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.

Check it out

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.
Check it out

Content

Random Featured

Featured

article

Animals show glimpses of cognitive abilities that challenge our traditional notions of higher-order thinking, making us question what truly characterises sophisticated thought and what it means to be clever.

Honey-bees are smarter than they should be

article

Every now and then, the tiniest creatures show glimpses of the highest-orders of cognitive ability. Plenty of animals do very clever stuff they really shouldn’t be able to do, given the way we currently conceptualise cognition. This doesn’t just raise questions about how they do it, but also what really makes humans different.
Animals show glimpses of cognitive abilities that challenge our traditional notions of higher-order thinking, making us question what truly characterises sophisticated thought and what it means to be clever.
Check it out

filed under:

betterment on-aesthetics on-the-nature-of-things on-thinking-and-reasoning somatic-architecture

Latest Content

Latest

audio

I describe five levels that help understand how good people do bad things—neural, cognitive, situational, social, and cultural. Inject some norms into the stack, and you can explain (and predict) moral behaviour.

Navigating Moral Terrain: the ETHIC Stack

audio

I wrote a series of papers on practical ethics. I didn’t really like those articles. But I was inspired to write a 45-page treatise on the behavioural science of ethical behaviour. There’s no way you’re going to want to read that, so I made this instead. An AI generated podcast, and a short little explainer. If you like how the water looks, I assure you, it’s plenty deep.
I describe five levels that help understand how good people do bad things—neural, cognitive, situational, social, and cultural. Inject some norms into the stack, and you can explain (and predict) moral behaviour.
Check it out

filed under:

betterment on-ethics on-leadership somatic-architecture

article

To avoid rationalising poor ethical intuitions, we can use three tools to develop our ethical muscles. Sensitising ourselves to the small number of basic ethical motivations and the the mechanisms which allow us ignore them, before asking what a good person would do. It gets us most of the way there.

Practical Ethics

article

Most discussions about ethics centre on catastrophic scenarios. Situations where it’d be very difficult to avoid unethical behaviour. These scenarios aren’t really very interesting to me. What the average person probably wants to know is how to avoid the tamer moral lapses we encounter every day. What the average person wants to do is know how to avoid that single decision that might haunt them. So let’s explore a more practical ethics. This is the last in the series—the three hooks for a practical ethic.
To avoid rationalising poor ethical intuitions, we can use three tools to develop our ethical muscles. Sensitising ourselves to the small number of basic ethical motivations and the the mechanisms which allow us ignore them, before asking what a good person would do. It gets us most of the way there.
Check it out

filed under:

betterment on-ethics on-leadership somatic-architecture

article

Most people think better ethical decision-making is just a matter of stopping to think before acting. But many moral judgements are intuitive, and then we rationalise them to ourselves. We have to train both intuition and reasoning, not rely on one to correct the other.

Moral Blindspots

article

Most discussions about ethics centre on catastrophic scenarios. Situations where it’‘d be very difficult to avoid unethical behaviour. These scenarios aren’‘t really very interesting to me. What the average person probably wants to know is how to avoid the tamer moral lapses we encounter every day. What the average person wants to do is know how to avoid that single decision that might haunt them. So let’’s explore a more practical ethics. This is the second in the series—avoiding the moral blindspot.
Most people think better ethical decision-making is just a matter of stopping to think before acting. But many moral judgements are intuitive, and then we rationalise them to ourselves. We have to train both intuition and reasoning, not rely on one to correct the other.
Check it out

filed under:

betterment on-ethics on-leadership somatic-architecture

marginalium

Marginalia are my notes on content from around the web.

Marginalium

My commentary on something from elsewhere on the web.

Ethical astrology:

Astrological forecasting tends to describe the future more thematically or archetypically than concretely, and the vast majority of astrological prediction today falls into this category … Horoscopes work this way

Astrological prediction, wielded gently and skillfully, can help to “spot the meaning and the movement [going forward] by looking to what is different,”

The downside to the immense meaning-making potential of astrology? It renders the practice vulnerable to misuse by uncareful types with dubious commitment to honorable behavior.

See also the placebo effect.

Check out the site

filed under:

gratification on-ethics on-therapy psychologia spiritual-architecture

marginalium

Marginalia are my notes on content from around the web.

Marginalium

My commentary on something from elsewhere on the web.

There is a thin line between sleep and wake. You know this if you have sleep paralysis or are a lucid dreamer.

In that spirit, here, we have surprisingly convincing evidence for communicating with REM (lucid dreaming) sleepers using various means, like facial twitches and eye movements.

Check out the site

filed under:

fragments animal-sentience gratification on-thinking-and-reasoning somatic-architecture
All the Analects

Recent Missives

Missives

July 11, 2025

July 10, 2025

Last Changelog

This week I sent a draft paper out for review. It’s a rather longwinded sketch of how I think we could approach ethics. It’s 45 pages or so long, but it was a lot of fun to write. I suspect most people will not want quite that level of detail though, so I made an AI podcast and a semi-AI explainer. People seem to quite like the AI summary stuff. You can find it all here.

However, the whole experience has made me realise that I’ve been pretty annoyed this last year. Since June, I’ve written an article a week, and most of them are shit.

I used to write an article a month, and I used to write them basically just for me—working an idea out for myself—and so it’s no surprise that I usually quite liked those articles.

But many people reasonably complained that they were impenetrable and infrequent. So I committed to an article a week instead, and I’d try to bridge the gap—try to write articles that were a little for me and a little for everyone else.

The result is that, for the most part, they do neither. Lots of strange fragmentary ‘series’ style posts, and unfinished and incomplete thinking. All useless to me, but also not very penetrable to others.

Then I wrote this 45-page paper, and I was obsessed with it. And I love it. And I don’t care that no one will read it.

So I’m going back to that, I think. Writing articles that are me being thoughtful for me. BUT. I will look to producing new forms of content for others, because I like teaching too. Rather than do two things badly, I will do both things well.

All the Missives
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