btrmt.

Analects

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

See everything I have on:
on-leadership

Other Projects  |  About btrmt.
btrmt.

Analects

filter by:

On Leadership

stuff On being the strength of others

show:

article

Our brain clusters things that are similar to each other together. This includes ideas and the words we attach to them. If your words are attached to the wrong ideas, you’re going to struggle to make the connection for them.

Language is a barrier to communication

Article

To make the leap from someone else’s idea to your own understanding of it is often troubled by something I call ‘the language problem’. Most of the time this is because of a difference in experience. Knowledge is sometimes a barrier to learning, and this is almost always related to the language problem. Let me show you what I mean.
Our brain clusters things that are similar to each other together. This includes ideas and the words we attach to them. If your words are attached to the wrong ideas, you’re going to struggle to make the connection for them.
Read this article

filed under:

betterment collective-architecture connection gratification on-being-fruitful on-leadership on-thinking-and-reasoning wealth-architecture

article

Basically, reward and ancipation both use the same system, but differently. Anticipation seems to come in through the senses and get sent throughout the brain, but pleasure seems to come in from more evaluatey bits—maybe to help us learn what’s rewarding.

Anticipation beats reward

Article

A lot of people reckon the brain treats rewards quite differently from the anticipation of rewards. And, in fact, the anticipation of reward seems like the bigger driver of our behaviour. And this little tidbit is one of the few places where human behaviour is actually explained well by exploring the brain. So let’s explore it.
Basically, reward and ancipation both use the same system, but differently. Anticipation seems to come in through the senses and get sent throughout the brain, but pleasure seems to come in from more evaluatey bits—maybe to help us learn what’s rewarding.
Read this article

filed under:

betterment gratification on-(un)happiness on-being-fruitful on-leadership somatic-architecture wealth-architecture

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 environment, normalised physical and emotional violence, and a lack of mental and physical resources, and you have the ingredients for atrocity.

When groups go bad

Article

There’s this cluster of classic social psychology experiments from the 50’s through the 70’s that you’ll be presented with in documentaries and whatnot whenever groups of people are behaving crazily. You’ve probably heard of some of them. Milgram’s ‘shock’ experiments, or Zimbardo’s prison experiment, or Asch’s conformity tests, and so on. These things gloss over just how hard it is to get people to do atrocities on a large-scale. Luckily, you have me to tell you how they really happen.
Without more tasteful social behaviours to sample from, we’re liable to attach very strongly to the behaviours of our group. Add a hostile environment, normalised physical and emotional violence, and a lack of mental and physical resources, and you have the ingredients for atrocity.
Read this article

filed under:

betterment collective-architecture connection on-culture on-ethics on-friendship on-leadership somatic-architecture

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 like we want to be. Our participation in the group depends on how we see it benefitting us, and see us benefitting the group. The stronger both are, the stronger our biases to stay engaged.

Useful groups are biased groups

Article

There’s this cluster of classic social psychology experiments from the 50’s through the 70’s that you’ll be presented with in documentaries and whatnot whenever groups of people are behaving crazily. You’ve probably heard of some of them. Milgram’s ‘shock’ experiments, or Zimbardo’s prison experiment, or Asch’s conformity tests, and so on. This is the second in a third on group dynamics. Here we’ll talk about what makes our attraction to groups stronger, as well as what makes people participate in groups, and how all our group biases make sense in the context.
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 like we want to be. Our participation in the group depends on how we see it benefitting us, and see us benefitting the group. The stronger both are, the stronger our biases to stay engaged.
Read this article

filed under:

betterment collective-architecture connection on-culture on-ethics on-leadership

article

You could think of a collection of group dynamics like ‘groupthink’ or ‘deindividuation’ or whatever are bad. Or you could consider that our social identity is formed by making the distinctions between in- and out- groups clear. Then it all makes sense.

Mob mentality is fine

Article

There’s this cluster of classic social psychology experiments from the 50’s through the 70’s that you’ll be presented with in documentaries and whatnot whenever groups of people are behaving crazily. You’ve probably heard of some of them. Milgram’s ‘shock’ experiments, or Zimbardo’s prison experiment, or Asch’s conformity tests, and so on. This is the second in a series on group dynamics. Here we’ll talk about how the same group dynamics people like to worry about actually underpin all group dynamics.
You could think of a collection of group dynamics like ‘groupthink’ or ‘deindividuation’ or whatever are bad. Or you could consider that our social identity is formed by making the distinctions between in- and out- groups clear. Then it all makes sense.
Read this article

filed under:

collective-architecture connection gratification on-culture on-ethics on-friendship on-leadership
Newsletter
Join over 2000 of us. Get the newsletter.
Read it first | Privacy | Not working?