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On Thinking and Reasoning — On knowing things, and how we get there

• [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.
• [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.
• [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
• [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.
• [audio] Stress is Good — 1 Nov 2025
  Stress isn’t poorly calibrated to modern life. It’s the energising force that allows us to perform. Optimal performance requires optimal stress. The difference between eustress and distress isn’t biological—it’s psychological. Controllability matters more than the stressor itself.
• [article] AI Hallucination is just Man-Guessing — 1 Nov 2025
  Human reasoning isn’t flawed, it’s a social tool we use in the wrong places. It’s about sharing and evaluating intuitive claims, not generating rational ones. AI is fundamentally this but crippled: without the grounded intuitions and social friction that makes it work.
• [marginalium] Against McAskillian Longtermism — 10 Jul 2025
• [marginalium] The line between sleep and wake — 6 Jul 2025