"Make bold claims by naming the gaps you cannot yet fill 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"