[newsletter]
There are no levels and other things
2 May 2026
Hello,
Here’s everything since my last little missive to you:
Excerpt: A consultant once told me we needed to move some leaders to “the next level”. When I asked what the levels were, it turned out there weren’t any. This kind of thing—pretty words that point at nothing, or at something banal, or away from something troubling—I call karstica. Like the limestone landscapes it’s named for, karstica is attractive at the surface and hollow underneath. And in the age of AI, we’ve built a factory for it.
Main idea: 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.
Excerpt: Science feels like the most reliable thing we have. The opposite of belief. But it’s a belief system itself—a ritual, with all the failure modes that rituals have. And the receipts are right there in the replication crisis.
Main idea: The scientific method is just another belief system, a ritual subject to errors of application like any other. And the consequence is a machine for generating exaggerations.
The Era Of The Business Idiot. Good article on what I have variously called Malcolm Gladwell Shit or karstic traps. I’ll pull a few quotes for the core idea:
Decades of direct erosion of the very concept of leadership means that the people running companies have been selected not based on their actual efficacy — especially as the position became defined by its lack of actual production — but on whether they resemble what a manager or executive is meant to look like based on the work that somebody else did.
“The power structures of modern society are run by business idiots — people that have learned enough to impress the people above them, because the business idiots have had power for decades. They have bred out true meritocracy or achievement or value-creation in favor of symbolic growth and superficial intelligence, because real work is hard, and there are so many of them in power they’ve all found a way to work together.”
“We live in the era of the symbolic executive, when ‘being good at stuff’ matters far less than the appearance of doing stuff, where ‘what’s useful’ is dictated not by outputs or metrics that one can measure but rather the vibes passed between managers and executives that have worked their entire careers to escape the world of work.”
“On some level, modern corporate power structures are a giant game of telephone where vibes beget further vibes, where managers only kind-of-sort-of understand what’s going on, and the more vague one’s understanding is, the more likely you are to lean toward what’s good, or easy, or makes you feel warm and fuzzy inside.”
“ChatGPT’s popularity is the ultimate Business Idiot success story — the ‘fastest growing product in Silicon Valley history’ that didn’t grow because it was useful, or good, or able to do anything in particular, but because a media controlled by Business Idiots decided it was ‘the next big thing’… Much like the Business Idiot themselves, ChatGPT doesn’t need to do anything specific. It just needs to make the right sounds at the right times to impress people that barely care what it does.”
In sum, Zitron is upset about karstica—stuff that sounds good but doesn’t really deliver anything. Malcolm Gladwell Shit—stuff that resembles thought or leadership, and which violates your weakly held beliefs, so looks appealing even while not producing anything.
Zitron reckons this is why corporates adopted AI and fired everyone before there was any data on how AI might help—the business idiot recognises the LLM as kin.
–
I hope you found something interesting.
You can find links to all my previous missives here.
Warm regards,