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ideologies worth choosing

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About

betterment

noun

making or becoming better;

ideology

noun

rituals of thought, feeling, and action;
the science of ideas;

Humans are animals first. responding adaptively to the environment around us. We see this in our habits, our routines, and our rituals: automatic patterns of behaviour that gracefully handle the predictable shapes of everyday life. But rituals of behaviour are preceded by rituals of thought—this is what brains do. Left unexamined, these rituals will be chosen for us, not by us.
Dorian Minors
I’m Dorian Minors, Cambridge-educated brain scientist and professor of behavioural science, and I reckon it’s better to choose yourself. Hence btrmt. A place to discover ideologies worth choosing.
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More about me

Projects

Analects

analects

I have a terrible memory. Everything I learn I have to leave somewhere I can find later. This is where I put them. Analects are a collection of ideas, extracts, or teachings. These are mine, to myself, and anyone else who might find them interesting. With a background in brain and behaviour science, I explore how ideas become ideologies become action, for better or worse. Here, you’ll find links to all the content I produce for any of the btrmt. projects.

The latest | See them all

Animals First

animals first

You might have read about me, but now, let me introduce you to btrmt. Animals First walks you through this little website of mine. The philosophy, and all the major threads and minor projects that make it up. Let's see if you can't find something worth your time.

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Neurotypica

neurotypica

Lots of people ask me "what's a good neuroscience book to read?" I never really had a good answer. So I made one. This is my experimental attempt to teach you how a brain scientist thinks about our patterns of thinking and acting. Neurotypica is my guide to brain and behaviour. See what you think.
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Black Cortex

black cortex

Black Cortex is the place I send people looking for leadership consulting. Myself and a colleage at Sandhurst delivering transformation that goes beyond buzzword. We take on select work where outcomes are measurable.

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Content

Random Featured

Featured

article

Creating a digital home for our digital selves

article

Our digital lives are as much an entity as our physical lives. Maybe moreso—many of us spend more time online than off. Yet we take very little care of our digital selves. We’re going to fix that. Simply. Because it causes us more stress than it needs to.
Check it out

filed under:

digital-architecture on-being-fruitful thought-architecture

Latest Content

Latest

article

Nature is just nurture over time, and nurture is far more obviously in charge; nothing changes if free will <em>isn’t</em> real; and the same is true of consciousness. They’re just complicated debates with no real outcomes.

Stupid Questions

article

There are a few questions which, on the surface, seem hugely important. Then, on closer inspection, turn out to be more or less irrelevant. I need a place to write about them, so I thought I’d make it a sort of always-evolving article. So far, I talk about how useless the nature-vs-nurture debate is and how boring the questions of whether free-will is real, and what consciousness might be are.
Nature is just nurture over time, and nurture is far more obviously in charge; nothing changes if free will isn’t real; and the same is true of consciousness. They’re just complicated debates with no real outcomes.
Check it out

filed under:

betterment on-being-fruitful on-ethics on-the-nature-of-things on-thinking-and-reasoning thought-architecture

audio

Nature is just nurture over time, and nurture is far more obviously in charge. The debate is Malcolm Gladwell shit—superficially sexy but practically useless.

Nature vs Nurture Just Isn't That Interesting

audio

The nature versus nurture debate seems foundational to understanding human behaviour. But evolutionary stories are just stories, genetics is shaped by environment, and the environment matters far more anyway. So why are we still arguing about it?
Nature is just nurture over time, and nurture is far more obviously in charge. The debate is Malcolm Gladwell shit—superficially sexy but practically useless.
Check it out

filed under:

betterment on-being-fruitful on-the-nature-of-things on-thinking-and-reasoning thought-architecture

article

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.
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.
Check it out

filed under:

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

marginalium

Marginalia are my notes on content from around the web.

Marginalium

My commentary on something from elsewhere on the web.

The deterministic view of free will always seems to cause such furore, forgetting that whether free will exists or not, this world is so intractably complex that for almost all practical purposes, it doesn’t matter. See also the arguments againse free well. See also AI predicting your brain activity into the future..

Check out the site

filed under:

betterment on-the-nature-of-things psychologia spiritual-architecture

marginalium

Marginalia are my notes on content from around the web.

Marginalium

My commentary on something from elsewhere on the web.

There is a thin line between sleep and wake. You know this if you have sleep paralysis or are a lucid dreamer.

In that spirit, here, we have surprisingly convincing evidence for communicating with REM (lucid dreaming) sleepers using various means, like facial twitches and eye movements.

Check out the site

filed under:

animal-sentience fragments gratification on-thinking-and-reasoning somatic-architecture
All the Analects

Recent Missives

Missives

July 11, 2025

December 1, 2025

Last Changelog

Since I quit writing weekly articles in July, and went back to my 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 shit 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.

All the Missives
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