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• [audio] The Scientific Ritual — 2 May 2026
  The scientific method is just another belief system, a ritual subject to errors of application like any other. And the consequence is a machine for generating 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
• [audio] It's Not Social Media, Life Is Just Worse — 18 Apr 2026
  Social media use probably isn’t the problem. It’s probably just the most visible symptom of a dozen structural problems getting worse at once. And the sad kids on TikTok might be there because they’re sad, not sad because they’re there.
• [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 theories are elaborate scaffolding around trivial advice. They’re attractive because they give us something to point at, make us feel scientific, and—crucially—make our problems someone else’s fault. The scaffolding is mostly harmless, but it hides the stuff that actually matters.
• [audio] Bias is Good — 21 Mar 2026
  Bias isn’t a flaw in human thinking—it’s a precision tool. The brain trades variance for consistency because the world is noisy. Stop trying to eliminate bias. Start identifying the beliefs that drive it.
• [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.
• [audio] The Amygdala is Not the Fear Centre — 7 Mar 2026
  The amygdala doesn’t determine your fear response. You do. It’s not a fear centre—it’s an intensity detector. Stop trying to calm the amygdala. Start paying attention to how you respond.
• [article] Values Don't Matter — 21 Feb 2026
  Values often function as virtue ethics—traits we’re expected to cultivate. But virtues are context-dependent: courage for a soldier isn’t courage for a teacher, and people respond primarily to their environment. So the real task is to design the context.
• [audio] Hydraulic Despotism — 21 Feb 2026
  Wittfogel was wrong about ancient empires, but his insight—control the flow, control the people—describes modern life perfectly. We’re coerced through convenience, not malice. The alternatives exist; we just don’t use them.
• [audio] Atavism Isn't the Answer — 7 Feb 2026
  The return-to-nature movement bundles legitimate health concerns with pseudoscience using a single template: identify a modern problem, construct an ancestral narrative, sell the return as the cure. It rests on two contradictory assumptions—that we know what ancestral life was like, and that humans are simultaneously robust and fragile.
• [marginalium] AI use and skill formation — 5 Feb 2026
• [article] Gesticism — 26 Jan 2026
  Lots of things are happening, but anything <em>can</em> 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.
• [marginalium] Gnosticism in Blood Meridian — 26 Jan 2026