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

• [audio] The Value of Ritual — 25 Jul 2026
  You don’t get a choice about whether you ritualise. Only about whether you chose the ritual.
• [audio] The Neuroscience Con — 11 Jul 2026
  Brain-words are cosmetic filler. Strip the neuroscience out and the advice means exactly what it did before—so learn to strip it out.
• [marginalium] Since I wrote my article on the Enigma of (AI) Reason, this arXiv article has come out, exploring the same fundamental premise — 8 Jul 2026
• [audio] Successful Prophets — 27 Jun 2026
  The most successful prophet isn’t a person. It’s a shared abstraction the group charges up and pins to a convenient emblem. Charisma is conferred, not possessed—so the leader is optional, substitutable, and sometimes already gone.
• [audio] You Can Catch Madness — 13 Jun 2026
  <em>Folie à deux</em> isn’t a rare clinical curiosity. It’s one misleading face of social isolation—intimacy plus loneliness, the same machinery running in all of us. The spectacular cases are selection bias. You can catch it.
• [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.
• [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.
• [audio] The Scientific Ritual — 2 May 2026
  Science isn’t the opposite of belief. It’s a ritual—and like any ritual it misfires, which is how a method built to find truth becomes a machine for manufacturing exaggerations.
• [article] There are no levels — 1 May 2026
  Ideas that stick are shaped to be interesting, not true. Some of these are weaponised; snuck by our faculties of reason. AI uses them in spades. I call them karstica—superficially pretty, but hiding sinkholes. If you don’t learn to detect it, the thinking gets done for you.
• [marginalium] The Era Of The Business Idiot — 29 Apr 2026
• [audio] It's Not Social Media, Life Is Just Worse — 18 Apr 2026
  Social media isn’t the disease. It’s the symptom you can see. The sad kids on TikTok are there because they’re sad, not sad because they’re there.
• [audio] Overengineering calming down — 4 Apr 2026
  Pop neuroscience is just “calm down” in a lab coat. The theories are scaffolding around trivial advice, attractive because they make your problems someone else’s fault, and the scaffolding hides what actually matters.
• [audio] Bias is Good — 21 Mar 2026
  Bias isn’t a flaw in your thinking. It’s a precision instrument. The brain trades variance for consistency because the world is noisy, so don’t fight the bias, find the belief driving 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
  Your amygdala doesn’t decide your fear. You do. It’s not a fear centre, it’s an intensity detector, and calming it down is solving the wrong problem. Watch how you respond instead.