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On Leadership — On being the strength of others

• [article] Successful Prophets — 5 Jun 2026
  We think of cults as the product of dangerously charismatic leaders but on examination this narrative falls apart. Really, the most successful prophets are not a person, but the followers, who use the leader as an emblem.
• [article] Folie à deux: the madness of two — 4 Jun 2026
  <em>Folie à deux</em>, or the ‘madness of two’, is the kind of psychological phenomenon that occasionally captures the imagination of the media. Two people, otherwise normal, suddenly go insane. It’s a premise that we can ghoulishly enjoy from afar because it seems like it could never happen to us. But I’m not so sure. From intra-family murder to Theranos to our own odder moments, I think shared madness is something that is much more common than you’d think. ideology: | <em>Folie</em> à deux is a striking phenomenon, but poorly understood. It seems to me that it might be just one misleading face of social isolation.
• [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.
• [marginalium] The Era Of The Business Idiot — 29 Apr 2026
• [audio] Hydraulic Despotism — 21 Feb 2026
  You’re not coerced by malice. You’re coerced by convenience. Control the flow, control the people: the most discredited theory in political science describes social media, energy and compute perfectly. The alternatives exist. We just don’t use them.
• [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] Values Don't Matter — 24 Jan 2026
  Values don’t shape behaviour. The room does. They’re virtue ethics relabelled—and courage for a soldier isn’t courage for a teacher. Build the context; drop the list.
• [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
  Cults aren’t the fringe. They’re the architecture of ordinary community, and not being in one usually means something’s gone wrong. The question is whether yours is one you chose.
• [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 <em>content</em>: what things motivate us. Then there is the <em>process</em>: how things motivate us. And lastly, we have those things that <em>maintain</em> 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.