btrmt. | Betterment

ideologies worth choosing

btrmt.

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About

betterment

noun

making or becoming better

ideology

noun

patterns or rituals of thought, feeling, and action

Most of what you believe, you didn’t choose. The habits of thought, the assumptions, the rituals of feeling and acting—they arrived before you did. That’s not a flaw. The world is complicated and we need patterns to make sense of it. The trouble is, most of ours were given to us, not chosen by us.

So, let me help you choose them.

More about me →

Projects

The btrmt. projects aren't random. They're the threads I keep pulling on.

  • analects

    I have a terrible memory, see. So, everything I learn I have to leave somewhere I can find later. This is where. With a background in brain and behaviour science, my analects are me teaching myself and anyone else interested in our patterns of thinking and behaving.

    See them all →

  • 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.

    Check it out →

  • 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.

    Check it out ↗

  • black cortex

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

    Check it out ↗

  • 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.

    Check it out ↗

  • omen

    It’s not silly to be superstitious. The placebo effect is an ‘effect’ because it works, and the scientific method is a ritual like any other. Rituals surface meaning regardless of the mechanism. Omen is a daily tarot draw. One card, personalised, as a moment for reflection. Bring your friends. Currently Invite only.

    Check it out ↗

Content

Latest and best the Analects, or my latest Missives to you all.

Random Featured

Featured

article

The brain primarily links chunks of meaning into patterns of neural pathways. Pathways and patterns of meaning help us intuitively solve the problems of everyday life. But they also trap us in those patterns, and stop us from seeing beyond them.

Meaning and its patterns in the brain

article

Many ideas that come to us are unbidden and automatic. The shape of a house. The wheels of a car. These things can be left unsaid. This is one of primary roles of the brain—to weave a web of meaning. But just as they help us make sense of the world, they trap us.
The brain primarily links chunks of meaning into patterns of neural pathways. Pathways and patterns of meaning help us intuitively solve the problems of everyday life. But they also trap us in those patterns, and stop us from seeing beyond them.
Check it out

filed under:

betterment on-being-fruitful on-the-nature-of-things on-aesthetics

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

Values often function as virtue ethics—traits we’re expected to cultivate. But virtues are context-dependent: courage for a soldier isn’t courage for a teacher, and people respond primarily to their environment. So the real task is to design the context.

Values Don't Matter

article

Every organisation or institution you have ever been a part of has almost certainly collected a list of values they want everyone to abide by. Corporates, militaries, sports clubs, schools, local councils, professional bodies. Any place where people collect in a serious way to do things. Even, sometimes, in groups that are less serious, like house rules in a D&D group. People love values. It’s a shame they don’t work.
Values often function as virtue ethics—traits we’re expected to cultivate. But virtues are context-dependent: courage for a soldier isn’t courage for a teacher, and people respond primarily to their environment. So the real task is to design the context.
Check it out

filed under:

betterment spiritual-architecture on-culture on-ethics on-leadership

audio

Values are virtue ethics in disguise—traits we’re expected to cultivate. But virtues are context-dependent (courage for a soldier isn’t courage for a teacher) and the situation overwhelmingly drives behaviour. The real task is designing the context, not listing the virtues.

Values Don't Matter

audio

Everyone loves organisational values. Corporates, militaries, sports clubs, schools—any place where people collect in a serious way has a list of qualities they want everyone to embody. But values are just virtue ethics by another name. And virtue ethics suffer two rather troubling problems: virtues are hugely context-dependent, and the situation overwhelmingly drives behaviour anyway. So if you want people to act virtuously, design the context.
Values are virtue ethics in disguise—traits we’re expected to cultivate. But virtues are context-dependent (courage for a soldier isn’t courage for a teacher) and the situation overwhelmingly drives behaviour. The real task is designing the context, not listing the virtues.
Check it out ↗

filed under:

betterment spiritual-architecture on-culture on-ethics on-leadership

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

marginalium

Marginalia are my notes on content from around the web.

Marginalium

My commentary on something from elsewhere on the web.

AI use and skill formation. A paper out of Anthropic’s alignment fellowship program. Coders coding with and without AI. Not super compelled by the specifics—not a power analysis in sight. The general trend is what everyone seems to be remarking on (e.g. here and here). Cognitive offloading—you’re offloading skill acquisition because you know you can rely on the resource to do it.

Another problem for newbies.

More interesting was the ‘interaction personas’. They had six different groups of AI users, with various outcomes. Again, specifics seem a bit iffy, but if you look at them as two groups—three which learned and three which didn’t—then you get a difference in people who engaged cognitively and didn’t. In that sense, I guess the paper identifies a couple of ways of cognitively engaging in tasks while using AI: asking conceptual questions, and asking explanatory follow ups.

All together another argument for AI for content, and attention to method.

Less optimistically, I don’t see anything here that suggests that AI enables over and above just doing it yourself. We might be more productive, but it still seems very likely that, even if there are better and worse ways of using AI, using AI might be worse for learning.

Equally though, the paper is just about procedural knowledge—improving on doing specific things from noticing and correcting errors. Not really about more abstract reasoning about whether this specific thing or that specific thing is better at a more abstract level. Much of my own notable learning thorugh AI comes from the fact that when I ask it to do stuff, it does different stuff from what I’d do, and often this is better than what I’d do. Learning these kinds of new patterns requires ZPD-style education, and AI seems like it can provide that.

Of course, even that is still subject to the tyranny of the authority. So, positive on net? Still unsure.

Check out the site ↗

filed under:

betterment digital-architecture wealth-architecture on-being-fruitful on-thinking-and-reasoning humans-arent-special

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 thought-architecture wealth-architecture collective-architecture on-ethics on-politics-and-power on-thinking-and-reasoning
All the Analects

Recent Missives

Missives

January 11, 2026

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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