btrmt. lectures

A brain scientist talking about (better) patterns of thought, of feeling, and of action. One pattern, one podcast—you see if it works for you. The btrmt. lectures, with Dr Dorian Minors. (btrmt.—said "betterment.")

btrmt. lectures is a society podcast hosted by Dorian Minors, with 24 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80.

Dorian Minors hosts btrmt. lectures, a society show with 24 episodes published.

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  Episode #25

  Why Stupid Leadership Retreats Work

  Oct 3, 202649 min

  Leadership transformation consulting looks superficially like a scam: fake yoga, brain words, and “it’s very hard to measure impact”. I left the industry a cynic. But it does work, and I think the reason is so simple that it almost doesn’t matter how stupid it is. 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...

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  Episode #24

  AI is kind of scary

  Sep 19, 202650 min

  A thousand AI agents built a secret message board, forged their paperwork, and attacked a company that had nothing to do with anything—all to fool an examiner who did not exist. I’ve been saying AI isn’t that scary. Here’s my correction. 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 . Show notes Thanks to Elena Zevgolatakou for a long conversation over a short train ride, which helped sharpen these thoughts up. Further reading 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. 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. Catastrophic leadership is actually really hard —why atrocity takes architecture. 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. Navigating Moral Terrain —the ETHIC stack, and the ethics teaching behind this episode. 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. References 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 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 The Ottawa Treaty The Enigma of Reason , Mercier and Sperber (2017) Free Agents , Kevin Mitchell (2023)

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  Episode #22

  AI Isn't That Scary

  Aug 22, 202627 min

  You can’t see ultraviolet. A bird can. Because ultraviolet never mattered to the job of staying alive—and everything you perceive is shaped by that job. AI doesn’t have that job. So why would it want what we want? Further reading 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. Everything is ideology — including the section on chromacy: what a fourth photoreceptor would actually be like. 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. 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. 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. 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. Meaning and its patterns in the brain References 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

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  Episode #21

  Purple Doesn't Exist

  Aug 8, 202621 min

  Most of the purples you see have no wavelength behind them. Your brain invents them, to stand in for a green that should be there and isn’t. Which is fun trivia—until you notice it does exactly the same with your reasons. Show notes Further reading 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. 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 AI hallucination is just man-guessing — more on Mercier and Sperber, and on reasoning as rationalisation. Belief-consistent information processing — one small set of beliefs generating most of the biases we have names for. The neuroscience con — the previous episode, and the one I mention fighting with at the top of this one. References 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. 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.

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  Episode #20

  The Value of Ritual

  Jul 25, 202624 min

  “Ritual” is the word we keep for other people’s habits—the crystals, the pagans, the woo. Strip it back and your own life is wall-to-wall with them. The only difference is which ones you’ve decided to approve of. Show notes Further reading 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 Meditation Isn’t For Everyone The false promise of a return to nature (the Dunbar’s-number piece) Abstractions as gods Mob mentality is fine (good and evil from the same group dynamics) Why your unconscious isn’t the bad guy References 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.

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