Human EcologyA Framework for Living
An exploration of how we relate to ourselves, each other, and the world around us. These dispatches form the draft chapters of an evolving book on the art of human flourishing.
Before the Map
Why Morals Need an Ecology
Your worldview, laid bare before we start pretending to be objective. This is where we state the philosophical stance and consilient ambition explicitly: how we see knowledge, morality, science, and meaning, and why a 'human ecology of moral emotion' is the right frame.
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Neurons to Nations
A Quick Tour of the Moral Machine
Defining the core architecture: Biology → Minds → Culture → Institutions → Ecology, with Moral Emotion as interface. This is the table of contents in model form—the overall research program laid out.
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Stone-Age Feelings, Networked Brains
What Evolution Wired In
The biological substrate of moral emotions: evolved affective systems, moral foundations, life-history strategies, and how they constrain which cultures and norms can actually stick.
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Hearts as Q-Functions
How Feelings Run the Cost-Benefit Calculus
Formalizing the idea that emotions (especially moral ones) are multi-level value functions: how they encode 'good/bad' at the gene, agent, group, and institutional levels, and how RL-style learning lives in the brain.
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Moral Accents
How Cultures Teach Different Versions of 'Good'
How cultures parameterize biology into specific moral grammars: what gets moralized, which emotions are legitimate, and how language, religion, and metaphor carve up the moral space.
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How You're Supposed to Feel
Norms, Legitimacy, and the Governance of Inner Weather
Analyzing norms as feeling rules and legitimacy as a shared emotional stance toward institutions; modeling how divergences between lived emotion and prescribed emotion drive norm change.
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Emotion Plumbing
Courts, Platforms, and Machines for Managing Outrage
Treating institutions as affective filters and amplifiers: mapping how designs mute certain emotions (vengeance, favoritism) and amplify others (civic pride, engagement, fear), and what that implies for system health.
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Organs of the Superorganism
The Recurring Characters Every Moral Ecosystem Casts
Defining the 'role ecology' of moral life: punishers, peacemakers, norm hackers, scapegoats, narrators, and how their interplay keeps the superorganism stable—or derails it.
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Framers, Spin Doctors, and Saints
Who Gets to Decide What Counts as 'Evil' This Year
Modeling moral entrepreneurs and strategic framers: how they pick which moral foundations to trigger, how they grow or kill norms, and when sacredness is weaponized or dissolved.
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The Outrage Factory
When Our Moral Hardware Becomes Someone Else's Business Model
Mapping the dark patterns: propaganda, moral panics, outrage farming, sacralization for control, and the structural incentives (algorithms, elites, institutions) that sustain those pathologies.
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Moral Tectonics
Slow Plates, Fast Quakes, and the Fault Lines We Call 'Controversies'
Building a multi-timescale model: how biology, deep culture, institutions, media, and tech move at different speeds, and defining 'controversy zones' as misfits between layers.
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Morals Under Fire
What Breaks, What Hardens, and What Changes Forever in a Crisis
How crises (war, pandemics, collapse) strip away high-level stories, push reversion to slow substrate intuitions, and then crystallize new moral orders; dissecting solidarity vs scapegoating pathways.
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Building Better Moral Weather
How to Live, Design, and Teach in Light of the Whole Ecology
Translating the theory into practice at four levels: individual (self-tuning moral emotions), relational (conflict and care), institutional (designing healthier affective systems), and educational (meta-moral literacy).
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Moral Animals in a Silent Universe
What This All Might Mean If There's No One Else Watching
Placing the whole human moral ecology in a wider metaphysical and existential frame: how different big stories (religious, secular, cosmic) wrap around the model, what remains robust under uncertainty, and how to hold moral seriousness without metaphysical certainty.
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This book is a living document
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