Changelog

Happy new year. On top of my updates last December, I have two new articles out: one on Hydraulic Despotism, and one on three questions that seem important, but end up being irrelevant. Specifically, questions about consciousness, free-will, and nature vs nurture.

Relatedly, I have four more podcasts/lectures out. Three are the audio version of the irrelevant questions article: Consciousness, Free Will, and Nature vs Nurture. Then one more on Mundane Cults.

Looks like it wasn’t a passing fancy, so I guess I should launch it properly now.

It’s hosted at Substack for the free storage and bandwidth for now, but you don’t need to subscribe there. I’ll still include the links in the normal newsletter.

Speaking of, I will be restarting the newsletter! I think you can tell I needed the break.

Changelog

Since I quit writing weekly articles in July, and went back to monthly ones, I have been much more pleased with the quality of my work.

I wrote my ETHIC Stack up properly, rather than resorting to AI. I also used it to improve the ethical decision-making model [we developed at RMA Sandhurst. Now, altogether, this work forms the core of the Ethical Leadership module I run at Sandhurst.

I also re-wrote my motivation articles, because those two have become a core part of my leadership content at Sandhurst.

I’ve had another go at explaining why AI seems so familiar, and yet so alien to us, and this will also almost certainly become part of my teaching as I begin a project of integrating AI into the leadership programme at Sandhurst.

Just six months off forcing half-cooked articles out every week, and look how much has been done!

But the more exciting news is that I’m finally testing the waters with the podcast. I’ve got two now: Stress is Good and Men aren’t from Mars. I’ll share more when I’m ready to launch it properly, but it’s experimental for now. See what you think.

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The AI article and podcast I made to go along with my academic paper on the behavioural mechanisms of ethical behaviour were fun, but I promised I would re-write them myself. So I did. You can still find links to the AI stuff in the article, but the article is all me. Forgive my self-indulgence, writing about it even more. I get a bit obsessed sometimes.

Changelog

This week I sent a draft paper out for review. It’s a rather longwinded sketch of how I think we could approach ethics. It’s 45 pages or so long, but it was a lot of fun to write. I suspect most people will not want quite that level of detail though, so I made an AI podcast and a semi-AI explainer. People seem to quite like the AI summary stuff. You can find it all here.

However, the whole experience has made me realise that I’ve been pretty annoyed this last year. Since June, I’ve written an article a week, and most of them are shit.

I used to write an article a month, and I used to write them basically just for me—working an idea out for myself—and so it’s no surprise that I usually quite liked those articles.

But many people reasonably complained that they were impenetrable and infrequent. So I committed to an article a week instead, and I’d try to bridge the gap—try to write articles that were a little for me and a little for everyone else.

The result is that, for the most part, they do neither. Lots of strange fragmentary ‘series’ style posts, and unfinished and incomplete thinking. All useless to me, but also not very penetrable to others.

Then I wrote this 45-page paper, and I was obsessed with it. And I love it. And I don’t care that no one will read it.

So I’m going back to that, I think. Writing articles that are me being thoughtful for me. BUT. I will look to producing new forms of content for others, because I like teaching too. Rather than do two things badly, I will do both things well.

Changelog

I forgot to schedule last week’s newsletter, but the article has been up since Friday. Apologies. I won’t send it now, I’ll just stack the two this week.

It’s not a terrible thing, because I hate sending these three or more part articles. With this week’s newsletter, you’ll get all of my moral terrain thinking-articles together.

Changelog

Last week I was supposed to do this week’s article, and got distracted by a cool feature of the study of language regions of the brain. Anyway, I updated last week’s article to stand alone, and this week’s article is what it should have been. If you read last weeks’ you can skip the intro to this weeks’ and just dive right in.

Changelog

A few changes over the last couple months to the site.

First, I now have a sort of ‘tour’ of the site I’m calling Animals First. It does a little handholding around the threads on the site, since all my playing around with the website doesn’t always make things so navigable.

Second I have a landing page for more applied stuff, I’m calling Karstica. People sometimes ask me to do stuff for money, and it’s not always appropriate to send them to the main page since I publish on a pretty wide range of topics. I’ll collect more practical content and such there.

Lastly, in trying to make the website a bit more mobile friendly and app-like, I have adjusted all the article listings to pop-up with an excerpt and ideology so you can figure out whether you want to read it before navigating to it. I’d be interested to hear if this is easier or harder to use. There is a known issue where sometimes the excerpt is wrong. No idea yet why that happens.

Happy new year!

Changelog

A big series of articles largely around the psychology of groups and leadership will take precedence over the next few weeks as I (re)familiarise myself with the content we teach at my new job.

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Updated On managing magic mushroom experiences to include a section specifically on risks of harm. Most of the literature, as you can expect, is on clinical use, and the literature that isn’t is pretty vague (again, as you’d expect from survey data recruiting from drug-use forums). But some clear points emerge—relative to other drugs, especially alcohol, psychedelics are astonishingly safe, and become even safer with careful, thoughtful, and better yet supervised use. Which is something you might have anticipated, given the rise of legal jurisdictions and use in clinical settings. But the ‘enduring changes’ that make them so appealing for clinical use are exactly the thing we should be taking care to think about, because there’s no guarantee these enduring changes need to be a good thing.

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I updated my article on neurotransmitters so substantially that I republished it this week. I still think they’re useless to talk about, but at least now you’ll come away better informed about them than anyone who tries to use them to make you buy something.

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Some renovations around here. As usual, you will see little of them, but they make my life easier. You’ll mostly notice the new Analects page: less cluttered and more straightforward to navigate and filter. Bit more app-like. Also, click on any marginalium. No more page of endless marginalia. Lastly, you can go to any missive and use the buttons at the top to scroll to the next or previous missives.

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I updated my article on making meaning in the brain, and made some small edits to repressed memories this week, alongside the usual article.

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Last week’s distraction from writing about my PhD, looking at shared madness, led me to finally update my long-running article on successful prophets. We think of cults as the product of dangerously charismatic leaders but on examination this narrative falls apart. Really, the most successful prophets are not a person, but the followers, who use the leader as an emblem.

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As a break from tapping out the findings of my PhD, I also returned to an old article, on folie à deux, or ‘shared madness’ and updated it this week. It’s probably not so rare as one might think.

Changelog

Now my PhD is done, I’ll probably spend a bit of time consolidating what I learned. For the next couple weeks, a series trying to explain my PhD, because people keep asking. I want to point out that my initial response to this is always “I promise that you won’t care”, but no one ever believes me. So, as a punishment, I’m going to make you read it. For three articles. You did this to yourselves.