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• [audio] Stupid Questions: Nature/Nurture — 13 Dec 2025
  Nature is just nurture given time, and nurture is obviously the one in charge. The whole debate is Gladwell bait: superficially sexy, practically useless.
• [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.
• [audio] Mundane Cults — 29 Nov 2025
  Cults aren’t the fringe. They’re the architecture of ordinary community, and not being in one usually means something’s gone wrong. The question is whether yours is one you chose.
• [audio] Men Aren't From Mars — 15 Nov 2025
  Men and women aren’t wired differently. We read the same behaviour as reasonable in him and unreasonable in her—normalising troubled men while pathologising women’s ordinary needs.
• [audio] Stress is Good — 1 Nov 2025
  Stress isn’t broken by modern life. It’s a performance tool, and the line between fuel and harm isn’t the stressor. It’s whether you control it.
• [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.
• [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 <em>content</em>: what things motivate us. Then there is the <em>process</em>: how things motivate us. And lastly, we have those things that <em>maintain</em> 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] Against McAskillian Longtermism — 10 Jul 2025
• [marginalium] Ethical astrology — 9 Jul 2025
• [marginalium] The economy of small pleasures — 8 Jul 2025
• [marginalium] The Practical Inconsequence of the Free Will Debate — 7 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.