psychology – Page 2 – Trance Blackman

The Accountability Gap: Institutions, Incentives, and Consequences

The Accountability Gap: Institutions, Incentives, and Consequences

Theranos and the Machinery of Trust

23 September 2026 ~ 21 minute read

There are certain conversations that begin with a single story and gradually reveal something much larger underneath it. Theranos is one of those stories. What initially appears to be a tale of technological deception opens into questions about institutions, incentives, accountability, evidence, and the ways ordinary people can be persuaded to trust things they have neither the knowledge nor the means to independently verify.

Lux Colloquii

The Language of Illness: From Symptoms to Systems

The Living Terrain of Body, Mind, and World

21 September 2026 ~ 23 minute read

There’s something about the simplest questions that can open into much larger territory. A cold, a symptom, a restless night, a shift in mood, a change in the weather: none of these things necessarily exist in isolation. They happen within a living system, within a particular person, at a particular moment, in relationship with everything surrounding them. And perhaps some of what we have forgotten begins there, in the relationship itself.

Journal Entries

The Poverty Program: The Operating System We Inherited

The Construct and the Self

19 September 2026 ~ 6 minute read

Perhaps the hardest programming to recognize is the programming that masquerades as virtue. It doesn’t arrive announcing itself as a limitation; it arrives as common sense, responsibility, humility, morality, even wisdom. We absorb it so completely that eventually we defend the very boundaries that keep us inside the smallest version of ourselves.

Film: Entrainment and the Moving Image

Lux Colloquii

Film: Entrainment and the Moving Image

The Machinery Behind the Story

18 September 2026 ~ 31 minute read

The deeper I get into these questions, the less interested I become in identifying a single person, institution, or hidden hand behind them. The more interesting thing, to me, is the machinery itself: the stories we inherit, the images we absorb, the things we are repeatedly shown, and the things that quietly disappear outside the frame. Somewhere in all of that is the question of how much of what we call our own perception has actually been shaped for us.

Journal Entries

The First Principle: The Body, the Story, and the Self

What If the Body Only Heals?

17 September 2026 ~ 11 minute read

There are some ideas that seem almost too simple to notice until, once noticed, they begin to rearrange everything around them. Perhaps this is one of those ideas. Perhaps the body has been telling us the same thing all along, in a language older and more immediate than anything we have constructed to explain it.

Tag: psychology

The Accountability Gap: Institutions, Incentives, and Consequences

The Language of Illness: From Symptoms to Systems

The Poverty Program: The Operating System We Inherited

Film: Entrainment and the Moving Image

The First Principle: The Body, the Story, and the Self