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Successful Prophets

• [article] Gesticism — 26 Jan 2026
  Lots of things are happening, but anything <em>can</em> matter, and whatever gives meaning will eventually demand sacrifice. The agony of attention. I’m not going to spend more time trying to reduce the core idea than that.
• [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?
• [marginalium] The long history of association between God and unusual smells — 19 Jun 2025
• [marginalium] Culture trumps evidence — 20 Feb 2025
• [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.
• [article] When groups go bad — 3 Jan 2025
  Without more tasteful social behaviours to sample from, we’re liable to attach very strongly to the behaviours of our group. Add a hostile environment, normalised physical and emotional violence, and a lack of mental and physical resources, and you have the ingredients for atrocity.
• [article] Useful groups are biased groups — 27 Dec 2024
  The strength of our attraction to a group is a function of how different a group is from other groups in ways that we feel like we are, or like we want to be. Our participation in the group depends on how we see it benefitting us, and see us benefitting the group. The stronger both are, the stronger our biases to stay engaged.
• [article] Mob mentality is fine — 20 Dec 2024
  You could think of a collection of group dynamics like ‘groupthink’ or ‘deindividuation’ or whatever are bad. Or you could consider that our social identity is formed by making the distinctions between in- and out- groups clear. Then it all makes sense.
• [article] Catastrophic leadership is actually really hard — 13 Dec 2024
  For group dynamics to produce really bad behaviour, you really need to work at it. You have to train your authority figures to be cruel, prevent dissent or disengagement, and intervene all the time to stop people fixing things. It’s <em>hard</em>.
• [article] Leadership consulting is usually more 'feel good' than 'do good' — 17 Aug 2023
  Leadership consulting proposes to fix leaders, but because we can confuse ‘making leaders feel good’ with ‘making leaders better’ it usually fails. It doesn’t have to though: just take the extra step from ‘collective vision’ to ‘collective norms’.
• [article] On managing magic mushroom experiences — 29 Jul 2023
  Mushrooms change the balance between inside-out forces (the all-consuming neural networks that support the ‘self’) and outside-in forces (the environment and world around us). This model seems most useful in explaining the mushroom experience.
• [marginalium] A theory of autocratic bad-decision-making (pdf) — 9 Jun 2023
• [marginalium] On handling people, when everyone is the main character — 5 Jun 2023
• [marginalium] Interesting piece—normal people becoming killers — 2 Jun 2023
• [marginalium] What happens, then, when large and powerful states, along with the transnational institutions and corporations they promote and protect, are all driving towards the same goal — 15 May 2023