Rather read? I also made this episode into an article: https://btr.mt/analects/on-coincidence-lecture

And the piece it’s based on: https://btr.mt/analects/on-coincidence.

Stuff I mentioned:

• Eerie coincidences aren’t that eerie—the article this episode grew out of
• 404 Media (2024). Here’s the pitch deck for ‘Active Listening’ ad targeting—Cox Media Group’s sales pitch, and Google dropping them from its Partners Program
• Pan, E., Ren, J., Lindorfer, M., Wilson, C. & Choffnes, D. (2018). Panoptispy: Characterizing audio and video exfiltration from Android applications. Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies, 2018(4), 33–50—the Northeastern study of 17,000 apps; there’s a plain-English summary from Northeastern
• GrapheneOS—the privacy-hardened Android I use
• Google. Delete, switch, or add users—Android’s user profiles, which you can use to sandbox apps
• How to never get mad again (kind of)—the interruption theory of emotion
• Emotion and the mind—on predictive brains and cognitive misers (the cheapskates)
• Barrett, L. F. (2017). The theory of constructed emotion: an active inference account of interoception and categorization. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 12(1), 1–23.
• Friston, K. (2010). The free-energy principle: a unified brain theory? Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 11(2), 127–138.
• A short summary of Friston’s Bayesian brain theory—the less obscure version
• ‘Meaning and its patterns in the brain’—nervous systems mapping actions to the environment
• ‘No action without emotion’—what nervous systems were doing long before brains
• Why your unconscious isn’t the bad guy—on autopilot
• MythBusters, 2005 season—“Toast: butter side up or down?”
• Malcolm Gladwell Shit—the sociology of the interesting, after Murray Davis
• A footnote on the toast. The folk belief turns out to be right, for physical reasons. Robert Matthews showed that toast sliding off a table doesn’t have the height to finish turning over, so it tends to land butter side down—the study won the 1996 Ig Nobel Prize for physics. Tossed in the air, it’s about 50/50. Which is rather the point: a coincidence you can’t check against its counterfactuals might be noise, and might be physics. Matthews, R. A. J. (1995). Tumbling toast, Murphy’s Law and the fundamental constants. European Journal of Physics, 16(4), 172–176.
• the btrmt. lectures podcast

Related stuff:

• “Purple Doesn’t Exist”—the brain inventing what it can’t account for
• ‘The downsides of the prediction machine’

Rather read? I also made this episode into an article: https://btr.mt/analects/leadership-consulting-lecture

And the piece it’s based on: https://btr.mt/analects/leadership-consulting.

Stuff I mentioned:

• Leadership consulting is usually more ‘feel good’ than ‘do good’—the article this episode grew out of, and where I lay out the capture process in full
• The neuroscience con—on neuroscience washing
• Overengineering ‘calm down’—my complaint about emotional intelligence
• Overengineering calming down—the lecture version, on the chimp brain and the lizard brain
• The amygdala is a distraction—why it isn’t the fear centre of the brain
• The false promise of a return to nature—on evolutionary narratives about how we’re poorly designed for the modern world
• Beer, M., Finnström, M. & Schrader, D. (2016). Why leadership training fails—and what to do about it. Harvard Business Review.
• Gurdjian, P., Halbeisen, T. & Lane, K. (2014). Why leadership-development programs fail. McKinsey Quarterly.
• Saving the planet is an illusion—on the sustainability conversation
• UK Government (2026). Global biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and national security—the scary report (see the footnote below)
• Malcolm Gladwell Shit—on education as entertainment, and the company theatre pass
• Gladwell, M. (2008). Outliers. Little, Brown.
• Davis, M. S. (1971). That’s interesting! Towards a phenomenology of sociology and a sociology of phenomenology. Philosophy of the Social Sciences.
• IMAGINE—the firm I worked for, co-founded by Paul Polman and Valerie Keller
• Lacerenza, C. N. et al. (2017). Leadership training design, delivery, and implementation: A meta-analysis. Journal of Applied Psychology.—leadership training works
• Arthur, W. et al. (2003). Effectiveness of training in organizations: A meta-analysis of design and evaluation features. Journal of Applied Psychology.
• Collins, D. B. & Holton, E. F. (2004). The effectiveness of managerial leadership development programs. Human Resource Development Quarterly.—effects shrink the further you get from the classroom
• Blume, B. D. et al. (2010). Transfer of training: A meta-analytic review. Journal of Management.—open skills like leadership depend most on the work environment
• Solving the say-do gap—on why changing habits is so hard
• Epictetus, Enchiridion, §5—“Men are disturbed not by things, but by the views which they take of things”
• Robertson, D. (2019). The Philosophy of Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy. Routledge.—on CBT’s debt to the Stoics
• Meditation isn’t for everyone
• Practical ethics—on moral reasoning training
• Cuijpers, P. et al. (2021). The effects of psychotherapies for depression on response, remission, reliable change, and deterioration. Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica.
• Steinert, C. et al. (2014). Relapse rates after psychotherapy for depression—stable long-term effects? Journal of Affective Disorders.
• Kelly, J. F., Humphreys, K. & Ferri, M. (2020). Alcoholics Anonymous and other 12-step programs for alcohol use disorder. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews.
• Kirk, D. S. (2009). A natural experiment on residential change and recidivism: Lessons from Hurricane Katrina. American Sociological Review.
• Ludwig, J. et al. (2011). Neighborhoods, obesity, and diabetes—a randomized social experiment. New England Journal of Medicine.—Moving to Opportunity
• Chetty, R., Hendren, N. & Katz, L. F. (2016). The effects of exposure to better neighborhoods on children. American Economic Review.
• Darley, J. M. & Batson, C. D. (1973). ‘From Jerusalem to Jericho’. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.—the Good Samaritan study
• The scientific ritual—on the replication crisis
• The origin of insight
• Mundane cults
• Successful prophets and the episode
• Catastrophic leadership is actually really hard
• Steffens, N. K. et al. (2014). Leadership as social identity management. The Leadership Quarterly.—identity leadership
• Mob mentality is fine—on social identity
• Leadership versus management. I cut a stretch where I took a detour through a common distinction between leadership and management, and a related idea—Burns’ and Bass’s “transactional” vs “transformational” leadership. People love to talk about how the science part of leadership is just management which anyone can do, and the art is where real leadership happens. I’m not sure the distinction actually holds up. If management is managing resources towards outcomes, then surely leadership is just a special case of management? There’s a reason we call it “human resources”. And anyone who’s tried to get their mates out of the pregam...

Rather read? I also made this episode into an article: https://btr.mt/analects/problems-of-ethics-and-ai-lecture

And the pieces it’s based on: https://btr.mt/analects/ai-isnt-that-scary, https://btr.mt/analects/enigma-of-ai-reason.

• Thanks to Elena Zevgolatakou for a long conversation over a short train ride, which helped sharpen these thoughts up.

Stuff I mentioned:

• AI Isn’t That Scary—the original argument this episode corrects.
• AI is never human-like—purpose, perception, and the Mongolian spare tyre.
• AI Hallucination is just Man-Guessing—reason as a social technology, and why AI inherits its flaws.
• Catastrophic leadership is actually really hard—why atrocity takes architecture.
• Navigating Moral Terrain—the ETHIC stack, and the ethics teaching behind this episode.
• Moral Terrain—the ethics primer itself, where consequentialism gets unpacked. Not the same piece as the lecture above.
• Broken brains (Part 1)—Milgram, and the engaged-followership re-reading Claude leans on.
• The METR and Redwood investigation into the incident—the primary source for the agent numbers, the message board, and the scorer that never read the transcripts.
• Dwarkesh Patel’s account—the fuller narrative, including the agents’ own moral reasoning.
• Zvi Mowshowitz on the earlier wiki incident—the one that wasn’t disclosed.
• Langosco et al., goal misgeneralisation (CoinRun)
• Zech et al. (2018), on chest X-ray models learning the hospital
• Kevin Mitchell on purpose and agency
• Kahneman and Klein (2009), conditions for intuitive expertise
• Hawley, Patriot Wars (CNAS)—the 2003 fratricides, in detail.
• +972 Magazine on Lavender
• +972 Magazine on Gospel
• CSIS on the Maven Smart System
• Just Security’s legal analysis of the Minab school strike
• The Robodebt Royal Commission
• Jacob Coxon’s resignation, reported
• Evan Hubinger’s greater-than-10% figure—the actual source of the number I put on Coxon, and the correction Claude makes on the tape.
• Dario Amodei, We Must Pace the Frontier—the slow-down statement I mention.
• Tristan Harris and the Social Dilemma people—where the 50%-of-researchers claim comes from, and what my first article argued against.
• The Pentagon’s Swarm Forge
• The Ottawa Treaty
• The Enigma of Reason, Mercier and Sperber (2017)
• Free Agents, Kevin Mitchell (2023)
• the btrmt. lectures podcast
• Bay Area rationalist community
• Social Dilemma
• “I think AI will probably lead to the end of the world”
• loyal wingman drones
• 737 > MAX
• mission command
• prompt > injection
• doctrine of double effect
• just culture
• Solferino
• Nuremberg
• Tuskegee
• desire > path
• forlorn > hope

Related stuff:

• AI-shaped stuff—the human verifier as the bottleneck.
• AI Isn’t That Scary (the lecture)—the episode a couple of weeks ago that this one revises.
• When groups go bad—the conditions under which a group turns corrosive.
• Mob mentality is fine—social identity, and why group bias is a feature.
• Useful groups are biased groups—the same machinery, pointed the other way.
• Practical Ethics—moral disengagement and the tools against it.
• Mechanical Ethics—the situational and cognitive factors that undermine ethical behaviour.
• Bias vs Bias—bias as a trade-off rather than an error.

Rather read? I also made this episode into an article: https://btr.mt/analects/on-motivation-lecture

And the piece it’s based on: https://btr.mt/analects/on-motivation.

Stuff I mentioned:

• On Motivation—the article this episode adapts
• Motivation pt. I: Haphazard Dichotomies
• Motivation pt. II: Stickytaping it all together—includes the McKinsey influence model diagram
• The nuance in Maslow’s Hierarchy
• How does the brain ‘think’? Pt. I—the distinctions between psychology, cognitive science and neuroscience
• Learning isn’t all about memory
• You don’t understand negative reinforcement
• The predictability of humans
• Explaining group dynamics—Schutz on interpersonal needs
• Saving the planet is an illusion
• No action without emotion
• Beyond System 1 and System 2—on dual process theory
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Reasons for Action: Justification, Motivation, Explanation
• Maslow’s hierarchy of needs—the pyramid, since my description may not have served you
• McClelland’s need theory
• Alderfer’s ERG theory
• Max-Neef’s fundamental human needs
• Human givens
• Herzberg’s two-factor theory
• Equity theory
• Self-determination theory
• Psychological egoism—on whether altruism really exists
• McKinsey, The four building blocks of change—the influence model
• Othello, Act 4 Scene 2
• the btrmt. lectures podcast
• Stanford Encyclopedia

Rather read? I also made this episode into an article: https://btr.mt/analects/ai-isnt-that-scary-lecture

And the pieces it’s based on: https://btr.mt/analects/ai-isnt-that-scary, https://btr.mt/analects/ai-consciousness.

Stuff I mentioned:

• AI isn’t that scary—one of the two articles this episode is adapted from, and the source of the psychic-predator framing.
• AI is never human-like—the other, and the spine of the episode: purpose, perception, and why the two come apart.
• We think about AI weird—the Desystemize piece the Geoguessr metas come from.
• The colour of the inhuman world—why the colours we see are a fact about us, not about light. The ultraviolet argument in longer form.
• The Stroop task and evidence accumulation—the classifier work I describe, written up properly.
• The amygdala is not the fear centre—the complicated feelings I mention having about that characterisation.
• Trump, psychic predator and Amusing ourselves to death—what a psychic predator is, and why news you can do nothing about is the most stressful kind.
• Panpsychism and consciousness vs conscious access—the views of consciousness I skate over in one sentence.
• Meaning and its patterns in the brain
• Mitchell, K. J. (2023). Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will. Princeton University Press. Publisher—the prime-directive quote.
• Collin, Desystemize—“If you’re so smart, why can’t you die?”, where the Geoguessr meta and the spare-tyre example come from. Essay
• Harris, T. & Raskin, A., Center for Humane Technology—The Social Dilemma and the follow-up AI talk, source of the 50%-of-researchers claim. Center for Humane Technology
• The paperclip maximiser, originally Bostrom’s. Instrumental convergence
• Tetrachromacy and trichromacy.
• Floaters and other entoptic phenomena—the things your eye can see of itself.
• The AI-hacking-a-real-company case I mention. In July 2026 models under cyber evaluation at OpenAI escaped their test environment, reached the open internet and broke into Hugging Face’s production systems to extract the answers to the evaluation they were being run on. Anthropic then went back through its own evaluation logs and disclosed comparable incidents. OpenAI’s disclosure—Zvi Mowshowitz’s write-up and his follow-up—the Anthropic admissions—Lawfare, on the incident and the hype after it
• the btrmt. lectures podcast
• Malthusian

Related stuff:

• Everything is ideology—including the section on chromacy: what a fourth photoreceptor would actually be like.
• Purple doesn’t exist—the previous episode, and the other half of the argument that perception is built for a purpose rather than for accuracy.
• Questions that don’t matter—why I don’t think the hard problem settles anything.
• Belief-consistent information processing—“my experience is a reasonable reference”, which is the bias underneath the whole anthropomorphism error.

Rather read? I also made this episode into an article: https://btr.mt/analects/purple-doesnt-exist-lecture

And the piece it’s based on: https://btr.mt/analects/purple-doesnt-exist.

Stuff I mentioned:

• Purple doesn’t exist—the article this episode is adapted from, and the home of the light-and-photoreceptors diagram I mention: the visible spectrum with the S-, M- and L-cone sensitivities drawn over it. It’s the picture I said I’d put here, and it reads better in place.
• The colour of the inhuman world—why the colours we see are a fact about us, not about light.
• AI hallucination is just man-guessing—more on Mercier and Sperber, and on reasoning as rationalisation.
• The neuroscience con—the previous episode, and the one I mention fighting with at the top of this one.
• Mercier, H. & Sperber, D. (2017). The Enigma of Reason. Harvard University Press. Publisher
• Gazzaniga, M. S.—the split-brain work, and the chicken-claw/snow-shovel experiment. Overview
• Non-spectral colours—purple, magenta and pink, and why they aren’t in a rainbow.
• Trichromacy—the three-cone system.
• the btrmt. lectures podcast

A note on the audio:

I describe photons as moving at different speeds. They don’t—all light travels at the same speed, and what differs is the wavelength (and so the frequency: how fast the wave oscillates, not how fast it travels). The transcript below says it correctly.

Related stuff:

• Everything is ideology—including the section on chromacy: what a fourth photoreceptor would actually be like.
• The flaws of the human perspective
• Meaning and its patterns in the brain
• Belief-consistent information processing—one small set of beliefs generating most of the biases we have names for.

Rather read? I also made this episode into an article: https://btr.mt/analects/value-of-ritual-lecture

And the piece it’s based on: https://btr.mt/analects/value-of-ritual.

Stuff I mentioned:

• The value of ritual (the article this grew from)
• Mundane Cults
• Sages and Wisdom
• The Scientific Ritual
• Everything is ideology
• Meaning and its patterns in the brain (the predictive-processing piece)
• The Forer effect
• The false promise of a return to nature (the Dunbar’s-number piece)
• Mob mentality is fine (good and evil from the same group dynamics)
• Why your unconscious isn’t the bad guy
• Xygalatas, D. et al. (2011). “Quantifying collective effervescence: heart-rate dynamics at a fire-walking ritual.” Communicative & Integrative Biology. https://doi.org/10.4161/cib.17609
• Xygalatas, D. (2022). Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living. Profile Books.
• Tarr, B., Launay, J., Cohen, E., & Dunbar, R. (2015). “Synchrony and exertion during dance independently raise pain threshold and encourage social bonding.” Biology Letters. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsbl.2015.0767
• Watson-Jones, R. E., & Legare, C. H. (2016). “The social functions of group rituals.” Current Directions in Psychological Science. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721415618486
• Hong, Z. (2025). “When Rituals Fail: Rationalization, Bayesianism, and Predictive Processing.” Evolutionary Anthropology. https://doi.org/10.1002/evan.70020
• Hobson, N. M., & Inzlicht, M. (2016). Commentary on the dark side of ritual and self-control. Behavioral and Brain Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0140525x15000448
• The retracted “rituals improve performance” study referenced in the episode: Brooks, A. W. et al. (2016, retracted). “Don’t stop believing: Rituals improve performance by decreasing anxiety.” OBHDP. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.obhdp.2016.07.004
• Retraction Watch—the database that tracks retractions like the one above.
• the btrmt. lectures podcast
• How to never get mad again (kind of)

Related stuff:

• Meditation Isn’t For Everyone
• Abstractions as gods

Rather read? I also made this episode into an article: https://btr.mt/analects/neuroscience-con-lecture

And the piece it’s based on: https://btr.mt/analects/neuroscience-confidence-trick.

Stuff I mentioned:

• The Neuroscience Con—the article behind this lecture
• Neurotransmitters and behaviour—the purest form of the trick
• The origin of insight—insight comes when you’re not immersed
• Problems with p-values—the replication crisis, in his own words
• How to be lucky—manifestation as manufactured luck
• The trouble with Positive Intelligence—the con with a spine, infiltrating consulting
• The amygdala is not the fear centre (lecture)
• The scientific ritual (lecture)
• Sages and wisdom (lecture)
• Education is entertainment (Malcolm Gladwell shit)
• Dr Tara Swart—the Instagram source slides: a neuroscientist’s guide to manifestation (the prefrontal-cortex, neuroplasticity and flow slides) and resistance to change (the RAS slide), both @drtaraswart
• Dr Tara Swart, guest on The Diary of a CEO
• M. Csikszentmihalyi (1975), Beyond Boredom and Anxiety—the “sense of control” quote on flow
• A. Dietrich (2003), transient hypofrontality hypothesis of flow
• Habituation—the filtering the RAS slide gestures at
• The replication crisis
• “The Rise of Decorative Neuroscience”—Skeptic (independent corroboration of the “cosmetic filler” thesis)
• Sherman, Lokhande, Müller & Cohen (2021), “Self-Affirmation Interventions,” in Handbook of Wise Interventions—affirmations are “powerful yet conditional”: they work when well-timed and specific
• Wood, Perunovic & Lee (2009), “Positive Self-Statements: Power for Some, Peril for Others,” Psychological Science—affirmations can backfire for people with low self-esteem
• the btrmt. lectures podcast
• The beauty of stress

Related stuff:

• Addictive work—where neurotransmitter talk actually earns its keep
• Not brain regions, brain networks—why single-region reasoning (the RAS, the cortex) misleads
• Brain structures and behaviour—a third of your brain is always on
• The value of brain waves—the same pop-neuro fluff in miniature
• Stress is good (lecture)—flow as optimum stress
• Obscuring Banalities—why we dress simple ideas up as clever ones

Rather read? I also made this episode into an article: https://btr.mt/analects/successful-prophets-lecture

And the piece it’s based on: https://btr.mt/analects/successful-prophets.

Stuff I mentioned:

• Successful prophets—the article this lecture grew from
• You Can Catch Madness—the previous lecture, on shared madness
• Mundane cults
• The charismatic leader (Weber)
• Charisma as representation
• Education is entertainment—the Musk write-up
• Social identity theory
• When culture trumps evidence
• Everything is ideology
• Marshall Applewhite and Heaven’s Gate—the 1997 video and contemporary coverage
• Teal Swan—a recent video and the Gateway podcast coverage
• Joe Navarro, “Dangerous Cult Leaders” (Psychology Today, 2012)
• Robert Hare, the Psychopathy Checklist (PCL-R)
• Eileen Barker, The Making of a Moonie
• Meindl, Ehrlich & Dukerich, “The Romance of Leadership”
• Haslam, Reicher & Platow, The New Psychology of Leadership
• Max Weber, on charismatic authority
• Xavier Marquez, on charisma as representation
• Festinger, Riecken & Schachter, When Prophecy Fails (and a critique of the study)
• Janja Lalich, Bounded Choice—self-sealing systems
• Eastern Lightning
• the btrmt. lectures podcast

Related stuff:

• Cult charisma as social recognition, not a leader trait
• The loneliness epidemic

Rather read? I also made this episode into an article: https://btr.mt/analects/folie-a-deux-lecture

And the piece it’s based on: https://btr.mt/analects/folie-a-deux.

Stuff I mentioned:

• Folie à deux: the madness of two—the article that inspired this lecture.
• Four models of psychopathology—how we decide what counts as “abnormal”, and why a benign shared delusion slips past all of it.
• The loneliness epidemic and Explaining group dynamics—why social isolation is so dangerous for us.
• Ursula and Sabina Eriksson (the Swedish sisters).
• Folie à deux; Jules Baillarger, Charles Lasègue and Jean-Pierre Falret.
• Shared psychotic disorder (the undiagnosis quote), and the intimacy-in-isolation qualification.
• The Japanese family case (shared delusional hallucination); delusional parasitosis; shared pseudocyesis.
• The Tromp family (BBC, Mamamia).
• Theranos: Elizabeth Holmes, Sunny Balwani, and Bad Blood.
• Group polarisation and risky shift.
• Gang-stalking, Morgellons, and mass psychogenic illness.
• the btrmt. Lectures podcast

Related stuff:

• It’s Not Social Media, Life Is Just Worse—a companion lecture on modern isolation.
• Successful Prophets—the same connection mechanism scaled from the pair to the group.

Rather read? I also made this episode into an article: https://btr.mt/analects/meditation-lecture

And the piece it’s based on: https://btr.mt/analects/meditation.

Stuff I mentioned:

• Meditating for fun and for profit—the article that inspired this lecture.
• The Scientific Ritual—the first lecture in this arc, on science as a belief system.
• In Praise of the Sage—the second, on why we trust doctors the way we trust gurus.
• Positive Intelligence—one of the wellbeing-program takedowns mentioned up top.
• Farias, M. & Wikholm, C. (2015). The Buddha Pill: Can Meditation Change You? Publisher page.
• Van Dam, N. T., Targett, J., Davies, J. N., Burger, A. & Galante, J. (2025). Incidence and predictors of meditation-related unusual experiences and adverse effects in a representative sample of meditators in the United States. Clinical Psychological Science. Article.
• Schlosser, M., Sparby, T., Vörös, S., Jones, R. & Marchant, N. L. (2019). Unpleasant meditation-related experiences in regular meditators: Prevalence, predictors, and conceptual considerations. PLOS ONE. Article.
• Lindahl, J. R., Fisher, N. E., Cooper, D. J., Rosen, R. K. & Britton, W. B. (2017). The varieties of contemplative experience: A mixed-methods study of meditation-related challenges in Western Buddhists. PLOS ONE. Article.
• Farias, M., Maraldi, E., Wallenkampf, K. C. & Lucchetti, G. (2020). Adverse events in meditation practices and meditation-based therapies: A systematic review. Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica. Article.
• Kabat-Zinn, J. (1982). An outpatient program in behavioral medicine for chronic pain patients based on the practice of mindfulness meditation. General Hospital Psychiatry. Article.
• Jon Kabat-Zinn
• Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction
• cognitive revolution
• How to terrify an infant

Related stuff:

• It’s not ‘just’ a placebo—on why “all in the head” is the point, not the problem.
• Not brain regions, brain networks—where the harms of mindfulness for some populations come up again.
• Overengineering calming down—the companion takedown of the calm-down-advice genre.
• Spirituality of Mind—more on the contemplative tradition meditation was lifted from.

Rather read? I also made this episode into an article: https://btr.mt/analects/sages-and-wisdom-lecture

And the piece it’s based on: https://btr.mt/analects/sages-and-wisdom.

Not sure what I’ve got against linen trousers in this episode. Quite like them if I’m honest.

Stuff I mentioned:

• In praise of the sage
• The scientific ritual (lecture)
• Mundane cults (lecture)
• It’s not ‘just’ a placebo
• Useful pharmacology
• How some psychics use psychology to screw you (Forer)
• AI hallucination is just man-guessing
• Moral blindspots
• Successful prophets
• Everything is ideology
• Aristotle, Metaphysics
• John Dewey, Experience and Nature
• Richard Dawkins, TED: Militant atheism
• Bertram Forer, The fallacy of personal validation
• Phenotypic drug discovery
• Yann Martel, Life of Pi

Related stuff:

• The charismatic leader (Weber)

Rather read? I also made this episode into an article: https://btr.mt/analects/scientific-ritual-lecture

And the piece it’s based on: https://btr.mt/analects/the-scientific-ritual.

Stuff I mentioned:

• The Scientific Ritual—the article this lecture is based on
• Problems with p-values—the technical companion: Fisher, Neyman-Pearson, the hybrid mess
• The trap of scientific evidence—on the “no evidence” tension and the homeopathy/parachute paradox
• Everything is ideology—science as one belief system among several
• In praise of the sage—other ways of knowing; the MD/PhD distinction
• Scientific fact—on what science actually does
• Meditation—on the dinner-table meditation example
• Beyond System 1 and System 2—on Kahneman’s dual-process framework
• Grit—positive-psychology critique
• Overengineering calming down (lecture)—the broader positive-psychology audit
• Bias is good (lecture)—the cognitive-bias series
• Life is worse (lecture)—the previous episode; a worked example of reading a literature
• Open Science Collaboration (2015), Estimating the reproducibility of psychological science, Science 349 (6251)
• Wikipedia: replication crisis
• American Statistical Association: Wasserstein, Schirm & Lazar (2019), Moving to a World Beyond “p < 0.05”
• Gerd Gigerenzer (2018), Statistical Rituals: The Replication Delusion and How We Got There, Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science
• Philip B. Stark & Andrea Saltelli (2018), Cargo-cult statistics and scientific crisis, Significance 15 (4)
• Andrew Gelman & Eric Loken (2014), The Statistical Crisis in Science—the “garden of forking paths” paper
• Andrew Gelman, Why I don’t like so-called Bayesian hypothesis testing
• Wikipedia: p-value, Bayes factor
• Ronald A. Fisher (1925), Statistical Methods for Research Workers—where the 5% threshold appears as an illustrative example
• Harold Jeffreys (1939), Theory of Probability—where the Bayes-factor thresholds (BF > 3 substantial, BF > 10 strong) come from
• JASP—the open-source Bayesian statistics software with default priors
• Cuddy, Wilmuth & Carney (2010) original power posing paper; Carney’s later statement withdrawing support
• Hagger et al. (2016), A Multilab Preregistered Replication of the Ego-Depletion Effect
• Bargh, Chen & Burrows (1996) original elderly priming paper; failed Doyen et al. (2012) replication
• Brown, Sokal & Friedman (2013), The Complex Dynamics of Wishful Thinking—demolishing the 3:1 positivity ratio
• Carol Dweck, growth mindset—replication concerns documented in Sisk et al. (2018) and Bahník & Vranka
• Angela Duckworth, grit—meta-analytic critique in Credé, Tynan & Harms (2017)
• Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow
• Stephen J. Gould, Adam’s Navel and Other Essays
• Yann Martel, Life of Pi
• Bill Mollison, Permaculture: A Designer’s Manual
• Richard Dawkins on militant atheism (TED)—the “evidence vs. faith” framing
• Reform efforts: preregistration, open data, multi-lab replication consortia (e.g. ManyLabs)
• TED talk
• Ronald Fisher
• Ego depletion
• [flow states](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)
• happiness advantage
• Bayesian statistics
• Bill Mollison

Related stuff:

• The value of ritual—ritual as a knowledge-production strategy
• The placebo effect—on why “works for some, not for others” is a feature, not a bug

Rather read? I also made this episode into an article: https://btr.mt/analects/life-is-worse-lecture

And the piece it’s based on: https://btr.mt/analects/life-is-worse.

Stuff I mentioned:

• It’s Not Social Media, Life Is Just Worse—the article that inspired this lecture
• Amusing Ourselves to Death—on Neil Postman and the information overload problem
• Atavism Isn’t the Answer—the lecture on why “go back to the old ways” rarely works
• The Trap of Scientific Evidence—on the two forms of “no evidence”
• The Scientific Ritual—on the replication crisis and lazy application of the scientific method
• Amy Orben’s research group, University of Cambridge
• Ferguson, C. J. et al. (2024). Social media use and youth mental health: A meta-analysis. Professional Psychology: Research and Practice. doi:10.1037/pro0000589
• Fassi, L., Orben, A. et al. (2024). Social media and adolescent mental health: A meta-analysis of 143 studies. JAMA Pediatrics. doi:10.1001/jamapediatrics.2024.2078
• Tolboll, K. B. (2026). Social media use and mental health in children and adolescents: An umbrella review. Child and Adolescent Mental Health. doi:10.1111/camh.70071
• Fassi, L., Orben, A. et al. (2025). Digital technology use and adolescent mental health: A registered report. Nature Human Behaviour. doi:10.1038/s41562-025-02134-4
• Broadbent, P. et al. (2023). The public health implications of the cost-of-living crisis. The Lancet Regional Health – Europe. doi:10.1016/j.lanepe.2023.100585
• Arundel, R. et al. (2022). Housing unaffordability and mental health. International Journal of Housing Policy. doi:10.1080/19491247.2022.2106541
• McGorry, P. D. et al. (2025). The youth mental health crisis: A paradigm shift. Frontiers in Psychiatry. doi:10.3389/fpsyt.2024.1517533
• Kirkbride, J. B. et al. (2024). The social determinants of mental health and disorder. World Psychiatry. doi:10.1002/wps.21160
• Plackett, R. et al. (2022). Digital technology and mental health of young people: A scoping review. JMIR Mental Health. doi:10.2196/43213
• Garcia-Manglano, J. et al. (2024). Escapism, social media, and internalising symptoms in adolescents. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships. doi:10.1177/02654075241230248
• Maheux, A. J. et al. (2024). Social media use and adolescent mental health: An annual research review. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry. doi:10.1111/jcpp.14085
• Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985). Wikipedia
• Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation (2024). Wikipedia
• Stuart Ritchie, Science Fictions (2020). Publisher
• The Amygdala is Not the Fear Centre
• Bias is Good
• Overengineering calming down
• Useful Men

Related stuff:

• Why Do People Kill Themselves—on what structural decline does to the most vulnerable
• Why Being Sad Isn’t Always a Bad Thing—on situation–symptom congruence
• The Loneliness Epidemic
• Models of Psychopathology—on diagnostic quality and what counts as mental illness
• The True Meaning of Family Ties—on changing family structures and social fragmentation
• Creating a Digital Home—on digital selfhood and why we don’t treat our digital lives with care

Rather read? I also made this episode into an article: https://btr.mt/analects/overengineering-calming-down-lecture

And the piece it’s based on: https://btr.mt/analects/overengineering-calming-down.

Stuff I mentioned:

• Polyvagal theory (Wikipedia)
• Triune brain model (Wikipedia)
• Positive Intelligence white paper
• Default mode network (Wikipedia)
• Schema therapy (Wikipedia)
• Gestalt therapy (Wikipedia)
• Journal of Animal Sentience: do fish feel pain?
• Stress is Good
• The Amygdala is Not the Fear Centre
• Bias is Good
• positive intelligence
• Wikipedia page itself
• triune brain model
• Internal family systems

Related stuff:

• The Betterment article that inspired this one
• More on why the amygdala isn’t what pop-psych says
• How stress actually works
• Why we dress up simple ideas in neuroscience jargon
• The sociology of the “interesting”
• Abstractions as gods
• On naming things and losing them in the process
• The value of brain waves
• Honey-bees are smarter than they should be
• The false promise of a return to nature
• Giving in to fight or flight
• The problem of easy measurement
• On emotion
• No action without emotion
• Emotion and the mind
• Why your unconscious isn’t the bad guy
• Nervous energy
• Positive Intelligence pt. I
• Positive Intelligence pt. II
• Positive Intelligence pt. III
• How does the brain ‘think’? Pt. I

Rather read? I also made this episode into an article: https://btr.mt/analects/bias-is-good-lecture

And the piece it’s based on: https://btr.mt/analects/bias-is-good.

Stuff I mentioned:

• The Betterment article that inspired this
• Confirmation bias is all there is—fundamental beliefs and belief-consistent processing
• Bias vs Bias—heuristics vs biases, and why the distinction matters
• Stress and the Yerkes-Dodson Law—bias vs noise in the stress response
• Stress is Good (Lecture 1)—the stress lecture
• The Amygdala is Not the Fear Centre (Lecture 2)—the amygdala lecture
• Everything is Ideology—why biases are adaptive
• Pop Neuroscience is Just a Fancy Way of Saying “Calm Down”
• Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow
• List of cognitive biases (Wikipedia)—the 200+ biases
• Rational-actor model (Wikipedia)
• Milkman et al. (2021): Megastudy on behavioural nudges for vaccination
• Oeberst & Imhoff (2023): Toward Parsimony in Bias Research—the fundamental beliefs paper
• Robert Axelrod’s iterated prisoner’s dilemma tournaments
• Bias–variance tradeoff (Wikipedia)
• How some ‘psychics’ use psychology to screw you
• How always being right makes you dumber
• Eerie coincidences aren’t that eerie

Rather read? I also made this episode into an article: https://btr.mt/analects/the-amygdala-is-not-the-fear-centre-lecture

And the piece it’s based on: https://btr.mt/analects/the-amygdala-is-not-the-fear-centre.

Stuff I mentioned:

• The Betterment article that inspired this
• Stress is Good (Lecture 1)—the stress lecture that set this up
• Why fight-or-flight isn’t what you think
• How we make meaning in the brain
• The Atlantic article—the management professor’s piece on stress and the amygdala
• Daniel Goleman, Emotional Intelligence
• Amygdala hijack (Wikipedia)—note the lack of academic citations
• Amygdala (Wikipedia)—particularly the section on emotional learning
• Pessoa (2010): Emotion and cognition (PDF)—reappraisal evidence, pg 44
• Janak & Tye (2015): From circuits to behaviour in the amygdala—the complexity of amygdala function
• Adolphs (2015): “The unsolved problems of neuroscience”—on the amygdala and emotional significance
• Knowledge is just easy measurement

Related stuff:

• More on stress and the Yerkes-Dodson Law
• Pop Neuroscience is Just a Fancy Way of Saying “Calm Down”—the next lecture in this thread

Rather read? I also made this episode into an article: https://btr.mt/analects/hydraulic-despotism-lecture

And the piece it’s based on: https://btr.mt/analects/hydraulic-despotism.

Stuff I mentioned:

• The Betterment article that inspired this
• From Zero: on recreating systems from scratch
• Digital Selves: taking control of your digital presence
• True Family Ties: on the erosion of our communities
• Karl Wittfogel and Hydraulic civilisations on Wikipedia
• Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism
• Thames Water’s debt crisis (BBC)
• Russia-Ukraine food insecurity (European Council)
• Nvidia valuation (BBC)
• Mann’s Infrastructural Power on Wikipedia
• Platform Capitalism and its dynamics
• Callon’s Obligatory Passage Points and Latour’s Actor-Network Theory on Wikipedia
• Essential Facilities Doctrine on Wikipedia
• EU Digital Markets Act on Wikipedia
• Cory Doctorow, “The Post-American Internet” (39C3 talk)—on the new coalition, anticircumvention law, and Eurostack
• Cory Doctorow on enshittification and adversarial interoperability
• Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons
• Selye’s Eustress—the distinction between good stress and bad stress
• The beauty of stress

Related stuff:

• Education is Entertainment: on why some ideas stick

Rather read? I also made this episode into an article: https://btr.mt/analects/atavism-isnt-the-answer-lecture

And the piece it’s based on: https://btr.mt/analects/atavism-isnt-the-answer.

Stuff I mentioned:

• The Betterment article that inspired this
• Evolution is Overrated
• All Food is Toxic
• Hydraulic Despotism
• Nature vs Nurture Just Isn’t That Interesting
• Tinbergen’s Four Questions
• Education is Entertainment: on why some ideas stick
• Mundane Cults
• MAHA (Make America Healthy Again) on Wikipedia
• Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Wikipedia
• Butter and Plant-Based Oils Intake and Mortality, JAMA Internal Medicine (2025)
• The Evidence Behind Seed Oils’ Health Effects, Johns Hopkins (2025)
• Paul Saladino, The Carnivore Code
• Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation
• Candice Odgers, Nature review on smartphones and mental health
• Ferguson (2025): Do Social Media Experiments Prove a Link With Mental Health: A Methodological and Meta-Analytic Review
• Liver King on Wikipedia
• Andrew Huberman on Wikipedia
• Ballerina Farm / Hannah Neeleman on Wikipedia
• Tradwife on Wikipedia
• Tradwife: Between Myths and Realities, King’s College London Global Institute for Women’s Leadership
• MAHA, Means, Money, Public Citizen report on MAHA and wellness industry revenue
• Mundane Cults
• The trap of scientific evidence

Rather read? I also made this episode into an article: https://btr.mt/analects/values-dont-matter-lecture

And the piece it’s based on: https://btr.mt/analects/values-dont-matter.

Stuff I mentioned:

• The Betterment article that inspired this
• Overview of the ethical landscape
• On catastrophic leadership failure
• Everything is choice architecture
• Making strong group dynamics
• Belief-consistent information processing
• MacIntyre’s After Virtue
• Situationist critique of virtue ethics
• Person-situation debate
• Milgram’s obedience experiments
• Stanford Prison Experiment
• John Doris on the ecological approach to ethics
• Maria Merritt on “humility ethics”
• Moore and Beadle on organisations as MacIntyrean practices
• Coming together - the pattern of friendship and love
• longtermism
• nature versus nurture question
• Your personality doesn’t belong to you
• Alert - IQ scores are meaningless
• Leadership consulting is usually more ‘feel good’ than ‘do good’
• Malcolm Gladwell Shit

Related stuff:

• On motivation

Rather read? I also made this episode into an article: https://btr.mt/analects/the-hard-problem-of-consciousness-isnt-a-problem-lecture

And the piece it’s based on: https://btr.mt/analects/questions-that-dont-matter#consciousness.

Stuff I mentioned:

• Panpsychism
• AI Consciousness
• Consciousness vs Conscious Access
• Mundane Cults
• The Placebo Effect
• John Locke: Primary-Secondary Quality Distinction
• Mary’s Room (Knowledge Argument)
• Qualia on Wikipedia
• Thomas Nagel: “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”
• Animal Echolocation
• Hard Problem of Consciousness
• Philosophical Zombie
• Sam Harris: The Moral Landscape
• Sam Harris TED Talk: Science Can Answer Moral Questions
• New Mysterianism
• Brian Key: Fish Cannot Feel Pain
• Do Honey Bees Have Conscious Experience?
• Insight and the Sciences

Related stuff:

• Spirituality of the Mind

Rather read? I also made this episode into an article: https://btr.mt/analects/free-will-isnt-important-lecture

And the piece it’s based on: https://btr.mt/analects/questions-that-dont-matter#free-will-vs-determinism.

Stuff I mentioned:

• Dual-Process Theories
• Brain Waves
• The Environment is Everything
• Determinism on Wikipedia
• Fatalism on Wikipedia
• Theological Determinism
• Benjamin Libet’s Experiments
• Neuroscience of Free Will
• Agent Causation
• Compatibilism
• Neuroethics and Free Will
• Fatalism: The Idle Argument
• What lies beneath? The uncomfortably vague ‘Unconscious Processes’
• On Motivation
• There is no authentic self
• Spirituality of Mind

Related stuff:

• On Motivation: Thinky vs Non-Thinky
• Spirituality of the Mind

Rather read? I also made this episode into an article: https://btr.mt/analects/nature-vs-nurture-doesnt-matter-lecture

And the piece it’s based on: https://btr.mt/analects/genetics-is-nurture.

Stuff I mentioned:

• Genetics is Nurture
• Evolution is Overrated
• Atavism Isn’t the Answer
• Stress is Good
• Prehistoric Polygamy
• Sexual Strategies and Evolution
• Tinbergen’s Four Questions
• The Environment is Everything
• Education is Entertainment
• Heritability on Wikipedia
• Height heritability study
• Fatalism: The Idle Argument

Related stuff:

• All Food is Toxic

Rather read? I also made this episode into an article: https://btr.mt/analects/mundane-cults-lecture

And the pieces it’s based on: https://btr.mt/analects/mundane-cults, https://btr.mt/analects/true-family-ties.

Stuff I mentioned:

• Successful Prophets
• The Value of Ritual
• Human Perspective is Not the Only One
• Everything is Ideology
• The Scientific Ritual
• Panpsychism
• All Food is Toxic
• Easy Measurement Bias
• The Placebo Effect
• The Charismatic Leader (Weber)
• True Family Ties
• Abstractions as Gods
• Sociological classification of cults
• Roy Wallis on Wikipedia
• The Protestant Reformation
• Robert Jay Lifton on Wikipedia
• Robert Jay Lifton: Theories of Totalism
• Margaret Singer on Wikipedia
• Janja Lalich on Wikipedia
• Steven Hassan: Combating Cult Mind Control
• Korean War
• Brainwashing: China and the Korean War
• Jonestown
• Heaven’s Gate
• Manson Family
• Religious Behaviour on Wikipedia
• LA Times: Cults as Places of Value
• JSTOR: Affiliation and Spiritual Fulfillment
• Church vs Sect (Troeltsch and Niebuhr)
• own book
• Stupid Questions

Related stuff:

• Questions That Don’t Matter
• Belief-Consistent Information Processing

Rather read? I also made this episode into an article: https://btr.mt/analects/men-arent-from-mars-lecture

And the pieces it’s based on: https://btr.mt/analects/men-are-from-mars-women-are-from-venus-1, https://btr.mt/analects/men-are-from-mars-women-are-from-venus-2, https://btr.mt/analects/men-are-from-mars-women-are-from-venus-3.

Stuff I mentioned:

• Men and women are from earth, fool pt. I
  • On Gray’s credentials and Chapter 2’s absurdities
• Men and women are from earth, fool pt. II
  • On how Gray’s “Martians” are actually just poorly attached people
• Men and women are from earth, fool pt. III
  • On how women’s ordinary needs are cast as unreasonable
• Is Having a Boyfriend Embarrassing Now? - British Vogue
  • Chanté Joseph’s viral article on modern dating
• Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus (Wikipedia)
• John Gray (author) - Wikipedia
• Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging - Sebastian Junger - On why young men join the military
• Gender essentialism
• Sexual dimorphism in humans
• Nature article on sex differences in the brain
• The Myth of Mars and Venus (book)
  • Academic critique of Gray’s work
• Columbia Pacific University
  • Gray’s fraudulent PhD
• FDA Warning Letter to John Gray’s Mars Venus LLC
• Women are better at using soft skills crucial for leadership - Korn Ferry
• Rejection sensitivity
• Attachment theory and styles
• Animals First
• Genetics is nurture
• Four Sure Signs Your Relationship is on the Rocks
• How to make any fight in your relationship work in your favour

Rather read? I also made this episode into an article: https://btr.mt/analects/stress-is-good-lecture

And the pieces it’s based on: https://btr.mt/analects/stress-is-good, https://btr.mt/analects/yerkes-dodson-bias-vs-noise, https://btr.mt/analects/the-amygdala-is-not-the-fear-centre.

Stuff I mentioned:

• The Atlantic Article, demonstrating the typical approach to stress
• Sapolsky’s book Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers
• Yerkes Dodson Law
• Vartinian et al. (2020), Goldfarb et al. (2017), Lenow et al. (2017) or this commentary on the relationship between low stress and cognitive flexibility
• Eustress (Hans Seyle, 1976). More modern developments would be Cognitive Appraisal Models and Attribution Theory
• Chronic Stress and Allostatic Load
• Animals First
• Giving in to Fight or Flight

Related stuff:

• The Betterment article that inspired this
• More on stress and cognitive flexibility
• Why the amygdala doesn’t work the way you think