Dorian Minors
Cambridge-educated brain scientist, behavioural science professor, and creator of btrmt.
About me
About me
My name is Dorian Minors. We each live such peculiarly turbulent lives, “the halt, lame, half-made creatures that we are.” I wanted to understand why.
I started btrmt. over a decade ago because I was studying psychology and it bothered me that these ideas—ideas about how we actually work—were locked behind the right degree. So I started writing them down for people who weren’t, or couldn’t.
I’ve since continued. Six years in the military. A PhD in brain science at Cambridge. Now Associate Professor at Sandhurst. Clinical practice, teaching, research. All of it looking for some instruction manual for this device in our head.
Sadly, I didn’t find one. Anyone who tells you they did is lying.
But I did find something. The more you study the brain, the clearer it becomes: what this device does is map the world to patterns of responding. Rituals of thought, then rituals of behaviour. That’s what brains do. Before anything else, we are animals.
But we’re animals with an extraordinary gift. Of all the creatures, humans have the greatest capacity for nurture. No other animal can come together and share ideas the way we can. We look to each other to cultivate ourselves—it’s our defining quality.
And there’s the tension. That impulse to look outward gets shaped by a world of animals. Power. Productivity. Status. The habits of thought, feeling, and action that shape us—they’re graceful solutions to an impossibly complex world. But most of them were given to us, not chosen by us. Absorbed from the world around us. And we rarely pick them up and examine them. How could we, when our attention is routinely directed towards the economy of shame, outrage, yearning, and terror that floods our media streams.
I call this karstic. Superficially pretty, but troubled by hidden sinkholes. We look fine on the surface. Underneath, the ground is hollow.
btrmt. gathers the patterns we inherit and examines them, so you can choose the ones worth keeping.
The name is the joke and the thesis. Betterment without the vowels. Because betterment is empty without gratification and connection. No true betterment occurs without celebrating the fruits of our success, and betterment is only meaningful in its reflection in the lives of others. btrmt. A little reminder that it’s hollow when it’s all by itself.
Everything I build here keeps those three things at the core—and gives you the architecture to keep them at yours.
fine print
Fineprint
Contact me
Contact me
btrmt. and its projects all use the company name BTRMT LIMITED when I'm selling you something, registered in England and Wales (no. 13755561). The registered office and postal address is:
Capital House
61 Amhurst Road
London E81LL UK
And you can contact me there or you can just email me at dorian(at)btr.mt.
Legal
Legal
Detail on any product related policies can be found at the associated project page.
Privacy
Privacy
I store webserver access logs for the default time (about 15 days) before they’re purged. The logs collect your IP address, the IP address of the site you came here from (if any), timing, type, and content of HTTP requests on the site, as well as standard ‘user agent’ information (browser, operating system, and platform). This is unfortunately essential—all websites need to do some logging to serve you content and protect against malicious actors. It is, however, GDPR compliant, not least because in the timeframe between when you ask me to remove your data and when I have to have it removed, your data will have already been purged. I’m pretty sure I can reduce the storage time to seven days, but it seems like a hassle, so I won’t unless someone asks. I don’t send any of this information to third parties, and I force HTTPS on the site (which protects the usage of your IP address and other identifiable data in the logging in my webserver from third parties).
There are a couple of other instances on this website where your data is processed.
This site uses Goatcounter to get a sense of how users find and use my site. I host the instance, so your data doesn’t go to any third party. Check their privacy policy for the most up to date reference regarding the data I collect with it, but the short version is that I gather non-identifiable data only (GDPR compliant), will only remember you for 8 hours (via hashed IP address), and I don’t drop cookies that follow you around the web. If you want, I can blacklist your IP so Goatcounter doesn’t track it. Just email/mail me. Though then, of course, I’ll be storing your IP address in my “don’t track these IP addresses” list, and this is not hashed. Also, your ISP might change your IP address occasionally, and I have no way of knowing that unless you keep me updated.
The newsletter is run on Listmonk, an open-source, self-hosted newsletter platform. I track who opens the newsletter so I can clean my list of inactive people and thus avoid running afoul of all the various spam-related regulatory techniques out there. I also collect clicks because I do a bit of A/B testing sometimes but, unlike opens, I do this anonymously so I never know who clicked what link. I host the instance, so your data doesn’t go to any third party. I do use Cloudflare Turnstile to protect the signup form from bots. Turnstile claims that doesn’t track you across sites or drop cookies. But if you’re worried, you should read their privacy policy. I only inject it if you interact with the email signup anyway, so you can also just not do that, and the problem is immaterial.
Newsletter Troubleshooting. You need JavaScript enabled for the signup form so that the anti-bot verification can run. If you’re having trouble signing up, contact me and I’ll subscribe you by hand.
If you got directed here because you’re having trouble receiving my emails, then it’s probably because I send mail using Amazon SES and your email server doesn’t like it. Try checking your spam box and/or whitelisting my email:
dorian(at)btr.mt
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