The Courage To Say ‘I Don’t Know’
cognoscenti.wbur.org
cognoscenti.wbur.org
Yes, we can categorize embarrassment as a kind of failure, but I think they are clearly separable in their effect on us. As she demonstrated, if you just say "I don't know" in conversation, you don't actually look stupid. But if you fail to write an essay, your grade will suffer.
But, back to her original point, I have noticed that the smartest people and best researchers I know are not afraid to say "I don't know" when asked a question. I've warned people who give interview talks here that their audience will be filled with very smart people who aren't scared of looking stupid. Which implies that they'll ask questions without fear of asking a "too obvious" question, which in turns implies they are more likely to ask fundamental, difficult to answer questions.
So true.
That is exactly what really hammered it home for me years ago.
I found myself working with a particularly capable and impressive guy who didn't have the slightest hesitation about saying "I don't know." when asked a question or "What's that?" when listening.
I've had some frustrating encounters with people who seem to live by hard and fast rules about what negative things "I don't know" supposedly demonstrates about a person [1], but overall it has been incredibly liberating. It's amazing how fast you can come to know someone and learn from them when you both come in open and unguarded.
1: A few of the more memorable responses I've seen to "I don't know".
* "Never, ever say that again. You should always try to relate the situation to something you do know. Saying I don't know just means you're lazy."
* "You were just feigning ignorance about that to get me to try to explain it so you could attack my explanation!"
This is the best possible way to get thoroughly idiotic ideas in your head. If you ever want to completely and utterly misunderstand a subject, I could not think of any better way to do that than to follow this advice.
> You were just feigning ignorance about that to get me to try to explain it so you could attack my explanation!
And this is a psychotic level of insecurity manifesting itself as delusions of persecution.
Series of tubes...
People cheat on tests because it increases the final score. That score contributes to the final grade. That grade determines ones rank at graduation time. Attaining the degree has numerous benefits.
When I was younger, I was the kind of person who would not admit to not knowing. I faked it. I wanted to be cool.
But I never cheated. I didn't care enough about the scores, grades, or even doing well. I figured I'd get the grade I got. I didn't care about the system.
Now, older and a little wiser, I don't fake knowing to be cool, and don't fake knowing to make it in the system. I just don't give a fuck.
"it fancifies a simple ideal (be honest), but because in so doing, it’s emblematic of the very culture that fosters fraudulence in the first place: the too-often obfuscating, gate-keeping, stratifying milieu of higher education."
"I’ve seen young writers contort their prose into incomprehensibly pretentious muddles, all in a disastrous bid to sound more erudite than they are."
I bet she has. I hope she put her advice to them more plainly.
That said, it sounds like she struggles with it too (and clearly did with the article):
“The first time I ever witnessed Mary do that,”
I continue, “I swore to myself I’d follow her
example, I’d be that brave. Guess how I’ve done?”
They raise their eyebrows, half-hopeful, half-leery.
“Not that great,” I confess. “It’s ridiculous! I
still do it sometimes! Less often, but yes – from
time to time, I still catch myself faking it!”
Here's an example of the kind of uncontrollable logorrhoea that she's talking about:
"Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account."
That's from the George Orwell essay "Politics and the English Language" (I'm sure you're familiar with it - snarf) and it's a rewording of the following Bible verse
"I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all."
The race is to the swift and the battle to the strong but the odds are never so short as the bookmaker offers and when the sea take the unsinkable ship with no lifeboats everybody drowns.
It's interesting to note that after Solomon became wise, he began to fall into something of an existential angst. I think that shows in this passage.
He may even have had that passage in mind when he wrote: "The biggest misconception about success is that we do it solely on our smarts, ambition, hustle and hard work".
English is often cited as an unusual language for the word count it has. What English has done is load a lot of connotations that in other languages might show in phrases or idioms into the words themselves. In the thesaurus, "conflagration" and "fire" are synonyms, but in fact they don't mean quite the same thing. One is a thing you might cook marshmallows over and the other certainly is not.
Those in the second category can identify those in the first with a glance. Sometimes you can even see them flinch if you're looking at them at the right time, when someone claims to have roasted their marshmallows over a conflagration.
The author is a professional writer and a professor, presumably of English or Writing. She comes by it honestly. If any of the vocabulary in that piece struck me on first reading (before I read your comment), I actually thought she was talking down to her students when she told the story about Mary.
(I am sure Muphry's Law is in full effect for this post.)
Having said that I assumed she was making a joke in the first paragraph, she seems to calm down a lot after that. Surely the irony of
> I’ve seen young writers contort their prose into incomprehensibly pretentious muddles, all in a disastrous bid to sound more erudite than they are.
is apparent to the author.
I started talking like that when I was younger as, I believe, a direct result of reading 6-7 books a week. The language would just surface as I was in the middle of a sentence. That language was quickly derided by my peers and those "above" me.
I found that conversing in a more general manner ("fire" vs "conflagration") is conducive to moving conversations forward, even if it results in a muddled understanding.
I now make efforts to speak in a less exact fashion in most circumstances and I've lost a good bit of my vocabulary as a result.
On occasion I write (privately) in such language so that I retain the ability to speak in a more exacting fashion, but it's rare these days and I often feel like I'm not presenting my arguments as well as I could be.
I believe this has also driven my adoption of languages like Haskell and Clojure, While making it easier for me to pick up languages such as Java and Obj-C.
I've witnessed these thought processes impede discussion and prevent improvement within engineering teams, which is why I push people during an interview to see of they'll say, "I don't know."
[1] Off topic, but I think this proposed cognitive bias enables the existence of most religions, because religion soothes people's uncertainty about metaphysics.
It's usually obvious when someone gives an answer out of their ass. Alternatively, some people will stay silent, as if they didn't hear the question. Rare to find someone who will say "I don't know" and explore the topic with you.
Given that most of us were raised in schools, there might be a correlation.
The Kangaroo Maths contest (which admittedly isn't a graded test, but the first example I can think of) involves a multiple choice test, where you lose points for wrong answers, and just get zero points for a blank.
The number of negative points it calculated to give you 0 points on average for blind guessing. If you can eliminate a few possibility and guess between the rest, your average score goes up.
For multiple choice questions with a variable number of right answers, it becomes harder.
I see this more as a criticism of test-driven undergraduate academia than as a counterpoint to the idea that people should be more forthcoming with admitting when they don't know something.
Smart people are more aware of the things they don't know. They are not ashamed of saying so. There are exceptions of course but generally I've found this to be true.
Possibly, but I think it's more about insecurity.
If you're less certain of your position, it's harder to "concede points".
So yes - the good people say "I don't know", but maybe that's just because they can get away with it more easily (lower cost for them).
Frankly, someone saying they don't know something lends credibility to the things they claim to know, as well.
It's viewed as a sign of weakness or incompetency.
I feel like those who never admit they don't know something are promoted up the chain. They don't trust you if you say "I don't know."
I do a lot video/motion graphics work. I'm often asked if I can accomplish something or finish by a certain deadline. Many times I can't give a definite answer, so I say I don't know. My bosses response was a sarcastic, "I like that confidence."
I'm honest when I don't know something, mainly because I don't want "my mouth to write checks that my ass can't cash." Claims of competence are going to be tested.
This doesn't impress the bosses. It kind of pisses them off.
This is a side effect of two things. First is a hierarchical kiss-up, kiss-ass culture -- this is in labor unions, so the organizational hierarchy is extremely important. Second is that they don't deal much with creating new IT services, but deal with people selling IT services or products. So the perception is that IT is magic, and it'll fix everything, if you just buy it. (LOLz)
There's also another reason, and it's that to a great extent, being able to get ahead or get things done within hierarchical organizations is about being a good salesperson. It's to bullshit enough to convince someone else with more power that something great is possible. It's useful to be a good salesperson.
Organizations value this quality in different quantities. An engineering consultancy, for example, would value having one person like this, to help make sales, but if they had too many it would be harmful - all the engineers would quit from being abused by salespeople making impossible promises, and there'd be no business at all.
A political consultancy, in contrast, would require this of almost every employee, except for people doing research or analysis. It would be a critical skill, because being able to bullshit many powerful people at once, in a coordinated way to achieve a specific result, is extremely difficult.
This seems somewhat self-referential. I'm not afraid of big words, but it seems like the article (especially making the point she's making) could have been written in simpler language.
Though, with a site name like "cognoscenti", I guess you have to maintain a certain proportion of multisyllabic vocabulary.
This means that everytime you say 'I Don't Know', you must think about what comes next and consequently add 'Let me go learn'.
Adopting good values, like I Don't Know, is admirable but very dangerous when taken out of it's appropriate context, which is the philosophy it depends on.
How often have you "pretended" or "bent the truth" and then found yourself in a tough spot? It usually leads to stress, either by rushing to learn so you appear to know, or a loss of trust when called on it.
I have much better conversations with people who I know are bright and are humble about what they know.
Question: "Is it A or B?"
Answer: "I'm not sure, but I think it's A. But I'm not sure. It could be B. But I think it's A."
It's annoying when that answer is seen as better than a simple "I don't know".
It's more about being honest about your level of knowledge. Sometimes that means grey are or saying "I don't know, but I will find out." OR "I don't know, but let's get a hold of someone that does."
That would happen in more of a professional environment than a conversational one :o)
Often I've found myself in situations where the person training me will ask 'Do you know about this?' and I think, well yes we briefly went over it yesterday, and then they forge ahead. But they should realise that it's worth slowing down and going over things at a conceptual level. You can't really build on a passing familiarity with the foundations. And the person being trained is not really in a position to judge how important it is to dwell on certain subjects.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4654361
I made the error of not knowing much about space shuttles and got my timeline most definitely wrong. For my error, I am currently sitting at -1. Not because I was nasty, but because I was wrong and asked a question. I even prefaced the question with "unless I'm much mistaken"!
(For the record, I did not downvote either of those posts, and I've upvoted some of your comments in the past.)
And what did happen, I still wonder? Does she know how many people cheated in her class when she made the old announcement, and how many people cheat now? Was there any change? Why even write this and leave off the actual effects of the changes, if it's such an interesting question?
From my standpoint this has nothing to do with their pride, they can still be very proud and constantly 1-up each other in daily conversation. As long as a manager with potential new tasks isn't listening in. ;)
My major hobby is teasing people who take themselves and the quality of their knowledge too seriously and those who don’t have the guts to sometimes say: I don’t know...
For an example of a subjective situation, in a poker game it can be useful to pretend to know you will win in cases where it is unknown, or even in cases where you know you have a weak hand. The other player's subjective impression of what you know is more important than its actual accuracy.
On the other hand, computer programmers and engineers usually are dealing with objective circumstances where not admitting you don't know results in things breaking and delays finding out the objectively true answer.
A common failing is to not recognize which of the two types of situations you are in, and just assume you should treat it like the one you are most used to. Hence engineering types may be ignored because they don't sound confident in their answers, and political types forget that that rules or legislation cannot override the laws of physics.
The better real world example isn't poker, but it comes up anytime you're talking with someone who knows less than you: your boss, customers, friends. The cost of being caught at wrong answers is often quite low.
And often the cost isn't only low to yourself, but to all parties involved. The article's author makes the leap to academic dishonesty right away. But, especially in this field of work, we talk a lot about the value of social skills over pure technical skills. BSing has a bad connotation but you can also think of it as consistently leaving good impressions or presenting things in the best light. It's not a rigid distinction.
A good example is the post below who said he probably got passed up for promotions because saying I don't know made the boss think he lacked "confidence". It's not surprising that the person in charge might disagree with the value of "I don't know". It's probably part of the social skill set that put him in charge in the first place.
Of course in the technical field the cost of a fudged truth can be very high, but the potential benefits are equally high, because you're often dealing with people who don't have the background to judge anything on its technical merits. The less knowledgeable they are, the more they have to rely on your presentation.
The "courage" to say I don't know is a good standard in academic and technical fields, but in the fields of business and politics (and social interactions in general!) it's not so clear-cut.