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On Leadership — On being the strength of others

[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.
[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?
[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.
[marginalium] How To Do Soul-Craft With State Tools — 6 Jun 2025
[marginalium] What Is Centrism? — 6 Jun 2025
[marginalium] Does Testosterone Effect Economic Preferences? — 30 May 2025
[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.
[marginalium] Anthropic co-founder on AI — 23 May 2025
[marginalium] The Era Of The Business Idiot — 23 May 2025