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Analects

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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.

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connection digital-architecture on-being-fruitful on-culture on-ethics on-leadership on-politics-and-power wealth-architecture collective-architecture thought-architecture

audio

Men and women engage in identical behaviours—complaining, offering solutions, needing validation, resisting criticism. The difference isn’t biological, it’s interpretive. We cast the same behaviour as reasonable for one gender and unreasonable for the other. Gray’s book is a perfect case study: emotionally troubled men are normalised while women’s ordinary needs are pathologised.

Men Aren't From Mars

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Gender essentialism is having a moment. Everyone’s reading books about what it means to be a man or woman, and Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus keeps getting recommended to me like it’s gospel. Here’s the thing: the book perfectly illustrates a pattern we see everywhere. The same behaviours—complaining, offering advice, needing reassurance, getting defensive—are cast as reasonable when men do them and unreasonable when women do them. Gray’s men are emotionally fragile and his women just want basic partnership, but somehow it’s the women who need to lower their expectations. This isn’t about men and women. It’s about how we frame identical behaviours differently based on who’s doing them.

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betterment collective-architecture connection on-(un)happiness on-culture on-love somatic-architecture

audio

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

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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

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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

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