Hello!

I have been thinking a lot about "I don't know."

"I don't know" is a huge thing in science, of course. For example, when there are a bunch of weird lights in the sky in New Jersey, the answer to the question, "What are they?" is "I don't know." But many people hear that and think, "That's not an answer. Here is what I think it is!" The human brain thinks, "SUCCESS!! I have answered the question!" But, of course, it HASN'T! What it has done is respond to "I don't know" with "I know," and that's literally the worst response. You need to leave "I don't know" as the answer, and that's very weird because it feels like the opposite of an answer. “I don’t know” is SO MUCH BETTER than walking away with the hole in your knowledge satisfied, even if the answer is incorrect.

I was thinking about this while thinking about weird drones in New Jersey, yes. But I was also thinking about it while listening to a series that On The Media and The Boston Globe are doing about the cultural explosion around Ivy League universities and, specifically, former Harvard President Claudine Gay. It's a three-part series and it's being run at the end of their regular episodes, which are also extremely worth listening to. The first episode is about how Trump's cabinet is basically just internet influencers and the second is about the murder of Brian Thompson and the virality of Luigi Mangione.

I often come away from internet discourse feeling like I am certain of a point of view, but listening to more in-depth discussions of complicated and controversial things, especially once those things are separated from the heat of the moment, helps me understand that it is not unusual for me to answer "I don't know" with "I know!!" in moments that are less about aliens and more about society.

I was also thinking about "I don't know" a lot while listening to this conversation between two friends of mine, Amanda McLoughlin (the CEO of podcast studio Multitude) and Jack Conte (the CEO of Patreon) because, of course, being a leader is sometimes THE WORST. You often need to make important and difficult decisions which is hard, even when you have very in-depth knowledge of a situation.

I have a lot of "I don't know" in my life, and I think it would be a better world if we were okay with that.

Hank

You can always email us at [email protected]

This Week in Stuff

• Mark Rober put a crow through a series of nine tests to see how smart they actually are.

• Kirby, a baby elephant at the Houston zoo, became an internet sensation for being “born on high alert.”

• 3D bird sculptures by artist Thomas Deininger became a fan favorite at Art Basel in Miami.

• Hank played an extra weird game of Connections.

• BBC Earth shared a video all about the world’s rarest bear cub.

Please send us stuff you think we should feature to [email protected]

Americans are now one-third less likely to die from cancer at the same ages as Americans in 1990

Saloni Dattani

How has the risk of dying from cancer changed in the United States?

To understand this, we can look at national cancer death rates in the United States.

The gray line shows the crude rate, which is the rate of deaths from cancer per 100,000 people. It has risen between 1950 and 1990 and has fallen slightly since then.

However, cancer death rates rise sharply with age, and the age of the US population has increased since 1950, so we would expect cancer death rates to rise for that reason alone.

What if we adjust for the increased age of the US population?

The red line, the age-standardized rate, shows this. It shows the cancer death rate if the age structure of the US population was held constant throughout.

This shows a slight rise until 1990 and then a significant decline; rates have fallen by one-third.

This means Americans are now one-third less likely to die from cancer at the same ages as Americans in 1990.

This comes from several factors: better screening and earlier diagnosis, medical advances in cancer treatments, and public health efforts to reduce risk factors like smoking and exposure to carcinogens.

Our World in Data is a UK-based non-profit organization that publishes research and data to make progress against the world’s largest problems. You can find more of their data insights here.

This Week at Complexly

This year’s Complexly calendar celebrates a quarter century of progress, and it is a collaboration between all of your favorite Complexly YouTube channels! CrashCourse, SciShow, Bizarre Beasts, and more have handpicked some of the most impactful milestones in education, science, and culture to be highlighted on each page of this 12-month calendar.

It features fantastic original art by artist Emily Alvarez, and each month has a paragraph at the bottom, teaching you more about that month’s topic. There are pages celebrating mRNA vaccines, social progress, and the Ingenuity Mars helicopter, along with 9 other important milestones of the past 25 years.

What if a person is a good leader… and a bad person? In the latest episode of Crash Course Political Theory, we unpack that idea through the lens of Machiavelli’s famous treatise, “The Prince,” and find more questions than answers.

Some Games to Play!

 Real Bird Fake Bird (by Studio Folly)

SpellCheck.xyc (by Answer in Progress)

Download Gubbins on iOS or Android!

If you post your results on social media, we’d love it if you post a link for folks to subscribe to “We’re Here” (https://werehere.beehiiv.com/subscribe)

Your art from squiggles

Last week, we asked you to draw a squiggle and make a piece of art from it. Thank you to everyone who sent us art this week!

See you next week!

Tell us about your favorite dessert! Send us a recipe, show us a photo, or describe the perfect chocolate chip cookie you had on vacation that one time.

Send your sweets to [email protected]

We're Here is the newsletter of Nerdfighteria; the community of people that sprung up around Hank and John Green's YouTube videos. That community has many focuses and has spawned many projects but the overarching theme is that hopelessness is the wrong response to imperfection. What makes the world better is groups of people trying to understand and solve problems, and people can only do that for an extended period if they're having at least a little bit of fun.