Analects

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Analects

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Collective Architecture

stuff On the structure of collectives

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Men and women engage in identical behaviours—complaining, offering solutions, needing validation, resisting criticism. The difference isn’t biological, it’s interpretive. We cast the same behaviour as reasonable for one gender and unreasonable for the other. Gray’s book is a perfect case study: emotionally troubled men are normalised while women’s ordinary needs are pathologised.

Men Aren't From Mars

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Gender essentialism is having a moment. Everyone’s reading books about what it means to be a man or woman, and Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus keeps getting recommended to me like it’s gospel. Here’s the thing: the book perfectly illustrates a pattern we see everywhere. The same behaviours—complaining, offering advice, needing reassurance, getting defensive—are cast as reasonable when men do them and unreasonable when women do them. Gray’s men are emotionally fragile and his women just want basic partnership, but somehow it’s the women who need to lower their expectations. This isn’t about men and women. It’s about how we frame identical behaviours differently based on who’s doing them.
Men and women engage in identical behaviours—complaining, offering solutions, needing validation, resisting criticism. The difference isn’t biological, it’s interpretive. We cast the same behaviour as reasonable for one gender and unreasonable for the other. Gray’s book is a perfect case study: emotionally troubled men are normalised while women’s ordinary needs are pathologised.

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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.

Mechanical Ethics

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Dennis Vincent’s S-CALM model elegantly identifies the factors that lead good people to do bad things. But identifying what goes wrong isn’t quite the same as understanding how to fix it. Here, I show how mechanistic thinking—illustrated by the ETHIC stack—can help us understand the causal plumbing beneath Vincent’s model, turning it from a diagnostic tool into an intervention toolkit.
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.

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article

When we want to identify with a group, we <em>bias</em> ourselves to filter out all theother ways we could be. It helps us cut down all our competing priorities to the group. The trade-off is the benefit in diversity of thought.

Sacrificing the Self

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Bias is just you using your expectations and assumptions to ignore the noise, and see the picture more clearly. The trade-off is that, sometimes, the noise is useful or your expectations are off. Mob-mentality and groupthink are usually posed as scary features of groups. But they’re just another example of this trade-off, and usually they’re more good than bad.
When we want to identify with a group, we bias ourselves to filter out all theother ways we could be. It helps us cut down all our competing priorities to the group. The trade-off is the benefit in diversity of thought.

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Our brain clusters things that are similar to each other together. This includes ideas and the words we attach to them. If your words are attached to the wrong ideas, you’re going to struggle to make the connection for them.

Language is a barrier to communication

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To make the leap from someone else’s idea to your own understanding of it is often troubled by something I call ‘the language problem’. Most of the time this is because of a difference in experience. Knowledge is sometimes a barrier to learning, and this is almost always related to the language problem. Let me show you what I mean.
Our brain clusters things that are similar to each other together. This includes ideas and the words we attach to them. If your words are attached to the wrong ideas, you’re going to struggle to make the connection for them.

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Cultural and aesthetic ‘facts’ are as real as any ‘objective’ truths. They’re just centred on different kinds of meaning. Trivialising them because they ‘go against’ the evidence is failing to recognise what evidence they care about.

Aesthetics are facts too

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Facts are just a special kind of belief… Because there isn’t really anything tangible that distinguishes a belief from a fact. Cultural and aesthetic beliefs are facts too, in a certain light—we’re tracing the fuzzy boundaries of our religions, theories, and convictions to put certain meaningful aspects of the world at the centre. They’re just as true as the facts that are more stable, and objective. They’re just centring on something different.
Cultural and aesthetic ‘facts’ are as real as any ‘objective’ truths. They’re just centred on different kinds of meaning. Trivialising them because they ‘go against’ the evidence is failing to recognise what evidence they care about.

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