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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.

Teaching S-CALM with ETHIC Glasses

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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.
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.

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We can think of motivations in terms of three things. There is the <em>content</em>: what things motivate us. Then there is the <em>process</em>: how things motivate us. And lastly, we have those things that <em>maintain</em> our motivation.

On Motivation

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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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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.
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.

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To avoid rationalising poor ethical intuitions, we can use three tools to develop our ethical muscles. Sensitising ourselves to the small number of basic ethical motivations and the the mechanisms which allow us ignore them, before asking what a good person would do. It gets us most of the way there.

Practical Ethics

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Most discussions about ethics centre on catastrophic scenarios. Situations where it’d be very difficult to avoid unethical behaviour. These scenarios aren’t really very interesting to me. What the average person probably wants to know is how to avoid the tamer moral lapses we encounter every day. What the average person wants to do is know how to avoid that single decision that might haunt them. So let’s explore a more practical ethics. This is the last in the series—the three hooks for a practical ethic.
To avoid rationalising poor ethical intuitions, we can use three tools to develop our ethical muscles. Sensitising ourselves to the small number of basic ethical motivations and the the mechanisms which allow us ignore them, before asking what a good person would do. It gets us most of the way there.

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article

Most people think better ethical decision-making is just a matter of stopping to think before acting. But many moral judgements are intuitive, and then we rationalise them to ourselves. We have to train both intuition and reasoning, not rely on one to correct the other.

Moral Blindspots

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Most discussions about ethics centre on catastrophic scenarios. Situations where it’‘d be very difficult to avoid unethical behaviour. These scenarios aren’‘t really very interesting to me. What the average person probably wants to know is how to avoid the tamer moral lapses we encounter every day. What the average person wants to do is know how to avoid that single decision that might haunt them. So let’’s explore a more practical ethics. This is the second in the series—avoiding the moral blindspot.
Most people think better ethical decision-making is just a matter of stopping to think before acting. But many moral judgements are intuitive, and then we rationalise them to ourselves. We have to train both intuition and reasoning, not rely on one to correct the other.

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