btrmt.

Analects

Here you'll find all the btrmt. content from across the projects.

See everything I have on:
betterment

Other Projects | About btrmt.

btrmt.

Analects

filter by:

Betterment

stuff On achievement and excellence

show:

article

We can think of motivations in terms of three things. There is the content: what things motivate us. Then there is the process: how things motivate us. And lastly, we have those things that maintain our motivation.

On Motivation

article

I needed to do a little refresher on motivation for another audience, so I’m going to subject you to it as well. It’s a messy subject, but at a high level, there are some interesting frameworks for understanding what makes people do things. More importantly, what I’ll show you is that motivational psychology is no different to any psychology. Anything that speaks to how we think and behave speaks to our motivations. So rather than teach you motivation theories, let me teach you a framework which will help you apply whatever theories you prefer to the motivation of people.

We can think of motivations in terms of three things. There is the content: what things motivate us. Then there is the process: how things motivate us. And lastly, we have those things that maintain our motivation.

Check it out

filed under:

betterment on-leadership somatic-architecture wealth-architecture

article

I describe five levels that help understand how good people do bad things—neural, cognitive, situational, social, and cultural. Inject some norms into the stack, and you can explain (and predict) moral behaviour.

Navigating Moral Terrain

article

I wrote a series of papers on practical ethics. I didn’t really like those articles. It did, hoever, inspire me to write a 45-page treatise on the behavioural science of ethical behaviour. There’s no way you’re going to want to read that, so I made this instead. It’s not actually heaps shorter, but it’s hopefully a bit more readable. Plus, if you like how the water looks, I assure you, it’s plenty deep.

Check it out

filed under:

betterment on-ethics on-leadership somatic-architecture

article

To avoid rationalising poor ethical intuitions, we can use three tools to develop our ethical muscles. Sensitising ourselves to the small number of basic ethical motivations and the the mechanisms which allow us ignore them, before asking what a good person would do. It gets us most of the way there.

Practical Ethics

article

Most discussions about ethics centre on catastrophic scenarios. Situations where it’d be very difficult to avoid unethical behaviour. These scenarios aren’t really very interesting to me. What the average person probably wants to know is how to avoid the tamer moral lapses we encounter every day. What the average person wants to do is know how to avoid that single decision that might haunt them. So let’s explore a more practical ethics. This is the last in the series—the three hooks for a practical ethic.

Check it out

filed under:

betterment on-ethics on-leadership somatic-architecture

article

Most people think better ethical decision-making is just a matter of stopping to think before acting. But many moral judgements are intuitive, and then we rationalise them to ourselves. We have to train both intuition and reasoning, not rely on one to correct the other.

Moral Blindspots

article

Most discussions about ethics centre on catastrophic scenarios. Situations where it’‘d be very difficult to avoid unethical behaviour. These scenarios aren’‘t really very interesting to me. What the average person probably wants to know is how to avoid the tamer moral lapses we encounter every day. What the average person wants to do is know how to avoid that single decision that might haunt them. So let’’s explore a more practical ethics. This is the second in the series—avoiding the moral blindspot.

Check it out

filed under:

betterment on-ethics on-leadership somatic-architecture

article

You could try to make ethical decisions by reasoning through. You want to do good, so you work out what good means. Then you work out what you should do to achieve the good. Or, you could do what most people do and wing it. Just make sure you reflect on what you’re doing.

Moral Terrain

article

Most discussions about ethics centre on catastrophic scenarios. Situations where it’d be very difficult to avoid unethical behaviour. These scenarios aren’t really very interesting to me. What the average person probably wants to know is how to avoid the tamer moral lapses we encounter every day. What the average person wants to do is know how to avoid that single decision that might haunt them. So let’s explore a more practical ethics. This is the first in the series—getting a sense of the moral terrain.

Check it out

filed under:

betterment on-ethics on-leadership somatic-architecture

Newsletter