btrmt. | Betterment

ideologies worth choosing

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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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.

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.

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.

Content

Random Featured

Featured

article

The scientific claim of ‘no evidence’ both indicates that we have evidence something isn’t true, and that no one has really looked. This fact bears forth the alluring capacity for science to sweep inconvenient truths aside rather than tackle them.

The trap of scientific evidence

Article

There is an odd tension in the journalistic use of ‘no scientific evidence’. No evidence for something is our scientific method telling us that we should accept alternative explanations. Unless of course, we never tested that thing in the first place, in which case our claim of no evidence has no particular meaning at all. But something interesting happens in the middle ground between these two spaces. When scientists must bridge the gap with a funny kind of scientific common sense. The result is often rather lazy.
The scientific claim of ‘no evidence’ both indicates that we have evidence something isn’t true, and that no one has really looked. This fact bears forth the alluring capacity for science to sweep inconvenient truths aside rather than tackle them.

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Latest Content

Latest

article

Stress promotes bias—stereotypical thinking and behaving. Less stress promotes cognitive flexibility—an openness to new ways of thinking and behaving. Neither is better than the other. It’s about the situation you deploy them in.

Bias vs Noise pt. II: Stress

Article

Bias is just you using your expectations and assumptions to ignore the noise, and see the picture more clearly. The trade-off is that, sometimes, the noise is useful or your expectations are off. The human stress response is perhaps the most fundamental example of this in behaviour, and a very valuable tool.
Stress promotes bias—stereotypical thinking and behaving. Less stress promotes cognitive flexibility—an openness to new ways of thinking and behaving. Neither is better than the other. It’s about the situation you deploy them in.

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article

The behavioural economists treat bias as an error. But the brain isn’t an economist. It’s more like a statistician, using bias as a trade-off. Bias ignores noise to see something more clearly, though of course, sometimes the noise shouldn’t be ignored.

Bias vs Noise pt. I: Bias vs Bias

Article

The perils of cognitive bias is a subject that’s dominated a substantial slice of social psychology, and appears in any leadership or personal development course as something to be avoided at all costs. It’s interesting, but it’s not actually that useful. You can’t sift through 200+ biases to work out what you might do wrong. The brain treats bias differently. Bias is a strategy to solve certain kinds of problems. Let me show you how.
The behavioural economists treat bias as an error. But the brain isn’t an economist. It’s more like a statistician, using bias as a trade-off. Bias ignores noise to see something more clearly, though of course, sometimes the noise shouldn’t be ignored.

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article

AI has human-like output, but a very different environment and different <em>values</em> for than environment, and until all three align, they will never <em>actually</em> be human-like.

AI is never human-like

Article

People treat lots of stuff like they treat humans. AI is one of them. We talk about how human-like they are. How long until their ‘intelligence’ is like our intelligence. How long until they start doing human things, like murdering their competitors. Things like this. But AI isn’t even approaching human-like. In two very fundamental ways. And until those things change, they’ll continue to be completely incomprehensible to us.
AI has human-like output, but a very different environment and different values for than environment, and until all three align, they will never actually be human-like.

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marginalium

Marginalia are my notes on content from around the web.

Marginalium

My commentary on something from elsewhere on the web.

Interesting article on how AI thinks, by Anthropic. Some highlights:

Knowing how models like Claude think would allow us to have a better understanding of their abilities, as well as help us ensure that they’re doing what we intend them to. For example:

  • Claude can speak dozens of languages. What language, if any, is it using “in its head”?> - Claude writes text one word at a time. Is it only focusing on predicting the next word or does it ever plan ahead?
  • Claude can write out its reasoning step-by-step. Does this explanation represent the actual steps it took to get to an answer, or is it sometimes fabricating a plausible argument for a foregone conclusion?

And:

solid evidence that:

  • Claude sometimes thinks in a conceptual space that is shared between languages, suggesting it has a kind of universal “language of thought.” We show this by translating simple sentences into multiple languages and tracing the overlap in how Claude processes them.
  • Claude will plan what it will say many words ahead, and write to get to that destination. We show this in the realm of poetry, where it thinks of possible rhyming words in advance and writes the next line to get there. This is powerful evidence that even though models are trained to output one word at a time, they may think on much longer horizons to do so.
  • Claude, on occasion, will give a plausible-sounding argument designed to agree with the user rather than to follow logical steps. We show this by asking it for help on a hard math problem while giving it an incorrect hint. We are able to “catch it in the act” as it makes up its fake reasoning, providing a proof of concept that our tools can be useful for flagging concerning mechanisms in models.

And:

In a study of hallucinations, we found the counter-intuitive result that Claude’s default behavior is to decline to speculate when asked a question, and it only answers questions when something inhibits this default reluctance.

Lots interesting. But I still think I disagree with calling this ‘thinking’. More here and here, but I still see no reason to believe this isn’t more like walking for an AI. On that account, these ‘thought processes’ would be more like adjusting to terrain, or something.


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marginalium

Marginalia are my notes on content from around the web.

Marginalium

My commentary on something from elsewhere on the web.

Stolen from a tweet. Not groundbreaking, but interesting thoughts on use-cases for the new OpenAI image model:

(1) This changes filters. Instagram filters required custom code; now all you need are a few keywords like “Studio Ghibli” or Dr. Seuss or South Park.

(2) This changes online ads. Much of the workflow of ad unit generation can now be automated, as per QT below.

(3) This changes memes. The baseline quality of memes should rise, because a critical threshold of reducing prompting effort to get good results has been reached.

(4) This may change books. I’d like to see someone take a public domain book from Project Gutenberg, feed it page by page into Claude, and have it turn it into comic book panels with the new ChatGPT. Old books may become more accessible this way.

(5) This changes slides. We’re now close to the point where you can generate a few reasonable AI images for any slide deck. With the right integration, there should be less bullet-point only presentations.

(6) This changes websites. You can now generate placeholder images in a site-specific style for any tag, as a kind of visual Loren Ipsum.

(7) This may change movies. We could see shot-for-shot remakes of old movies in new visual styles, with dubbing just for the artistry of it. Though these might be more interesting as clips than as full movies.

(8) This may change social networking. Once this tech is open source and/or cheap enough to widely integrate, every upload image button will have a generate image alongside it.

(9) This should change image search. A generate option will likewise pop up alongside available images.

(10) In general, visual styles have suddenly become extremely easy to copy, even easier than frontend code. Distinction will have to come in other ways.


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Recent Missives

Missives

March 28, 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.

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