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On Leadership — On being the strength of others

[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.
[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.
[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.
[article] Positive Intelligence pt.II — 23 May 2025
Chamine’s ‘Positivity Quotient’ is based on nothing beyond ‘being happier is better than being sad’, and unless they appeal to you, there’s no reason to pick his ‘ten saboteurs’ over any of the other inner-critics out there.
[article] Positive Intelligence pt.I — 16 May 2025
It says it’s based on the latest research, but actually it’s based on a 40 year old version of the concept of an ‘inner critic’, and a pack of very well worded porky-pies.
[article] Uncertainty vs Risk — 9 May 2025
Our brains track two kinds of uncertainty. Expected uncertainty makes us trust our model of the world more and exploit familiar patterns (be biased). Unexpected uncertainty makes us explore and update our model (prefer noise). Correctly diagnosing the uncertainty is the key.
[article] Sacrificing the Self — 4 Apr 2025
When we want to identify with a group, we bias ourselves to filter out all theother ways we could be. It helps us cut down all our competing priorities to the group. The trade-off is the benefit in diversity of thought.
[article] Stress and Creativity — 28 Mar 2025
Stress promotes bias—stereotypical thinking and behaving. Less stress promotes cognitive flexibility—an openness to new ways of thinking and behaving. Neither is better than the other. It’s about the situation you deploy them in.
[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] Anticipation beats reward — 31 Jan 2025
Basically, reward and ancipation both use the same system, but differently. Anticipation seems to come in through the senses and get sent throughout the brain, but pleasure seems to come in from more evaluatey bits—maybe to help us learn what’s rewarding.