the importance of not knowing - by Adam Aleksic

It’s human nature to be inquisitive. There are always things we don’t know, and it feels good to know the answer. In Ancient Greece, if you had a question you needed answering, you would make a pilgrimage to Delphi, wait several months, sacrifice a goat, bathe in a sacred spring, and hike up the side of a mountain to reach Apollo’s temple. Then the oracle would give you some vague riddle that you would spend the next few years interpreting. Today, if you have a question, you ask ChatGPT, and it instantly tells you what you wanted to hear. Unlike the oracle at Delphi, the answer is clear and immediate. You can close out the chatbot, confident that you have the right answer without having to grapple with an ambiguous prophecy. And yet something important is lost with efficiency. Truly knowing an answer requires struggling with uncertainty. All the greatest scholars labor for years, deeply investigating their topic, before they feel able to present their work—and even so, they’ll usually

It’s human nature to be inquisitive. There are always things we don’t know, and it feels good to know the answer. In Ancient Greece, if you had a question you needed answering, you would make a pilgrimage to Delphi, wait several months, sacrifice a goat, bathe in a sacred spring, and hike up the side of a mountain to reach Apollo’s temple. Then the oracle would give you some vague riddle that you would spend the next few years interpreting. Today, if you have a question, you ask ChatGPT, and it instantly tells you what you wanted to hear. Unlike the oracle at Delphi, the answer is clear and im