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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. At our core, we are creatures like any other—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. And unexamined, such things are karstic: pretty landscapes that obscure sinkholes, caves, and rivers beneath. I thought, better to look where you tread. Hence, btrmt. A place to discover ideologies worth choosing.

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Who am I?

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 science and the sciences of mind, 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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Karstica

karstica

Karstica is the landing page I send people to when they want to pay me to help them. Coaching, consulting, keynote speaking, that kind of thing. I also do pro bono mentorship on a case-by-case basis. Have a look if you want to see my approach to coaching and consulting.
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Content

Random Featured

Featured

article

A narrative of 'grit'

Article

Angela Duckworth’s concept of the personality trait ‘grit’ is an interesting one, but it’s actually rather less helpful than the narrative about success she weaves in her book Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance.
Read this article

filed under:

betterment connection gratification on-being-fruitful on-culture on-leadership wealth-architecture

Latest Content

Latest

article

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

Article

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.
Read this article

filed under:

betterment on-ethics on-leadership somatic-architecture

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

Article

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.
Read this article

filed under:

betterment on-ethics on-leadership somatic-architecture

article

You could try to make ethical decisions by reasoning through. You want to do good, so you work out what good means. Then you work out what you should do to achieve the good. Or, you could do what most people do and wing it. Just make sure you reflect on what you’re doing.

Moral Terrain

Article

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 first in the series—getting a sense of the moral terrain.
You could try to make ethical decisions by reasoning through. You want to do good, so you work out what good means. Then you work out what you should do to achieve the good. Or, you could do what most people do and wing it. Just make sure you reflect on what you’re doing.
Read this article

filed under:

betterment on-ethics on-leadership somatic-architecture

marginalium

Marginalia are my notes on content from around the web.

Marginalium

My commentary on something from elsewhere on the web.

I think a lot of people intuitively like the kind of “calculus of pain and pleasure” that utilitarianism offers. But it often falls short of answering important ethical questions. That’s why there’s heaps of approaches. And as Roberts suggests, it leads to some pretty strange ways of thinking (to me). For example, I point out elsewhere:

There this way of thinking that says, if we just increase overall economic wealth, everyone will be better off (think economists like Tyler Cowan, or lots of the EA folks). You know, bring the average up, and that’ll bring everyone up, sort of thing. These are also often the people who often think things like affirmative action and DEI policies are obstacles to this kind of economic growth
[but] there seems something quite odd about preferring future, hypothetical people over the suffering of real, current people

And also the measures we use are troubling, as that marginalia points out.

Anyway. Here is a detailed, multi-part critique of utilitarianism. See also my own practical ethics, which isn’t quite there yet, but is getting there.

Check out the site

filed under:

betterment cognitive-karstica thought-architecture on-ethics

marginalium

Marginalia are my notes on content from around the web.

Marginalium

My commentary on something from elsewhere on the web.

Are intelligentsia less happy? An argument for why intelligent people are less happy—because intelligence does not measure how good you are at solving the poorly defined problems of life.

People love ‘g’—the general mental ability Spearman was measuring. It predicts all sorts of things. But it’s not really clear what it is. Maybe processing speed?. This guy thinks we could extend that to speed at ‘well-defined problems’:

Spearman … did not, as he claimed, observe a “continued tendency to success throughout all variations of both form and subject-matter,” nor has anybody else. It merely looks as if we’ve varied all the forms and the subject-matters because we have the wrong theory about what makes them different … I think a good name for problems like these is well-defined … problems

But perhaps not to ‘poorly defined problems’ like raising a family well.

Check out the site

filed under:

betterment neurotypica on-(un)happiness on-being-fruitful on-thinking-and-reasoning somatic-architecture
All the Analects

Recent Missives

Missives

July 4, 2025

June 30, 2025

Last 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.

All the Missives
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