Newsletter
Useful Men and other things
April 4, 2026
Hello,
Here’s everything since my last little missive to you:
I’ve been trying to write the most recent article, The Last Hiding Place of Incompetent Men since January. I distinctly remember teasing it in a podcast around then. It was hard. But it’s done.
I also transitioned from Sendy to Listmonk and consequently, the newsletter has been broken for a while. Forgive the subsequent pile up of articles, podcasts, and lectures.
Main idea: It’s true that the ‘pathways’ to manhood are closing. I don’t think it’s a crisis of masculinity though. It’s a crisis of no more excuses for incompetent. We’re trying to find the meaning of manhood when what we actually need are new skills. Men just need to be useful.
Main idea: The brain prepares multiple action plans simultaneously and the environment biases which one fires, via salience, practice, goals, and urgency. Design the competition and you design the behaviour.
Main idea: Values often function as virtue ethics—traits we’re expected to cultivate. But virtues are context-dependent: courage for a soldier isn’t courage for a teacher, and people respond primarily to their environment. So the real task is to design the context.
Main idea: Lots of things are happening, but anything can matter, and whatever gives meaning will eventually demand sacrifice. The agony of attention. I’m not going to spend more time trying to reduce the core idea than that.
Main idea: Pop neuroscience theories are elaborate scaffolding around trivial advice. They’re attractive because they give us something to point at, make us feel scientific, and—crucially—make our problems someone else’s fault. The scaffolding is mostly harmless, but it hides the stuff that actually matters.
Main idea: Bias isn’t a flaw in human thinking—it’s a precision tool. The brain trades variance for consistency because the world is noisy. Stop trying to eliminate bias. Start identifying the beliefs that drive it.
The Amygdala is Not the Fear Centre
Main idea: The amygdala doesn’t determine your fear response. You do. It’s not a fear centre—it’s an intensity detector. Stop trying to calm the amygdala. Start paying attention to how you respond.
Main idea: Wittfogel was wrong about ancient empires, but his insight—control the flow, control the people—describes modern life perfectly. We’re coerced through convenience, not malice. The alternatives exist; we just don’t use them.
Main idea: The return-to-nature movement bundles legitimate health concerns with pseudoscience using a single template: identify a modern problem, construct an ancestral narrative, sell the return as the cure. It rests on two contradictory assumptions—that we know what ancestral life was like, and that humans are simultaneously robust and fragile.
Main idea: Values are virtue ethics in disguise—traits we’re expected to cultivate. But virtues are context-dependent (courage for a soldier isn’t courage for a teacher) and the situation overwhelmingly drives behaviour. The real task is designing the context, not listing the virtues.
AI use and skill formation. A paper out of Anthropic’s alignment fellowship program. Coders coding with and without AI. Not super compelled by the specifics—not a power analysis in sight. The general trend is what everyone seems to be remarking on (e.g. here and here). Cognitive offloading—you’re offloading skill acquisition because you know you can rely on the resource to do it.
Another problem for newbies.
More interesting was the ‘interaction personas’. They had six different groups of AI users, with various outcomes. Again, specifics seem a bit iffy, but if you look at them as two groups—three which learned and three which didn’t—then you get a difference in people who engaged cognitively and didn’t. In that sense, I guess the paper identifies a couple of ways of cognitively engaging in tasks while using AI: asking conceptual questions, and asking explanatory follow ups.
All together another argument for AI for content, and attention to method.
Less optimistically, I don’t see anything here that suggests that AI enables over and above just doing it yourself. We might be more productive, but it still seems very likely that, even if there are better and worse ways of using AI, using AI might be worse for learning.
Equally though, the paper is just about procedural knowledge—improving on doing specific things from noticing and correcting errors. Not really about more abstract reasoning about whether this specific thing or that specific thing is better at a more abstract level. Much of my own notable learning thorugh AI comes from the fact that when I ask it to do stuff, it does different stuff from what I’d do, and often this is better than what I’d do. Learning these kinds of new patterns requires ZPD-style education, and AI seems like it can provide that.
Of course, even that is still subject to the tyranny of the authority. So, positive on net? Still unsure.
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Gnosticism in Blood Meridian.
Fantastic old essay on the Gnostic themes in McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. I am a little confused by his account of the Fates—I think he’s confusing them with the Furies. But the idea of the Judge representing the trappedness we experience as humans made me think of a quote from a completely different book:
There are superficial facts in life. And then there are truths. You’ll know when you’ve found a truth. It sticks to your heart.
Anyway. If you are new to McCarthy or Gnosticism, this might be enough to get you to check out both. It might explain why Blood Meridian’s gruesomeness doesn’t seem to really stop the book from being beautiful in a bleak way.
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I hope you found something interesting.
You can find links to all my previous missives here.
Warm regards,