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Karstica — On the science con

• [marginalium] AI Dark Output — 4 Jun 2026
• [marginalium] Space skepticism — 30 May 2026
• [audio] The Scientific Ritual — 2 May 2026
  Science isn’t the opposite of belief. It’s a ritual—and like any ritual it misfires, which is how a method built to find truth becomes a machine for manufacturing exaggerations.
• [article] There are no levels — 1 May 2026
  Ideas that stick are shaped to be interesting, not true. Some of these are weaponised; snuck by our faculties of reason. AI uses them in spades. I call them karstica—superficially pretty, but hiding sinkholes. If you don’t learn to detect it, the thinking gets done for you.
• [marginalium] The Era Of The Business Idiot — 29 Apr 2026
• [audio] It's Not Social Media, Life Is Just Worse — 18 Apr 2026
  Social media isn’t the disease. It’s the symptom you can see. The sad kids on TikTok are there because they’re sad, not sad because they’re there.
• [article] Useful Men — 4 Apr 2026
  It’s true that the ‘pathways’ to manhood are closing. I don’t think it’s a crisis of masculinity though. It’s a crisis of no more excuses for incompetence. We’re trying to find the meaning of manhood when what we actually need are new skills. Men just need to be useful.
• [audio] Overengineering calming down — 4 Apr 2026
  Pop neuroscience is just “calm down” in a lab coat. The theories are scaffolding around trivial advice, attractive because they make your problems someone else’s fault, and the scaffolding hides what actually matters.
• [audio] Bias is Good — 21 Mar 2026
  Bias isn’t a flaw in your thinking. It’s a precision instrument. The brain trades variance for consistency because the world is noisy, so don’t fight the bias, find the belief driving it.
• [audio] The Amygdala is Not the Fear Centre — 7 Mar 2026
  Your amygdala doesn’t decide your fear. You do. It’s not a fear centre, it’s an intensity detector, and calming it down is solving the wrong problem. Watch how you respond instead.
• [article] Values Don't Matter — 21 Feb 2026
  Values often function as virtue ethics—traits we’re expected to cultivate. But virtues are context-dependent: courage for a soldier isn’t courage for a teacher, and people respond primarily to their environment. So the real task is to design the context.
• [audio] Atavism Isn't the Answer — 7 Feb 2026
  Seed oils, raw milk, cold plunges, tradwives—one template runs them all: name a modern ill, invent an ancestral past, sell the return as cure. It’s built on a fantasy we can’t verify.
• [audio] Values Don't Matter — 24 Jan 2026
  Values don’t shape behaviour. The room does. They’re virtue ethics relabelled—and courage for a soldier isn’t courage for a teacher. Build the context; drop the list.
• [audio] Men Aren't From Mars — 15 Nov 2025
  Men and women aren’t wired differently. We read the same behaviour as reasonable in him and unreasonable in her—normalising troubled men while pathologising women’s ordinary needs.
• [audio] Stress is Good — 1 Nov 2025
  Stress isn’t broken by modern life. It’s a performance tool, and the line between fuel and harm isn’t the stressor. It’s whether you control it.