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Betterment — On achievement and excellence

• [audio] The Value of Ritual — 25 Jul 2026
  You don’t get a choice about whether you ritualise. Only about whether you chose the ritual.
• [audio] The Neuroscience Con — 11 Jul 2026
  Brain-words are cosmetic filler. Strip the neuroscience out and the advice means exactly what it did before—so learn to strip it out.
• [marginalium] Since I wrote my article on the Enigma of (AI) Reason, this arXiv article has come out, exploring the same fundamental premise — 8 Jul 2026
• [article] AI-shaped stuff — 13 Jun 2026
  We keep waiting for AI to get good enough. That’s backwards. The bottleneck is human: work that isn’t AI-shaped, verification we’re bad at, and confidence we’ve offloaded to the machine itself.
• [marginalium] AI Dark Output — 4 Jun 2026
• [marginalium] AI and task fragmentation — 4 Jun 2026
• [marginalium] Space skepticism — 30 May 2026
• [audio] Meditation Isn't For Everyone — 30 May 2026
  Meditation can harm you, and it isn’t for everyone. Strip the branding and it’s just trained attention—half of what you already do—so the only real variable is what you point it at.
• [marginalium] AI productivity — 22 May 2026
• [audio] Sages and Wisdom — 16 May 2026
  The doctor and the guru run on the same authority structure. We just pick which one to trust by its costume. Choose by what sits under the coat or you lose to charlatans.
• [audio] The Scientific Ritual — 2 May 2026
  Science isn’t the opposite of belief. It’s a ritual—and like any ritual it misfires, which is how a method built to find truth becomes a machine for manufacturing exaggerations.
• [article] There are no levels — 1 May 2026
  Ideas that stick are shaped to be interesting, not true. Some of these are weaponised; snuck by our faculties of reason. AI uses them in spades. I call them karstica—superficially pretty, but hiding sinkholes. If you don’t learn to detect it, the thinking gets done for you.
• [marginalium] The Era Of The Business Idiot — 29 Apr 2026
• [article] Useful Men — 4 Apr 2026
  It’s true that the ‘pathways’ to manhood are closing. I don’t think it’s a crisis of masculinity though. It’s a crisis of no more excuses for incompetence. We’re trying to find the meaning of manhood when what we actually need are new skills. Men just need to be useful.
• [audio] Overengineering calming down — 4 Apr 2026
  Pop neuroscience is just “calm down” in a lab coat. The theories are scaffolding around trivial advice, attractive because they make your problems someone else’s fault, and the scaffolding hides what actually matters.