Analects

Filter by type: All · Articles · Audio · Marginalia

Filter by anthology: All · Betterment · Gratification · Connection · Somatic Architecture · Spiritual Architecture · Thought Architecture · Wealth Architecture · Digital Architecture · Collective Architecture

Accidental Talent — On the accident of talent

• [article] Affordance Competition — 14 Mar 2026
  The brain prepares multiple action plans simultaneously and the environment biases which one fires, via salience, practice, goals, and urgency. Design the competition and you design the behaviour.
• [article] On Motivation — 15 Sep 2025
  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.
• [marginalium] Being a bit underemployed — 23 May 2025
• [marginalium] We underestimate skill decay — 28 Mar 2025
• [marginalium] Are the kids better at all — 28 Mar 2025
• [marginalium] Anecdote on homeschooling — 28 Mar 2025
• [marginalium] People With Parents With Money — 13 Mar 2025
• [marginalium] Personality traits and gender gaps — 7 Mar 2025
• [marginalium] Is science done by a small elite — 19 Feb 2025
• [article] Anticipation beats reward — 31 Jan 2025
  Basically, reward and ancipation both use the same system, but differently. Anticipation seems to come in through the senses and get sent throughout the brain, but pleasure seems to come in from more evaluatey bits—maybe to help us learn what’s rewarding.
• [article] Addictive Work — 24 Jan 2025
  The neural reward circuit implies that small, rewarding tasks that share environmental context are going to be the most addictive, so break tasks into small steps that end in a clear good feeling and optimise for a shared environment.
• [marginalium] The number of exceptional people — 23 Jan 2025
• [article] Motivation pt. II: Stickytaping it all together — 6 Dec 2024
  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.
• [marginalium] Where Geniuses Hide Today — 6 Dec 2024
• [article] Motivation pt. I: Haphazard Dichotomies — 29 Nov 2024
  Individually, the disconnected dichotomies of intrinsic vs extrinsic, normative vs motivating, ‘cognitive’ and ‘biological’, and the like have little utility. But when you put them together, you can get some quite juicy fidelity on why people do what they do.