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

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.

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

We’ve been taught that cults are dark and scary things. But we have been fooled. The cult is a prominent building block of modern community. If you’re not in one, you’re probably doing something wrong. The question is, is the cult you’re in a cult you chose?

Mundane Cults

audio

The word cult conjures images of hooded figures, mass suicide, and narcissistic leaders. But this dark image is nonsense—the kind that makes us more vulnerable to destructive groups. Cults are actually a pervasive building block of modern community, from veganism to fitness franchises to health movements. The question isn’t whether you’re in one, but whether it’s one you chose.

Check it out

filed under:

collective-architecture connection on-(un)happiness on-being-fruitful on-culture on-leadership spiritual-architecture thought-architecture

article

Vincent’s S-CALM model describes the situational and cognitive factors that undermine ethical behaviour. Mechanistic thinking helps explain how those factors might operate, and thus, where we might intervene on them.

Mechanical Ethics

article

Dennis Vincent’s S-CALM model elegantly identifies the factors that lead good people to do bad things. But identifying what goes wrong isn’t quite the same as understanding how to fix it. Here, I show how mechanistic thinking—illustrated by the ETHIC stack—can help us understand the causal plumbing beneath Vincent’s model, turning it from a diagnostic tool into an intervention toolkit.

Check it out

filed under:

betterment collective-architecture on-ethics on-leadership somatic-architecture

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 35-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

Newsletter