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. 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.

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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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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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Lectures

lectures

I mostly write my articles for me. These lectures are for you. I spend so much of my time teaching, why not do some of that in front of a microphone. The btrmt. lectures, where I take one concept I write about or teach, and try and teach it to you. Currently hosted on Substack.

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Content

Random Featured

Featured

article

On Emotion

article

Emotion is an impossible term to define. Seems important though, so let’s try anyway.
Check it out

filed under:

connection betterment thought-architecture on-(un)happiness on-love on-friendship on-politics-and-power on-the-nature-of-things

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

Latest Content

Latest

article

Nature is just nurture over time, and nurture is far more obviously in charge; nothing changes if free will <em>isn’t</em> real; and the same is true of consciousness. They’re just complicated debates with no real outcomes.

Stupid Questions

article

There are a few questions which, on the surface, seem hugely important. Then, on closer inspection, turn out to be more or less irrelevant. I need a place to write about them, so I thought I’d make it a sort of always-evolving article. So far, I talk about how useless the nature-vs-nurture debate is and how boring the questions of whether free-will is real, and what consciousness might be are.
Nature is just nurture over time, and nurture is far more obviously in charge; nothing changes if free will isn’t real; and the same is true of consciousness. They’re just complicated debates with no real outcomes.
Check it out

filed under:

betterment thought-architecture on-being-fruitful on-ethics on-the-nature-of-things on-thinking-and-reasoning

audio

The hard problem of consciousness is just a complicated debate with no real outcomes. It’s the behaviour that matters, not whether there’s ineffable qualia behind the curtain.

Stupid Questions: Consciousness

audio

What is consciousness? From Mary’s Room to philosophical zombies, from panpsychism to eliminativism, everyone has theories about the “hard problem.” But under what realistic circumstances would it actually matter whether something is truly conscious versus merely appearing conscious?
The hard problem of consciousness is just a complicated debate with no real outcomes. It’s the behaviour that matters, not whether there’s ineffable qualia behind the curtain.
Check it out

filed under:

betterment thought-architecture on-being-fruitful on-ethics on-the-nature-of-things on-thinking-and-reasoning

audio

Nothing changes if free will isn’t real. The world is so intractably complex that it doesn’t matter, and we can shape behaviour either way. Why bother asking?

Stupid Questions: Free Will

audio

From Libet’s experiments to modern neuroscience, evidence keeps mounting that our decisions might be predetermined. But even if free will is an illusion, what would actually change? Behaviour is still something we can modify, determinism doesn’t excuse us from consequence, and the debate itself is practically irrelevant.
Nothing changes if free will isn’t real. The world is so intractably complex that it doesn’t matter, and we can shape behaviour either way. Why bother asking?
Check it out

filed under:

betterment thought-architecture on-being-fruitful on-ethics on-the-nature-of-things on-thinking-and-reasoning

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 spiritual-architecture psychologia on-therapy on-ethics

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

Recent Missives

Missives

July 11, 2025

January 9, 2026

Last Changelog

Happy new year. On top of my updates last December, I have two new articles out: one on Hydraulic Despotism, and one on three questions that seem important, but end up being irrelevant. Specifically, questions about consciousness, free-will, and nature vs nurture.

Relatedly, I have four more podcasts/lectures out. Three are the audio version of the irrelevant questions article: Consciousness, Free Will, and Nature vs Nurture. Then one more on Mundane Cults.

Looks like it wasn’t a passing fancy, so I guess I should launch it properly now.

It’s hosted at Substack for the free storage and bandwidth for now, but you don’t need to subscribe there. I’ll still include the links in the normal newsletter.

Speaking of, I will be restarting the newsletter! I think you can tell I needed the break.

All the Missives
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