I don't know: In Praise of Admitting Ignorance (Except When You Shouldn’t)
Leah Hager Cohen
Language: English
Pages: 128
ISBN: 1594632391
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
A short, concise book in favor of honoring doubt and admitting when the answer is: I don’t know.
In a tight, enlightening narrative, Leah Hager Cohen explores why, so often, we attempt to hide our ignorance, and why, in so many different areas, we would be better off coming clean. Weaving entertaining, anecdotal reporting with eye-opening research, she considers both the ramifications of and alternatives to this ubiquitous habit in arenas as varied as education, finance, medicine, politics, warfare, trial courts, and climate change. But it’s more than just encouraging readers to confess their ignorance—Cohen proposes that we have much to gain by embracing uncertainty. Three little words can in fact liberate and empower, and increase the possibilities for true communication. So much becomes possible when we honor doubt.
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course of researching this book I asked scores of people, friends and strangers, if they could think of a time when they’d covered up their ignorance or felt pressure to refrain from saying “I don’t know.” Some responded instantly with detailed anecdotes, painful, funny, or both. Some offered more general associations they had with the feeling of being caught not knowing. Others mused about the underlying reasons they had felt, at various times in their lives and with various audiences, more or
journalism school, I’d been afraid to admit I didn’t know what a nut graf was because I dreaded exposing myself as inadequate. But the deeper dread was that I’d be cast off, abandoned, that a connection would be revoked. Consider the irony. We swallow the words “I don’t know” for fear of rupture: The admission might sever us from those we love or esteem. But the passive lie—the pretense of knowing—causes shame: an internal rupture, a rupture of self. And the bond we think we’ve managed to sustain
accompanied it. The professor had sought to shame her students (by repeating the question when the answer was obvious) and wielded her power to punish them (by refusing to elucidate, withholding her knowledge). Yet in time the students used humor to defang the incident. At the end of the year they put on a variety show. In one of the skits, my father, bewigged and in drag, played the role of the tetchy professor, in which he answered all manner of questions (“Where’s the bathroom?” “What time is
journal Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, suggests that intuition can be an effective substitute for knowledge. It outlines two studies, one in which participants rated the difficulty of basketball shots, another in which they were asked to judge whether designer pocketbooks were real or knockoffs. (Would it shock you to hear all three researchers were men? Can’t you just picture them sitting around, coming up with the basketball idea, then going, “Wait—should we make this