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<h1>Cursed Knowledge</h1>
<div class="keepws">
(<span class="bold">notes</span>
(date 2025-05-30)
(category <a href="../../notes.html">culture</a>)
(status <span class="status-evergreen">evergreen</span>)
(confidence certain)
(importance 6)
(tags reflection epistemology beliefs))
</div>
<p class="preview">Insights that made my life harder after learning them.</p>
<div class="prose">
<h2>Cursed Knowledge</h2>
<p>Things I wish I could unknow. Information that, once learned, changes how you see the world—usually for the worse. Consider this your content warning.</p>
<h3>About Food & Health</h3>
<ul>
<li><strong>Processed food engineering</strong>: Learning how food scientists design products to be maximally addictive, using specific combinations of salt, sugar, and fat that trigger dopamine responses</li>
<li><strong>Factory farming realities</strong>: The actual conditions in which most meat, dairy, and eggs are produced</li>
<li><strong>Microplastics ubiquity</strong>: They're in our water, food, air, and bloodstream. There's no escape, and we don't know the long-term effects</li>
<li><strong>Sugar industry manipulation</strong>: How Big Sugar suppressed research about sugar's health effects for decades, similar to tobacco companies</li>
</ul>
<h3>About Technology & Privacy</h3>
<ul>
<li><strong>Data broker profiles</strong>: The incredibly detailed profiles companies build about you from seemingly innocuous data points</li>
<li><strong>Attention economy mechanics</strong>: How social media platforms are designed to create addiction and maximize engagement at the cost of mental health</li>
<li><strong>Smartphone tracking</strong>: Your phone tracks your location even when you think it's off, and this data is sold to hundreds of companies</li>
<li><strong>AI training datasets</strong>: Many AI systems are trained on data scraped without consent, including private conversations and copyrighted material</li>
</ul>
<h3>About Economics & Society</h3>
<ul>
<li><strong>Wealth concentration mathematics</strong>: How compound interest and capital gains ensure that wealth inequality grows exponentially over time</li>
<li><strong>Planned obsolescence</strong>: How products are intentionally designed to fail after a certain period to drive repeat purchases</li>
<li><strong>Marketing psychology</strong>: The sophisticated psychological manipulation techniques used in advertising and retail design</li>
<li><strong>Healthcare profit incentives</strong>: How treatment is often more profitable than prevention or cures</li>
</ul>
<h3>About Human Psychology</h3>
<ul>
<li><strong>Cognitive bias catalog</strong>: Once you know about confirmation bias, anchoring, and availability heuristic, you start seeing how wrong your brain is about everything</li>
<li><strong>Social proof manipulation</strong>: How easy it is to manufacture consensus and make people believe false things through fake social signals</li>
<li><strong>Sunk cost fallacy</strong>: Recognizing how much of life is spent continuing bad decisions just because you've already invested in them</li>
<li><strong>Dunning-Kruger effect</strong>: The more incompetent someone is, the more confident they tend to be, and this explains a lot about public discourse</li>
</ul>
<h3>About Media & Information</h3>
<ul>
<li><strong>News cycle manipulation</strong>: How stories are timed and framed to distract from other news or serve particular interests</li>
<li><strong>Astroturfing prevalence</strong>: How much of what appears to be grassroots opinion is actually manufactured by PR firms</li>
<li><strong>Search engine bias</strong>: How Google and other search engines shape what information you can find and in what order</li>
<li><strong>Historical revisionism</strong>: How much of what you learned in school was simplified, biased, or outright false</li>
</ul>
<h3>About Environmental Reality</h3>
<ul>
<li><strong>Climate feedback loops</strong>: The self-reinforcing cycles that make climate change accelerate beyond what linear models predict</li>
<li><strong>Ecosystem collapse timelines</strong>: How quickly biodiversity loss is occurring and what it means for food systems</li>
<li><strong>Ocean acidification</strong>: The "other CO₂ problem" that's killing marine ecosystems and getting less attention than global warming</li>
<li><strong>Topsoil depletion</strong>: We're losing the soil that feeds us faster than it can be replenished</li>
</ul>
<h3>About Personal Relationships</h3>
<ul>
<li><strong>Attachment theory implications</strong>: How your early childhood experiences continue to shape your relationships in predictable ways</li>
<li><strong>Relationship statistics</strong>: The actual success rates of marriages, the prevalence of infidelity, and what predicts relationship failure</li>
<li><strong>Social network effects</strong>: How your friends' friends' friends can influence your behavior and decisions without you knowing</li>
<li><strong>Empathy limits</strong>: Humans can only meaningfully care about about 150 people, which explains a lot about society's problems</li>
</ul>
<h3>About Existential Realities</h3>
<ul>
<li><strong>Heat death of the universe</strong>: Everything will eventually end in maximum entropy and cold darkness</li>
<li><strong>Fermi paradox implications</strong>: The various explanations for why we haven't found alien life, and what they suggest about our future</li>
<li><strong>Mortality salience</strong>: How awareness of death influences almost every decision you make, usually unconsciously</li>
<li><strong>Simulation hypothesis</strong>: The mathematical argument that we're more likely to be in a simulation than base reality</li>
</ul>
<h3>About Work & Career</h3>
<ul>
<li><strong>Peter Principle universality</strong>: Most people rise to their level of incompetence and stay there</li>
<li><strong>Bullshit jobs prevalence</strong>: How many careers involve work that adds no real value to the world</li>
<li><strong>Automation displacement</strong>: Which jobs will be eliminated by AI and how quickly it's happening</li>
<li><strong>Meritocracy myth</strong>: How much success depends on luck, privilege, and circumstances rather than merit</li>
</ul>
<p><em>Knowledge is power, but some knowledge is a burden. Once you know these things, you can't unknow them. They change how you see everything else.</em></p>
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