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 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.
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Content

Random Featured

Featured

article

The human animal is an animal first–responding adaptively to the environment around it. Humans are only unpredictable because we’re obsessed with the human mind and uncomfortable accepting how influential our environment is.

The predictability of humans

Article

The notion that humans are unpredictable is a common refrain. But it’s not true. Humans are not unpredictable, so much as they are unpredictably predictable. This is because we fail to take into account one fundamental thing.
The human animal is an animal first–responding adaptively to the environment around it. Humans are only unpredictable because we’re obsessed with the human mind and uncomfortable accepting how influential our environment is.
Read this article

filed under:

betterment digital-architecture on-(un)happiness on-being-fruitful on-thinking-and-reasoning somatic-architecture

Latest Content

Latest

article

Without time-travel, evolutionary narratives can only identify theories that <em>don’t</em> make sense (like death drives). It can’t tell you what theories <em>do</em> make sense, because you can make many to explain the same thing. All they do is let you see what people wish the world was like.

Evolution is overrated

Article

People love a good evolutionary narrative. I wouldn’t be able to count the number of times I’ve heard “back in our evolutionary past…”. Somewhere along the line, evolutionary theories went from a useful way to fix psychological theories, to a generator of some of the most superficially idiotic. And I think, reading between the lines, we can find a new use for them. But first, let me convince you that evolutionary narratives aren’t usually worth very much.
Without time-travel, evolutionary narratives can only identify theories that don’t make sense (like death drives). It can’t tell you what theories do make sense, because you can make many to explain the same thing. All they do is let you see what people wish the world was like.
Read this article

filed under:

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

article

There’s no hidden version of you. If anything, we are a collection of bits and pieces that we weave together from the stories we learn from others. You don’t need to find an authentic <em>self</em>, you need to find a story you can weave that makes you happy.

There is no authentic self

Article

There’s this idea that other people’s expectations stop us from finding our ‘authentic’ self. Other people somehow take us away from who we are. Inside us is some truer version of us that is slowly withering in the face of the demands of the world around us to be something else. And I just reject this premise out of hand.
There’s no hidden version of you. If anything, we are a collection of bits and pieces that we weave together from the stories we learn from others. You don’t need to find an authentic self, you need to find a story you can weave that makes you happy.
Read this article

filed under:

betterment gratification on-(un)happiness on-the-nature-of-things on-thinking-and-reasoning somatic-architecture spiritual-architecture

article

When we want to identify with a group, we <em>bias</em> ourselves to filter out all theother ways we could be. It helps us cut down all our competing priorities to the group. The trade-off is the benefit in diversity of thought.

Bias vs Noise pt. III: Groups

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. Mob-mentality and groupthink are usually posed as scary features of groups. But they’re just another example of this trade-off, and usually they’re more good than bad.
When we want to identify with a group, we bias ourselves to filter out all theother ways we could be. It helps us cut down all our competing priorities to the group. The trade-off is the benefit in diversity of thought.
Read this article

filed under:

betterment collective-architecture connection on-(un)happiness on-culture 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.

AI tutoring works:

students working on mathematics with tutors randomly assigned to have access to Tutor CoPilot are 4 percentage points (p.p.) more likely to master topics (p<0.01). Notably, students of lower-rated tutors experienced the greatest benefit, improving mastery by 9 p.p. relative to the control group. We find that Tutor CoPilot costs only $20 per-tutor annually, based on the tutors’ usage during the study. We analyze 550,000+ messages using classifiers to identify pedagogical strategies, and find that tutors with access to Tutor CoPilot are more likely to use strategies that foster student understanding (e.g., asking guiding questions) and less likely to give away the answer to the student, aligning with high-quality teaching practices. Tutor interviews qualitatively highlight how Tutor CoPilot’s guidance helps them to respond to student needs, though tutors flag common issues in Tutor CoPilot, such as generating suggestions that are not grade-level appropriate

So a 4-9% improvement in learning outcomes, at the session level. But mostly it highlights that AI is helping bad tutors become as good as seasoned ones, which is more exciting.

Check out the site

filed under:

betterment wealth-architecture digital-architecture on-being-fruitful

marginalium

Marginalia are my notes on content from around the web.

Marginalium

My commentary on something from elsewhere on the web.

We’re wrong about ADHD. Use a paywall buster:

some scientists have begun to argue that the traditional conception of A.D.H.D. as an unchanging, essential fact about you — something you simply have or don’t have, something wired deep in your brain — is both inaccurate and unhelpful. According to Sonuga-Barke, the British researcher, the traditional notion that there is a natural category of “people with A.D.H.D.” that clinicians can objectively measure and define “just doesn’t seem to be the case.”

We’ve known for a while that diagnosis is a bit helter-skelter, and self-diagnosing online is making it much harder to tell true cases from people who are learning how to meet diagnosable criteria (because ADHD is now trendy). But this is new and exciting—that ADHD might not be permanent. It might be environmental, and the lasting effects come from the effects of stimulants in making people feel a connection to their work. For people who are truly worried about ADHD, this is interesting to explore.

Check out the site

filed under:

betterment somatic-architecture on-being-fruitful on-ethics
All the Analects

Recent Missives

Missives

April 18, 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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