analects noun, pl

/ˈan.ə.lɛkts/

a collection of ideas, extracts, or teachings.

On Ethics

stuff On conduct, ideal and otherwise

show:

analects under the categories btrmt. believes in, as set out in the manifesto

analects organised according to the fundamental questions of philosophy

sequences of articles gathered around a more focused idea

  • ai is kind of scary 19 Sep 2026 [audio + edited transcript] The AI panic mostly represents old problems: machines acting on a proxy of the world, to serve a proxy of our purpose. We’ve got a century o...
  • values don't matter 21 Feb 2026 [article] Values often function as virtue ethics—traits we’re expected to cultivate. But virtues are context-dependent: courage for a soldier isn’t co...
  • hydraulic despotism 21 Feb 2026 [audio + edited transcript] You’re not coerced by malice. You’re coerced by convenience. Control the flow, control the people: the most discredited theory in political...
  • values don't matter 24 Jan 2026 [audio + edited transcript] Values don’t shape behaviour. The room does. They’re virtue ethics relabelled—and courage for a soldier isn’t courage for a teacher. Build t...
  • stupid questions: consciousness 10 Jan 2026 [audio + edited transcript] The hard problem of consciousness isn’t a problem. It’s a beautiful argument with no stakes. Behaviour is what matters, not the ghost behind...
  • stupid questions 1 Jan 2026 [article] 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...
  • stupid questions: free will 27 Dec 2025 [audio + edited transcript] Whether free will is real changes precisely nothing. The world’s too complex for the answer to bite, and behaviour bends the same way no mat...
  • hydraulic despotism 1 Dec 2025 [article] Control the water, control the people. Today’s water is energy, social media, infrastructure. We’re coerced through convenience, not malice....
  • mechanical ethics 1 Oct 2025 [article] Vincent’s S-CALM model describes the situational and cognitive factors that undermine ethical behaviour. Mechanistic thinking helps explain...
  • navigating moral terrain 1 Sep 2025 [article] I describe five levels that help understand how good people do bad things—neural, cognitive, situational, social, and cultural. Inject some...
  • practical ethics 4 Jul 2025 [article] To avoid rationalising poor ethical intuitions, we can use three tools to develop our ethical muscles. Sensitising ourselves to the small nu...
  • moral blindspots 27 Jun 2025 [article] Most people think better ethical decision-making is just a matter of stopping to think before acting. But many moral judgements are intuitiv...
  • moral terrain 20 Jun 2025 [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 y...
  • when groups go bad 3 Jan 2025 [article] Without more tasteful social behaviours to sample from, we’re liable to attach very strongly to the behaviours of our group. Add a hostile e...
  • useful groups are biased groups 27 Dec 2024 [article] The strength of our attraction to a group is a function of how different a group is from other groups in ways that we feel like we are, or l...
  • mob mentality is fine 20 Dec 2024 [article] You could think of a collection of group dynamics like ‘groupthink’ or ‘deindividuation’ or whatever are bad. Or you could consider that our...
  • catastrophic leadership is actually really hard 13 Dec 2024 [article] For group dynamics to produce really bad behaviour, you really need to work at it. You have to train your authority figures to be cruel, pre...
  • the trouble with objectivity 21 Dec 2023 [article] The obsession over objectivity is a confusion of two things. There’s rationality, the desire to be less biased. Then there’s truth which is...
  • trans-opportunism is boring 22 Nov 2022 [article] Focusing on edge-cases of “trans-regret” is missing the point. If you actually care about these cases, then the interesting issue are the un...
  • useful pharmacology 28 Jul 2022 [article] We absolutely love some drugs. Others terrify us. The difference is familiarity more than any other single thing and the result is confusion...

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