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Betterment — On achievement and excellence

[article] Gesticism — 26 Jan 2026
Lots of things are happening, but anything can matter, and whatever gives meaning will eventually demand sacrifice. The agony of attention. I’m not going to spend more time trying to reduce the core idea than that.
[article] Stupid Questions — 1 Jan 2026
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.
[article] AI Hallucination is just Man-Guessing — 1 Nov 2025
Human reasoning isn’t flawed, it’s a social tool we use in the wrong places. It’s about sharing and evaluating intuitive claims, not generating rational ones. AI is fundamentally this but crippled: without the grounded intuitions and social friction that makes it work.
[article] Mechanical Ethics — 1 Oct 2025
Vincent’s S-CALM model describes the situational and cognitive factors that undermine ethical behaviour. Mechanistic thinking helps explain how those factors might operate, and thus, where we might intervene on them.
[article] On Motivation — 15 Sep 2025
We can think of motivations in terms of three things. There is the content: what things motivate us. Then there is the process: how things motivate us. And lastly, we have those things that maintain our motivation.
[article] Navigating Moral Terrain — 1 Sep 2025
I describe five levels that help understand how good people do bad things—neural, cognitive, situational, social, and cultural. Inject some norms into the stack, and you can explain (and predict) moral behaviour.
[article] Practical Ethics — 4 Jul 2025
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.
[article] Moral Blindspots — 27 Jun 2025
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.
[article] Moral Terrain — 20 Jun 2025
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.
[article] Beyond System 1 and System 2 — 13 Jun 2025
System 1 vs System 2 is a useful shorthand, but our minds aren’t two-speed engines—they’re multi-process coalitions of specialised agents working in parallel and in series.
[article] The Neuroscience Con — 6 Jun 2025
The neuroscience confidence game trades content for cosmetic filler, making vacuous advice look smart.
[article] Positive Intelligence pt.III — 30 May 2025
This might be the most comprehensive example of the neuroscience confidence game I’ve ever written about. That and a heavy dose of self-indulgence. Neuroscientific self-help, not so much.
[article] Positive Intelligence pt.II — 23 May 2025
Chamine’s ‘Positivity Quotient’ is based on nothing beyond ‘being happier is better than being sad’, and unless they appeal to you, there’s no reason to pick his ‘ten saboteurs’ over any of the other inner-critics out there.
[article] Positive Intelligence pt.I — 16 May 2025
It says it’s based on the latest research, but actually it’s based on a 40 year old version of the concept of an ‘inner critic’, and a pack of very well worded porky-pies.
[article] Uncertainty vs Risk — 9 May 2025
Our brains track two kinds of uncertainty. Expected uncertainty makes us trust our model of the world more and exploit familiar patterns (be biased). Unexpected uncertainty makes us explore and update our model (prefer noise). Correctly diagnosing the uncertainty is the key.