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.

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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 aspect of btrmt.---what works and what doesn'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

The ‘Great Man’ theory of history has the history of ideas moved forward by individuals. But by thinking of these as ‘Great Ideas’, or better ‘spirits’ of ideas, we’re encouraged to examine their motivations, which is surprisingly effective.

Latest Content

Latest

article

Bias reduces noise—if you know <em>roughly</em> what to expect, then being biased by those expectations means you won’t get distracted by less relevant data points.

article

The brain is an <em>integrator</em>. It takes in information from all over the body, and puts it together to decide how you should act. This messy integration acts as a bottleneck, forcing the brain to streamline as much as possible. Rarely does it try to ‘think’.

article

We usually complain about systems ‘getting in our way’, with arbitrary criteria that determine success. But this goes the other way too. Much of my success and that of those around me is similarly mechanical. Not luck, effort, or nepotism.

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

November 16, 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
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