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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

The sacred isn’t a social myth; a delusion of the religious. It is what happens when we bind moments of personal meaning and power to something greater than ourselves. And, without the sacred, we are left unable to transform meaning into purpose.

The Value of the Sacred

article

At the top of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs lies the spiritual ones—to connect with the world, and something greater than ourselves. He describes, in this space, the kinds of ‘peak’ experiences many of us are familiar with—a feeling of euphoria or bliss when encountering an awe-inspiring piece of art or natural vista. If we are familiar with Maslow’s states of transcendence, it implies we are capable of fulfilling our spiritual needs. One then wonders why we are in the midst of a spiritual crisis. I suspect a reason lies in a problematic attitude toward the concept of the sacred.
The sacred isn’t a social myth; a delusion of the religious. It is what happens when we bind moments of personal meaning and power to something greater than ourselves. And, without the sacred, we are left unable to transform meaning into purpose.
Check it out

filed under:

betterment gratification on-(un)happiness on-being-fruitful on-the-nature-of-things somatic-architecture spiritual-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

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

audio

Stress isn’t poorly calibrated to modern life. It’s the energising force that allows us to perform. Optimal performance requires optimal stress. The difference between eustress and distress isn’t biological—it’s psychological. Controllability matters more than the stressor itself.

Stress is Good

audio

Everyone’s convinced stress is this outdated evolutionary technology—poorly calibrated to modern life, something to avoid at all costs. The story goes that it evolved to help us run from tigers, but now it’s just triggered by email notifications. This is nonsense. Stress is the only thing that gets us to perform at all. It’s the most valuable biological technology we have. This lecture walks through the Yerkes-Dodson Law—a simple, 100-year-old model that explains how stress actually works, why we need it, and how to use it well.
Stress isn’t poorly calibrated to modern life. It’s the energising force that allows us to perform. Optimal performance requires optimal stress. The difference between eustress and distress isn’t biological—it’s psychological. Controllability matters more than the stressor itself.
Check it out

filed under:

betterment gratification on-(un)happiness on-being-fruitful on-thinking-and-reasoning 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.

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 on-ethics on-therapy psychologia spiritual-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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