Preface: A Superpower Hiding in Plain Sight

We live in a civilization built, top to bottom, by the scientific method. The device you’re listening to this on is a cathedral to it. And yet, on the questions that shape our common life—whose child gets care, whose history gets taught, whose body gets legislated—a remarkable number of us shut that discipline off. This first episode is about why, and about what I’ve come to think of as a cultural addiction: an addiction to certainty.

I’m Pete Tchoryk. I’m an engineer, and I’m the father of a transgender son. Across this series I argue that the most underrated of human attributes is curiosity and its inseparable twin, critical thinking—the closest thing we have to a superpower. But a superpower does us no good if we can’t access it, and there’s a requirement that has to come first: the willingness to be uncertain. If we can’t admit to not knowing, we’ve already decided we have all the answers we need.

I lay out the frame the whole series returns to. The difference between objective truth and subjective truth, and why a society that loses the ability to tell them apart has lost the one tool it has for governing itself honestly. The difference between honest certainty—the kind my son had at three when he told us who he was—and manufactured certainty, produced on purpose, by people who have studied how to produce it, to keep a set of arrangements from being examined. I’ll name the engineering tools I reach for, and the authors I trust, from Carl Sagan to Isabel Wilkerson to the Reverend William Barber.

This is a series with a political thesis, but it is not partisan. The scientific method does not have a political party. If you’re willing to ask one more question—and to accept the answer even when you don’t like it—start here.

Transcript

Preface: A Superpower Hiding in Plain Sight

Here is a sentence I did not expect to write but now wonder why it took me so long. The most powerful, and perhaps most underrated, of human attributes is curiosity and its inseparable twin, critical thinking.

Within this humble duo lies the power to transform individuals, societies, and the entire human race. Courage, grit, and determination all have their place, of course, but it is curiosity and critical thinking that have opened our minds to the vastness of the universe and shown us the power in acknowledging what we know and what we don’t know.

It is this combination that is the closest thing we have to a superpower. It is the key, I believe, to humanity taking the next leap forward—in how we treat each other, how we solve conflicts, and how we find solutions to the complex existential threats we face as a species.

But as with any superpower, it does us no good if we can’t access it. And it turns out there is an oft-overlooked requirement, a mindset that has to come first. Before we can engage our curiosity, before we can think critically about anything, we have to acknowledge that we don’t know something. We have to be willing to be uncertain.

If we cannot admit to ignorance and uncertainty, we have already decided we have all the answers we need and that they are correct. That is the opposite of a curious mind. It is fundamentally at odds with critical thinking and with learning itself—and we do it, mostly, to avoid the fear and pain of not knowing.

As an engineer, a large part of my job description requires the accurate assessment and management of risk and uncertainty. Fear of uncertainty, unfortunately, is a deeply ingrained evolutionary trait, and although it has certainly served us well in the past, it can be a liability in today’s world.

In the earlier stages of our evolution, uncertainty meant we were in a high-risk situation. Survival in those times favored quick decisions rather than slower, more thoughtful ones. Fast forward to today, and the opposite tends to be true. Left unchecked, a fear of uncertainty can lead us to adopt false certainties that are far more dangerous to ourselves and others than the not-knowing ever was.

One way to overcome that fear is by engaging our sense of curiosity. When we examine a problem through the lens of curiosity, we route it through our prefrontal cortex instead of our amygdala. Uncertainty then becomes an asset—a guiderail, the very thing that makes good decision-making possible.

And here is the root of the problem we face, both as individuals and collectively. Our inability to live with uncertainty—especially about the origins of life and the nature of death—has created a monumental paradox. We have started to declare subjective and objective truth to be equivalent. I have come to think of this as a kind of addiction to certainty: a cultural habit that soothes the pain of not-knowing by manufacturing answers that were never earned.

And like most addictions, this one has pushers—kingpins who benefit while everyone else in the equation loses. The kingpins today are the political organizations behind massive, well-funded campaigns to instill fear and doubt about trans kids, about the climate crisis, about vaccines, about women’s bodily autonomy, and about the true history of Black and Indigenous Americans.

This podcast series, and the book behind it, are about the costs of this societal addiction to certainty and what we can do about it.

Let me say a word about those two kinds of truth, because they are not actually hard to tell apart. An objective truth is a claim about the world that does not depend on who makes it. The Earth orbits the Sun whether or not anyone believes it. A subjective truth is a claim about inner experience—real to the person having it, even when no instrument can measure it.

When my not-quite-three-year-old son told us that his body did not match the boy he knew himself to be, that was a subjective truth, and it was his to tell. Both kinds of truth matter. But they are not the same—and a society that loses the ability to tell them apart has lost the one tool it has for governing itself honestly.

I want to start there, with a paradox I keep running into. We live in a civilization built, top to bottom, by the scientific method. The device you are listening to this on is a cathedral to it. The vaccine in your child’s arm, the bridge you drove over this morning, the weather forecast that told you whether to bring a jacket—none of that exists without a specific, hard-won discipline: the willingness to hold beliefs lightly, test them against the world, and revise them when the world disagrees.

And yet, when it comes to the questions that most directly shape our common life—whose child gets care, whose history gets taught, whose body gets legislated, whose vote gets counted—a remarkable number of us shut that discipline off. We treat subjective claims as if they were objective. We treat ancient authority as if it were evidence. We treat “I feel this strongly” as if it settled anything beyond what the speaker is feeling.

Let me name what this is. The branch of philosophy that studies how we know what we know is called epistemology—the meta-discipline that houses the scientific method, not its rival. The fight we are in, at its root, is a fight between two ways of knowing. One says evidence sets the rules, and beliefs must be revised when the evidence demands it. The other says authority sets the rules, and certain claims are exempt from evidence by virtue of who, or what, makes them. This book is, at its root, an argument between those two.

The paradox isn’t that people are religious, or that people have convictions. The paradox is that a culture can simultaneously be the most scientifically empowered in human history and the most epistemologically careless. We trust the method completely when it’s keeping the plane in the air. We abandon it the moment it points somewhere uncomfortable.

Part of what’s going on is biological. Uncertainty is physically unpleasant. The brain treats ambiguity the way it treats a stubbed toe—as something to resolve, and fast. Certainty feels like safety, even when it isn’t. And there is a whole industry—political, religious, algorithmic—that has learned to sell certainty to people who are, underneath, just trying to stop the ache of not knowing.

The engineer in me wants to call this a failure mode. The father in me knows it’s more serious than that. Because when manufactured certainty attaches itself to power, the people who pay the cost are not the ones who bought the story. They’re the ones the story was told about.

So I want to introduce, up front, the frame this series keeps returning to. I believe that curiosity plus critical thinking—the willingness to ask one more question and the discipline to accept the answer even when you don’t like it—is not a nice-to-have, not a pedagogical preference, not something to reserve for gifted classrooms. It’s a civic superpower. It’s what free people owe each other. It’s our guide star for distinguishing truth from whatever we happen to prefer.

And it’s the thing our public life is most actively hostile to right now.

You’ll hear me, throughout this series, keep drawing a distinction that I think matters enormously: the difference between honest certainty and manufactured certainty. Honest certainty is what my son had when he was three and told us who he was. It’s certainty produced by direct, first-person evidence—the only kind that is earned.

Manufactured certainty is something else entirely. It’s certainty produced on purpose, for a reason, by people who have studied how to produce it, to keep a set of arrangements from being examined.

A lot of this book is about telling those two apart.

I am not neutral about the stakes. I have a son who has been living openly, in defiance of manufactured certainty about his identity, since he was a toddler. I have three kids, three grandkids, and a family I love beyond measure. I have a country I grew up believing in and a Constitution I still do. I have a community I am proud to belong to. All of those have skin in this.

But the argument I’m making isn’t primarily about my family, or even about the specific groups of people whose lives have been turned into political pawns. It’s an argument about how a self-governing society sustains itself. A democracy that allows manufactured certainty to govern the lives of its most vulnerable members is, by definition, not governing itself honestly. It is being governed, instead, by a faction that has figured out how to wear the costume of truth.

The answer isn’t more certainty on the other side. It’s more curiosity. More of the specific cognitive posture that asks, before anything else, what would change my mind? What evidence is there? Who benefits if I don’t ask?

Let me say something about the word curiosity, because I think we’ve let it get weak. In ordinary speech it suggests a mild, pleasant disposition—the child peering into an anthill, the tourist picking up an unfamiliar object. I want to use it more strictly than that. The curiosity I’m talking about is a disciplined willingness to let reality have the last word. It is a commitment, made in advance, that when the world and your preferences disagree, the world wins. That’s a difficult commitment to keep. Most people, in most situations, do not. I am asking us to try.

The second word—critical thinking—has taken on a particular baggage in American education, where it sometimes reduces to a set of classroom exercises in identifying logical fallacies. I mean something more foundational. Critical thinking, in the sense I’m using it, is simply the habit of asking who benefits from me believing this, what evidence would change my mind, and whether the confidence of the person telling me is matched by the quality of what they’re telling me. Those three questions, asked together, would disassemble most of the political manipulation the current moment is running on.

A quick word about how this series is going to work. You’ll hear me tell the same story from different angles—the morning I met my son as he actually is, the decade of learning that followed, the fights we didn’t choose and the people we’ve met along the way. You’ll hear me name authors I trust, and I’ll try to give you enough that you can go read them yourself. Carl Sagan, Isabel Wilkerson, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Michael Tomasello, Carol Anderson, Bart Ehrman, Katherine Stewart, the Reverend William Barber—to name just a few. These are the voices I keep returning to, and if you follow nothing else from me, follow them.

When I try to understand the world, I reach for the engineering tools I was trained in—risk assessment, failure mode analysis, feedback loops, safety factors. It turns out those tools work surprisingly well on the machinery of manufactured certainty, which has its own failure modes and its own feedback loops. I’ll name them as we go.

You’ll also hear the father in me. The book this series is built on was not written in the calm of philosophical reflection. It was written during a stretch of history that saw America seduced into embracing its darkest, most destructive impulses—the fear-driven rage that bypasses rational thought entirely, and that is so easily weaponized against perceived enemies.

This series and the book were written by a parent, for his son and every kid like his son, because those same fear-driven, irrational impulses have now been weaponized against trans kids by people who value political victory over human life. The tone of this work reflects that. I will try to be measured. I will occasionally fail. I think that’s the right ratio and the best I can offer.

There’s one more thing I want to name at the start. This is a series with a political thesis, but it is not partisan. The scientific method does not have a political party. Evidence is evidence. Anyone who commits themselves to the honest weighing of evidence will, over time, end up on the same side of many of these questions regardless of where they started politically.

I do not write this book from a place of earned wisdom. The simple truth is that I came to the knowledge in it largely through the experiences of my young trans son and his sisters. It is not the culmination of a lifetime spent in thoughtful introspection, and it was not a sudden burst of enlightenment. It seems I had to see the world through my kids’ eyes—pained eyes—to learn the lessons that matter most. To realize that my worldview was almost absurdly inadequate, and that I needed to do something about it, fast.

The good news? It is not too late. It is not too late to acknowledge this extraordinary, mysterious, and highly uncertain world we live in, and to recommit ourselves—individually and collectively—to understanding it better, and our role in it.

And that commitment—to embrace the uncertainty, and to meet it with curiosity and critical thinking—is what ultimately unleashes our superpower.