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.

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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

‘Control’ isn’t always a bad thing in a relationship. In fact it’s necessary. We always have a level of control over our partners, we must just use it with their approval, and to meet their needs as well as ours.

Creating a digital home for our digital selves

Article

Our digital lives are as much an entity as our physical lives. Maybe moreso—many of us spend more time online than off. Yet we take very little care of our digital selves. We’re going to fix that. Simply. Because it causes us more stress than it needs to.
‘Control’ isn’t always a bad thing in a relationship. In fact it’s necessary. We always have a level of control over our partners, we must just use it with their approval, and to meet their needs as well as ours.
Read this article

filed under:

digital-architecture on-being-fruitful thought-architecture

Latest Content

Latest

article

Basically, reward and ancipation both use the same system, but differently. Anticipation seems to come in through the senses and get sent throughout the brain, but pleasure seems to come in from more evaluatey bits—maybe to help us learn what’s rewarding.

Anticipation beats reward

Article

A lot of people reckon the brain treats rewards quite differently from the anticipation of rewards. And, in fact, the anticipation of reward seems like the bigger driver of our behaviour. And this little tidbit is one of the few places where human behaviour is actually explained well by exploring the brain. So let’s explore it.
Basically, reward and ancipation both use the same system, but differently. Anticipation seems to come in through the senses and get sent throughout the brain, but pleasure seems to come in from more evaluatey bits—maybe to help us learn what’s rewarding.
Read this article

filed under:

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

article

The neural reward circuit implies that small, rewarding tasks that share environmental context are going to be the most addictive, so break tasks into small steps that end in a clear good feeling and optimise for a shared environment.

Addictive Work

Article

It’s very trendy to say stuff like ‘start your day by making your bed and something something life is better’. But this is usually some kind of comment about the value of small and simple acts in promoting a sense of order and discipline. I’m not so interested in that. I’m more interested in those small and simple acts that make you addicted to those acts. I like other things that people say are addictive, so this sounds much more my speed, when it comes to productivity.
The neural reward circuit implies that small, rewarding tasks that share environmental context are going to be the most addictive, so break tasks into small steps that end in a clear good feeling and optimise for a shared environment.
Read this article

filed under:

betterment gratification on-being-fruitful somatic-architecture wealth-architecture

article

BDSM is an ideology stack—a collection of behaviours borne of a culture that surrounds some core set of human needs. But is it lazy? Hard to tell. It seems easy to explain away parts of it as hormone hijacking and socialisation, but there is something deeper there.

BDSM as a lazy ideology

Article

I write a lot about ideologies here. Rituals of thought and behaviour that come out of our need to automatically solve predictable problems of a complex world. I also point out that ideologies ‘stack’. They all sort of ‘stick together’, making these bundles of beliefs and behaviours. Most of these are lazy: stacks of ideologies we adopt just because they’re there. I reckon BDSM might be just one of these. It might be an ideology stack that people gravatate to, not because it’s the most efficient way of expressing some core human need, but because it’s just the most common. Let me explain what I mean.
BDSM is an ideology stack—a collection of behaviours borne of a culture that surrounds some core set of human needs. But is it lazy? Hard to tell. It seems easy to explain away parts of it as hormone hijacking and socialisation, but there is something deeper there.
Read this article

filed under:

connection gratification on-(un)happiness on-culture on-love somatic-architecture thought-architecture

marginalium

Marginalia are my notes on content from around the web.

Marginalium

My commentary on something from elsewhere on the web.

The Mediterranean diet is a lie:

Orthodoxy holds that the American duo discovered [in Italy] a fantastically nourishing, mostly plant-based regimen centered on moderation and communal eating, as well as a food pyramid much like the one we all saw as children … [but] The diet wasn’t discovered so much as invented — and Nicoterans’ leanness was due to a different ingredient: hunger.

And Italy sure isn’t doing so hot now. Check out the graphs.

Check out the site

filed under:

gratification somatic-architecture on-culture on-ethics

marginalium

Marginalia are my notes on content from around the web.

Marginalium

My commentary on something from elsewhere on the web.

The ideology that is ‘species’. It’s a social constructivist argument, but of course, the distinctions between species are not particularly clear. Yet, this particular arbitration determines a great proportion of our conservation efforts. Are the extinctions of sub-species less important than the extinctions of species? There’s no good answer. It’s just ideologies at work.

Check out the site

filed under:

betterment thought-architecture on-politics-and-power on-the-nature-of-things
All the Analects

Recent Missives

Missives

January 31, 2025

December 12, 2024

Last Changelog

A big series of articles largely around the psychology of groups and leadership will take precedence over the next few weeks as I (re)familiarise myself with the content we teach at my new job.

All the Missives
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