Missives
Changelog
New article: Useful Pharmacology
Overhauled article: the value of social comparisons.
Overhauled article: The value of relationship control.
Updates to All Food is Toxic.
After the move from "the Armchair Collective" to btrmt, the articles were named "The Armchair Collection" so old readers would find familiarity there. After some (vocal) feedback, the interim 'Armchair Collection' is gone. Now the articles are just the articles. Membership to The Armchair Collective is still by invitation only (for now), but everyone will always have access to the articles.
Updates to four common causes of relationship conflict.
Overhauled article: The five stages of grief are a lie
Overhaul of a most useful heuristic for mapping common group behavioural dynamics.
New article: on creativity and the a-ha moment.
New article: neurotransmitters are a confidence game.
Now that btrmt is more than just a collection of articles, it's time to bring it all together.
As such, we've migrated---the Armchair Collective rehomed at its parent, [btrmt]. You can find all the articles here now, as one of the projects of btrmt. Membership to The Armchair Collective is still by invitation only, for now, but those articles will always be for anyone to read.
In addition to Project Petrichor, also launched Neurotypica: a guide to brain and behaviour. Updates to follow as it develops.
New article on Neil Postman's amusing ourselves to death now and then.
Updates to the predictability of humans.
New article on Voluntary Censorship.
A little more clarity in the purpose of the site: a project in betterment is a project about choosing ideologies, not adopting the ones thrust upon you. We've always really been about this, but it's pleasant to finally have the elevator pitch. Only took a year and a half to get there since the relaunch of the site in April last year.
In that vein, putting together summaries of the ideologies we explore on articles. Currently we have Voluntary Censorship and Predicting Human Behaviour. See what you think.
An article in praise of the sage and less in praise of other things.
On the difference between the heart and the head: emotions and the mind.
Updates to On Emotion, and added curated articles to the anthologies.
A bit of a follow on from Varela's Gestures, that's dense enough to be its own article: insight and the sciences.
New article on Varela's Gestures.
Part of a series, I suspect.
New font and colour palette. Reorganised collections around the actual collections from Project Petrichor as the anthologies.
Published Project Petrichor, the manifesto for this project. Time to start arranging this site around what it's arranged around.
Edit Nov 2021: Project Petrichor has been re-homed at The Betterment Institute, the Armchair Collective's parent and the more natural home for it.
Edit 2022: Obviously after merging the Armchair Collective into btrmt, Project Petrichor is here too.
New article on the myth of the millennium.
New series on the concept of from zero.
New articles in the Digital Architecture series:
Server 101: Digital Foundations
Server 102: Access Everywhere
These are probably only going to appeal to those who are motivated by the premise I set out in Digital Architecture. More, they're just drafts—it's difficult to remember what concepts I found difficult when I started these projects myself, and at points do a bad job explaining them. Thank you to everyone who has already provided feedback. These are for you, so I welcome any feedback in future.
New article about Karl Popper's solution to his own paradox of tolerance.
New articles:
Autopoeisis: the origin of thought.
New project on nutrition, to combat my impulse toward biohacking. First segment is on how everything is poison.
From a letter to a friend, an article on the [merits of existential therapies]/articles/existential-therapy).
Updated Stages of Change.
RSS feed back up and running after the changeover to the new backend. It's here No longer an atom feed, just basic RSS, so update your readers accordingly.
Sorry for the hiatus. Site is no longer static. I made it into a web app. It might take a while to straighten out the kinks because I'm hanging on by the seat of my pants coding this thing. That said, look forward to more fun features.
The first fun feature is the Marginalia. See also the new sections on the home page, updated now with the latest content.
Updated: why, much like the cupboard under the stairs, your brain might be nothing more than a happy accident.
New article on the value of Duckworth's narrative about motivation, community, and success—Grit.
Update to the loneliness epidemic.
Update to IQ is meaningless.
Donation process formalised---no more long email conversations about how to do that, unless you actually want to. Accepting bitcoin and paypal. Links scattered around the place.
EDIT: I got a little carried away after I sent the newsletter
RSS feed moved to here. Redirects in place. Hopefully not too annoying for you all.
Google Analytics removed from the website. Privacy policy updated.
The nature/nurture debate is entirely misleading. Genetics is nurture.
Update to the impact of social isolation on our genetics.
Updated the forer effect article: the reason why astrology is so sexy to us.
Move newsletter from mailchimp to Sendy. Took bloody ages.
Happy new year.
By request, merge changelog and newsletters into RSS feed.
Updates to States of Mind.
Goatcounter instance launched for the site for testing against current Google Analytics. Privacy information added to site.
Monster article on states of consciousness, from the mundane to the drug-induced.
Updates to Female Zealots.
New article on how unimportant the self really is.
Built the alpineJS library into the website, rather than pulling it in from CDN so users with uMatrix (you masochists) can use the site properly.
New articles on the nature of personality:
A historical perspective on the fundamental role of elements in personality study.
How your personality is forced upon you.
Newsletter for all changes since the last newsletter.
New articles:
Advice on brain science from a farming manual.
The flaws of the human perspective.
New additions to Successful Prophets.
New article on what might be the oldest and most universal religious impulse, and the crucial role of female zealots.
Newsletter signup form made less obtrusive but scattered in more places around the site in response to a couple emails noting they couldn't find it.
Query string parameters implemented so javascript tab navigation remembers what tab you're on. Had quite some wine before doing this so do let me know if it's messed up somewhere.
Updates to high traffic articles:
On the link between reading fiction, the development of empathy, and theory of mind.
Article on how we choose our psychic predators and the ancient tension between natural law and social law.
Update to the article on Bandura's famous bobo doll experiments, about how children model violence.
New article on hydraulic despotism.
New article on a societal design feature that keeps us from creating and maintaining communities.
More updates to popular articles—the evils of academic publishing and a short primer on memory.
New article on the loneliness epidemic.
More updates to ranking search results—the psychology of needs and a primer on psychological theories.
New article on the predictability of humans.
Updates to old articles that get a lot of traffic:
What our reasons for having sex tell us about sexuality
Gottman's couple typology, and his rule for relatioship stability
New article on folie à deux.
Large extension to Successful Prophets.
In response to questions and a general amazement that we don't take this very seriously, a new project on protecting our digital selves started, with step one complete.
New article started on motivation, success, and (accidental) talent.
New article on repressed memories. Follow up on therapeutic perspectives toward detailing traumas in response to reader questions. New article on the false narrative of teenage brain development.
Site is even thinner again. No more cover images anywhere. Vastly different styling on home and articles pages to eliminate clutter.
New project article: successful prophets. A couple other new standalone articles too. All links in newsletter. Newsletter will now print articles in full, in response to feedback.
Moving to a lighter version of the site, which means getting rid of cover images. Working on new article card and article layouts that we don't need images to be visually interesting.
EDIT 22 Aug: New article cards and article layouts added. No more article cover images!
Some major changes to the site composition. It's difficult to produce little self-contained articles when the more interesting ideas are so sprawling, and they also aren't the most popular content. Long form articles are preferred.
Articles now have a status, indicating how complete they might be. Some will be more iterative, reflecting my thinking on a particular topic to date. These might get broken out into smaller articles over time.
The newest of these iterative articles is On Emotion and isn't finished, but is coherent. Whereas, On Attraction and Love has been updated to satisfaction and I think that's going to remain fairly stable for a while. You can sometimes find a list of all the articles tagged for inclusion in more sprawling pieces at the bottom of the artice.
This will allow a more focused and project-oriented approach to ideas. To help draw attention to the interesting changes on the site, I'm now publishing my changelog here.
All previous newsletters since the new site launch can now be found here.
There have been minor updates to quite a few articles, and a major update to one. You can find those in the newsletter.
Many of the changes are inspired by gwern.net. Worth a look if you're into rabbitholes.
Also, some site speed updates, including image compression.
Big effort on Chompsky. Detailing his media model with Herman, and then applying it to current trends. Helps to identify the means of finding more sensible sources of news. A number of old articles updated also for an upcoming piece on emotion.
Some behind the scenes work on the site also, to speed both the site and the publishing process up.
A bunch of articles updated. Three of note. Two new articles. All of which, you can find in the newsletter. Reporting on the coronavirus pandemic and the US election is highlighting the tensions inherent to media reporting. Worth revisiting Chompsky, I think.
Plato excursion has led us down a little democracy rabbithole. Our democracy is most certainly not like his.
A big dig into Plato the last couple of weeks, and by extension Socrates. Some preliminary notes here. His Republic will have to wait for another time.
Facebook relaunched. Still almost 2000 followers after a year or more of neglect. My apologies.
First newsletter sent in over a year. Mailchimp forced me to delete all subscribers and invite them to subscribe to a new list. I'm glad so many of you resubscribed.
In the newsletter I point out a new article and a couple of old updated ones, but really quite a few have been updated in the process of relaunching the site. All the old articles can be found in the archive for The Dirt Psychology.
Website relaunched. Seven years on and The Dirt Psychology has become something more.
Turns out that brain science isn't always really psychology, and often both are philosophy. When the goal is to turn scholarship into wisdom, we need to cast the net a little wider.
As such, we've relaunched around the interests of the most faithful as the Armchair Collective. Our capacity to thrive is due to our ability to adapt, and our ability to adapt is merely a reflection of our ability to come together and share ideas. The Armchair Collective is a place to do just that.
Several old articles were also updated as part of the upgrade for the launch article On Attraction and Love in an effort toward more project focused research.
Using a static site generator (tightenco/jigsaw) since accessibility was a problem for readers with slower internet.