behaviorengineering.ai
behaviorengineering.ai
Mind-Infrastructure Social-Protocols Cognitive-Memetics Human-Condition
behaviorengineering.ai

  • You don't see what you're seeing, until you see it; but when you do see it... it let's you see many other things.

    - William Thurston -

  • It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see.

    - Henry David Thoreau -

  • The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.

    - Robertson Davies -

  • Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.

    - Marcus Aurelius -

  • You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.

    - Mark Twain -

  • We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.

    - Anaïs Nin -

  • All significant breakthroughs are break-'withs' old ways of thinking.

    - Thomas Kuhn -

  • A mind is like a parachute. It doesn't work if it is not open.

    - Frank Zappa -

  • The question is not whether intelligent machines can have emotions, but whether machines can be intelligent without them.

    - Marvin Minsky -

  • No price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.

    - Friedrich Nietzsche -

  • Freedom is what we do with what is done to us.

    - Jean-Paul Sartre -

  • Do not allow yourselves to be deceived: Great Minds are Skeptical.

    - Friedrich Nietzsche -

  • There are no facts, only interpretations.

    - Friedrich Nietzsche -
At the dawn of scaling AI . . . we stand before mirrors of our own species. . .
It is now time to speak, to act, and to ensure that as we mass deploy synthetic intelligence, we help it move beyond our recurring imperfections.

Psychological fitness standards for Australia's highest offices

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28 days of stories and arguments for stronger psychological fitness checks for Australia’s top leaders. Petition EN9806.
Cognitive-MemeticsPsych-Fitness-28
D28Today is the final day to sign
/cognitive-memetics/psych-fitness-28/2026-05-29-day-28-today-is-the-final-day-to-sign/28.webp

TLDR

October 28, 1962.

Khrushchev announced the withdrawal of missiles from Cuba. The crisis ended. The world stepped back from nuclear war because structures around the president helped hold judgment steady under maximum pressure.

Kennedy had support. He had mechanisms. He had people who could push back when his judgment narrowed. That is the standard we are asking for now.

Today is the final day to sign. Every signature stands for a simple truth. The people making our biggest decisions need the fitness and support to make them well.

Context

We all run on the same human hardware. Let’s build the support and checks to match the pressure of the job.

Sign the petition: 👉 Petition (EN9806): Stronger Checks and Balances: Psychological Fitness for Australia’s Top Leaders https://www.aph.gov.au/e-petitions/petition/EN9806

Cognitive-Memetics

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How ideas spread and take over.

Memes, frames, and narratives that jump between minds and compete for attention and control.

Cognitive-MemeticsReptilocracy
W9Thanks For Your Taxes
/cognitive-memetics/reptilocracy/2026-06-07-the-geopolitics-donation-box/the-geopolitics-donation-box.jpg

TLDR

We drop in our income contribution while the box quietly buys more chaos overseas. The system calls it policy, but it feels like backing a fund that makes the world hotter and then sells us fire insurance.

Context

This scene shows misaligned incentives in large systems: ordinary people carry the financial risk, while a narrow leadership layer enjoys status, contracts, and “overseas adventures.” Narrative control masks this by wrapping interventions in abstract language about security, influence, or stability, so paying for escalation feels responsible rather than optional.

Time horizons stay short, leaders focus on the next news cycle or election, not on the long-term blowback we are underwriting. “We fund the game and live with the score.” Without psychological fitness filters for honesty about costs, restraint under status pressure, and the courage to say no to attractive but destabilising moves, institutions keep promoting people who treat geopolitics as a prestige hobby bought with other people’s lives and money.

Mind-Infrastructure

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How tools and systems reshape how we think.

AI models, platforms, metrics, and habits that train, outsource, or dull human intelligence.

Mind-Infrastructure
💊🌀 Why might someone pass exams on LSD without notes?
/mind-infrastructure/2026-06-04-lsd-plasticity-overfitting/wrong-pill-matrix.webp

Claim

After a classic psychedelic dose, the brain may enter a brief neuroplasticity window where recent material encodes more strongly while updating when rules change gets harder. One way to read that mix is a short-lived overfitting bias; that offers a speculative explanation for stories of effortless memorization, not proof they happened.

Grounding

Classic psychedelics can open a neuroplasticity window that outlasts the acute trip. A low-dose LSD study (50 μg, tested 24 h later) found better episodic memory and verbal fluency but worse cognitive flexibility when rules changed. Sources: Towards an understanding of psychedelic-induced neuroplasticity ; LSD, afterglow and hangover: Increased episodic memory and verbal fluency, decreased cognitive flexibility

Human-Condition

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What it’s like to be human under all this.

Wiring, traits, empathy, and dysfunction, and how they play out in work, love, and power.

Human-ConditionMental-Processes
🏢🔺 Why does every group organize into a pyramid?
/human-condition/2026-05-28-why-humans-keep-building-pyramids/skull.jpg

Claim

Brains compress the world into layers and rank, route attention upward, so local noise gets summarized before it reaches a decision. That is why pyramid-like groups feel obvious: a few signals at the top, many roles below, a ladder everyone can read. Hierarchy is an attractor, not destiny. Flatter systems need counter-design because the nervous system is already used to climbing.

Grounding

Human functional MRI (brain imaging; Zink et al., 2008) shows the brain automatically tracks social rank and treats status wins and losses like rewards worth chasing; layered cortex explains why pyramid orgs feel legible before anyone defends them. Source: Know Your Place: Neural Processing of Social Hierarchy in Humans (PubMed Central).