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Somatic Architecture — On our somatic architecture

[audio] Men Aren't From Mars — 15 Nov 2025
Men and women engage in identical behaviours—complaining, offering solutions, needing validation, resisting criticism. The difference isn’t biological, it’s interpretive. We cast the same behaviour as reasonable for one gender and unreasonable for the other. Gray’s book is a perfect case study: emotionally troubled men are normalised while women’s ordinary needs are pathologised.
[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.
[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] 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.
[marginalium] The economy of small pleasures — 8 Jul 2025
[marginalium] The line between sleep and wake — 6 Jul 2025
[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.
[marginalium] Are intelligentsia less happy — 26 Jun 2025
[marginalium] The Personal and Private Nature of Smartphones — 25 Jun 2025
[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] Nature is Nurture — 18 Jun 2025
[marginalium] Why Individuals Avoid Information — 17 Jun 2025