In Jeff Vandermeer's novel, Annihilation, from 2014, a team of scientists investigates the mysterious Area X, a sealed-off area of unknowable nature. Vandermeer's novel has been compared to the work of the great American ruralist, philosophical ruralist, Henry David Thoreau, whose 1851 book Walden is the great American literary meditation on the relationship between humanity and the natural world.
we engage with it is based on the principles of complexity, but that doesn't mean that it's unknowable . What we can do is we have a good idea by creating these systems through which we're going to evaluate them much more specifically; we create conditions in which the probability of a particular outcome is likely. We can never say 100% certain, but that doesn't mean that the technology itself is out of control. Also, these are very dependent
You couldn't claim that it was obviously irrational in any way. People were trying to cope with an unknowable future. They made this judgment.
We need to extrapolate based on actual experience of projections of what we do know into the unknown or I would argue in many ways unknowable . Well, when you look at the standard assumptions feeding into the three models that are used most prominently
And I pushed a button here, and as I pushed the button, it started stretching into two dimensional directions. So there is your first unknowable at the cosmic scale, right?
of Jacob Barber as sort one embodiment of what our capabilities are is interesting, and it's interesting because of his background and his particular characteristics, but the idea that this is some shadowy unknowable boy with all of these influences, physical and social, that drive him to be the things that they are, removes him in a way from the ordinary. And I want to, I wonder what would happen if the ordinary, if the Barber
That's not the best part of it. So mid-term it's unknowable but kinda scary.
of some kind of law of conservation of information in the sense that there are limits to what can be derived from a given set of physical laws. He thought that might mean that certain things may actually be unknowable to science. And he challenged scientists with this very interesting challenge-- can you find a logical operation that would add to the information content of any utterance
thought about that scenario during the standoff between the capitalist system and the communist system. Now what would occur right of boom is unknowable . This is a hypothetical.
And I pushed a button here, and as I pushed the button, it started stretching into two dimensional directions. So these are two sort of very interesting unknowables .
And you should remember that the real meaning is actual conflict of interest. Forecasting, noun-- the attempt to predict the unknowable by measuring the irrelevant. A task that in one way or another employs most people on Wall Street.
Expectations. And sometimes, these can be pinned down by what look like sensible or plausible views of the world. But other times, the future is so inherently unknowable that there's no rational basis on which to form expectations about the future. And so in the book, what I talk about is that people don't optimize, they cope.
Science lets us understand the ocean in this way, and the cultural, intuitive thing lets us understand it in this way. But if you have cheap, highly processed fish in a fish finger from some completely unknowable source that's been designed to be as cheap as possible,
and get to the other end. So it's really exciting for an academic to be invited to come and talk to Google people because you are the unknowable -- the group of people that we all hear about, the millennials, et cetera.
Well, I get asked that question a lot. But when I think about it is the great mystery, and that god is essentially unknowable , that helps me a lot.
So that route means nothing. But your choice is either say, this stuff is unknowable and I'm just going to index, which is a completely rational thing to do, by the way,
And I pushed a button here, and as I pushed the button, it started stretching into two dimensional directions. So it's something that is not just unknown, it's unknowable , right?
so there's no shortage of things to work on right exactly and as I don't know I I think there's something really comforting in that for me um and that's not to say that other people's anxiety is not real I I completely understand that too I think you know I feel bad about the ocean it's so big and so deep and so unknowable and I'm like oh my God that's terrifying but yeah um you know for some reason my wires are crossed the other way when it comes to the cosmos um but I think you know for anybody who feels that anxiety
um you know for some reason my wires are crossed the other way when it comes to the cosmos um but I think you know for anybody who feels that anxiety hopefully I I don't know I mean I hope in the text and and you know in speaking there's something that is also exciting about it you know we chip away at that unknowable um you know vast Universe to to learn things and to to learn more about our home you know ultimately the universe is our home and that's something worth investigating and being curious
The exact numbers for, let's say, the '40s and '50s in America are sort of unknowable .
Lightning was commonly used in romantic art and writing-- you know, think of Frankenstein-- to invoke awe, grandeur, the sublime, the unknowable ,
The investor is, in effect, to borrow a term coined by Professor Richard Zeckhouser in his wonderful paper titled "investing in the Unknown and the Unknowable ,"
But something about-- and now I'm stretching a metaphor pretty thin-- but something about that architecture of early computers with all these kind of knowable but unknowable
That's not the best part of it. The problem with fracking is that it's short term smart, long-term, mid-term unknowable
we've given away. They don't know me. I'm still the singular human being, an enigma, an unknowable . Not knowing is an option too, it's a choice I hope my daughter's generation