"Claim boldly by naming the gaps remaining Tao highlights that Darwin built scientific credibility not by hiding weaknesses but by explicitly predicting what future evidence would look like — he said "in the future people would find transitional forms, they would find the mechanism of inheritance" — and they did. Naming your open questions honestly, rather than papering over them, makes a case more persuasive because it shows you understand the domain well enough to know what is missing. Whether you're pitching a startup, proposing a project, or writing a thesis, articulating the gaps and what evidence would close them is more convincing than overstating certainty. Source: Terence Tao, Dwarkesh Podcast, Terence Tao – Hardest Math Problems, AI's Limits, and Scientific Progress"