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 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.
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Content

Random Featured

Featured

article

We often use complicated-sounding words to dress up simple ideas about the human experience. But this isn’t just self-indulgence. It’s also a desire to conform to the right ‘ways’ of knowing as well as a desire for something to point at—an enemy, so to speak.

On attraction and love

Article

Much is written on the subject of attractiveness. It has become synonymous with beauty. Attractive celebrities, attractive influencers, attractive art. And through this myopic lens, attraction becomes something ugly. Something that people have or do not have. Something to be jealous of. Something to be torn down. But it doesn’t have to be. It can actually be something very beautiful indeed.
We often use complicated-sounding words to dress up simple ideas about the human experience. But this isn’t just self-indulgence. It’s also a desire to conform to the right ‘ways’ of knowing as well as a desire for something to point at—an enemy, so to speak.
Read this article

filed under:

collective-architecture connection on-(un)happiness on-aesthetics on-being-fruitful on-culture on-friendship on-love thought-architecture

Latest Content

Latest

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.
Read this article

filed under:

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

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.
Read this article

filed under:

betterment gratification on-(un)happiness on-aesthetics on-being-fruitful on-thinking-and-reasoning somatic-architecture thought-architecture wealth-architecture

article

Cognitive dissonance is often thought of as the <em>discomfort</em> we have with conflicting cognitions. But it’s really about how the brain will smooth over <em>dissonant</em> cognitions, whether they’re uncomfortable or not. It happens a lot.

Cognitive dissonance isn't discomfort

Article

I’ve never written an article about the phenomenon of cognitive dissonance, even though I’ve referenced it a lot. It’s so mainstream that I assume everyone knows what it is. But, actually, people don’t. And even the guy who came up with it was a little disappointed by where the literature around it went. So I thought we’d revisit it, and keep it short and fun.
Cognitive dissonance is often thought of as the discomfort we have with conflicting cognitions. But it’s really about how the brain will smooth over dissonant cognitions, whether they’re uncomfortable or not. It happens a lot.
Read this article

filed under:

betterment gratification on-(un)happiness on-aesthetics on-being-fruitful on-thinking-and-reasoning somatic-architecture thought-architecture wealth-architecture

marginalium

Marginalia are my notes on content from around the web.

Marginalium

My commentary on something from elsewhere on the web.

I’m not going to pretend to understand this properly, but the main thing I took away is that old mate reckons:

  1. direct-collapse supermassive black holes somehow produce universes; then
  2. galaxies form around them and produce a bunch of stellar-mass black holes; then
  3. life evolves, resulting in technology that eventually generates a bunch of tiny black holes for energy.

So universes are black hole reproduction, in the natural selection sense. It’s not even the main point. Something about how the way the black holes produce universes means we don’t need to explain dark matter anymore.

This shorter, more punchy version tells us that people are paying attention to the theory.

And I’m not overly fussed whether this ends up being true or not. Just that this can be true makes me feel like my little articles talking about how we can’t understand the world, so we make everything an ideology are a little more salient.

Check out the site

filed under:

gratification on-aesthetics on-the-nature-of-things thought-architecture

marginalium

Marginalia are my notes on content from around the web.

Marginalium

My commentary on something from elsewhere on the web.

Cheating with AI. It’s mostly narrative, but I liked it. I went to a conference recently where the guy who co-wrote the 2024 paper demonstrating we can’t tell what papers spoke. It doesn’t seem like there’s a fix in the works. And it makes me wonder, is this something that’s distasteful now, and won’t really matter in a few years? Or is this going to end up a problem?

Check out the site

filed under:

gratification wealth-architecture digital-architecture on-being-fruitful on-ethics
All the Analects

Recent Missives

Missives

May 9, 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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