The Wisdom of Uncertainty
· The Atlantic
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How comfortable are you with saying, “I don’t know”? Most of us spend our lives trying to know more. We look things up, seek expert advice, and gather information before making decisions. In many cases when we disagree with someone, we assume that if we could just establish the facts, one of us would turn out to be right. We accumulate knowledge until, we hope, the uncertainty disappears.
But what if uncertainty never fully goes away? In a recent Atlantic essay, the physicist Carlo Rovelli argues that modern science complicates the idea that we can ever arrive at a completely objective description of reality. Even physics suggests that what we see can depend on the relationship between the observer and what they’re looking at. We are not standing outside the world looking in, Rovelli writes. We are part of the world we are trying to understand.
That doesn’t mean that facts don’t exist or that knowledge is useless. Rovelli points out that we make decisions without absolute certainty all the time, and science works much the same way: It can give us extraordinarily reliable knowledge without perfect certainty. The same idea can be freeing in everyday life: We can hold convictions without assuming that our understanding is complete, and approach other perspectives with curiosity rather than immediately dismissing them. Today’s newsletter explores the value of leaving room for uncertainty.
On Valuing Uncertainty
The Myth of Perfect Knowledge
By Carlo Rovelli
Science will never be able to give a completely objective description of the world. That should make us humbler—and wiser.
How to Have a ‘Don’t-Know Mind’
By Michael Pollan
My quest to understand consciousness took me to a cave in New Mexico and then deep into the cosmos.
The Truth Physics Can No Longer Ignore
By Adam Frank
The fundamental nature of living things challenges assumptions that physicists have held for centuries. (From 2025)
Still Curious?
- You don’t know yourself as well as you think you do. And that’s okay, Julie Beck wrote last year.
- How to think, not what to think: College is not just about transmitting knowledge—it’s also about learning and practicing the skills that connect us to one another, Sian Leah Beilock wrote last year.
Other Diversions
- The artist who ripped up the rules of drawing
- Thomas Chatterton Williams on the other way AI impairs our thinking
- What nature’s silence said to Annie Dillard
PS
Courtesy of Nick G.My colleague Isabel Fattal recently asked readers to share a photo of something that sparks their sense of awe in the world. Nick G. shared a photo from “the volcanic blast zone of Mount St. Helens in Washington State during a summer sunrise.”
We’ll continue to feature your responses in the coming weeks.
— Rafaela