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• [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] Affordance Competition — 24 Feb 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] 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] Values Don't Matter — 1 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.
• [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
• [audio] Values Don't Matter — 24 Jan 2026
  Values are virtue ethics in disguise—traits we’re expected to cultivate. But virtues are context-dependent (courage for a soldier isn’t courage for a teacher) and the situation overwhelmingly drives behaviour. The real task is designing the context, not listing the virtues.
• [audio] Stupid Questions: Consciousness — 10 Jan 2026
  The hard problem of consciousness is just a complicated debate with no real outcomes. It’s the behaviour that matters, not whether there’s ineffable qualia behind the curtain.
• [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.
• [audio] Stupid Questions: Free Will — 27 Dec 2025
  Nothing changes if free will isn’t real. The world is so intractably complex that it doesn’t matter, and we can shape behaviour either way. Why bother asking?
• [audio] Stupid Questions: Nature/Nurture — 13 Dec 2025
  Nature is just nurture over time, and nurture is far more obviously in charge. The debate is Malcolm Gladwell shit—superficially sexy but practically useless.
• [article] Hydraulic Despotism — 1 Dec 2025
  Control the water, control the people. Today’s water is energy, social media, infrastructure. We’re coerced through convenience, not malice. There are many vectors for control—we don’t need to hand them over.
• [audio] Mundane Cults — 29 Nov 2025
  We’ve been taught that cults are dark and scary things. But we have been fooled. The cult is a prominent building block of modern community. If you’re not in one, you’re probably doing something wrong. The question is, is the cult you’re in a cult you chose?