Preface: A Superpower Hiding in Plain Sight

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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 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.