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Brand New Thoughts/Philosophy
'I Don't Know' Is an Intellectual Skill
Certainty is impressive on camera. Learning requires something harder: knowing where your knowledge stops without treating that boundary as a failure.
By ElleJanelle|July 30, 2026|3 min read
The Internet Rewards the Person Who Answers Fastest
There is a strange pressure online to have a position immediately.
A story breaks at 8:03.
By 8:07, everybody is supposed to know what happened, who is responsible, what it means, which historical analogy applies and which side of the argument proves you are a good person.
During Live News Dashboard, ElleJanelle described wanting Brand New Thoughts to operate differently.
Sometimes the correct response should be:
I don't know. Let's figure it out.
I don't know is not the end of a thought. It is a location on the map.
Brand New Thoughts
Psychologists have a name for part of this capacity: intellectual humility, broadly understood as recognizing the limits and fallibility of one's own beliefs and knowledge.
Research reviews have linked intellectual humility with greater openness, learning and more constructive engagement across disagreement. A 2022 review summarizes the evidence.
Confidence is not knowledge
People who sound certain are easier to follow.
That creates a media problem.
The person who says "here is exactly what happened" often produces a more satisfying clip than the person who says "we have three reports, two conflict, and I need to see the underlying document."
But epistemically, the second person may be doing better work.
Confidence answers:
How sure do I feel?
Knowledge answers:
How strong is the evidence?
Those variables can move together.
They do not have to.
The different kinds of I-don't-know
Not every admission of uncertainty is equally useful.
There is lazy not-knowing:
I don't know and I do not care enough to investigate.
There is strategic not-knowing:
I don't know, so nobody can hold me responsible for taking a position.
And there is disciplined not-knowing:
I do not currently have enough evidence to answer this responsibly, so here is what I need to learn next.
That third version is a skill.
It identifies the missing information rather than hiding behind the absence of it.
A Good Question Shrinks the Unknown
Suppose the question is:
Did this policy cause wages to fall?
"I don't know" can immediately become a research plan.
What happened to wages before the policy?
What happened afterward?
What happened in comparable places without the policy?
Which workers were affected?
Did inflation change at the same time?
Did hours or employment change?
The admission of uncertainty creates the structure for learning.
That is why intellectual humility is not the opposite of intelligence.
It is part of intellectual calibration.
Updating is not losing
Online argument often treats consistency as never changing your mind.
But there are two very different forms of consistency.
One is:
I said it before, so I have to defend it forever.
The other is:
I use the same standard of evidence even when the evidence forces me to update.
The second is harder because it requires public revision.
It also produces better beliefs.
A 2024 study found intellectual humility reliably associated with more constructive responses to disagreement. The research is available here.
Thinking Publicly Requires Visible Uncertainty
Brand New Thoughts is built around a risky format: thinking before every conclusion has been polished.
That means viewers sometimes watch the process that normally disappears from finished commentary.
A first interpretation.
A correction.
A source that complicates it.
A definition that changes the argument.
An opinion that no longer fits.
That can look less authoritative than arriving with a monologue already finished.
But it makes something else visible: how beliefs are built.
A Useful Sentence to Keep
The next time you reach the edge of your knowledge, try making the sentence longer.
Not just:
I don't know.
Try:
I don't know yet. Here is what I would need to know before I feel confident answering.
That turns ignorance into method.
And method is how the unknown gets smaller.
Watch the episode
What have you changed your mind about?
Add to the DiscussionWhat is something you once felt certain about that became more complicated after you learned more?