btrmt. | Betterment

Analects

analects

Analects are a collection of ideas, extracts, or teachings. A funny kind of word that dresses up the sharing of ideologies in a facade of respectability. These are my analects. With a background in brain science and the sciences of mind, I explore how ideas become ideologies become action, for better or worse. Here, you'll find articles, video, and audio.

Manifesto

credenda

The human animal is “half awake. Our fires are damped, our rafts are checked… the human individual lives usually far within his limits”. The old stories we are told teach us that this is the best we can do, halt, lame, half-made creatures that we are. There is another story though. A story that has us waking up; embracing the unique capacity of the human mind. This is a manifesto that tells that story.

Marginalia

marginalia

Marginalia is the word for the marks one makes in the margins of books and the like. These Marginalia are my daily notes on interesting content from around the web, or whatever I'm reading right now. A collection of links, quotes, and extracts, with my commentary alongside.

Missives

missives

The Missives are the newsletter and the changelog: my notes to you so that you can keep track of what's happened since you were last here. Of course, you can get the newsletter in your inbox too, or get everything in the RSS feed.

Curricula

curricula

Many of our existing ideologies are filtered through an economy of shame, outrage, yearning, and terror while what narratives of growth we have left are increasingly superficial. The scholastic enterprise has gone a bit funny too: a thousand proliferating disciplines, showering us with knowledge split into a million isolated fragments until "we know more and more about less and less". The curricula are my attempt to make something rather more useful. A collection of heuristics, or frames, through which we make some of the chaos into meaning while accepting that in doing so, we are choosing to make some meaning into chaos.