Abstract. Alan Hajek has recently criticised the thesis that Deliberation Crowds Out Prediction (renaming it the DARC thesis, for ‘Deliberation Annihilates Reflective Credence’). Hajek’s paper has reinforced my sense that proponents and opponents of this thesis often talk past one other. To avoid confusions of this kind we need to dissect our way to the heart of DARCness, and to distinguish it from various claims for which it is liable to be mistaken. In this talk, based on joint work with Yang Liu, I do some of this anatomical work. Properly understood, I argue, the heart is in good shape, and untouched by Hajek’s jabs at surrounding tissue. Moreover, a feature that Hajek takes to be problem for the DARC thesis – that it commits us to widespread ‘credal gaps’ – turns out to be a common and benign feature of a broad class of cases, of which deliberation is easily seen to be one.