I want to write about a small habit I have come to associate, over the last decade or so, with a particular kind of intelligence that the wider culture does not, on the available evidence, fully recognize as intelligence.
The habit is simple. The habit is the willingness to say “I don’t know” without rushing to follow it with a guess.
This sounds, in summary, like a small thing. It is, on close examination, not a small thing. The habit is, in my experience, one of the more useful signals I have encountered for whether the person I am talking to has a deeper relationship with thinking, as opposed to the surface performance of sounding informed. The two are different. The difference matters.
I want to be precise about what I mean by this, because the description sounds, in summary, slightly self-congratulatory in a way I would like to avoid.
The intelligence I am describing is not, on examination, anything I particularly possess. The intelligence is something I have, in the last decade, learned to recognize in other people, and to want to be more like.
What “I don’t know” actually requires
It is worth being precise about what the willingness to say “I don’t know” actually involves, because the willingness is structurally harder than it appears.
The willingness involves, on close examination, two distinguishable internal acts. The first act is the recognition, in real time during a conversation, that one does not in fact know the answer to whatever has just been asked. The recognition is not automatic. Most adults, when asked a question, have a particular kind of fast internal process that produces, almost instantly, the best available answer their apparatus can generate. The process does not, in most cases, distinguish carefully between the answer that the apparatus actually knows and the answer that the apparatus is generating by interpolating from adjacent material. The two feel, internally, similar enough that the person producing them does not register the distinction. The first act of the habit I am describing is, accordingly, the slowing-down required to notice the distinction in real time. The slowing-down is, on close examination, a particular kind of internal discipline that most adults have not developed.
The second act, once the recognition has occurred, is the willingness to articulate the recognition out loud rather than to convert it into a confident-sounding approximation. This is, on examination, the harder of the two. Most adult social environments reward the appearance of knowing. The reward is small but reliable. The person who produces, in response to a question, a confident-sounding answer is treated, by the wider environment, as more competent than the person who admits that they do not, in fact, know. The reward structure has been operating, in most adults’ lives, since adolescence. The reward structure has, by adulthood, installed in most people the small automatic habit of converting recognized ignorance into sounded-like-knowing. The conversion happens beneath conscious awareness. The conversion is, in some real way, what most adults are doing every time they are asked a question they do not actually have an answer to.
The willingness to say “I don’t know” without immediately following it with a guess requires the override of this conversion. The override is uncomfortable. The override produces, in the room, a small awkward moment in which one has admitted to not knowing without offering any compensating material. The moment is, in most adult social environments, structurally awkward in a way the immediate-guess response is not. The willingness to sit with the awkwardness rather than to dissolve it through the production of a guess is what I am calling the habit. The habit is rare. The habit is, in my experience, almost perfectly correlated with a particular kind of intelligence that the wider culture has not yet, on the available evidence, learned to credit.
Why the habit correlates with intelligence in the deeper sense
The reason the habit correlates with the deeper kind of intelligence is, on close examination, structural. The deeper kind of intelligence requires, as one of its load-bearing features, the capacity to distinguish between what one knows and what one is producing by interpolation. The distinction is the foundation of every more sophisticated cognitive operation. Without the distinction, the apparatus is, in some real way, running on confused inputs. The confusion compounds. By the time the apparatus has been operating for a few decades without the distinction, the apparatus has accumulated an enormous internal library of material it does not, in fact, know, but that it treats as known. The library is large. The library is, on close examination, what most adults are running their thinking from.
The person who has cultivated the habit of saying “I don’t know” without immediately guessing has, by definition, been maintaining the distinction throughout their adult life. The maintenance is, in some real way, the structural foundation of their thinking. Their internal library contains, by long discipline, considerably less material that they have not actually verified. The smaller library is also a more accurate library. The accuracy is what allows the deeper kind of intelligence to function. The deeper kind of intelligence is, in some real way, what one’s apparatus does when it is running on accurate inputs rather than on the confused mixture of known and interpolated material that most adult apparatuses are running on.
I have, in the last decade, started paying attention to who, in the various rooms I find myself in, has the habit. The paying-attention has produced a small ongoing signal that I find more useful than many of the obvious markers. The signal is not whether the person is articulate. It is not whether the person is well-credentialed. It is not whether the person speaks with confidence. It is, more specifically, whether the person, when asked a question they do not actually know the answer to, says so without compensating material. The people who say so are, in my experience, often the people whose thinking I find most worth attending to over the long run. The people who do not say so are often leaning on the kind of confident interpolation that can eventually produce confident wrongness.
What the wider culture has been mis-rewarding
I want to be honest about what the wider culture has been doing in this domain, because the wider culture has, on examination, been actively rewarding the wrong thing for a long time.
The wider culture has, in most professional and social environments, been rewarding the appearance of certainty. The person who speaks with confidence is treated as more competent than the person who acknowledges uncertainty. The reward is so consistent that it has, in some real way, become the structural feature of how adult competence is assessed in most rooms. The assessment is, on close examination, almost exactly the wrong way to measure the actual underlying competence. The actual underlying competence is, more often than not, inversely correlated with the willingness to perform certainty one has not, in any real sense, earned.
This means that the wider culture has been, for some time, selecting against the deeper kind of intelligence by rewarding the surface signal that the deeper kind of intelligence specifically tries to suppress. The selection is not, in most cases, conscious. The selection is, more accurately, the natural consequence of a reward structure that has been calibrated to a particular kind of social performance rather than to the underlying cognitive substance the performance is ostensibly indicating. The performance and the substance are, on examination, almost opposed. The wider culture has, accordingly, been selecting against the substance for as long as the reward structure has been operating.
The person who has cultivated the habit of saying “I don’t know” is, in some real way, choosing to operate against the reward structure. The choosing is not, in most cases, heroic. The choosing is, more accurately, what the apparatus does when the apparatus has decided that the maintenance of the distinction between knowing and sounding-like-knowing is, in some real way, more important than the small ongoing social reward for collapsing the distinction. The decision is, on close examination, the structural commitment of someone who is more interested in the actual quality of their thinking than in the appearance of it.
What I am, slowly, trying to do
I want to acknowledge, before ending, that I am not the person I am describing. I have the habit, on my best days, in selected contexts. I do not, on most days, have it consistently. When I am asked a question I do not actually know the answer to, my apparatus still produces, in most cases, the confident-sounding approximation before I have had time to register that I do not, in fact, know. The override of the approximation is, in my case, late. The override often arrives only after I have already produced the approximation, at which point the override is structurally embarrassing rather than helpful.
What I have been trying to do, in the last few years, is to develop the habit more reliably. The development is slow. The development involves, in particular, the small ongoing practice of noticing, in real time, when my apparatus is generating an answer by interpolation rather than by actual knowing. The noticing is the work. The work is, on close examination, considerably harder than it sounds. The reward structure that has been operating in my life since adolescence is, in some real way, still operating. The override of the reward structure requires deliberate work that I have not, on most days, performed.
What I have, more modestly, is the recognition that the habit is worth developing. The recognition is the start. The recognition is, in some real way, more than I had a decade ago. The decade ago version of me would have produced the confident approximation and moved on. The current version of me at least sometimes notices that the approximation is what I am producing, and the noticing is, in some real way, the first step toward eventually being able to suppress the production altogether.
The suppression is the habit. The habit is, on the available evidence, the small daily signature of a kind of intelligence I would like to have more of, and that I have, in the last decade, come to recognize as one of the more reliable indicators of who in any given room is, in fact, worth listening to over the long run. The recognition is mine. The intelligence, more modestly, I am still working on.
