Low diatribe

The universe is big, like, really big. Douglas Adams captured it in a way that has stuck with me ever since my first read of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy over forty years ago: "Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space." The math behind this is humbling. If the universe is infinite and we can only perceive a tiny slice of it, then statistically, we're operating from near-complete ignorance. We know almost nothing about almost everything.

I like watching Star Talk, drawn to Neil deGrasse Tyson's way of making the cosmos comprehensible. In one episode, he mentioned that everything we can observe — all the stars, planets, galaxies, and cosmic phenomena that fill our telescopes and textbooks — represents less than 5% of what actually exists in the universe. The other 95% is dark matter and dark energy, which we can detect only through their gravitational effects but cannot directly observe or understand.

Worse yet, these forces are accelerating the expansion of the universe. At some point, other observable galaxies will be pushed past our horizon. Future scientists will have huge swaths of the puzzle blanked out entirely. Tyson admits this keeps him up at night — wondering what events have already been occluded from us as observers. There are things we will never be able to know, and we have zero knowledge of them.

As he put it: "We are prisoners of the present, in perpetual transition from an inaccessible past to an unknowable future." Most of what we call "knowledge" is just stuff we made up and agreed to call true. We're not just missing pieces of the puzzle; we don't even know what most of the puzzle looks like.

I have started to think that our "understanding" of the universe is equivalent to a toddler claiming they know how a school bus works, because, you know, it's yellow.

The scale itself compounds the problem. Adams had another take on infinity that captures the absurdity: "Infinite: Bigger than the biggest thing ever and then some. Much bigger than that in fact, really amazingly immense, a totally stunning size, real 'wow, that's big,' time. Infinity is just so big that, by comparison, bigness itself looks really titchy. Gigantic multiplied by colossal multiplied by staggeringly huge is the sort of concept we're trying to get across here."

Infinity is such a weird concept. Something that helped me start to wrap my head around this weirdness was learning about the infinity hotel — Hilbert's paradox where a hotel with infinite rooms can always accommodate more guests, even when completely full. Say one person shows up at the front desk. No problem — move the guest from room 1 to room 2, from 2 to 3, and so on, all the way to infinity, freeing up room 1 for the newcomer.

A bus arrives with infinite people? Still manageable. Move everyone to double their room number — the guest in room 1 goes to room 2, room 2 goes to room 4, and so forth. This frees up the infinite odd-numbered rooms (1, 3, 5, 7...) for all the new arrivals from the bus.

But here's where it gets truly mind-bending: an infinite number of buses show up, each carrying infinite people. Somehow, there's still room. Move the current guests to double their room number again, then assign each bus to a prime number and its multiples. Since there are infinite primes, the math checks out. QED.

If infinity itself breaks our intuitive understanding of "full" and "empty," what hope do we have of grasping the true scale of what we don't know?

This perspective shift has profound implications for how we approach leadership and decision-making. If our collective human knowledge represents such a tiny fraction of reality, what does that say about the confidence with which we make strategic decisions, design organizational structures, or predict market behaviors?

I've found that the most effective leaders carry this cosmic humility with them. They make decisions with conviction while holding their conclusions lightly. They plan for the future while acknowledging that their models are almost certainly incomplete. They lead with authority while remaining genuinely curious about what they might be missing.

This isn't paralysis by analysis or decision-making by committee. It's something more nuanced: the ability to act decisively based on limited information while staying open to new data that might change everything. It's confidence paired with intellectual honesty about the boundaries of that confidence.

In practice, this looks like saying "Based on what we know today, I think we should..." instead of "This is definitely the right approach." It means asking "What would change our minds?" when making strategic decisions. It's the difference between "Our projections show..." and "Our best guess, given these assumptions, suggests..." Small language shifts that preserve authority while acknowledging uncertainty.

I've learned to create explicit space for "I don't know" in leadership conversations. When someone asks a question I can't answer, I say so directly, then follow with what I do know and how we might find out more. This doesn't undermine credibility — it builds trust. People respect leaders who can distinguish between what they know and what they're guessing at.

I think about this when I'm in meetings where people speak with absolute certainty about complex systems, market dynamics, or human behavior. The more certain someone sounds about inherently uncertain things, the more skeptical I become. Not because they're necessarily wrong, but because certainty in the face of cosmic ignorance often signals a failure to grasp the scope of what we don't know.

The paradox is that acknowledging our ignorance can actually make us more effective, not less. When we accept that our mental models are approximations rather than truth, we become more adaptable when reality doesn't match our expectations. When we recognize that our perspective is limited, we become more curious about other viewpoints. When we admit that our knowledge has boundaries, we become more careful about the decisions that matter most.

This doesn't mean abandoning expertise or treating all opinions as equally valid. The surgeon still needs to know anatomy, the engineer still needs to understand physics, the leader still needs to grasp organizational dynamics. But it does mean holding that expertise within a larger context of humility about what remains unknown.

I've started thinking of knowledge not as a collection of facts but as a set of useful approximations. The map is not the territory, but a good map can still help you navigate. The model is not reality, but a useful model can still guide decisions. The framework is not truth, but a solid framework can still create clarity.

The best leaders I know are deeply knowledgeable about their domains while remaining genuinely humble about the limits of that knowledge. They can make tough calls based on incomplete information while staying curious about what they might be missing. They lead with conviction while maintaining what Zen practitioners call "beginner's mind" — the openness to learning that comes from not assuming you already know everything.

Here's where cosmic humility becomes empowering rather than paralyzing: in almost all of our human interactions, we have more complete knowledge of the space. Unlike the vast unknowable universe, the systems we navigate daily are human creations. We made this all up.

Business structures, stock markets, governments, organizational hierarchies — none of these exist in nature. They're human inventions, created by people who knew far less than we do now about psychology, systems thinking, network effects, or behavioral economics. It has me asking: what didn't we know when we built these systems?

The founders of the stock market didn't understand high-frequency trading or algorithmic manipulation. The designers of corporate hierarchies had no concept of remote work or distributed teams. The architects of democratic institutions couldn't foresee social media's impact on information flow. They built with the knowledge they had, not the knowledge we have.

And with that I think there's an opportunity to unmake the parts that no longer serve. If we can acknowledge our cosmic ignorance about the universe while recognizing our growing understanding of human systems, we can redesign what we've outgrown.

In a universe where we understand less than 5% of what exists, perhaps the most rational position is radical humility paired with decisive action. We act on what we know while remaining open to what we don't. We lead with confidence while acknowledging that confidence has limits.

After all, if we're going to be wrong about most things — and statistically, we are — we might as well be wrong with curiosity, adaptability, and grace.