culture on-politics-and-power

marginalium

Marginalia are my notes on content from around the web.

Marginalium

My commentary on something from elsewhere on the web.

C.D.C. Posts, Then Deletes, Data on Bird Flu Spread Between Cats and People. A concern about the handling about COVID, or an error?

Check out the site

filed under:

betterment somatic-architecture on-(un)happiness on-ethics absit-omnia
All the Analects

Recent Missives

Missives

February 14, 2025

February 14, 2025

Last Changelog

Last week I was supposed to do this week’s article, and got distracted by a cool feature of the study of language regions of the brain. Anyway, I updated last week’s article to stand alone, and this week’s article is what it should have been. If you read last weeks’ you can skip the intro to this weeks’ and just dive right in.

All the Missives
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