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Browsing the site? Read this first
1 Jan 2013
Frankly, the articles I wrote almost a decade ago are a little embarrassing to me. My writing was worse, my ideas less developed. They’re not valueless—they represent the start of a journey. But only the start.
This site started as a way of keeping track of the ideas I was learning in my psychology studies. Then it became an effort to explain those things to the people who weren’t studying what I was studying. Eventually, as I realised that all these ideas I was sharing co-existed with other ideas, some better and some worse, it became a way of having a dialogue. Synthesising what I had come to learn with the all the stuff around me. And it went back to being a way of keeping track—reminding my future self of the lessons I was learning along the way.
The upshot is that these older articles are naive to a fault, limited in scope, and sometimes troublingly out of touch with the complexity of the world. I leave them here because they do translate scholarship and they map an intellectual journey. But not as well as I’d like.
This site is something more now. It’s a collection of frames I use to make some of the chaos out there into meaning, and I use it often. In the dialogues I have with myself in the analects, with the members of the community that has formed around them, and in the conversations I have in the nooks and crannies of everyday life.
So my advice is that you use it in the same way. Start with the curation on the analects, grouped around the crendeda of btrmt. Drawn from my interests as a brain scientist, or from the foundational divisions in philosophy, these much better reflect not just the complexity of the world, but also the things that seem to drive us as people. You don’t have to agree, but at least it’ll make for a more interesting dialogue, with me, with others, or with yourself.
Happy hunting.