Cursed Knowledge

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.

About Food & Health

• Processed food engineering: Learning how food scientists design products to be maximally addictive, using specific combinations of salt, sugar, and fat that trigger dopamine responses
• Factory farming realities: The actual conditions in which most meat, dairy, and eggs are produced
• Microplastics ubiquity: They're in our water, food, air, and bloodstream. There's no escape, and we don't know the long-term effects
• Sugar industry manipulation: How Big Sugar suppressed research about sugar's health effects for decades, similar to tobacco companies

About Technology & Privacy

• Data broker profiles: The incredibly detailed profiles companies build about you from seemingly innocuous data points
• Attention economy mechanics: How social media platforms are designed to create addiction and maximize engagement at the cost of mental health
• Smartphone tracking: Your phone tracks your location even when you think it's off, and this data is sold to hundreds of companies
• AI training datasets: Many AI systems are trained on data scraped without consent, including private conversations and copyrighted material

About Economics & Society

• Wealth concentration mathematics: How compound interest and capital gains ensure that wealth inequality grows exponentially over time
• Planned obsolescence: How products are intentionally designed to fail after a certain period to drive repeat purchases
• Marketing psychology: The sophisticated psychological manipulation techniques used in advertising and retail design
• Healthcare profit incentives: How treatment is often more profitable than prevention or cures

About Human Psychology

• Cognitive bias catalog: Once you know about confirmation bias, anchoring, and availability heuristic, you start seeing how wrong your brain is about everything
• Social proof manipulation: How easy it is to manufacture consensus and make people believe false things through fake social signals
• Sunk cost fallacy: Recognizing how much of life is spent continuing bad decisions just because you've already invested in them
• Dunning-Kruger effect: The more incompetent someone is, the more confident they tend to be, and this explains a lot about public discourse

About Media & Information

• News cycle manipulation: How stories are timed and framed to distract from other news or serve particular interests
• Astroturfing prevalence: How much of what appears to be grassroots opinion is actually manufactured by PR firms
• Search engine bias: How Google and other search engines shape what information you can find and in what order
• Historical revisionism: How much of what you learned in school was simplified, biased, or outright false

About Environmental Reality

• Climate feedback loops: The self-reinforcing cycles that make climate change accelerate beyond what linear models predict
• Ecosystem collapse timelines: How quickly biodiversity loss is occurring and what it means for food systems
• Ocean acidification: The "other CO₂ problem" that's killing marine ecosystems and getting less attention than global warming
• Topsoil depletion: We're losing the soil that feeds us faster than it can be replenished

About Personal Relationships

• Attachment theory implications: How your early childhood experiences continue to shape your relationships in predictable ways
• Relationship statistics: The actual success rates of marriages, the prevalence of infidelity, and what predicts relationship failure
• Social network effects: How your friends' friends' friends can influence your behavior and decisions without you knowing
• Empathy limits: Humans can only meaningfully care about about 150 people, which explains a lot about society's problems

About Existential Realities

• Heat death of the universe: Everything will eventually end in maximum entropy and cold darkness
• Fermi paradox implications: The various explanations for why we haven't found alien life, and what they suggest about our future
• Mortality salience: How awareness of death influences almost every decision you make, usually unconsciously
• Simulation hypothesis: The mathematical argument that we're more likely to be in a simulation than base reality

About Work & Career

• Peter Principle universality: Most people rise to their level of incompetence and stay there
• Bullshit jobs prevalence: How many careers involve work that adds no real value to the world
• Automation displacement: Which jobs will be eliminated by AI and how quickly it's happening
• Meritocracy myth: How much success depends on luck, privilege, and circumstances rather than merit

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.

@article{yotam2025cursed-knowledge,
  title   = "Cursed Knowledge",
  author  = "Yotam, Kris",
  journal = "krisyotam.com",
  year    = "2025",
  month   = "May",
  url     = "https://krisyotam.com/notes/random/cursed-knowledge"
}