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Everything Is Ideology — On the patterns you didn't choose

• [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 <em>isn’t</em> real; and the same is true of consciousness. They’re just complicated debates with no real outcomes.
• [article] There is no authentic self — 11 Apr 2025
  There’s no hidden version of you. If anything, we are a collection of bits and pieces that we weave together from the stories we learn from others. You don’t need to find an authentic <em>self</em>, you need to find a story you can weave that makes you happy.
• [article] Language is a barrier to communication — 28 Feb 2025
  Our brain clusters things that are similar to each other together. This includes ideas and the words we attach to them. If your words are attached to the wrong ideas, you’re going to struggle to make the connection for them.
• [article] Aesthetics are facts too — 21 Feb 2025
  Cultural and aesthetic ‘facts’ are as real as any ‘objective’ truths. They’re just centred on different kinds of meaning. Trivialising them because they ‘go against’ the evidence is failing to recognise what evidence they care about.
• [article] BDSM as a lazy ideology — 17 Jan 2025
  BDSM is an ideology stack—a collection of behaviours borne of a culture that surrounds some core set of human needs. But is it lazy? Hard to tell. It seems easy to explain away parts of it as hormone hijacking and socialisation, but there is something deeper there.
• [article] Confirmation bias is all there is — 18 Oct 2024
  Many cognitive biases seem like they can be boiled down to a handful of fundamental beliefs, and then belief-consistent information processing (i.e. confirmation bias).
• [article] There are no levels — 4 Oct 2024
  The ‘naming’ problem, where by naming something we feel we have explained it, the ‘language’ problem, where the words we use stop others from understanding, and the ‘question’ problem, where we fail to find the right questions, are common and funny.
• [article] Great Spirits of History — 6 Sep 2024
  The ‘Great Man’ theory of history has the history of ideas moved forward by individuals. But by thinking of these as ‘Great Ideas’, or better ‘spirits’ of ideas, we’re encouraged to examine their motivations, which is surprisingly effective.
• [article] It's not social media, life is just worse — 2 Aug 2024
  Social media use probably isn’t the problem. Social media use is probably just the most obvious manifestation of lots of problems. And in fact, social media could probably be a solution. It’s up to you.
• [article] Ideologies stack — 15 Jun 2024
  Fringe theories always seem to cluster together. It seems weird, but mainstream theories also do, we just don’t often examine them. Examining why different theory stacks arise reveals much about our biases, ideologies, and the influence of community-based knowledge.
• [article] The Trouble With Objectivity — 21 Dec 2023
  The obsession over objectivity is a confusion of two things. There’s rationality, the desire to be less biased. Then there’s truth which is going to be necessarily biased toward whatever aspect of the world we’re trying to understand. In both cases objectivity is irrelevant.
• [article] Eerie coincidences aren't that eerie — 12 Nov 2023
  Your phone probably isn’t eavesdropping for ads. Your brain’s job is to highlight unexpected hits while ignoring the misses. Eerie coincidences are probably just you not noticing all the times something weird could have happened but didn’t.
• [article] Solving the say-do-gap — 12 May 2023
  To close the say-do-gap, we need to feel some ownership of the problem, we need the social support to support the change, and we need to know how. Anything less will make us focus on how good thinking about changing feels and not actually putting in the work.
• [article] Saving the planet is an illusion — 15 Apr 2023
  Sustainability discussions often prioritise saving the planet, missing the fact that the planet doesn’t care about climate change. Maybe we should focus on the imminent death and disease instead of the planet’s feelings.
• [article] The value of ritual — 17 Mar 2023
  Rituals are often dismissed, but they’re just procedures with a purpose. We all engage in ritualistic behavior—many habits and routines meet this criteria. Redefining them through the uncomfortable lens of ritual prompts us to question our own practices and beliefs.