Analects

Filter by type: All · Articles · Audio · Marginalia

Filter by anthology: All · Betterment · Gratification · Connection · Somatic Architecture · Spiritual Architecture · Thought Architecture · Wealth Architecture · Digital Architecture · Collective Architecture

• [article] AI-shaped stuff — 13 Jun 2026
  We keep waiting for AI to get good enough. That’s backwards. The bottleneck is human: work that isn’t AI-shaped, verification we’re bad at, and confidence we’ve offloaded to the machine itself.
• [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.
• [article] Folie à deux: the madness of two — 4 Jun 2026
  <em>Folie à deux</em>, or the ‘madness of two’, is the kind of psychological phenomenon that occasionally captures the imagination of the media. Two people, otherwise normal, suddenly go insane. It’s a premise that we can ghoulishly enjoy from afar because it seems like it could never happen to us. But I’m not so sure. From intra-family murder to Theranos to our own odder moments, I think shared madness is something that is much more common than you’d think. ideology: | <em>Folie</em> à deux is a striking phenomenon, but poorly understood. It seems to me that it might be just one misleading face of social isolation.
• [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.
• [article] Useful Men — 4 Apr 2026
  It’s true that the ‘pathways’ to manhood are closing. I don’t think it’s a crisis of masculinity though. It’s a crisis of no more excuses for incompetence. We’re trying to find the meaning of manhood when what we actually need are new skills. Men just need to be useful.
• [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.
• [article] Values Don't Matter — 21 Feb 2026
  Values often function as virtue ethics—traits we’re expected to cultivate. But virtues are context-dependent: courage for a soldier isn’t courage for a teacher, and people respond primarily to their environment. So the real task is to design the context.
• [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.
• [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.
• [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.
• [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.
• [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.