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 the landing page I send people to when they want to pay me to help them. Coaching, consulting, keynote speaking, that kind of thing. I also do pro bono mentorship on a case-by-case basis. Have a look if you want to see my approach to coaching and consulting.

Content

Random Featured

Featured

article

We can use abstractions to get a handle on complex features of the world. By personalising centres of purpose in the world, we can better connect them to ideologies. This permits the crafting of ever more graceful solutions to our complex world.

Abstractions as Gods

Article

The notion of ‘minds’ or ‘souls’ or ‘spirits’ or ‘parts’ or ‘malevolent children’ recurs in many domains of cognition or in our interpretations of the world around us, but this analogy, once spoken, cannot be contained within the person. It immediately begins to press at the boundaries of agentic creatures like humans or other animals and spills into domains that we wouldn’t otherwise be inclined to ascribe things like ‘mind’ or ‘spirit’ … so why not lean into that?
We can use abstractions to get a handle on complex features of the world. By personalising centres of purpose in the world, we can better connect them to ideologies. This permits the crafting of ever more graceful solutions to our complex world.

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Latest Content

Latest

article

It says it’s based on the latest research, but actually it’s based on a 40 year old version of the concept of an ‘inner critic’, and a pack of very well worded porky-pies.

Positive Intelligence pt.I

Article

A lot of people were upset with me for teasing the ‘neuroscience-based’ coaching programme ‘Positive Intelligence’, so I thought I’d do a little autopsy. This is part one, on the context that should make you pretty worried about it.
It says it’s based on the latest research, but actually it’s based on a 40 year old version of the concept of an ‘inner critic’, and a pack of very well worded porky-pies.

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article

Our brains track two kinds of uncertainty. Expected uncertainty makes us trust our model of the world more and exploit familiar patterns (be biased). Unexpected uncertainty makes us explore and update our model (prefer noise). Correctly diagnosing the uncertainty is the key.

Uncertainty vs Risk

Article

I’ve been talking about we’re all quite scared of bias, but actually bias is quite handy. It’s a preference for precision—you can ignore a noisy world because you have some expectations about how things are going to play out. But you don’t always know when to be biased, or when to open yourself up to the noisy world. So, sometimes you’re biased when you shouldn’t be, and sometimes you’re paralysed by indecision when you should have just gone from the gut. This article explores the lever that sits under that process—uncertainty.
Our brains track two kinds of uncertainty. Expected uncertainty makes us trust our model of the world more and exploit familiar patterns (be biased). Unexpected uncertainty makes us explore and update our model (prefer noise). Correctly diagnosing the uncertainty is the key.

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article

Cogntive dissonance often describes a bias towards seeing ourselves as coherent. Sure, it’s sneaky and prevalent, but entirely necessary. And, other times we tolerate how noisy we are, keeping us open to new insights and better equipped for a complex world.

Preferring Coherence

Article

The concept of cognitive dissonance gets flogged online. It’s always this malevolent feature of our minds lurking back there making us do outrageous stuff. But cognitive dissonance isn’t really this. It’s just another example of bias—optimising us for certain features of a messy world so we can get on with things. Of course this doesn’t always help. But actually most of the time it does. And people don’t often talk about the fact that we don’t always worry about conflicting cognitions. But we don’t—sometimes we’re open to the noise too.
Cogntive dissonance often describes a bias towards seeing ourselves as coherent. Sure, it’s sneaky and prevalent, but entirely necessary. And, other times we tolerate how noisy we are, keeping us open to new insights and better equipped for a complex world.

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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.

Drink water, get skinny. Highlights of the journal article:

  • Water consumption is associated with numerous health benefits including greater odds of achieving clinically meaningful weight loss and less weight gain over time.
  • Pre-meal water consumption may be an effective strategy for reducing hunger and meal energy intake, particularly among middle-aged and older adults.
  • The substitution of water for sugar-sweetened beverages or increasing water intake reduces body weight by 0.33 kg compared to control conditions.

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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.

On Eurasian Demonology. I wrote an article this week about a very expensive faux-neuroscience-based program that talks about your inner demons, and it seems fun to see the places that our historical concept of actual demons overlaps. But also how we make abstractions gods and how we Christianised them:

However, this is not the whole picture, because, generally speaking, it was only these inner daimons of possession that were potentially ‘demonic’. When approached in the proper manner, the custodians of springs and rivers and sacred groves, like Plato’s guardian spirits or the various oracles of the ancient Mediterranean world, have shown themselves to be of a benevolent sort, and so have been sought out by persons in need of their help. Fairies, trolls, elves, nymphs and gnomes are so many ‘land spirits’, daimons of the natural environment. So it was that, when faced by their parishioners’ stubborn recourse to the healing waters of pagan sanctuaries, the same medieval Church whose vocation it had been to combat the demonic hordes was forced to yield to popular custom. Even today, the Mediterranean world is dotted with thousands of pools and springs consecrated to various saints and virgins who are none other than the daimons and fairies of yore, overlaid with the slightest Christian veneer.


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Recent Missives

Missives

May 16, 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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