Post #167709

"Admitting you don't know the answer looks weak" One of my favorite bits of feedback I got on a talk was "I love how confidently you said you didn't know things". There's a lot I don't know. I consider it basic courtesy to clearly flag the boundaries of my knowledge. It's rude to pass around falsehoods. "Strength", whatever the hell that means in this context, comes from being able to think about how to get the missing information, or being able to think about what the parts of a system you do understand constrain the parts you don't know about. There's real skill demonstrated if someone is able to say "I don't know, but if you flip the third rock from the left, the answer will be right there."