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Analects

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Somatic Architecture

stuff On our somatic architecture

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Stress isn’t poorly calibrated to modern life. It’s the energising force that allows us to perform. Optimal performance requires optimal stress. The difference between eustress and distress isn’t biological—it’s psychological. Controllability matters more than the stressor itself.

Stress is Good

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Everyone’s convinced stress is this outdated evolutionary technology—poorly calibrated to modern life, something to avoid at all costs. The story goes that it evolved to help us run from tigers, but now it’s just triggered by email notifications. This is nonsense. Stress is the only thing that gets us to perform at all. It’s the most valuable biological technology we have. This lecture walks through the Yerkes-Dodson Law—a simple, 100-year-old model that explains how stress actually works, why we need it, and how to use it well.

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betterment gratification on-(un)happiness on-being-fruitful on-thinking-and-reasoning somatic-architecture

article

Human reasoning isn’t flawed, it’s a social tool we use in the wrong places. It’s about sharing and evaluating intuitive claims, not generating rational ones. AI is fundamentally this but crippled: without the grounded intuitions and social friction that makes it work.

AI Hallucination is just Man-Guessing

article

One time I was out drinking with some Swedish folks and they told me about the word killgissa. It means something like ‘man-guessing’, referring to when you sound like you know what you’re talking about but you’re actually just guessing. I reckon AI hallucination is just man-guessing, but on your behalf. To explain, I first have to convince you that human reason isn’t actually that reasonable. With any luck it’ll make you better at managing your own processes of reason and your AIs. Let’s see.

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betterment digital-architecture on-being-fruitful on-thinking-and-reasoning somatic-architecture thought-architecture wealth-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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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betterment on-ethics on-leadership somatic-architecture

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