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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. 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. Left unexamined, these rituals will be chosen for us, not by us.
Dorian Minors
I’m Dorian Minors, Cambridge-educated brain scientist and professor of behavioural science, and I reckon it’s better to choose yourself. Hence btrmt. A place to discover ideologies worth choosing.
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More about me

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 and behaviour science, 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.

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Neurotypica

neurotypica

Lots of people ask me "what's a good neuroscience book to read?" I never really had a good answer. So I made one. This is my experimental attempt to teach you how a brain scientist thinks about our patterns of thinking and acting. Neurotypica is my guide to brain and behaviour. See what you think.
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Black Cortex

black cortex

Black Cortex is the place I send people looking for leadership consulting. Myself and a colleage at Sandhurst delivering transformation that goes beyond buzzword. We take on select work where outcomes are measurable.
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Content

Random Featured

Featured

article

A narrative of 'grit'

article

Angela Duckworth’s concept of the personality trait ‘grit’ is an interesting one, but it’s actually rather less helpful than the narrative about success she weaves in her book Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance.
Check it out

filed under:

betterment connection gratification on-being-fruitful on-culture on-leadership wealth-architecture

Latest Content

Latest

article

Control the water, control the people. Today’s water is energy, social media, infrastructure. We’re coerced through convenience, not malice. There are many vectors for control—we don’t need to hand them over.

Hydraulic Despotism

article

If you control the water, you control the people: Karl Wittfogel’s theory of hydraulic civilisations gives us a tidy little insight I think is worth extracting. Today ‘water’ is many things: water, electricity, social media and it has some interesting implications. There are some better theories to get after this insight of ours, but better doesn’t mean interesting, and none sound nearly as sexy as Hydraulic Despotism. So I’m going to bring it back.
Control the water, control the people. Today’s water is energy, social media, infrastructure. We’re coerced through convenience, not malice. There are many vectors for control—we don’t need to hand them over.
Check it out

filed under:

connection digital-architecture on-being-fruitful on-culture on-ethics on-leadership on-politics-and-power wealth-architecture collective-architecture thought-architecture

audio

We’ve been taught that cults are dark and scary things. But we have been fooled. The cult is a prominent building block of modern community. If you’re not in one, you’re probably doing something wrong. The question is, is the cult you’re in a cult you chose?

Mundane Cults

audio

The word cult conjures images of hooded figures, mass suicide, and narcissistic leaders. But this dark image is nonsense—the kind that makes us more vulnerable to destructive groups. Cults are actually a pervasive building block of modern community, from veganism to fitness franchises to health movements. The question isn’t whether you’re in one, but whether it’s one you chose.
We’ve been taught that cults are dark and scary things. But we have been fooled. The cult is a prominent building block of modern community. If you’re not in one, you’re probably doing something wrong. The question is, is the cult you’re in a cult you chose?
Check it out

filed under:

collective-architecture connection on-(un)happiness on-being-fruitful on-culture on-leadership spiritual-architecture thought-architecture

audio

Men and women engage in identical behaviours—complaining, offering solutions, needing validation, resisting criticism. The difference isn’t biological, it’s interpretive. We cast the same behaviour as reasonable for one gender and unreasonable for the other. Gray’s book is a perfect case study: emotionally troubled men are normalised while women’s ordinary needs are pathologised.

Men Aren't From Mars

audio

Gender essentialism is having a moment. Everyone’s reading books about what it means to be a man or woman, and Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus keeps getting recommended to me like it’s gospel. Here’s the thing: the book perfectly illustrates a pattern we see everywhere. The same behaviours—complaining, offering advice, needing reassurance, getting defensive—are cast as reasonable when men do them and unreasonable when women do them. Gray’s men are emotionally fragile and his women just want basic partnership, but somehow it’s the women who need to lower their expectations. This isn’t about men and women. It’s about how we frame identical behaviours differently based on who’s doing them.
Men and women engage in identical behaviours—complaining, offering solutions, needing validation, resisting criticism. The difference isn’t biological, it’s interpretive. We cast the same behaviour as reasonable for one gender and unreasonable for the other. Gray’s book is a perfect case study: emotionally troubled men are normalised while women’s ordinary needs are pathologised.
Check it out

filed under:

betterment collective-architecture connection on-(un)happiness on-culture on-love somatic-architecture

marginalium

Marginalia are my notes on content from around the web.

Marginalium

My commentary on something from elsewhere on the web.

Against McAskillian Longtermism:

Whatever is wrong with utilitarians who advocate the murder of a million for a 0.0001 percent reduction in the risk of human extinction, it isn’t a lack of computational power. Morality isn’t made by us—we can’t just decide on the moral truth—but it’s made for us: it rests on our common humanity

See also anti-consequentialism, and anti-utilitarian economics.

Check out the site

filed under:

betterment collective-architecture on-ethics on-politics-and-power on-thinking-and-reasoning 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.

The continued failure of the economy of small pleasures.

extrinsic incentives such as money or grades to learn [make it] harder to learn new related information when that incentive is gone … the learning outcome may be poorer due to the absence of reward

Actually, speaks a bit to the value of violence (or, rather, the lack thereof).

Check out the site

filed under:

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

Recent Missives

Missives

July 11, 2025

December 1, 2025

Last Changelog

Since I quit writing weekly articles in July, and went back to my monthly ones, I have been much more pleased with the quality of my work.

I wrote my ETHIC Stack up properly, rather than resorting to AI. I also used it to improve the ethical decision-making model [we developed at RMA Sandhurst. Now, altogether, this work forms the core of the Ethical Leadership module I run at Sandhurst.

I also re-wrote my motivation articles, because those two have become a core part of my leadership content at Sandhurst.

I’ve had another go at explaining why AI seems so familiar, and yet so alien to us, and this will also almost certainly become part of my teaching as I begin a project of integrating AI into the leadership programme at Sandhurst.

Just six months off forcing shit articles out every week, and look how much has been done!

But the more exciting news is that I’m finally testing the waters with the podcast. I’ve got two now: Stress is Good and Men aren’t from Mars. I’ll share more when I’m ready to launch it properly, but it’s experimental for now. See what you think.

All the Missives
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